A Healing Partnership

In my practice, I work with the interaction of mind and body, and offer individual therapy and group programs designed to create a healthful mind/body relationship. In working with you and your counseling concerns, we may include therapies such as guided imagery, relaxation therapy, journal writing, and a variety of healing touch therapies. If you need a doctor or other necessary health care provider, I am happy to make referrals.

Personal growth issues

Exploration of unhealthy life patterns

Persons working with 12 step programs

Healing shame of sexual abuse

Concerns of sexual orientation

Adjustment to physical illness

Dying, death, and bereavement

Physical Health Concerns

Nutrition and lifestyle choices

Headaches, neck and back pain

Chronic or acute pain or infection

Other symptom control

Life-altering illness

Life-threatening illness

Home, hospital, or office appointments

Holistic counseling, tailored to your concerns, promotes self healing and a genuine sense of aliveness by exploring the opportunities to create the life you really want. In emotional healing, we explore blockages to your happiness and fulfillment. If you have physical illness, we find ways to use your mind and emotions to assist you in healing. While this approach does not promote "mind over matter," it does value the powerful roles of the mind and emotion in healing. Holistic counseling includes addressing personal growth issues or physical health concerns with this definition of health in mind:

welcoming responsibility for your life

having choices and making decisions

loving ourselves and others and being loved

an aliveness with love, trust, expectancy and enthusiasm with which we live our lives

living a relationship with our spirituality

seeking the highest truth

learning to have fun and consciously creating success

Thoughts, feelings, and attitudes affect health. Positive and relaxing guided imagery taped specifically for you and your issues is used for surgery, to reduce or alleviate painful symptoms, or to accelerate personal growth and success.

Touch therapies, or energetic healing therapies, are painless and pleasant. Therapeutically controlled and directed touch supports and assists the body in regaining harmony and balance, while complementing other healing practices such as medicine, surgery, and psychotherapy. It reduces or alleviates pain, accelerates healing, reduces stress and anxiety, and assists you with personal growth issues. While some of these therapies relieve tension and pain in common problem areas such as head, neck, and back, others are more useful for generalized pain or symptom management. We decide together which of these are the best for you:

Craniosacral Therapy

The relaxation response is a physiologic state of profound rest that slows the heart and respiratory rate, lowers blood pressure and muscle tension, stabilizes blood flow to the muscles, and increases rest-state alpha and theta brain waves. These changes are elicited through a short, simple relaxation technique similar to meditation. Regular use of this technique decreases anxiety, increases your ability to cope with stressful situations, and enhances your sense of well-being.

About Holistic Nursing

Holistic nursing is a discipline that integrates modern health care with powerful self-help treatments to strengthen the natural healing capacities of the mind, body, and spirit. It is based on an academic nursing background, a sensitive balance between art and science, analytical and intuitive skills, and the opportunity to choose from a wide variety of modalities to promote healing and the harmonious balance of human energy systems. Holistic nursing works with the causes of poor health, which are multi-dimensional, involving the interaction among physical, psychological, social, spiritual, and environmental factors. It recognizes that all persons have the potential for growth and progression toward wholeness and of being their own healer; that all persons have the right of self determination thereby assuming the primary responsibility in guiding, directing, and controlling their own health, disease, and illness. Holistic nurse practitioners assist people in assuming personal responsibility for their health and to learn from disease and distress as opportunities for increased awareness of the interconnectedness of body, mind, and spirit.

Joan Furman, MSN,AHN-BC, CET II

Board Certified Holistic Nurse Practitioner

Certified Reiki Master Therapist/Teacher

Faculty member at Vanderbilt University

Faculty member at Tennessee State University

Degrees in nursing and psychology

International study of health systems