You’re a strong advocate of meditation and in your books you describe both expressive and quiet methods. Most people think of meditation as sitting still with eyes closed. Could you explain what other methods you encourage people to pursue?

It’s understandable that people see quiet meditation as meditation, because that’s mostly what we have learned in the West and most of what’s available to people. There are basically three kinds of meditation. One is concentrative meditation, focusing on a sound or image or prayer or pretty much anything else on which you can focus. Mantra meditation is focusing on a sound. You could be focusing on a candle. Or if you say “Hail Mary” or “Sh’ma Yisroel” or “La Illaha Ilallah.” Those are all technically concentrative meditations. The second type is awareness meditation, becoming aware of thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they arise. This can be called Mindfulness. Vipassana is the name of the South Asian form of meditation which we call Mindfulness. The third kind is expressive meditation, which is the oldest meditation on the planet. It’s the one that the shamans have used for tens of thousands of years. It could be chanting, dancing, shaking, whirling or jumping up and down on one foot. These are very powerful techniques for bringing us to the same state of relaxed, moment-to-moment awareness that concentrative and awareness meditations can also bring us to.

I think the great advantage of expressive meditations is that they raise the energy of those of us who have low energy when we’re feeling depressed or discouraged. They also burn off some of that agitation and anxiety, rumination and troubled mind that afflicts us when we’re anxious or depressed or confused. So they have a very direct effect and for many people they are more appropriate.

If you’re really depressed, sometimes quiet meditation can be helpful at relaxing you, but you also need something to energize you when you’re depleted. And these active meditations—which could be just putting on fast music and dancing to it, or shaking your body first for five or ten minutes, and then allowing the body to dance—this puts energy into this depleted organism and helps break up the fixed patterns, the ‘stuckness’ that characterizes depression.” And by working on the body, breaking up some of the fixed patterns of the body, it also turns out they break up some of the fixed mental patterns. As you’re shaking and dancing, some of the rumination—that solid clot of rumination that’s there in our heads—begins to break up. People feel a little freer. So I love to use these techniques. I think they’re really important for people who are depressed or anxious or just people who are kind of uptight. You can do these with others who are also doing them or by putting on some music when you’re alone at home, whatever’s most comfortable for you.

You’ve taught for many years at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. As part of your work there you founded the first medical school program in complementary and integrative medicine, including education in meditation, exercise, and whole foods nutrition. To what extent has this approach spread further through the medical profession in recent years?

That’s a great question. At The Center for Mind-Body Medicine, we trained about 20 Georgetown faculty in our integrative approach, which includes the techniques that I describe in Unstuck. Quiet meditation, shaking and dancing, guided imagery to understand yourself, biofeedback, written exercises to explore your unconscious wisdom, drawings. All of these approaches we taught to 20 Georgetown faculty, and now these full-time faculty at Georgetown are leading groups each year for medical students and also for other faculty and for the staff, the people who work at the medical center.