By: Lakeview Health
Eva Fajardo, who spoke at the first Lakeview Professional Lecture, joins our podcast. She discusses how she got involved in her subject “The Right Use of Power,” the mind-body connection and integrative mental health, all of which form a part of her private practice.
Podcast Transcript
Gina Thorne: Hello, this is Gina Thorne with Lakeview Health and I’m joined today with Eva Fajardo a licensed mental health clinician and certified addiction professional of Living in the Solution, and she joins us today after completing our first Lakeview Professional Lecture Series on ethics, the heart of ethics for the helping professional,, and we’re very pleased to have you here today Eva. Eva: Thank you so much and it’s great to be here. Gina: Well, we were really excited to have you here in Jacksonville talking with our local folks about ethics and we all know ethics is a very much needed aspect of working in this profession and we’re going to hearing a little bit more about your approach to ethics. But before we do that, I’m interested in hearing about your background and what got you into the field of addiction? Eva: Okay, great. I actually got into the field of addictions from my own recovery. And I worked in treatment centers for about nine years in residential treatment and my last position was as clinical director of a women’s residential in Orlando, Florida, and then I went into private practice and I got licensed in licensed mental health and really started specializing in the mind-body integrative mental health. Gina: And so how did that move you into the direction of doing this very unique presentation on ethics? Eva: I met Cedar Barstow who is the author of the book, “The Right Use of Power: The Heart of Ethics for the Helping Professional,” and she was involved with body-based psychotherapy that I was interested in and so meeting her in that route we started talking about “The Right Use of Power” and I started doing training with her and became one of her trained facilitators. Then I was on board with her as she transformed her practice from just work for herself to now The Right Use of Power Institute. And we’re wanting to promote right use of power and the experiential work which she’s developed just brilliantly, not only wrote the book “The Right Use of Power,” but also a resource guide facilitating these experiential workshops to really embody ethics, to really get online to allowing your heart and mind to come together. To be able to navigate the ethical field in relationship to all relationships really, to relationships with yourself, with your clients and with the world. Gina: And sometimes I think that’s forgotten in this field, particularly with the helping professional because we always get so bogged down into the concrete and now that the fields expanding and utilizing more experiential, it sounds like it’s a very unique approach. Eva: Yes it is, and I really appreciated it. It really woke me to the richness and the satisfaction of studying of ethics and seeing it really as an awakening and kind of a call to our “divine human prototype” is what I like to call it, you know those aspects of ourselves that we are inherently good and ethical and that it’s really negative relationships with experiences that leave their mark on us throughout our lifetime and they kind of separate us from really living our best life and so I love that this work helps us to begin uncovering that and healing from that and really being the people that we want to be. Gina: Well, you sound like a fascinating therapeutic approach and I’m curious a little bit more about your actual area of specialty, you are in private practice and you’re located in South Florida? Eva: I’m in Winter Park, Florida, which is the Greater Orlando area, and I’ve been in Orlando, gosh, for quite a while now. First I worked for agencies and for treatment centers and then I’ve been in private practice, wow, about 15 years now. Initially working with people with chronic illness, not only with certified addictions but also with people that had AIDS, MS, cancer and so forth. And then I gotten to work with a lot of couples lately so I do enjoy working with couples, I really do enjoy the mind-body connection and the idea of integrative mental health, so that mental health is also connected to the way we move our bodies, to how we eat, to befriending the mind and how we resolving the emotional body so really is a whole person approach. And I love that and by those means I team with lot of other practitioners and lot of other modalities in order to help my clients achieve their optimal life. Gina: It’s a good collaboration, and speaking of collaboration, we were really fortune today to work with Foundations Recovery Network who sponsored you to come up here to Jacksonville to present for us. They’re a fabulous organization and we’re really excited to have that relationship with Foundations, so I want to thank them for allowing you to come up here and work with us and share the wonderful work that you’re doing. If individuals are trying to reach out specifically for private practice work, how can they get in touch with you? Eva: My email is eva1651@hotmail.com and my website: www.evafajardo.com Gina: That’s wonderful, well, thank you again for taking time to spend with us. For those of you that are listening, and you would like to learn more about Lakeview and our Lakeview Professional Lecture Series, we invite you to visit us at lakeviewhealth.multiplica.dev or you can call us at [Direct]. Thank you.
