Chris Adams, MD

Chris is a faculty member at Harmony Hill, and has facilitated at Cancer Retreats, Mindfulness, and Grief and Loss Retreats since 2004. She currently co-facilitates a Cancer Wellness Circle at Virginia Mason. As a family doctor who practiced integrative and mind-body medicine for many years, she was inspired to join the Harmony Hill faculty to work with people with cancer and caregivers who face life challenging conditions as a part of the healing process. She leads workshops for health professionals who are on the front lines of caring for others and can benefit from learning to sustain their spirits and stamina in this essential work. She currently works as a counselor with individuals for insight, growth, grief work, and resilience. Her training in mindfulness and cross-cultural medicine, and her love for literature and the creative process provide a foundation that she draws upon in her circles. She incorporates deep listening, poetry, self-expression, movement, breath, and inquiry as ways to open up for growth and to become more intimate and present with one’s inner life, and what it is to live in harmony with the natural world.

Chris has many life experiences that inspire her, from her own medical/healing background to journeying with her grandmother, mother, and sister on their cancer journeys. Chris feels the power of being guided by instinct and love as well as study and learning. As a family doctor, she has an intimate knowledge of attending to birth and death, and the joy and suffering in between. In her circles, Chris explores and appreciates the paradox of life and is ever moved by the resilience, beauty, understanding, compassion, and community that participants discover along the way as they learn what it is to feel whole again. She is a longtime practitioner and teacher of tai chi and qi gong, and is a lover of all things made from yarn, fiber, and clay. Her love of the natural world finds her gardening and wandering in the woods, meadows, forests, and beaches. Chris feels deeply supported by family and friends, a rich and generative inner life, and from the wisdom of many teachers and teachings. She is grateful for her longtime relationship with the land and life of Harmony Hill which feels like a homecoming for her and for all who come for renewal and community.