ADHD and Inner Resilience with Dean Hall

In today's episode I had the pleasure of sitting down with the great Dean Hall. Dean has been a licensed clinical therapist and coach for over 30 years. He is also a best selling author (www.thewildcureway.com). Dean and I explore how harnessing his ADHD superpowers of curiosity and inner resilience helped heal himself from cancer by being the first person to swim the entirety of the 187 mile Willamette River.  Some say Dean has lived multiple lifetimes in his 63 years. I have to agree.  Come join me as we explore Dean's remarkable life and how he saw his inner resilience during the darkest periods of his life. 

Besides being a best-selling author, and highly sought-after speaker, Dean is also a two-time cancer survivor, widower and two-time world record-setting extreme distance swimmer.  He is the first person to swim the entire 187-mile length of Oregon’s longest river, the Willamette River, (which he did as an active cancer patient) in 2014, and Ireland’s longest river, the River Shannon (180 miles), in 2017. 

This much time spent immersed in the flow of mighty rivers has changed Dean’s life in many dynamic and miraculous ways. His Willamette River swim threw Dean into radical remission unexpectedly healing his leukemia without chemo or radiation while easing his trauma and grief from losing his wife fifteen days before their thirtieth anniversary. Buoyed by his firsthand experience of the healing power of nature when his lymphoma worsened and doctors once again pushed him to do chemo and radiation Dean chose to try Forest Bathing first. Dr. Qing Li’s research on the proven efficacy of time spent in forests and how it boosted NK (Natural Killer) cells and the immune system by over two-hundred and fifty times for a period of two weeks gave Dean the courage to decide instead for a weekly regimen of forest bathing instead. In May of 2015, he started spending all day once a week forest bathing deep in the Mt. Hood Wilderness and by March of 2016 he was declared cancer free.

These gifts of natural healing pushed Dean to make it his organization, The Wild Cure Way, whose mission is to encourage the world to get out of concrete jungles, manmade boxes and away from digital devices and dive into wild waterways and venture into deep forests as a form of authentic deep healing and, oddly enough, environmental protection. He believes it’s impossible to swim in wild waters or amble through ancient forests without falling in love with them and like Jacque Cousteau used to say, “You protect what you love.”