Belleruth Naparstek

Naparstek has worked to establish guided imagery as an evidence-based, adjuvant therapy for medical procedures, treatment of illness and support for healthy behavior change by producing medically- and psychologically-oriented audio programs. Studies of her audio programs' efficacy persuaded a variety of health care institutions, starting with Kaiser Permanente in 1994, to distribute guided imagery to health consumers and the general public.

At the request of Edgardo Padin-Rivera, Ph.D., Chief of Psychological Services at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Naparstek developed guided imagery recordings to remediate the symptoms of combat stress, military sexual trauma, and post-traumatic stress, for use by veterans and military personnel. The audio programs were also dispensed to traumatized survivors of events such as the Virginia Tech shooting, Hurricane Katrina, the Chardon High School shooting, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Health Journeys' guided imagery audio programs were distributed by the American Red Cross and the counseling department of the John Jay School of Criminal Justice to survivors, early responders and site workers in Lower Manhattan for months after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Naparstek teaches Guided Imagery on the faculty of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine’s post doctoral Fellowship Program.

Naparstek grew up in an observant Jewish family in Sharon, Massachusetts, the daughter of Olla Davis Krepon, an immigrant from Lithuania, and Harry Krepon, a first generation Bostonian from the neighborhood of Roxbury. Her older sister is religious educator Dr. Carol Krepon Ingall and her younger brother is Michael Krepon, international nuclear disarmament expert and co-founder of The Stimson Center in Washington D.C..

Naparstek received her Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1964, and her Master of Arts degree in 1967 from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.

In 1965, she married social worker, educator, public policy expert and legislative pioneer Dr. Arthur J. Naparstek. They had three children: Aaron Naparstek, a Brooklyn-based journalist, environmental and transportation activist, and founder of the online publication, Streetsblog; Keila Naparstek Hund, a Columbus, Ohio-based clinical social worker with specialties in geriatrics, chemical dependency and clinical program development; and Brooklyn-based commercial real estate developer, Abe Naparstek, Senior Vice President for East Coast Development, Forest City Enterprises.

Naparstek lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio and Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. Her husband died in 2004 from complications of lung cancer.

By junior high school, Naparstek knew she wanted to be a social worker. In high school she volunteered with developmentally disabled adults at the Wrentham State School in Wrentham, Massachusetts and worked summers on the locked wards of Foxborough State Hospital in Foxborough, Massachusetts.

After college, she worked as a psychologist at Tinley Park State Hospital, while appearing evenings in a musical comedy revue, The Six Ages of Man, at the Tip Top Tap of the Allerton Hotel in Downtown Chicago.

As part of her graduate school training, she worked with groups of children and teens at Newberry House, an inner city settlement house within the projects of Chicago’s West Side. Her second year field placement was at the Chicago-Read Mental Health Center, one of the nation’s first community mental health centers, funded by President John F. Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act of 1963.

Naparstek continued working within the Illinois state mental health system after graduate school, establishing a community day program for de-institutionalized mental patients, in the basement of the Church of the Three Crosses on the North Side of Chicago. In 1969, Naparstek and her husband moved to Boston.

In Boston, Naparstek worked at Cambridge Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, under Dr. John Mack, providing outpatient psychotherapy, community mental health consultation and supervision in family and group psychotherapy to psychiatric residents from Harvard Medical School. She also began a part-time private practice at this time.

In 1974, after a move to Washington D.C., Naparstek re-established her private practice, while developing and directing the Consultation and Education Unit at the newly built Woodburn Center for Community Mental Health in Annandale, Virginia. As Chief of Consultation and Education, she built a department that worked with police, teachers, visiting nurses, religious leaders and hospital personnel, using a combined approach of clinical expertise and public health-based prevention, early detection and crisis intervention methods, along with principles of community organization, to deliver innovative mental health services to families and neighborhoods in Fairfax County, Virginia.

In 1979, Naparstek left the Woodburn Center to build up a full-time private practice, and in 1983 she and her family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she continued her practice in both Virginia and Ohio, commuting for two and a half years before closing her Washington D.C. office.

From 1987 to 1994 Naparstek served as adjunct faculty at Case Western Reserve University’s Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, teaching graduate social work students the basics of group work, clinical supervision and psychotherapy.

Naparstek had always been intrigued by the mind-body connection and the power of altered states to catalyze deeper healing, insight, growth, and change. She began studying the guided meditation that was available in the early 1980’s, especially the work of Stephen Levine, Kenneth Pelletier, Emmett Miller, Louise Hay and Bernie Siegel.

By 1987, in her Cleveland private practice, Naparstek began experimenting with creating personalized guided imagery audio cassette tapes for interested clients—people who wanted to speed up their progress in therapy. She used two boom boxes at her kitchen table, one for recording a narrative and the other for playing background music. She gathered feedback on what worked and what did not. Altogether, she made thirty-eight of these individualized tapes for clients over the course of the next two years.

Naparstek describes guided imagery as a form of meditation, a kind of directed daydreaming or focused reverie. Listeners are encouraged to imagine a desired end state with all of their senses. The narrative elicits fantasy and memory, often telling a healing story with the help of evocative images, symbol, metaphor, archetypal themes and universal figures. Voice tone, pacing and music are as important as the wording, if not more so.

Naparstek writes that guided imagery has the built-in capacity to deliver multiple layers of complex, encoded messages by way of simple symbol and metaphor, acting like a depth charge dropped deep beneath the surface of the bodymind, where it can reverberate again and again.

Guided imagery audio recordings have the advantage of being a portable, private, self-administered self-help tool, available day or night, making it an ideal intervention for trauma survivors. It works well with other treatment methods, or can be used as a stand-alone resource. It has the advantage of requiring no special training or preparation of the listener; and its impact grows with continued use.

In 1988, a new client appeared at Naparstek’s practice, who had heard about the personalized recordings she was making for clients. The client had advanced, metastatic breast cancer which had spread to her bones, brain and lungs. She wanted an audio program to help her through an upcoming course of chemotherapy. She was frightened and anxious, and her goal was to live long enough to see her daughter, a sophomore in high school, graduate. She was motivated, charismatic and bossy, and when Naparstek demurred, saying that she didn't know enough to make such a tape, she replied, "Don't worry; I'll tell you what to do."

Naparstek checked with her client's oncologist and was encouraged to go ahead and give her whatever she wanted, because regardless, she was not likely to survive past six months. Naparstek and her new client collaborated, putting together comforting childhood memories of walking on the beach with her beloved father, her little hand in his big, warm one; she also imagined the waves washing through her body, taking all the cancer out with the tide; she also included images of her mother, a formidable cleaner, vacuuming cancer cells out of her body with characteristic ferocity. She envisioned tumors shrinking and white cells becoming more active. The recording turned out to be about fifteen minutes long, with an assortment of this woman’s images on it. She responded well to chemotherapy, and the lesions began to shrink dramatically.

On the chemotherapy unit of the Ireland Cancer Center, this woman was no longer anxious. Instead, she was on a mission, telling other patients, staff, and anyone who would listen that they too should have a guided imagery audio tape. She dispensed bootlegged copies of her own tape and as a result of her ad hoc promotional campaign, the nurses requested guided imagery recordings for anxious waiting room patients.

This woman lasted two years longer than predicted with very little discomfort and good quality of life, up until her last weeks. Naparstek became intrigued by the simplicity and power of guided imagery, and its ability to empower a frightened woman, giving her a sense of agency over her circumstances. Other requests for tapes came in – for multiple sclerosis and surgery, depression and stroke. Naparstek began buttonholing doctors, nurses and patients, digging into the medical literature and the guided imagery research to create appropriate content.

A friend introduced her to George Klein, a local businessman who funded the initial production of seven new health-specific guided imagery tapes. Naparstek found composer Steven Mark Kohn who introduced her to sound engineer Bruce Gigax. In 1991, Klein and Naparstek launched Akron, Ohio-based Health Journeys, Inc. to produce and distribute Naparstek's guided imagery audio programs.

In 1993, Larry Kirshbaum, then editor of Warner Books, opened a new division, Time Warner AudioBooks. Time Warner AudioBooks picked up Naparstek’s first fourteen audio titles and began national bookstore distribution of Health Journeys audio cassettes and compact discs.

In 1994, pharmaceutical company Smithkline Beecham private-labeled 200,000 Health Journeys chemotherapy audio cassettes to give away to patients undergoing treatment with the help of their anti-emetic, Zofran. Soon after, a competitor, Roche Laboratories, signed a similar deal for their anti-emetic, Kytril.

Naparstek closed her private practice in 1998 in order to devote more time to speaking, writing, teaching and building her company. As of 2017, Health Journeys has published over eighty audio titles, and distributes more than two hundred mind-body, self-help programs created by a variety of producers.

Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal. Bantam Dell: New York, 2006.

Your Sixth Sense: Unlocking the Power of Your Intuition. Harper Collins: San Francisco, 1997.

Staying Well with Guided Imagery: How to Harness the Power of Your Imagination for Health and Healing. Warner Books: New York, 1994.