Evan Zazula, DMIN, BCC

Evan is a Board-Certified Chaplain previously with The Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute, based at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai for ten years, and is currently a faculty consultant with the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), working with the Clinical Education team. He received his Doctor of Ministry from Hebrew Union College after completing his Master of Arts in Pastoral Care and Counseling at New York Theological Seminary and four units of Clinical Pastoral Education with New York Zen Center. For the past twenty-five years, he has consulted for international businesses, organizations, and professionals. He has co-established the endowment for Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo’s Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in India and is also a cofounder of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Initiatives, a U.S. not-for-profit 501(c)(3), serving female monastics in the Himalayas. Evan collaborates with CAPC to develop clinical education products that reflect chaplaincy expertise, and the spiritual care needs of people with serious illness and their caregivers. Evan also serves as faculty on CAPC’s Clinical Education Certificate program.

I have always been interested in how loving kindness and compassion show up in our lives, but never anticipated they would lead me to becoming a palliative care chaplain. You could say palliative care found me, as I explored death and dying through my Buddhist practice, and I’m deeply grateful I have pursued this path. At the Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute, I have experienced our clinicians embody these qualities and enrich the lives of patients, families, and staff alike, and I continue to be humbled and inspired by all of them. They are supreme teachers in my aspiration to become a more compassionate and authentic person and chaplain.

My interest in chaplaincy has always been to provide care through psychosocial-spiritual and social justice lenses. From the first, my focus has been to better serve our patients and families by furthering my education and ability to bring to bear psychotherapeutic modalities, such as Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) and Internal Family Systems (IFS), the contemplative somatic trauma therapy of the Realization Process (RP), and now also the potential of psychedelics and entheogens in healing trauma and emotional/spiritual distress.

When I began my work as a chaplain for the Palliative Care/Geriatrics Fellows Ambulatory Clinic at MSH and MS Morningside, the first team member I met in the clinic was Dr. Diane Meier. Her guidance and humility were transformative and were a crucial inspiration to me in how I approached my work. Her work with patients and their families navigating chronic illness, trauma, end-of-life trajectories, systemic bias, and aloneness, allowed them to feel fully witnessed without judgment, and empowered them to voice their truth and complexity.

Some of our clinic patients repeatedly spoke of feeling unseen and unheard while navigating their serious illnesses. They were in need of like-minded community to undo their aloneness and to voice and process their medical and emotional pain, bias experiences, and life trauma. To support their “whole person care,” I initiated a weekly Zoom support group “Reclaiming Our Aliveness.” In this group, the members witnessed and validated each other's experiences and shared their wisdom with each other, often lifting their depression and emotional/spiritual/physical distress, and creating a deeply connected community that is ongoing.

It was a privilege to co-create and co-facilitate Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine’s curriculum “Thursday With Mort” (TWM) with Rabbi Edie Meyerson, its Director of Pastoral Counseling and Bereavement Services. TWM’s curriculum is designed to address palliative medicine fellows' countertransference reactions to mortality in a supportive holding environment where they can feel safe to explore and process their relationship with loss, death, and dying, allowing them to deepen their internal awareness and understanding and support their resilience. Presented at AAHPM, TWM is now a cornerstone of Brookdale’s fellowship education programming.

With Dr. Diane Meier, I also coproduced the video “Shilekka’s Story,” which documents the experience of this beloved patient of ours in navigating serious/complex illness in the setting of social and medical bias. This powerful video has been included in educational programming at Mount Sinai Hospital, NYU Hospital, Brookdale Institute, and CAPC.