Stan Goldberg | Lessons for the Living

November 6, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is the author of a wonderful book called ‘Lessons for the Living.’ It’s a very beautiful note that we can end the show on today. The author of this book is Stan Goldberg, and the subtitle is, ‘Stories of Forgiveness, Gratitude and Courage at the End of Life.’ Welcome to the show, Stan Goldberg.

Stan Goldberg: Thanks, Kent, for having me on.

Dr. Kent: You went through a terrible experience yourself, and that’s how you got into this whole thing.

Stan Goldberg: Yes. I have prostate cancer, and when I contracted that, I really didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I didn’t know what the prognosis was. Through a series of events, I ended up as a bedside hospice volunteer.

Dr. Kent: Your background is as a professor, and of course you have your PhD in speech pathology, and all sorts of history teaching and presenting and all of that. Now how is this different from all of that?

Stan Goldberg: I think that the biggest difference is that in a world of academia, you tend to be very objective, very empirical, very data oriented, very almost constricted in some way. Being a bedside hospice volunteer, you have to throw all of that out, and it’s a very emotional, present experience. It was a radical transformation that I had to go through in order to be effective as a bedside hospice volunteer.

Dr. Kent: The book itself is obviously dealing with both you and them. How did you learn through these experiences of talking to these people?

Stan Goldberg: When I started to do my volunteer work, I really had no intention of writing this book. I was actually working on a novel. The experiences were so transforming that I thought that I really needed to write these things down. What happened was, I went from someone who pretty much fit the stereotypical view of a university professor to someone who was much more open, not only about what I was experiencing going through cancer, but also what my patients were experiencing. Being in their presence really allowed me to get much more in touch with myself, and pretty much learn how to live regardless of how long that might be.

Dr. Kent: All of us, from early on in life, have real problems thinking about death: of course we do. It’s a terrifying thing. You confronted it by being diagnosed first of all. It’s obviously a different perspective when it happens to you or when you see it happen to someone else. What did you see in seeing through the window, both directions?

Stan Goldberg: I think that there’s really three levels of understanding that I found. The first is what I had been most accustomed to, which was book [indecipherable]: essentially you can read about something and have an intellectual understanding of that. The second thing is you can actually watch it happen, and that would be at the bedside, and you’re seeing people confront their own deaths. The third most intimate, I think probably most genuine form of knowledge, is when you experience the thing yourself. I’ve been able to do all three of those things now.

Dr. Kent: There are such taboos around death. You shouldn’t talk too much about it, and nobody prepares you for those times when your family members are in the hospital, or when you yourself are diagnosed with something. What stories did you come across that made you write this book?

Stan Goldberg: There were many things I learned. If you look at the book, there’s about eight very specific lessons. They all seem to have very simple descriptions, such as letting go, not taking along with you something that no longer is functional. An example of that would be there was a woman that I served whose mother had difficulty accepting the idea that her daughter was dying. Because she couldn’t accept that, the daughter made a conscious decision to keep on living in spite of tremendous pain she was experiencing. Watching that happen, it made me realize that I was doing the same thing on some levels, even though it wasn’t that traumatic. Because of my cancer, I was putting myself in physical risk, because I did a lot of outdoor things alone, that didn’t make sense any longer. So that was one direct application, where watching what my patient was going through was a direct lesson to how I needed to change my own life.

Dr. Kent: So you have prostate cancer, which is something that is terrifying to a lot of men, and yet men rarely get checked for it, honestly. What can you say about the cancer itself?

Stan Goldberg: Get it checked quick, and soon and often. Prostate cancer is one of the slowest growing forms of cancer. If it’s caught early enough, while the cancer is still in the prostate gland, it’s a hundred percent curable almost. But once it’s allowed to get out of that gland, which has been the case with me, then those microscopic cells are going to be there forever. When I said that my diagnosis is indeterminate, what I really meant was that the cells are always there, and it’s a holding action that medication is taking essentially. My thought is that the cancer cells will always be there, they will be hungry, and they’ll be ready and waiting to go, unless something else beats them to the punch.

Dr. Kent: It’s fascinating to me to speak to someone who does have a close perspective on that: all of this healthcare debate is going on right now. Obviously one thing is Americans are thinking a lot more about health over the last several months, but what’s your take on the whole debate happening?

Stan Goldberg: One of the biggest problems that I saw was that you had people who had a vested interest in keeping the healthcare system exactly as it is scaring the most vulnerable people in our society, those that were sick and elderly. It’s taken the hospice movement numbers of years in order to have the whole issue of looking at end of life care as something that was important. I think a lot of the discussion on death panels, on pulling the plug, really put us back many years. I was very disheartened by what was happening.

Dr. Kent: Because it’s a political tactic on an issue that really all of these, even the people that were saying those phrases, advocated planning, which is the strange thing. So there’s this political thing happening for something that we really do need.

Stan Goldberg: I agree with you completely.

Dr. Kent: In terms of this book, what’s the been the feedback? Obviously there’s not many folks out there that are able to put this perspective to death. Of course the book is called, ‘Lessons for the Living.’ It’s not about how to die or something like that. What’s been the feedback, because clearly you do offer perspective that is new?

Stan Goldberg: It’s interesting. I think there’s two levels of feedback that I’ve been getting. The first one is a reluctance to read it because people have a natural fear of dying. They look at death as the finality of it, the horror of it, and whatever negative term they can think of for it. But when they actually read the book, the feedback is incredibly gratifying. I think the purpose of the book was to have people understand that the greatest teacher we can have about living really is death. A willingness to look at it openly and see what it can teach us is what I try to give people in the book.

Dr. Kent: What does this book mean to you in terms of what you’ve been able to do with it, and what it means now for you moving forward?

Stan Goldberg: There’s two different forms of satisfaction from this book. The one is in writing it, essentially I felt that I was given information and knowledge that I felt I was required to share. As I said, I had no intention of writing the book, but the message was so clear and so important, I thought I was obligated to share it. Now I’ve done that, and that was one of the purposes. The second is being in the presence of these people has radically transformed my life. For me, it’s more important that the quality of the life that I have not just physically, but also psychologically, than it is the quantity of life that I have left. That I got from my patients.

Dr. Kent: What a beautiful book it is. Give us another peak inside the cover. Tell us another one of the sections in the book.

Stan Goldberg: There was a woman who had spent her life waiting for a person that she had a relationship with to get out of jail, which was a very strange relationship they had. As he had about a few more years left, she contracted brain cancer. She realized that by waiting her entire life for this guy, she had wasted hers. At that point, when he would finally able to be released from prison, her life would long have been over. She came to understand that living in the future is a way of denying the present. That was a lesson that I took very seriously. That’s the lesson that a lot of the patients that I was with came to understand: we don’t know about tomorrow, we don’t know about the future. The past is gone, all we have is today. Live for today because that’s the only time we exist in.

Dr. Kent: Those are beautiful words. What’s the immediate job that you do? Tell us more, because I know from my time with family in the hospital, there’s some incredible workers that work with people. What is the work you do? Do you work at a hospital? Do you go to homes?

Stan Goldberg: I’ve been with four different hospices. Hospice can take place in a dedicated unit, it can take place within a hospital, it can also take place in homes. I’m currently with Pathways Home Healthcare and Hospice, and they almost completely go into people’s homes. So I will go into someone’s home, I will sit with them, I will talk with them. If something needs to be taken care of in the house, I will do that. But it’s usually that I’m there to – the best way to describe it is a midwife to death. I’m there just to listen to them, to be there to witness their pain, to talk to them about dying if they bring up the subject. It’s almost what you would do with a family member or a good friend, and that’s what a hospice volunteer does.

Dr. Kent: That’s also such an incredible opportunity to sit at someone’s bedside, because they recant the tales of their entire life at times, I’m sure.

Stan Goldberg: It’s an honor to be able to sit there and be invited into someone’s life, especially as it’s getting closer to ending. People are more honest with you than they are sometimes with their family members. They’re willing to share with you things that they’ve never told anybody. You walk away from the bedside of these people, a different person, a better person, every time you’re there.

Dr. Kent: On a lighter note, your latest blog entry talks about people who died in the middle ages. I’ve got to say I was chuckling – death is at sometimes sort of funny in a weird way. You talked about when people died, they said goodbye, gave away the furniture, and then they just stopped breathing.

Stan Goldberg: Yes, and that was pretty much how it was. At that point, death was viewed as just a part of living. As a part of living, it was treated no differently than birth. So it was this continual wheel that people accepted and they didn’t have any fear about. Now, it’s a very fearful topic. I don’t know if I mentioned that blog, but there was a story that Thomas Merton told that when his mother, Donna, was dying – this was about 1910 or 1913 – they wouldn’t allow him to come to the hospital, because they thought it would traumatize him, although he loved his mother and she loved him. What she did was to write him a letter that he was able to read after she died. It’s that kind of fear we have of death. I think it ends up doing two evils: one, it makes it difficult for those of us who survive people who have died to really understand what is going on and to learn from them, and the second, it makes it difficult for the person who’s dying. It’s important to say goodbye. It’s important to finish up things. There’s a lot of things that we can do for loved ones as they are dying if we just weren’t so afraid of the topic.

Dr. Kent: You know what’s interesting too, I was just thinking Halloween weekend is approaching, and it used to be that Halloween was a scary night because the souls of friends and family and other folks were just drifting about before All Saints’ Day. It’s kind of kids paint cemeteries, and they dress up as dead people and this and that, but it made me think, it’s all become so commercialized, that the kids aren’t actually thinking about death anymore. They’re just having a good time. I’ve heard that many cultures, even American culture 50 years ago, 100 years ago, it was much more talked about, death. There was always an open casket, and the whole town would come see. What’s the relationship that we have now adays with death?

Stan Goldberg: I think we fear it generally. We think that if we ignore it, it will go away. I think it also allows us to think in terms of the future rather than living for today. I’ll always have time to say I’m sorry. I’ll have time to say goodbye. I’ll have time to hundreds of different things, and I think in some way it insulates us from maybe some of the more difficult things that we currently experience. Like, if I screw up, I tell people now I’m sorry right away. I don’t wait, because I don’t know how much longer I have. I think it’s that insulation that people want. They would prefer to think that there’s always time to do it. If you believe you always have time to do it, then you’re not going to want to deal with death.

Dr. Kent: These lessons for the living, it’s almost that you’re telling people, there are things that we should be thankful for, and things you should apologize for right away. Is there some of that to what your book is about?

Stan Goldberg: That’s the whole book. The nut of the book is that the way that we live is going to be the way we die. If you live in the present, you take care of people. You say you’re sorry when you’ve done something that you shouldn’t have. You tell people how much you love them. If you do all of that now, and don’t think you have time for the future to do that, I’ve found that deaths tend to be much easier.

Dr. Kent: Yes. It’s so fascinating talking with you. What are you working on now? Obviously you’re doing some interviews, and giving this wonderful book out there, but what are you doing now?

Stan Goldberg: There’s another book I’m working on, don’t know the title yet, but it has to do with resurrecting one’s joy. One of the things that I’ve seen is that a lot of times, people will grieve a loss they have, whether it’s a loss for a person, a pet, a job, and many other things, and the question then becomes, how do you regain that joy that you lost? The approach most people take is, well, you look for an exact substitute. If your husband dies, you look for a new husband, if your pet dies, you look for another pet. What I started looking at is those people that I’ve seen who’ve recovered their joy did it not necessarily by looking for an exact duplicate, but rather, looking at the emotion.

Dr. Kent: I don’t know if you ever heard – where did I see this? On television or somewhere, the story of the couple that cloned their dog or their pig or something.

Stan Goldberg: No, I didn’t.

Dr. Kent: It was their beloved – was it a pig? I can’t remember – but their beloved animal, and they cloned it. Of course, the animal that they literally reproduced wasn’t the same animal. Exactly what you were just saying. It’s such an honor to chat with you, Dr. Stan Goldberg. Now your background is in communicative disorders at San Francisco State, and you’ve got political theory background, and philosophy.

Stan Goldberg: As my mother would say, I could never make up my mind.

Dr. Kent: Yes [laughs]. Exactly. Now you’re a writer in a topic that’s very important. I look forward to seeing what you come up with next, and this is truly a beautiful book. Thank you so much for talking to me.

Stan Goldberg: Thank you for having me on Kent.

Dr. Kent: People can check out Stan Goldberg’s newest book, and his blog: great amounts of information on StanGoldbergWriter.com. Of course his book is called, ‘Lessons for the Living.’ What incredible stories he’s told us even here, and go check it out. Next week on the show, I’m excited because we’re going to have a whole different lineup of guests. Every week, it’s kind of a different thing. I believe next week, we’ve got an author for most of the show, and then a musician at the end. Every day this week at 3pm, you can tune in and listen to Sound Authors interviews. I hope you’re all able to pick up a great book: Stan Goldberg’s book is a book that you need to buy for everyone in your family who has ever dealt with death or thought about it. It’s called, ‘Lessons for the Living.’ Clarke Buehling – what a fun conversation that was – talking about The SkirtLifters, his music of the last 20 years, his explorations of the last 40 with the banjo, and the origins of urban and country music, and of White and Black music. It’s been a great show today. Everyone have a safe week, and we’ll talk to you live again next Friday. Tune in every day at 3pm to hear some favorites of mine from Sound Authors radio. Have a safe week, and pick up a great book.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Health, Inspiration, Medicine, Motivation, PODCAST, Spirituality

Stan Goldberg | Lessons for the Living

November 6, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Stan Goldberg [22:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Stan Goldberg is a Professor Emeritus of Communicative Disorders at San Francisco State University with a Ph.D. in Speech Pathology, a Masters in Political Theory, and a Bachelors in Philosophy. For over 25 years he taught, provided therapy, researched, and published in the area of learning problems and change. Dr. Goldberg has published six books, written numerous articles and delivered over 100 lectures and workshops throughout the United States, Latin America and Asia. His latest book is ‘Lessons for the Living: Stories of Forgiveness, Gratitude, and Courage at the End of Life.’ In 2009 he was named by the Hospice Volunteer Association as ‘Volunteer of the Year.’

Posted by jamie | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Health, Inspiration, Medicine, Motivation, PODCAST, Spirituality

Dr. D.A. Henderson | Smallpox: The Death of a Disease

October 30, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. My next guest on the show is Dr. D.A. Henderson. He’s the author of ‘Smallpox: Death of a Disease.’ This book is an account of challenges, obstacles and disasters faced by an intrepid international program in achieving the global eradication of smallpox. Fascinating, fascinating tale. Welcome to the show, Dr. D.A. Henderson.

Dr. D.A. Henderson: Delighted to be with you.

Dr. Kent: Give me a little background about it. What is smallpox?

Dr. D.A. Henderson: Smallpox was probably the most devastating disease known to history. It goes back at least 3500 years, and has caused tens of millions of deaths, hundreds of millions of deaths, over the century. It’s a virus disease: it causes a severe rash, a high fever. The person who acquires it has about a 30 percent chance of dying from the disease, and some of those who recover are left blind. Throughout history, it was regarded as probably the most feared out of all the diseases: it’s worse than cholera or yellow fever, or any of the other diseases.

Dr. Kent: My goodness. How was it part of Americans’ lives early this century?

Dr. D.A. Henderson: It certainly kept going throughout the US until 1949; that was when our last cases occurred. One of the remarkable things is that the American Indians, the natives here in this country and throughout the western hemisphere, were particularly susceptible to it. So death rates of 60 to 80 percent were recorded. In fact, they recorded the fact that so many people died, that they couldn’t harvest the food to keep going, and whole tribes disappeared.

Dr. Kent: Wow. The toll just during the 20th century, according to your bio, says that there were 300 to 500 million deaths.

Dr. D.A. Henderson: That’s a fairly conservative estimate. Before the disease was eradicated (the last case occurred in 1977), we estimated that there were at least 300 million deaths. One compares that to what the New York Times has said how many people died as a result directly or indirectly of our conflicts in the 20th century, they estimate about 120 million, so it was more than two and half times that number dying as a result of smallpox in various countries throughout the world.

Dr. Kent: There’s such a hubbub around vaccines these days. Celebrities are starting not to vaccinate their children. This buzz is starting. With a father who’s a physician, he always tells me it’s foolish not to vaccinate, and part of the reason is because there’s such power in vaccines, and of course, with smallpox, my goodness, of course 500 million deaths, that’s a huge number that can be prevented by a vaccine. So tell me about the vaccine: how it works, how you started to think about coming up with it, or how the whole community did.

Dr. D.A. Henderson: The smallpox vaccine is actually largely comprised of another virus called cowpox, which did infect cows. It’s sort of a cousin of smallpox. It started very early that they found they could inoculate this material into the arm, and there would be an infection: a little pustule would form. The individual would then develop protective antibodies, antibodies in the blood, so that when the individual is exposed to smallpox, the antibodies would fight off the infection. This is the way vaccines work. Some of them, what they call ‘kill’ vaccines, you take a virus, like influenza, and you grow up a certain quantity of it, and you kill that virus and actually you inoculate it into the skin, and that really is your vaccine. Your body makes protective antibodies against that virus, which is dead – it’s growing – and when you are then exposed to the live virus, those antibodies are fighting off the invasion of the live virus.

Dr. Kent: Wow. How do you eradicate, even using something as incredible as this vaccination, how do you eradicate a disease? How can you get every single case?

Dr. D.A. Henderson: In fact, we did not try to get every single case. What we tried to do was provide a vaccine protection to let’s say 80 percent of the population. Now smallpox cannot infect animals, and it cannot just lie in the soil and infect people. So therefore, that virus, to keep going, it has to infect one person after another. One after the other. Think of it as a chain of infection. Now if we can stop that virus from infecting one person, and one person from infecting another, we then can break that chain and gradually get rid of the disease. So what we did was try to first of all protect a lot of people, by vaccination, and then we did something that’s called surveillance and containment: basically, find the cases. Once you’ve found a case, a team would go out and they’d vaccinate, in Africa for example, 30 houses around where the case was, all of the people there. Those people would then be protected. Then the patient could not spread the disease to anybody else. The chain would be broken, and little by little, you’d stop the spread of smallpox throughout the area.

Dr. Kent: Fascinating. Is that a technique that has been used before?

Dr. D.A. Henderson: Yes, it actually goes back a long time. Our first vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, goes back to 1796, and this was the discovery that you could take cowpox, or a little infection off of a cow and protect an individual person with that. So it had been used off and on, although it had been used pretty much on, until the time of eradication. But it was impossible really to get that vaccine out to distant areas, so that it wasn’t destroyed by feat, then to get it properly inserted in the skin so that it would really grow, and to do this throughout a lot of parts of the world which are very remote, and which are virtually inaccessible. So, it left places, areas and people where the smallpox could keep going and did keep going.

Dr. Kent: Wow. What other diseases could potentially be eradicated completely? There’s so many out there in the world, is it possible to eliminate some of these, and are efforts going on?

Dr. D.A. Henderson: It’s pretty hard to get rid of a lot of diseases. A number of them, like tuberculosis, an individual gets infected, and they get perhaps temporarily cured, but they’re still carrying the organism and can still transmit it. Poliomyelitis, for example, the individual spreads the disease, but you can’t tell where it is, because only one person in about 200 will get paralyzed, and the others will be infected, but there will be no symptoms, so that makes it difficult. There are some organisms that really largely exist in animals, and so we only get in contact with them periodically, like rabies: people know about that in dogs, and man does not get infected very often. So there are a lot of diseases that we cannot eradicate. Smallpox, fortunately, having been the most disastrous of all the diseases, had this weakness that it did not infect animals, and individuals, when they recovered from the disease, if they did, they were protected: they’d never get another case for the rest of their lives. So this was what we took advantage of with smallpox, and then tried to eradicate it.

Dr. Kent: Smallpox was essentially destroyed, but you talk about that there are stockpiles of this disease in certain places, and that could potentially be used as a weapon.

Dr. D.A. Henderson: It’s a worry. We do know that back in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, that the Soviet Union was working with smallpox. It was the preferred agent that they would use if they were going to use a biological weapon. So, this was a concern. When we got our last case, which actually occurred October 26, 1977, we then wrote to laboratories, contacted people all over the world who might still have some virus of smallpox. They were asked to destroy these; governments were asked to check their laboratories and to destroy them, or to transfer them to one of two laboratories which had been research laboratories that were working with us: one being actually in Moscow, one being in Atlanta, Georgia. After a while, all of the laboratories insisted finally that they had destroyed the virus or transferred it. It left us just the two places that we knew had the smallpox virus. Since then, there’s been continuing discussion as to whether those should be destroyed or not. This has been studied by many experts and scientists. I think most believe that it would be a good idea, let’s just destroy it. There’s some who believe that we might be able to learn something by retaining it, keeping it, and working with it, but there’s always a risk in that. The question is: are you going to risk having it escape, for example, or are you going to destroy it? This is something that is being discussed in the World Health Assembly and the World Health Organization: trying to reach a decision on this.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been such an honor talking to Dr. D.A. Henderson. He’s the author of ‘Smallpox: Death of a Disease.’ It’s so riveting thinking about all of this. I appreciate you being on the show, and I hope to talk to you again.

Dr. D.A. Henderson: Thank you very much; nice to be with you.

Dr. Kent: Again, you can find that book all over the place. It’s called, ‘Smallpox: Death of a Disease,’ by Dr. D.A. Henderson.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Health, History, Medicine, PODCAST, Science, TRANSCRIPTS

Dr. D.A. Henderson | Smallpox: The Death of a Disease

October 30, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Dr. D.A. Henderson [12:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From Wikipedia:

Donald Ainslie Henderson, known as D.A. Henderson, is an American physician and epidemiologist, who headed the international effort during the 1960s to eradicate smallpox. As of 2005, he is a Resident Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity and a professor of public health and medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Johns Hopkins University Distinguished Service Professor and Dean Emeritus of the School of Public Health, with a joint appointment in the Department of Epidemiology. Dr. Henderson is the author of, ‘Smallpox: The Death of a Disease.’

Posted by jamie | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Health, History, Medicine, PODCAST, Science

Michelle Karen | Astrology for Enlightenment

October 7, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Well, this is Dr. Kent, and it’s my pleasure to speak to the author of Astrology for Enlightenment. It’s a beautiful book, and her name is Michelle Karen. Welcome to the show.

Michelle Karen: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: And it’s really a beautiful book, on the outside and on the inside. Tell me a nutshell of what this book is all about.

Michelle Karen: Well, it’s a very original book in that it’s an astrology book but it’s way more than that. It’s really a book on enlightenment. On the Mayan calendar what is happening between now and 2012, which is the end of the Mayan calendar, why does the Mayan calendar end on the 21st of December, 2012, what this means to us, and I share very classical insights on how to reach enlightenment in our daily life, in our bedroom and our bathroom and our kitchen, etc. And I also offer excerpts from the prophecy of John of Jerusalem, that was origined 500 years before Nostradamus seen centuries, and which is a very clear prophecy for our time that is absolutely predicting what is going on in our lives right now, and all the drama (inaudible) that we’re exposed to that is the prophecy that’s full of hope, and that’s giving away that this world of darkness that we are exposed to now is actually giving way to a beautiful time of magic and peace and harmony. And I also redefine each sign in a holistic way, so based on the law of similarities, I explain how to understand each sign by referring to the colors, the sounds, the animals, the plants, the cities they are connected to, and I also give a very detailed prediction for each sign between now and 2012 and how to write those changes as elegantly as possible. So it’s basically a memoir. It’s a very handsome kind of book that is going to really help you understand what is going on, why there’s changes, and how to deal with them as positively and effectively as possible.

Dr. Kent: Well I know a little bit about astrology but not too much. Kind of the extent of what I know is, I heard a great lecture on, you know, the three wise men and the Christian bible, and they were three astrologers, so I know a little bit about that. And then also, of course, the horoscope that comes in the newspaper every week. What do you think people don’t know about astrology?

Michelle Karen: Well, I think, well first of all I think you’re way ahead than most people because the fact that you know that those guys were actually soldiers and they followed the star that told them that there was going to be a very special birth on the planet, which was Christ, it’s already way ahead of the game already. I would say that astrology to me is really a tool for empowerment. Because more, it’s totally based on your date of birth and month, day and year, your time of birth and your place of birth in terms of city, state and/or country. It’s going to give a map of the heavens at the time you were born, what you breathed in with your first breath. So that is very much, there is a sense there of something that gives us a tool that enables us to really understand what our weakness is and our strengths, and what did we choose when we walk on this planet or when we in come in groups. And out of that we can direct our lives with more focus, much faster, it’s basically like having a map, you know, and it’s like if you were invited somewhere and you just drove around randomly hoping to get to your destination, you’re probably going to spend a lot of time just scattered around, and getting frustrated and not figuring out where it is that you’re supposed to go and never finding that place. Whereas if you get your GPS and it tells you to go right, to go left, to make a turn, that maybe here there’s a nice museum to look at, or here there’s a nice viewpoint, or here there’s a great restaurant, well you’re going on a much more enjoyable ride and finding much more efficient and you’re definitely going to get to your destination much faster and in much better condition. And that’s basically what having a birth chart is about. Finding the fastest and the most efficient and the most empowering way to become all that you are.

Dr. Kent: And so, you know, I’m a Sagittarius, and people purport to know a lot about me just by knowing my birthday. What does birth date have to do with all of this?

Michelle Karen: Well, the birthday is based on, you know, because (inaudible) priests who wear the ancient astrologers and festive astrologers in Caldea which is present day Iraq, they figure things out by just observing what was going on in the sky and what was going on on earth, and they started to see that there were a lot of similarities between certain configurations and certain times of the year and that people born during that specific time of the year displayed very similar character traits. So Sagittarius in our northern hemisphere is December, and this is the time of the year where usually the trees are barren and it’s cold, but there is still some very beautiful days and there is a hope that the despite all this coldness that we’ll feel great. So this is the time of Christmas, this is the time of Hanukah and all those holidays where we should give to our family and eat together and we have gratitude for life. And this is, and this could be the hardest days you have dealing with this specific time of the year connected to a specific sign reveal what that sign is about. So if you look at Hanukah or Christmas, these are really beautiful holidays of sharing and gratitude, and that’s the basic character of Sagittarius. Sagittarius is a fierce line, so it’s a very dynamic, energetic, full of faith kind of sign. Very philosophical, also very interested in foreign languages and foreign cultures and long distance traveling, and definitely people. And it’s represented by the centaur, you know with the arrow, you know when you have an arrow it’s usually shot and lands much further than where it was shot from, and usually Sagittarians are people who are able to see the silver lining on every dark cloud and who are very adventurous, who are usually quite athletic, and who really take great pride in having a very fit body, and who are extremely intelligent and usually have an encyclopedic knowledge and a great friend who can usually know, you know, connect very easily to people and have this warmth and this very shiny intelligence that embraces everything. So they’re not always very good with details, because they’re always focusing on the great picture. But they’re very dynamic and hopeful leaders in a religious or philosophical way. And they’re very honest people, you can always know the truth from a Sagittarius, they will never lie to you, or if they lie it’s really very obvious.

Dr. Kent: It’s such a fascinating thing. Now, is there a bad sign? You know, if you were born in March did you get hit with the unlucky stick? Or are all signs good in their own ways?

Michelle Karen: Every sign is good in its own way. And sometimes the Sagittarius is going to be easier for you to connect with an Aries or Leo who are other fire signs, than it might be to a Pisces who is born in March who is more sensitive, more imaginative, more inner mystical, meditative, very concerned with music, or who loves peace and solitary and who could be a little more secretive. So it doesn’t, so there is different qualities specific to different signs, and each of these qualities create the tapestry of life so they each have a very important role. It’s as if we had this society that only has accountants, where probably our finances would definitely be in order, but nobody would eat. We need a baker, we need a school, we need teachers, we need accountants, we need all sorts of artists, we need all sorts of people with different skills and gifts that are going to enrich our experience of life.

Dr. Kent: So your book Astrology for Enlightenment, you mentioned it’s sort of like a guide or an encyclopedia. Tell us about, how does one read the book?

Michelle Karen: Well for example, there’s a lot of ways to read the book, but there is one very unique feature to this book, which is on the last page, and which is a guide to the planetary rulership of every hour of every day. So the nice thing is that you don’t need to look into and count zones, time zones or summer time or wintertime. It’s going to be just the time that’s on your clock, and you’re going to look, for example, if you want to create successful meetings and you should always, and I explain how to use it with the meaning of every planet, but you should always use the sun hour. And the sun hour happens, each planetary hour happens four times every day of every week. So for example, if you want to start a fitness hour, well the Mars hour would be the right one. If you want to have a successful date or you want to create harmony with someone with whom there’s been discord, then you would use the Venus hour. And then you can also look at, for example, when somebody calls you and emails you, and check at what time they called you or they emailed you, and that’s going to give you a sense of their hidden agenda or what their real purpose was in contacting you. So that’s one way of looking at it. Another way to use the book is to use the prediction for the next four years and I did it sign by sign, and I created a (inaudible). So for example, as a Sagittarius if you want to know what’s going, what are going to be the major dates or shifts in your love life, for example, your career, then you would go to that specific segment of the book. And then I also used that, you know we usually, you’re Sagittarius so you go and read Sagittarius. But I explain in my book that we are the 12 signs. So as you read Sagittarius, well you might also want to read Capricorn if you’re interested in your finances, or enhancing your finances. And Capricorn, and I explain exactly on the grid on which sign corresponds to what are of life for every single sign. And for example, if you start to use a tool for enlightenment of each sign, for example the colors and the gemstones and the scents and the perfumes and the plants, as we see with the Capricorn, you start creating something in your life that’s going to help you enhance or empower the area of finances. So it’s a very complete book, and then I give also predictions based on the Mayan calendar, and based on or in relation to with our Western astrology, which I believe brings much deeper depth to what the Mayan calendar talks about and the various stages and cycles we are in between now and 2012. So it’s really a book that you can have fun with. It’s a book that you can go back and forth with, it’s a book that you can use in all sorts of ways. So that’s why it’s sort of a manual you want to have with you at all times, because I know some friends who have bought like four different copies of Astrology for Enlightenment for each member of their family. Because there’s always someone who is using the book and (inaudible) very different ways. So it’s one of those books that you know, you don’t necessarily read from cover to cover. You can, of course, and reading for first read it will help, but after that you’re just going to go back and forth and flip through the pages.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been such an honor chatting with Michelle Karen. Her book is called Astrology for Enlightenment. Again, it’s a gorgeous book, it’s something you definitely could leave sitting around the house and be proud when people see it. It’s a beautiful looking book. And it’s been such a pleasure to talk to you.

Michelle Karen: Thank you very much, and people can also order it on my website if they want, and I’ll sign every copy personally. And it’s michellekaren.com.

Dr. Kent: So michellekaren.com, and the book again is Astrology for Enlightenment, and it was a real pleasure talking to you.

Michelle Karen: Thank you very much.

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