The Beauty in Breaking

“It’s the possibility of greater change that rejuvenates me,” says Michele Harper, MD. “That’s what makes it possible for me to keep going.” Harper is an emergency room physician who has worked as chief resident at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and in the emergency department at the VA medical center in Philadelphia. She is also the author of The Beauty in Breaking. Today, she joins host Elise Loehnen to share how she manages the emotional strain of being witness to so much suffering, what she’s learned from her patients about healing, and why she sees her commitment to positive change as a form of meditation. “It is all so depleting—all of it,” she says. “But I’ve always turned my grief, my pain, my suffering into action.”