Michael Kearney - The Nest in the Stream: Lessons from Nature on Being with Pain

In a quiet, gradually illuminating way Michael Kearney introduces us to a few key spiritual and emotional discoveries he made during his work as a palliative care doctor and as a novice in Native American rites of passage. The writing is clear and beautiful, the lessons easily taken to heart, and the vision truly inspiring. I loved reading this book and know that its wisdom will stay with me, lightening the burden.

Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul

In this dear book, Michael yet again takes us deeper, closer. He nudges us to see that to understand someone is to care for them. Yes, love them. This book is most directly about the cautions and craft of caregiving. And it is about receiving too, as though by necessity these come together. This is the sweet reciprocal loop that Michael has been pointing out to me for many years now and Im so glad hes offered us more stories and intimacies to reify this subtly potent point. For all its quietness, this book is full of brave explorations just beyond the line of familiarity. And since he dares to look and seewe can too.

B.J. Miller MD, Zen Hospice Project, presenter of 2015 TED talk What Really Matters at The End of Life

Kearneys work is deep, thorough, risky, elegant and poetic. He is an exemplar for all those who come to realize that self-healing is a necessary condition for helping others to be healed. It is a win-win bargain. This is a warriors path, redefining the meaning of manhood and bravery and engaging the deepest and most challenging purposes of life.

Edward Bastian, PhD, Director Spiritual Paths Foundation

Michael Kearney has written a wonderful book. I read it in one sitting and was left with a new sense of the preciousness of life and present again to the longing to make a difference in other peoples lives that motivates whole person care. It should be mandatory reading for all medical students and physicians in practice. But its interest is not limited to people with medical expertise. I find it hard to imagine a person who would not enjoy and benefit from this soul-nurturing book.

Tom Hutchinson MD, Medical Director McGill Center for Whole Person Care, McGill University, Montreal

Michael Kearneys The Nest in the Stream is a deeply moving account of the authors search for healing in lives filled with pain: his patients, his own, and the worlds. Throughout, his relationship with nature is paramount and profound. He finds his way into its inner reaches, and it ripples through the fine-grained net of his sparsely elegant poetic prose. The reader is grateful for the gift of this singular book: its sure and subtle vision as well as its genius for finding connectivity everywhere, indeed for realizing that one is this very connectivity. In the end, the reader comes to know that being at one with all our relations is the heart of healing.

Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook; Distinguished Visiting Faculty, Pacifica Graduate Institute

I started the book and could not put it down for three hours. It weaves between clinical experiences and philosophical and spiritual insights of some of Kearneys previous works and personal biography like a Celtic knot. It is a unique form of biography that bridges the personal with the universal.

James Morley, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Ramapo College of New Jersey

You and I, and our home, this threatened planet, share a common journey through pain, in a quest for healing and wholeness. Whatever our perception, each of us is involved as both sufferer and caregiver. In this sensitive, wise and wondrously revealing memoir, physician and wounded healer Michael Kearney plumbs the depths of his personal path while drawing on a galaxy of inspired teachers. This is a profoundly important book.

Balfour Mount MD, Emeritus Eric M. Flanders Chair of Palliative Medicine, McGill University, Montreal

I always know when a book has entered into my soul when I find myself drawing on it frequently in my clinical practice and personal life. This is such a book! I am sure it will make a deep impact on others in the helping professions and those who care about themselves and others.

Mary L.S. Vachon, PhD, RN, Adjunct Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Beneath, above, beside, and inside the life we think we are living, lays another life, often cast out of our awareness. This wider life is not only our experience of being held by nature, but the fact of our being part of nature. Michael Kearney brings this other life into focus as he shares lucid stories of experiencing interconnection with other-than-human nature. As a wounded healer, Kearney awakens us to how we often deal with grief and suffering. He offers pathways to standing in our wider home, as we turn toward suffering with an open heart.

Mary Watkins, Chair MA, PhD, Depth Psychology Program, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara

There is no one in the field of medicine and healing I respect more than Michael Kearney, MD. Whenever a book of his appears it is a reason for celebration. But when he writes about suffering in an ever-deepening way until in the end of the book one feels one has traveled to the underworld and back, one is awestruck. His words have the power to confront loneliness and make us feel embedded in the social and natural world around us. This is a story of the suffering of humans and of Nature, and of a doctor who admits his fear of pain yet who doesnt flinch. Anyone who has ever suffered will find this book a revelation. I sure did!

Robert Bosnak, PsyA, Jungian psychoanalyst, author of Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming

Some seeds need to be scarifiedcracked open in the grit of a creek-bed, say, making them amenable to waterbefore they can become seedlings, then saplings, then great, shade-making trees. This is the story of such a journey. A magnanimous, gently wise, at times wrenchingly vulnerable account of one mans gritty heart-work done for the sake of all our relations. Read it and be cracked open. Read it to remember things you perhaps didnt know you forgot. Read it to root deeper into this earth and into your life. Read it and be returned.

Teddy Macker, author of This World

Parallax Press

P.O. Box 7355

Berkeley, California 94707

parallax.org

Parallax Press is the publishing division of Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, Inc.

Copyright 2018 by Michael Kearney

All rights reserved

Cover and text design by Jess Morphew

Cover and interior art CPD-Lab/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Author Photo Stephanie Baker

Ebook ISBN9781946764010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kearney, Michael (Physician), author.

Title: The nest in the stream : lessons from nature on being with pain / by Michael Kearney.

Description: Berkeley, CA : Parallax Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017042774 (print) | LCCN 2017044445 (ebook) | ISBN 9781946764010 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781946764003 (pbk.)