'Mindfulness' for his own life and his patients'

Tom Casey's family tree casts a dark shadow. Heart disease infected virtually every branch. Heart attacks and strokes claimed the lives of both his father and mother before they were 60. They died within a year of each other, when Casey was only 24.

It was, he says, "a wake-up call."

Casey, who grew up in Ardmore and went to Monsignor Bonner, St. Joe's, and Temple University School of Medicine, stopped smoking. He began exercising - biking, running, swimming. He reformed his diet and monitored his blood pressure and cholesterol.

Healing and the Mind, Bill Moyers' 1993 PBS special, fascinated him. He was receptive to the gospel of cardiologist Dean Ornish, who recommends yoga and meditation for reducing stress and managing hypertension. He was impressed by the research of Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, whose studies showed that Buddhist-based "mindfulness" not only lowers stress but also improves the quality of life of people with cancer, severe pain, and chronic heart and lung disease.

In the mid-1990s, friends invited Casey to yoga class. It was a revelation.

"I loved it," Casey says. "It was tremendous fun, and I felt great afterward."

Clumsy at ball sports, Casey discovered, to his delight, that he was adept at yoga (though he had to tame his initial Type-A tendency to push through the poses). He began attending classes four days a week.

Yoga appealed to him because it provided the framework and discipline for achieving mindfulness, which Casey, quoting Kabat-Zinn, defines as "paying attention in the present moment on purpose." Yoga made him more relaxed, more "trusting in the unfolding of things."

It was good for his heart, he knew, and he was beginning to suspect it would be good also for his work as a neurodevelopmental pediatrician.

Casey, a board-certified private practitioner who's on staff at Bryn Mawr Hospital and St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, describes his specialty as "halfway between neurology and psychiatry." His patients are kids with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learning and developmental disorders, and behavioral problems.

Inspired by a mindfulness course taught by Diane Reibel of Thomas Jefferson University, Casey, in 1999, attended a weeklong mindfulness retreat in California. It was, he says, "a high," and he returned home with "a profound sense of connectedness."

"It made me more attuned to what's going on in the present moment," Casey says. "It changed the way I practice."