Event Focuses on Healthy Mind, Healthy Body

Westside Family Health Center (WFHC) hosted a Lunch and Learn event to educate the community about the connection between a healthy mind and body May 21 at the Mt. Olive Lutheran Church in Santa Monica.

Over 40 people attended the luncheon and learned about the effects of mental health on physical well-being through presentations and interactive exercises. The event also featured a panel of speakers, including Kehillat Israel Rabbi Amy Bernstein, executive director of Naam Yoga Jane Ohmes Mirshak and Nicholas Bruss, a certified Mindfulness Facilitator by UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

WFHC is a non-profit community health center that provides a wide-range of low-cost primary healthcare services and serves more than 9,500 low-income and uninsured Angelenos annually.

Palisadian and owner of the local eatery Mick’s Café, Zara Guivi was among the attendees.

WFHC Director of Development and Palisadian Celia Bernstein said that the luncheon integrated many of the clinic’s core values.

“Deb Farmer, President and CEO of WFHC often wonders, ‘How did the head get cut off from the body?’” Celia Bernstein said. “At this Lunch & Learn we were seeking to create a new vision of health and wellness that includes and integrates mind body and spirit. One day WFHC hopes to realize this vision in an expanded site that will incorporate mindfulness and mental and dental health into our primary care services.”

Rabbi Bernstein believed that the event sent a positive message to the community.

“Wisdom traditions from all over the world have taught, for millennia, that body and mind are interdependent,” she said. “Our health and well-being depends on body, mind and spirit being nurtured. It is time for us, in the contemporary Western world, to explore old and create new ways of exploring and strengthening the connection of body and mind. We are integrated and whole beings, and it is only when we exercise and care for every aspect of our wonderfully complex and multi-faceted selves that we can possibly hope to achieve living life to our fullest capacity.”