At this juncture in my life, I look back on a life well lived and enjoyed. Now more than ever, there is a cultivated integration of the personal and the professional. The haste and race has been left behind. One settles into enjoying the nothingness of everything, and the everything in nothingness.
Since the age of 23 years, I have navigated gravity gingerly after a motor vehicle accident changed my life forever, taking from me the ease with which I could place my footfalls on this earth. I have had to learn how to walk 4 times in my life – and I am still not good at it. That accident was 45 years ago, and in those years, I chose to practice mindfulness and mindfulness meditation as a form of healing or making myself whole on a daily basis. The breath married to compassion was the elixir of my life. I applied what I knew about mindfulness and mindfulness meditation to attend to my own suffering, and the suffering of those who were dying inpalliative care, their family members and the teams that provided care. I have also taught thousands of students and advocated for change to our care policies and procedures at an international, national, and local level. This presentation will speak to the integration of mindfulness and mindfulness meditation, of the personal and professional path taken, how it spilled out into the field of others, how it went from personalized to professionalized care, and will now be Michele’s sherpa in her own aging and dying.
Dr. Michele Chaban is a master trained social worker (UofT) and a clinical thanatologist (U of Wales, Lampeter). Michele was the Founding and Former Director of the Temmy Latner Center for Palliative Care at Mt. Sinai Hospital, where she was Associate Professor, cross appointed to Family and Community Medicine, the Dala Lana School of Public Health, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, and The Center for Bio-ethics. Leaving Temmy Latner Center, Michele then became the Founding and Former Director of the Applied Mindfulness Meditation (AMM-MIND) program at University of Toronto. In her retirement, Michele is an adjunct professor, continuing to teach the Foundations of AMM-MIND and a certificate on Mindfulness Informed End of Life Care and is advocating for a graduate program in mindfulness meditation at University of Toronto. She lives in urban and rural Ontario with her partner Peter and their golden retriever, Alphia.