 Hello, everyone. I want to thank Deb Adams for inviting me to say a few words at the kickoff of this meeting. I'm honored to speak at an event that is a tribute to Terry Crane, a man who has served THI in the profusion community with honor and distinction. There's no doubt that Terry's teaching and mentoring is at a positive impact upon the lives of hundreds of profusionists and thousands and thousands of patients over the course of his career and certainly going forward. For all of the lives you have impacted in such a positive way, I want to thank you, Terry. And on a personal note, I want to thank you for Amy Patel, who was one of your students about 15, 16 years ago and became a colleague of mine. And not only that, became a very close personal friend of a wonderful human being. And most recently you've sent us two great profusionists, Mark Bittarelli, who's who's it was a delight to work with, and Lily Maya, both working out beautifully at the Brigham and caring for patients on a daily basis. So thank you very much, Terry. I personally have refrained from public speaking for the last several years, mostly because I was tired of listening to myself. But when Deb contacted me about doing this, I felt the duty to both Deb and Terry. But I also felt an obligation to the profusen students who themselves find themselves in very uncertain and difficult times. Deb gave the title of my talk today, Mindfulness Meditation, and I have a problem with the whole concept of mindfulness. First of all, it feels a little pretentious. And second of all, I don't know anything about it. But what I do know about is the struggle to live a life and a professional life of integrity and purpose. And so what I can offer you is a little bit of insight into what has helped me with that struggle, and maybe it might be instructive to you. This is my offering. Seek the truth. Not that my God is better than your God kind of truth, but the truth of your everyday lived experience. Terry Crane is a model for this behavior professionally, often reflecting upon how we profusionists screw up, owning our screw-ups, sharing them with the community, and developing strategies to prevent these mistakes going forward. Seeking the truth about the moment, about ourselves, is very hard work. David Foster Wallace, a favorite writer of mine, once wrote, quote, truth will set you free once it is finished with you. And that's really how it feels sometimes. This practice that is not dissimilar from the practice of perfusion asks for openness and compassionate awareness, not judging yourself for others, not defending your actions or motives, not catastrophizing, turning molehills into mountains. These behaviors are challenging to cultivate, but there are many good tools available to help us on this path. Michael Singer, author of The Untethered Soul, asks us to consider who we are, who the self really is. Are we the constant hum of voices in our head? You know, the one's always judging yourself and others, telling you what you should have done or must do in the future. Consider for a bit the listener, the one hearing all that stuff. Well, who are you? Are you the noise maker or the listener? Are you at the mercy of the treadmill of half-twos, need-twos, needs and wants, or are you the observer? Making thoughtful choices about when and how to engage in your life, in your practice. Do you react or do you respond? I offer you the possibility of the space and the time to breathe and respond appropriately with loving awareness and in every moment of our lives. Of late, I have been caring for patients with COVID-19 on ECMO. For me personally, this has been very difficult and at times very depressing. The outcomes have not been great. Witnessing the virus's effect on the bodies of previously healthy 40-year-olds is frightening. And really, I was frightened for myself. I'm a 66-year-old guy. I'm at risk. A lot was going through my head. During this time, you know, pulling night shifts and the rest. But the way through this for me was to watch and then join the nurses caring for these patients. They provided the inspiration and allowed me to help them in the intimate process of turning and cleaning the patients, all the while maintaining the dignity of those persons stricken. I personally will be forever grateful for them allowing me to help. So yeah, these are difficult times and it is likely that in each of our lives, there will be more. Know profoundly that you have everything you need. You have everything you need to weather any storm. We all have within us the strength, the imagination, the awareness to make any moment more thoughtful, more positive. We can do this for ourselves and for all of those whose lives we touch. I will share with you a couple of things. First, a poem from Boston's team poet laureate. Yeah, Boston is a team poet laureate. Her name is Alondra Babadiya and she was writing about the pandemic when she wrote this short piece. I think of this as a golden moment, an opportunity to let the soul inside you speak buried truths, an opportunity to extend yourself beyond your limit, to pick up old instruments from which you once found purpose, a chance to mend the wounds that you have left unattended, to bring light to places that have for so long been abandoned. I want to conclude with a couple of things and one is a little breathing exercise. I'm a yogi, a practice a lot of yoga and a few years back trying to transition to this old person persona, I decided to take yoga teacher training. So now I'm a certified yoga teacher and it's kind of funny. People laugh, they say, you know, Danny Fitz teaches old white man yoga and basically that's true. But it's been very powerful for me to engage in this practice. So I want to share a little bit of that with you. In yoga, the breathing exercises are called pranayama and prana means in Sanskrit is the life force, the energy force. So this is breathing in and breathing out the positive energy force. And so I'm going to teach you something. This was, for me, the hardest part of yoga practice because I just couldn't let go. I couldn't excel and I couldn't breathe and they started counting and it made me crazy. And the idea of bringing my attention to breathing made the breathing all erratic until one of the teachers taught this simple three part breathing exercise which is called valoma. So I'm going to ask you to work along with me here and to perform this breathing exercise. So if you're sitting, you know, sit comfortably, make sure your shoulders are over your hips and straighten out your head a little bit so that the crown of your head is pulling up to the ceiling and you're quite comfortable and the hands can just rest in your lap. There's nothing special to do with those. And I'll talk you through this. The first part of the breathing exercise is just it's going to be breathing in three parts. So the first part is to breathe into the belly and then pause and then breathe in to the mid ribs and pause and then breathe up into the apices up into the chest, way up to the neck and the clavicle. And so we'll begin like this and and I'll take I'll do it once and then have you guys do it. So first breathe into the belly. Breathe into the chest and breathe in to the clavicle and the beautiful exhale. And so let's do this a couple of times. And what I found is it really got me in touch with where the air goes and how we can maneuver with it and and really bringing your consciousness to the movement of the air and how it expands your ribs and moves to your back and your kidneys winds up being, I think, a very powerful tool to have in your toolkit when you need to come back to something when you're over anxious. So let's do it a few times. Standing quietly, sitting quietly, inhale, the third of the way, hold it, inhale to your mid ribs. Hold it, inhale all the way up to the clavicle. Hold it, exhale. Inhale, hold, inhale, hold. Inhale, hold, exhale. One more time. Inhale, hold, inhale, hold. Inhale, hold, exhale. Again. Inhale, hold, inhale, hold. Inhale, hold, exhale. Thanks for doing that with me. I hope you try it whenever you're feeling a little bit of stressed out because what we tend to do when we get anxious and stressed is to hold our breath and breathe shallowly and that makes us more anxious. So I think really learning how to use your diaphragm, use your chest and use yourself to learn to relax and become more aware is very powerful. I'm going to leave you with a little song and at the end of this song, I'm going to be gone. The song is a piece by the Eels called Be Hurt. And I want you to just be for four minutes before this conference gets started, but I also want you to know that you can be however you're feeling every single day. You don't have to be an automaton. You don't have to be a thing that never makes mistakes. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be anything but who you are. And being in touch with the things that are troubling and bothering you and hurting you is a way to be in touch with your humanity. So I'll leave you with this little piece, Be Hurt by the Eels. Namaste.