December 2025 Letter | John Fox, PPM

Dear Friend of Poetic Medicine,

Thriving & Comfort, in the Room Together

I hope you are well and thriving. This time of year, a transitional passage into the new, could be considered a place where you envision the possible. I cheer that possible for you.

If this letter finds you in a more difficult place, I am sending gentle encouragement and comfort. Comfort?

Yes, comfort may be what most of us long for, especially in these days of harsh, hurtful actions and rhetoric in some quarters. I feel we may welcome comfort even if we are well and looking forward.

We probably wish comfort for others. I am, every day.

Earlier this year I gave a talk at Commonweal in Bolinas, CA that lifted-up comfort. The three-day conference was bringing to the fore the healing nature of psychedelics, especially psilocybin. Lots of hope expressed there!

I was speaking about an early experience of comfort and tenderness I had in the 4th grade: In that vulnerable, awkward, embarrassing experience, I learned tenderness and comfort are real. I experienced what they feel like. I learned they can be given. I know that I didn’t think about it; I didn’t think “now that was tenderness and comfort.” Yet that kiss is the only thing I remember from 4th grade. My body and soul remember.

Christine Mineart, Program Director of Cancer Choices at Commonweal, describes my talk in a distilled way.

In a luminous, deeply human talk, John Fox, founder of the Institute for Poetic Medicine, invites us to explore poetry as healing practice. Fox shows how poems become doorways to tenderness, comfort, truth-telling, and transformation.

~ Christine Mineart

Moving Forward into 2026, A Tough Decision

This month there was tough decision the IPM Board needed to make; it is tough for many reasons – first, because we have such amazing work to share about applying poetic medicine to an immense range of needs – second, because we want to meet you face to face and have you meet us that way.

What is our tough decision? You may have guessed by now. We have decided to shift from an in-person Summit in Austin, TX to an on-line Summit. We will STILL share the amazing programs that were planned for April 25 & 26 event in Austin. This will happen on-line in April and . I am shifting my excitement to this!

My positive mind-set: This on-line Summit will allow us to reach more people! You! We hope that you will attend with us virtually this year and that we will be able to have plans in place to see you all in person soon!

RISE the Deep Resilience Way

My story of being born with a very challenging genetic disorder is included in a superb new book by Dr. Neena Verma, titled RISE: The 'Deep Resilience' Way. While sharing this story is quite vulnerable, this book shows that vulnerability can be a pathway to resilience and to a hard-won strength.

I don’t share my genetic story very often. When meeting Dr Verma, she won my trust. The purpose of her book, to evoke and show our capacity for deep resilience drew me in. I trusted Neena to tell my story accurately and with consideration. I jumped in to share my raw details, trusting she would weave them into a truth that could help others. She felt my life demonstrates resilience. Others praise her book:

“…a luminous lantern of welcome wisdom about the riddle of resilience.”

~ Robert A. Niemeyer, Ph.D. Originator of “Grief Therapy as Meaning Reconstruction’

Buy the Book Here

Here is an excellent description of RISE:

Life is a mosaic of misery and meaningfulness, both at once. It brings us rainstorms and rainbows alike. If it tests us with setbacks, turbulent times, loss and trauma, it also endows us with the gift of resilience. Unfortunately when dark clouds of fear, chaos and despair take over, we do not notice or invoke our inherent capacity of resilience. 

A seasoned practitioner, coach and educator of leadership, resilience, wellbeing, grief, post-traumatic growth and therapeutic writing, Neena Verma takes resilience beyond its popular connotation of ‘bouncing back’. And shepherds the reader to its deep, restorative, generative, supple and expansive aspects.

Neena, wrote this to me:

I am writing to share the happy news that my new book "RISE - The 'Deep Resilience' Way" is releasing next week.

I am deeply grateful for the gift of your story that I am sure will inspire the readers to invoke, activate and strengthen their 'deep resilience' capacity, and 'resilience mindset'.

May this be so – that my story and the “the deep resilience way” inspire you!

Return to Roots —The Indigenous Origins of Poetic Medicine

When I wrote Poetic Medicine in nineteen-ninety-six, twenty-nine years ago, I made a conscious choice for the first poem in Chapter One, Heart, Who Will You Cry Out To, to be a prayer by a Navaho.

I knew that although I was part of the evolution of poetry therapy as a clinical practice, as an expressive art of incomparable value, I knew that this did not do justice to the actual origins of poetry-as-healer, to language having the power to transform life, to celebrate it.

I wrote:

Expressing our experience through poetry, we connect to a widely-varied community of poem-makers and kindred spirits. In this inner/outer place of relatedness and communication, it is possible to recognize profound healing and wholeness:

I ask them with reverence,

of my mother the earth,

of the sky, moon, and sun my father.

I am old age:

the essence of life,

I am the source of all happiness.

All is peaceful, all in beauty,

all in harmony, all in joy.

~ Anonymous Navaho

That poem/prayer is recognized in my heart as belonging to Indigenous peoples. That is where poetry therapy begins.

It was in 1997, soon after the book was published, that I had the great good fortune to meet Jon and Lupita McClanahan living in Canyon de Chelly. They were for REAL, Diné people who served as our guides when I brought a group to write poems in this sacred place. A place and people I was meeting for the first time.

For the next twelve years there was collaboration between Footpath Journeys and The Institute for Poetic Medicine. I brought groups
of people to not only write poems, but to camp, share meals, sit in fire circles, walk that sacred place and experience Lupita’s wisdom, humor and presence.

Our friendships with Jon and Lupita have only flourished since that time.

Our good fortune, once again, is that Lupita is stepping out from her ancestral land, to bring her wisdom about the Beauty Way – and much more – into the modern world. That includes speaking across the US. In particular I invite you to attend her programs in California: January 17th in Mountain View and and January 19th in Carmel Valley, CA.

I will be there and hope that you come too! They are free to attend. Please see the links above to learn more.

Extra news – there are plans for Lupita to speak by radio through the program, Voices of the Native Nation, hosted by Mary Jean Robertson.

There is a lovely synchronicity here – I met Mary Jean 35 years ago when we found we were both friends with the Athabascan, lay St. Francis follower, the poet, Mary TallMountain.

The interview with Lupita is on Wednesday, December 31 at 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific, via KPOO at 89.5. You can listen on the internet via this link.

Lupita is a most extraordinary human being. I have had the blessing to know her for all these years and I hope you will hear her – perhaps, see her in person.

Please let people know in the South Bay of San Francisco and Monterey Bay near Carmel Valley.

Who We Are, What We Do

Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself,

it has to be created between people.

~ Adrienne Rich

Our task is to listen to the news

that is always arriving out of silence.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

There is much good happening in the LIFE of IPM; happenings deeply in tune what Rainer Rilke and Adrienne Rich say!

• Our training work flourishes; flourishing, which includes making the training available to people who the general culture think of as living at the margins or do not consider such people at all.

• We continue our work with Veterans, many at risk of self-harm, suicide. VETS whose voices and experience can help us grow.

• The Spring will bring a new offering for people living with Parkinson’s Disease. This program is many years in process. The community that is created here is as important as the poems.

• Poetry of Nature (PON) is going into its seventh (7th) year! Led brilliantly by NanLeah and Geoff Oelsner, PON is our response to the Climate Crisis and extends the 7th chapter I wrote in Poetic Medicine – The Peace of Wild Things, that says our wholeness is connected to our relationship with earth.

• New proposals for funding consideration by the IPM Board of Directors will include a new program designed to help traumatized youth and another program by long-time Poetry Partner Merna Ann Hecht (previously funded programs include Stories of Arrival and Word Travels) to continue her work with immigrants and refugees, demonized by the current administration. We have funded Merna for 13 years.

This is a modest list, there is so much more.

Stirring Your Hope

I want these healing actions of IPM to stir your hope. I want our hearts to raise your desire to help us do more. I know you are asked often at this time of year to help so many causes. I know so much is necessary and profoundly good. May I ask you – has poetry-as-healer helped you? Please consider helping others with this healing art of poetry.

We are deeply committed with joy & courage, willingness & creativity to advance poetic medicine and make a better world in 2026. May your new year be abundant with goodness and kindness – and yes, with comfort.

John Fox