MIND-BODY


Donna Karan meditates: The fashion designer has long been an advocate of complementary therapies


IN SICKNESS & IN HEALTH W


Conceived by fashion designer Donna Karan, the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy programme merges medical and complementary therapies and trains professionals in its own effective style of sickness and preventative care. Julie Cramer reports


hen renowned fashion designer Donna Karan launched her Urban Zen Integrative Therapy (UZIT) programme – a


pioneering complementary therapy initiative aimed at helping acutely ill patients in health and social care settings – she had already faced the trauma of losing friends, colleagues and family members as a result of terminal illness. As a rookie designer in the 70s, Karan


went to work for Anne Klein in New York and was promptly handed the responsibility of fi nishing her new boss’s collection, as Klein had terminal breast cancer. That tragedy was the catalyst that helped launch Karan’s career, but it was also the beginning of many personal losses, including her best friend who died of breast and brain cancer, and her second husband, Stephen Weiss, who died of lung cancer in 2001. Karan had always been a proponent


of the healing powers of complementary therapies like reiki and acupuncture,


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and her own homes are known to be spa-like sanctuaries. She used what her husband called her ‘woo woo’ therapies to help him through the fi nal years of his life, and after his death went on a quest to fi ll the gap missing between medical treatment of the patient’s disease, and sympathetic care of the individual. Her search culminated in the creation


of a 10-day Wellbeing Forum in 2007, to stimulate an exchange of ideas between patients, doctors, nurses, yoga instructors and alternative healthcare practitioners. Two years later, in 2009, the fi rst UZIT training programme was born; since then almost 500 UZIT practitioners from both the medical and wellness worlds have been trained, with another 100 or so in the training system.


East meets west UZIT’s mission is to integrate ancient healing techniques into Western medical practices, as well as spread this work further through yoga, spa and wellness centres. Its core modalities are yoga


August 2015 © Cybertrek 2015


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