About Felipe Jain, MD
On March 31, 2019, Dr. Felipe Jain awoke from sleep to a new reality.  Although he woke up to the same body, the same small apartment overlooking a concrete parking lot, next to the same wife, father of the same kids, with the same job, everything seemed different from how he knew it.  Everything seemed newly created, as if from nothingness.  The quality of his awareness had changed, from one identifying only with his history and body, to feeling as though his awareness was somehow greater and more connected to everything around him than he had ever known.  “It felt as though I swallowed the universe”, he said, “as if the blackness of the night sky had come alive inside of me and that everything I knew about myself and my history was a form of ego, but not the whole truth of what I am.  Einstein’s words, which I had so frequently remembered, that ‘our sense of individuality is an optical delusion of consciousness’, became experientially real in my own awareness, and I felt as though underneath the individual things and people I perceived was a deeper connectedness.”

Dr. Jain attributes this change – a “bliss-filled mental software upgrade” – to the impact of the meditation and guided imagery techniques that he began to create, practice and research in 2011 when a psychiatry resident at the University of California, Los Angeles, and which are freely shared here on the Fern Hill Center website.  Dr. Jain’s work in the research realm has enabled him to demonstrate efficacy of group therapy programs based on these techniques for ameliorating stress and improving positive mood, as well as strengthening brain circuit connectivity in regions important for cognitive control.  An expert on the intersection of mindfulness, relationships and wellness, Dr. Jain is Director of Healthy Aging Studies at the Depression Clinical Research Program of the Massachusetts General Hospital and a full time Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School.  He serves as a psychotherapy mentor for the Advanced Fellowship in Mindfulness at the Cambridge Health Alliance, as a Member of the Board of Directors of the Hoffman Institute Foundation, and on the MD Advisory Board for the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology.  Dr. Jain is the first psychiatrist to receive a highly competitive Beeson K76 Emerging Leaders in Aging Research Career Development Award from the National Institute on Aging since the inception of the award in 2016.

Follow Dr. Jain on Twitter @felipejainmd and Instagram @felipejainmd.