BA and MA in Health Arts and Sciences Programs
It is with great pleasure that I introduce myself to the Health and Sciences learning community at Goddard. I am honored to become a fellow traveler on this journey of discovery and transformation. I believe that every individual who seeks the adventure of inquiry has heard the call to journey. These pivotal points, which inspire us to travel into unfamiliar terrain, not only expand and delight us as individuals but also have the potential to shape the world around us. As those who hear this invitation to travel and accept the challenge we move into the unknown, where the journey has a life of its own and the destination has yet to be discovered.
It is my hope that I will support you along your way through the sharing of my experience, my focused attention to your particular quest, and my confidence in the process of personal evolution through conscious experience. A wise friend and seasoned traveler taught me to gather my "material and spiritual provisions" before embarking on any journey to inner or outer worlds. As I prepare to accompany each of you I will take along both skills and materials specific to your area of interest and my commitment to humor, flexibility, honesty, intuition, and compassion.
The cornerstones of my work are integrative health, women’s health, and midwifery. I have been in practice for 27 years, starting as a public health nurse in a rural community on Cape Cod, continuing on to midwifery practice, both as a clinician and an educator, and over the past 10 years developing an integrative approach to health which has included advanced training as a psychiatric nurse practitioner. I have been in a private home birth practice, community hospitals, several tertiary care centers, and a rural hospital based birth center. As the founding member of several of these practices and the first midwife to practice in the areas I have extensive experience in creating a financially viable practice, writing protocols, meeting with executive boards and medical staff, structuring public relations and publicity, and dealing with obstacles and barriers on every level.
In my current integrative women’s health practice which is situated in a rural area of Western Massachusetts the population I serve is quite diverse in terms of culture, economics, age, education, and previous knowledge of integrative medicine. I see women for all aspects of pregnancy and childbirth including perinatal psychiatry, women of all ages for gynecology and integrative health care (including sexuality, nutrition, prevention, alternative and complementary choices, mental health (including working with treatment and recovery for people who have suffered trauma) naturopathic and allopathic pharmacology), and couples for counseling primarily related to familial adjustment to perinatal psychiatric issues. The integrative nature of my practice is informed by my experience in allopathic medicine, complementary and alternative medicine, and a philosophical and spiritual approach to the whole of the individual and the society being greater than the sum of its parts. My practice is shaped by the belief that each individual is a spoke within the wheel of the larger social unit, from the nuclear family to the global community. I have spent time over the past 10 years doing volunteer work in Mexico with community midwives and midwifery students. I also volunteer at a free clinic in my home town where there is a growing population of uninsured, non English speaking women.
Throughout my years of practice I have been fundamentally motivated to serve individuals and communities most in need. I have worked with migrant families, adolescent mothers, trans-gendered people, chronically mentally ill people, the incarcerated, and people seeking care within an integrative health model. In all of these examples, access is not necessarily limited by financial resources but rather by availability of providers who are able and willing to incorporate these needs into their practice. As an integrative practitioner my core focus is on establishing a therapeutic relationship which is where I feel healing, education, and the best of diagnosis takes place. My hope is that the students in the HAS program will expand the ranks of those willing to listen to and serve those in need of safe, affordable, expansive, integrative, benevolent, honoring, and inclusive health care.
Education: Case Western Reserve University, Master of Science in Nursing; Stony Brook University, Post-Master’s Certificate as Psychiatric Nurse practitioner; Frontier School of Midwifery, Nurse Midwife; Bridgewater State College, Master of Education, New York University, Bachelor of Science in Nursing.
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Robin Rivinus, M.Ed, MS