The Urban Zen Foundation is Donna Karans tribute to love. What might have proven too much for some to handle, Karan transformed into a force for change. Long a devotee of yoga and Eastern methods of medicine, after her husband, artist Stephan Weiss, passed away in 2001, a seed was planted to take advantage of these new-age concepts, which led to a wellness center and culminated in a foundation. Fulfilling a promise she made to Weiss, when he shared one of his final wishes to take care of the nurses Karan has gone on to promote the work of caregivers worldwide, primarily through the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy (UZIT) Program, which trains and provides care to doctors, nurses and physical and massage therapists in Eastern healing techniques such as yoga, shiatsu, aromatherapy, nutrition and contemplative end-of-life care.

Donna Karan gives a talk about the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program (Photo courtesy of Urban Zen Foundation)

Karan was moved to take action as a result of her frustrations with the treatment Weiss received during his seven-year battle with lung cancer. As he lay dying of the illness, she discovered an urgent need for new approaches to wellness and patient care. Everybody was dealing with his disease and nobody was looking at him holistically as a patient, of how to treat the patient at the mind-body level, and not only the patient but the loved ones, doctors and nurses. Despite all his high-tech medical treatment, Weiss could not breathe until a yoga teacher taught him to open his lungs, although he had never previously been receptive to yoga and alternative healing therapies. Karan saw how beneficial a human touch was and realized that treating patients as people and their loved ones was the key to wellbeing.

When my husband Stephan my partner in life, love, business and family was sick with lung cancer, it was a wake-up call, Karan explains. Everyone was taking care of the disease, but who was taking care of the patient and the loved ones? Stephan needed the knowledge of traditional Western medicine. But he also needed healing that can only be accessed from the heart and through the spirit. It was then that I realized that there was a missing link in healthcare and education. As someone who has practiced yoga for so many years, I realized what was missing in my husbands care: yoga, meditation, essential oils, Reiki, nutrition and an understanding of palliative care. Each and every one of us is a patient and a loved one. No one gets away with it. So I created the UZIT Program with my teachers, Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman, to help support patients, loved ones, doctors and nurses, just like I promised Stephan I would do.

A self-professed yogi on a path, Karan finds calm and self-knowledge from Eastern philosophy and yoga. Her spiritual practice infuses her daily routine. She divulges, Yoga is part of my body. I took to the mat when I was 18. It was a way of connecting to myself. Then I navigated the world of yoga on many different levels, and I found that I was most in touch with my body instead of in my brain, and then I could find the calm in the chaos. Yoga is not just putting your leg around your head. People say to me, Are you doing yoga? And I say, Yes, Im breathing. The awareness of what breath work is, the awareness of how to communicate, how to give, how to care, how to share thats yoga.

A yoga session at the Urban Zen Center (Photo courtesy of Urban Zen Foundation)

With wellbeing her first priority, Karans goal was to introduce programs into hospitals that would teach medical professionals how to incorporate nontraditional healing into patient care. She introduced an Eastern healing program to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, which she designed, in partnership with her Urban Zen Foundation. In 2008, the foundation donated $850,000 to the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City for a yearlong experiment combining Eastern and Western healing methods to create an optimal healing environment for cancer patients, families and caregivers. The project turned the hospital into a testing ground for a controversial notion: that yoga, meditation and aromatherapy could enhance regimens of chemotherapy and radiation. Yoga teachers, whose salaries were paid for by the foundation, were sent to the cancer ward to work with nonterminal patients, while nurses were trained in holistic care techniques and self-care practices.

Karan turned to Beth Israel because it was among a handful of hospitals nationwide with full-fledged integrative medicine departments, having experimented with incorporating mainstream and alternative therapies for years. The project was broader, better financed and more integrated into the medical protocol than previous initiatives across the US, and included a research component in the hopes of demonstrating that the Urban Zen regime could reduce classic symptoms of cancer and its treatment, like pain, nausea and anxiety (thus cutting hospital stays and costs) and serve as a model for others. The pilot study proved that there were savings of $900,099 on one floor by bringing integrative therapists to the healthcare system. Karan says, Our goal is to treat the whole patient through techniques of Eastern healing, yoga and meditation that is combined with the very best in Western medicine.

Excerpt from:
Donna Karan's Urban Zen Foundation Attends To The Mind, Body And Spirit