Every Body: Finding Strength in our Struggle with Illness
April 2025
Our worlds and belief systems shatter when faced with chronic or serious illness. Our bodies were supposed to function a certain way, but a disease forces us to navigate transitions, to acknowledge our lack of agency, and confront mortality. How do we move forward in the world with purpose? What are strategies to live with pain or affliction, but not allow it to foreground our day-to-day? Join this three-part series in which we lean into grief associated with illness and disease, but at the same time recognize opportunities to learn, transform, or grow. Guest speakers—authors, artists, therapists, spiritual leaders, and activists—will share their stories and practical tools and support. In a time when many feel the threat of a fracturing health care system, it’s important to come together in community and strengthen our resources. What roles do creativity, spirituality and acts of service have in everyone's journey in this struggle?
Who is this for?
- We're honoring those who are directly experiencing the fear and transitions that accompany a diagnosis or the ambiguous grief of not having a diagnosis.
- We're creating space for those who want to increase their grief literacy and show up for friends and family dealing with health challenges.
Upcoming Events
This panel discussion features some of the most articulate and passionate voices in patient empowerment, spiritual care, and grief education, advocacy, and literacy. Guest speakers include author and interfaith minister Barbara Becker, entrepreneur and advocate Nitika Chopra, Grammy Award-winning musician and producer Brian Kennedy, and grief activist Lisa Keefauver (moderator).
Barbara Becker is the award-winning author of Heartwood: The Art Of Living With The End In Mind, which Katie Couric Media named a “Book that will Change your Life.” Barbara has dedicated more than twenty-five years to partnering with human-rights advocates around the world in pursuit of peace and interreligious understanding. She has worked with the United Nations, Human Rights First, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. She is an ordained interfaith minister who bridges the sacred and the secular, and has sat with hundreds of people at the end of their lives. As a cancer survivor herself, Barbara speaks frequently about balancing life’s 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows.
Nitika Chopra is the Founder and CEO of Chronicon and The Chronicon Foundation, dedicated to empowering individuals with chronic illnesses. With a personal journey marked by psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis diagnoses since childhood, Nitika turned her experiences into a force for change. Her entrepreneurial spirit led her to host her own TV show, 'Naturally Beautiful,' and organize over 100 transformative events. Nitika's influence extends to partnerships with major brands like Google, Microsoft, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, where she advocates for the chronic illness community.
@Nitika Chopra @ChroniconOfficial @TheChroniconFoundation
Brian Kennedy is a four-time Grammy Award-winner, musical phenomenon and founder of Hits To Healing (H2H), a transformative non-profit that fosters communication between healthcare entities and the patients they serve through the universal language of music. H2H empowers the community via patient advocacy, preventive care, communal support, lifestyle options, and trustworthy health information. Kennedy has a career that spans over twenty years. Some of his credits include chart-topping hits by Rihanna, Chris Brown, Kelly Clarkson, The Weeknd, Fantasia, and Jennifer Hudson. After struggling with kidney failure for 8 years, Brian received a new lease on life thanks to a donation from his brother Kevin.
Lisa Keefauver (moderator) is an in-demand grief activist, speaker, author, and breast cancer survivor. She began her career as a social worker and narrative therapist, then expanded her activism in a variety of roles: clinical director and supervisor, non-profit co-founder, facilitator of personal and professional growth and healing. Lisa's wisdom and insights on grief are also embodied from her personal losses. She is a mother of an adopted child, who became an only parent when she lost her husband Eric to brain cancer in 2011. Lisa's grief advocacy inspired her to found Reimagining Grief, with a mission to illuminate and dismantle the limited and misleading collective story of grief that causes so much unnecessary suffering. Best known for her interview skills as host of the top-rated podcast, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch, she has spent much of her time sharing her warmth, wisdom, humor and compassion facilitating conversations as a speaker and moderator on stages, as an organizational consultant to facilitate grief-smart companies, and leading workshops and retreats.
Grief is a Sneaky Bitch: An Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss
About the Series
Every Body: Finding Strength in our Struggle with Illness
Our worlds and belief systems shatter when faced with chronic or serious illness. Our bodies were supposed to function a certain way, but a disease forces us to navigate transitions, to acknowledge our lack of agency, and confront mortality. How do we move forward in the world with purpose? What are strategies to live with pain or affliction, but not allow it to foreground our day-to-day? Join this three-part series in which we lean into grief associated with illness and disease, but at the same time recognize opportunities to learn, transform, or grow. Guest speakers—authors, artists, therapists, spiritual leaders, and activists—will share their stories and practical tools and support. In a time when many feel the threat of a fracturing health care system, it’s important to come together in community and strengthen our resources. What roles do creativity, spirituality and acts of service have in everyone's journey in this struggle?
Who is this for?
- We're honoring those who are directly experiencing the fear and transitions that accompany a diagnosis or the ambiguous grief of not having a diagnosis.
- We're creating space for those who want to increase their grief literacy and show up for friends and family dealing with health challenges.
About Reimagine
Reimagine is a nonprofit organization catalyzing a uniquely powerful community–people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths (and no faith) coming together to create a more compassionate world. We support each other in facing adversity, loss, and mortality and channeling life's biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth.
Track:
Wellness, Caregiving, Grief, Healthcare,
Creative movement of the body helps us change our relationship to ourselves and our environment. But sometimes—whether due to illness, injury, age or other factors—movement feels not so accessible. What if we could practice rest, notice the present moment, and invite the body to move and dance? Multidisciplinary dance artist, movement and fitness educator, and multiple myeloma cancer survivor Larissa Velez-Jackson shares ways to find restful presence as a means to creative movement at home and offers a menu of take-aways for self care. Elements of the workshop may include breathwork, tapping, and micro-meditations with sound. Participants can take part standing, seated, lying down or a combination of these.
Beginning with a brief introduction to their personal story and daily self-care body practices, which have been paramount to their healing; Larissa will take workshop participants through playful and accessible embodiment exercises that involve breath, vocal sound, gentle movement, facial, neck and shoulder exercises, touch-based and writing to love and further know ourselves. As a sound healing practitioner and disability advocate, Larissa believes that illness brought them in much closer contact with their life’s purpose, and a very necessary pause from the fast-paced exploitative rhythm of modern life. With that in mind, the workshop will include moments of rest and reflective meditation with the accompaniment of sound, vibrational instruments played live to soothe our minds and bring connection to our resilient spirits. Here we practice how illness is a direct path to greater self-knowing, self-love and wellness.
Larissa Velez-Jackson (LVJ) is originally from Newark, New Jersey, lived in New York City for twenty years and now lives in Middletown, NY. Described by The New York Times as “an adroit physical comedian” who “seems to be questioning entrenched conventions of contemporary performance,” LVJ is a choreographer, movement educator and multi-platform artist who developed an improvisation performance practice called the Star Pû Method. As the artistic director of LVJ Performance Co., LVJ's performances involve movement, digital and vocal sound, storytelling and intergenerational community practice. They created a band Yackez with their spouse, Jon Velez-Jackson and recently launched the YouTube ASMR personality, Dr. Absurd Joy. LVJ is an ongoing cancer survivor and an advocate of the healing potential of combining art and body/mind practice.
https://www.larissa-velez-jackson.com/
About the Series
Every Body: Finding Strength in our Struggle with Illness
Our worlds and belief systems shatter when faced with chronic or serious illness. Our bodies were supposed to function a certain way, but a disease forces us to navigate transitions, to acknowledge our lack of agency, and confront mortality. How do we move forward in the world with purpose? What are strategies to live with pain or affliction, but not allow it to foreground our day-to-day? Join this three-part series in which we lean into grief associated with illness and disease, but at the same time recognize opportunities to learn, transform, or grow. Guest speakers—authors, artists, therapists, spiritual leaders, and activists—will share their stories and practical tools and support. In a time when many feel the threat of a fracturing health care system, it’s important to come together in community and strengthen our resources. What roles do creativity, spirituality and acts of service have in everyone's journey in this struggle?
Who is this for?
- We're honoring those who are directly experiencing the fear and transitions that accompany a diagnosis or the ambiguous grief of not having a diagnosis.
- We're creating space for those who want to increase their grief literacy and show up for friends and family dealing with health challenges.
About Reimagine
Reimagine is a nonprofit organization catalyzing a uniquely powerful community–people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths (and no faith) coming together to create a more compassionate world. We support each other in facing adversity, loss, and mortality and channeling life's biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth.
Type:
Movement & Dance, Music & Sound, Workshop, Meditation,
Join Jeannie Blaustein, PhD., D. Ministry, and Wendy Videlock – two remarkable individuals living with a range of chronic and serious illnesses – as part of this conversation in the series Every Body. Jeannie and Wendy will reflect on poetry and writing as wayfinders in their health journeys and their creative paths. How can finding and generating words and language help us to take small, sweet steps towards growth, transformation, and learning?
The event culminates in peer-led breakout sessions, offering a space for shared reflection through the following guided prompts:
- Your body has a wisdom of its own. It seeks to be expressed and witnessed. What does it want to say today?
- What is one thing you’ve been avoiding and what is one small, sweet step you can take to gently approach it?
- Think of an aspect of your health that feels particularly heavy. What’s one tiny act of self-compassion you can offer yourself around that?
- Grief and loss often shift our priorities. Is there something new you’ve been curious about exploring or learning? What’s one small way you can start? (prompts courtesy of Nina Rodriguez, Grief and Light)
Dr. Jeannie Blaustein is a graduate of Brown University, a licensed clinical psychologist and pastoral counselor, with additional training and experience in hospital chaplaincy, hospice, and palliative care. She is the co-founder of Reimagine, a national non-profit which leverages the power of the arts, spirituality, and community to help us transform our experiences of mortality, loss and adversity so that we may all live fully until the end.
A strong believer in the power of the arts to open hearts and minds, Jeannie is an executive producer of an Off Broadway drama and six films, including The Chaplain and the Doctor (2025, Jessica Zitter), There is Another Way (2024, Steve Apkon), The Last Ecstatic Days (2022, Adithi Sethi), Caregiver: A Love Story (2020, Jessica Zitter), Defining Hope (2017, Caroline Jones), and Wrestling Jerusalem (2016, Aaron Davidman).
Diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Jeannie has herself found writing and painting to be extremely helpful as she’s been adjusting to living with serious chronic illness. She said recently that making art is “both meditative and intellectually stimulating, bringing [her] right into the present moment and reminding [her] that this moment is the only thing we truly know.”
Wendy Videlock lives at the foot of Thunder Mountain in Western Colorado. She believes language is the invisible influence informing our thoughts, our perceptions and our relationships. Wendy is the author of five critically acclaimed books of poetry, a children's book and a collection of essays. Wendy is also a visual artist whose works appear in galleries across Colorado. Her poems and essays appear most notably in Poetry, Best American Poetry, the New York Times and O Magazine. Wendy teaches for THINK360 and directs several literary programs across the region, advocating for the arts in public spaces. Wendy serves as poet laureate of Western Colorado. In response to the question, “Would you say you are a writer living with chronic illness?” her response is, “Yes, several.”
https://wendy-videlock.constantcontactsites.com/
About the Series
Every Body: Finding Strength in our Struggle with Illness
Our worlds and belief systems shatter when faced with chronic or serious illness. Our bodies were supposed to function a certain way, but a disease forces us to navigate transitions, to acknowledge our lack of agency, and confront mortality. How do we move forward in the world with purpose? What are strategies to live with pain or affliction, but not allow it to foreground our day-to-day? Join this three-part series in which we lean into grief associated with illness and disease, but at the same time recognize opportunities to learn, transform, or grow. Guest speakers—authors, artists, therapists, spiritual leaders, and activists—will share their stories and practical tools and support. In a time when many feel the threat of a fracturing health care system, it’s important to come together in community and strengthen our resources. What roles do creativity, spirituality and acts of service have in everyone's journey in this struggle?
Who is this for?
- We're honoring those who are directly experiencing the fear and transitions that accompany a diagnosis or the ambiguous grief of not having a diagnosis.
- We're creating space for those who want to increase their grief literacy and show up for friends and family dealing with health challenges.
About Reimagine
Reimagine is a nonprofit organization catalyzing a uniquely powerful community–people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths (and no faith) coming together to create a more compassionate world. We support each other in facing adversity, loss, and mortality and channeling life's biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth.
