a revolutionary app designed to restore, relax, reflect, revitalize, and renew healthcare staff, uniquely drawing from the environment around them so they can feel supported in the most challenging times. The contextualized experience provides a catalyst to promote
a positive change for the occupants in the specific environment.
Using your environment as its canvas, the Healing Trails team offers a collection of high-quality, restorative multi-length podcasts that hospital employees can access on their phones
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customized to where they are and when they need relief the most.
The first issue of Healing Trails has a limited number of spaces available,
please let us know if you are interested and would like to learn more.
We know that the environment is a major influencer to health and healing.
During this pandemic, the hospital environment is chaotic. Working in these spaces and situations each day can cause increasing work stress that in turn causes significant reduction in staff’s ability to work at their best.These five Healing Trails foci
can help you reduce stress and shift your body and mind to healing.
1. Brown, D. Barton, J. and Galdwell, V. (2013) Viewing Nature Scenes Positively Affects Recovery of Autonomic
Function Following Acute-Mental Stress Environmental Science & Technology 3 47 (11), 5562-5569
2. Huet, V. (2015). Literature review of art therapy-based interventions for work-related stress. International
Journal of Art Therapy: Inscape, 20(2),66-76
Bruce Cryer has worn many hats and explored many professional passions. He began as a singer/dancer/actor on Broadway, including two years in The Fantasticks, the world’s longest running musical. Bruce has been adjunct professor at Stanford University since 1997 and was named CEO of HeartMath in 2000, having helped launch the HeartMath Institute with founder Doc Childre in 1991. Bruce’s clients include Mayo Clinic, The World Bank, Kaiser, NASA, Unilever, Shell, Cisco, Cathay Pacific Airways and the NHS (UK).
Bruce is co-author of From Chaos to Coherence: The Power to Change Performance and the Harvard Business Review article “Pull the Plug on Stress”, both of which feature the HeartMath system.
A two-year health crisis convinced him to focus his energies on creativity. Bruce now enjoys robust health while singing, dancing and enjoying photography. He recently released Renaissance Human, an album of original songs co-created with the Brothers Koren and he performs regularly in New York.
It’s hard to comprehend the lasting memory of in the hallways of a hospital, devotedly by the side of your ailing mother, unless you’ve experienced it first-hand. But looking deep into the eyes of Story Clark and Lorissa MacAllister, it draws awe when you realize that their individual experiences were a catalyst that led both of them on separate, successful entrepreneurial journeys to change the way we experience the environment. Deep within the recesses of their memories lie a similar tale of an ill mother and how the environment affected her stay.
“As a young mother of three girls ages 3 to 13 years old, my mother was determined to demonstrate that her journey with cancer was not scary, that science could help, and to instill eternal optimism in her children. She made every hospital experience fun for my sisters and I from placing animal noses on face masks to exploring the features of her hospital room like a detective. She created daily adventures for us and included all the other patients on the floor in helping to lift their spirits,” said Dr. MacAllister, President & CEO of Enviah™, a cutting-edge consulting firm leading the healthcare industry by putting health and care back into healthcare.
Dr. MacAllister continues, “While my mother lost her battle with cancer, she won over so many people with her determination, optimism, and inventiveness using the environment as a tool for a positive change.” Dr. MacAllister founded Enviah in 2010 and has created thriving environments for her clients by aligning people, places, purposes, and holistic frameworks.
Clark, founder of TravelStoryGPS™ , an SAAS company that develops highly accessible, trusted technology for presenting place-based, authentic content to orient, inform, and inspire people in real time recounts a similar story from her young adulthood.
“My mother suffered a severe cerebral hemorrhage and had to spend four months in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). During those four months and the two years that followed, I saw and understood how the environment directly affected my mother and how not only she responded, even in IUC, to looking out the window, seeing a painting in the hallway, or listening to music. In that hospital, I saw the power of the connection with sunlight and the natural world, with the beauty of art –no matter how limited, and even the smallest amount of exercise,” said Clark.
Their roads converged to create Healing Trails, which is designed with the healthcare staff, patients, and visitors in mind. The app, which is the first part of a much larger initiative, aims to restore, relax, reflect, revitalize, and renew users through contextualized experiences. These audio experiences provide a catalyst to enrich well-being by using the environment –both indoors and out – for healing.
The Healing Trails app launched on July 9th to hospitals first, with podcast collections for patients and visitors soon to follow. This subscription-based service can be customized to specific hospitals.