2025 Commencement Speaker Dr. Russell Greenfield: A Call to Heal with Humility, Service, and Gratitude

At Southern California University of Health Sciences’ 2025 Commencement Ceremony, graduates and their families were invited into a deeply reflective and inspiring moment with Dr. Russell Greenfield, the University’s commencement speaker.

A nationally recognized physician leader in Whole Health, Dr. Greenfield delivered a moving address that blended personal storytelling, moral clarity, and a powerful call to service. His message challenged the Class of 2025 to see healing not merely as a profession, but as a sacred responsibility, one rooted in humility, presence, and gratitude.

Drawing from more than four decades in the healing arts, Dr. Greenfield reminded graduates that while their education has prepared them with knowledge and skill, their greatest impact will come from how they show up for others, bearing witness to suffering, acting with heart, and honoring the whole person before them.

Dr. Russell Greenfield’s Commencement Address to the Class of 2025

Congratulations, graduates and family members one and all. It’s been said that we don’t remember days. We remember moments. This, this is a moment. This is your moment. Your moment to celebrate an extraordinary accomplishment, born of hard work, discipline, grit, a commitment to excellence, and personal growth.

A moment that represents not your first step, but the next one. For context and only briefly, I want to share a little bit about me, so you have some understanding of why I have the great good fortune to speak before you today. My calling to the Healing Arts was a little bit dramatic, and it started when I was 10 years old.

My big brother, my rock, the person who always stood up for me, got into a really bad car accident at like one o’clock in the morning, in a small town in Connecticut. I remember my mom and dad bundling me up and taking me to the hospital, sitting in the emergency department for a period of time, and then going up to the intensive care unit, which was completely empty except for us.

The lights were out, and there was a little bit of light coming in from the hallway. I sat down on one of those plastic couches, not knowing what was going on, and about 10 feet away, my mom and dad were hugging. It was the first time in my life that I saw my dad cry.

Fast forward three months later, and my brother gets out of the hospital, and everybody is happy – my family members, friends, everybody.

As a 10-year-old, I remember thinking. Wow, how cool would it be to try and work where you could take people who are sad and help make them happy? That’s how I got interested in this, and I’m now in my 41st year of trying to help people heal, initially as an emergency department physician and for the last 28 years as an integrative medicine doctor.

To become who I am now. I actually had to unlearn some of what I learned in medical school and subsequent training, probably not something your teachers want you to hear. However, I don’t foresee this for you. Your education has been far, far more humane, far more focused on health and healing than was my own.

Your instructors, the leaders of this university, have long recognized things that I only came to understand years after I was out in practice, and they have shared their wise counsel with you. You are crossing a threshold, the same person you always were, yet somehow different, and you are ready for your next step.

So, I’m here to offer you a glimpse of what your future might look like, and spoiler alert, it’s even better than you might have reason to believe. In fact, it’s simply awesome. In many ways, the space you inhabit is sacred. There are traditions around the globe where to wash oneself, to help wash another, is a truly meaningful act performed not just with hygiene in mind, but with purification, to wash, as a sacred act.

So, I offer for your consideration that to answer the call, to participate in the healing arts, is to acknowledge that you will wash. In this regard, the W refers to bearing witness, accompanying a fellow traveler on their journey, if only for a moment, and bearing witness to the human condition, the human contract. Of course, to bear witness is a gift and a rare one, and alone it is not sufficient.

When we see someone in need, we need in turn to act. Act with a combination of clear-headed assessment and judgment, discernment, recognition, expertise, technical prowess, and heart. Heart, because the action we take should be in service to the whole person to engage that person’s own innate capacity to heal.

And in the doing, largely in retrospect. Hopefully, contribute to a sense of meaning and purpose in the moment for them and for you. After all, to serve another and have the opportunity to help them heal.  Honestly, what could be more wondrous? What could be more fulfilling? Fulfilling, yes, and it’s important to stay small. Service should ideally be offered from a place of humility.

The smallest, most humble act can have an exponential benefit on the well-being of those you serve and on you. Though you assist in the healing of others, participating in the most meaningful work imaginable, may you stay small, that you might always have room to grow.

SCU has helped you learn how to wash. To bear witness, to act in service from a place of humility. That is the journey you are embarking upon. There’s one more aspect that needs mentioning, and I’ll get to that shortly. The expectations that others have for you likely pale in comparison to those you have for yourselves. Be kind with yourselves, you got this.

After all, you graduates honestly are amazing. You reflect the community of humankind as well as every thread in the tapestry of SCU’s academic offerings, and you are united by a courageous commitment. A commitment to care for those in need, and it is courageous.

You could have done most anything with your lives, and you chose to help people heal, to ease suffering, to help restore balance, to hold space for possibility in the face of uncertainty and fear, to provide company on the journey when people are at their most vulnerable. That choice matters.

In every age, the world has its challenges. The present is no exception. The problems are real, so are you. You came to SCU possessing the timeless human qualities that help the world to heal, to take its next step.

It’s not your responsibility to heal the world, to save the world. Even so, doing your part, big or small, odds are very good that you’ll save the world. It’s been said that to save one life is to save the world entire. You’ll have the opportunity to do that many times over, and there are many ways to save a life.

Some are heroic, some are quiet, some are simply witnessed, each equally impactful. Maya Angelou said, “Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space, invite one to stay.” By your actions, your very nature. You help heal the world. Today and every day that follows, you are hope in motion.

Now, this moment of course did not arise by chance. It emerged through a union of the values that shaped you with an institution looking for you, specifically looking for you. Change agents, capable and compassionate, intelligent and wise beyond your years.

The author of The Little Prince said, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to gather wood. Teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” SCU did not teach you to yearn, to heal those in need. You’re likely old souls. You brought that desire to serve with you. You brought your spirit to Southern California University, where you were guided to care for the whole person in ways that attend to illness while honoring a person’s story, their sense of meaning and purpose.

You brought your spirit to a university whose bold leadership decided not just to help you become the best healers you could be, but to position you to help lead a transformation for all of healthcare across our nation. To shape a new future of the healing arts that emphasizes whole health. Empowering and equipping people to lead their best lives by attending to the whole of the human experience.

Which begs the question, why SCU? Conventional medical institutions, large and small, have had every opportunity to lead this movement, but they haven’t. In many ways, they’re too deeply enmeshed in the status quo, too firmly ensconced in the ways of a broken healthcare system, honestly, to be beholden to largely uncaring power brokers to accept the mantle of leadership.

Your university leadership stands up when almost all others choose to sit and wait. SCU has chosen to lead in large part because they were inspired by you. I know this because I actually know your leadership well. Like you, they’re bold and visionary, sharp, creative, courageous, and compassionate too. On a mission to help heal the world one person at a time.

By simply being your authentic selves, you are all SCU’s Emissaries. Helping to spread a message of Whole Health for all. You see people not as problems to be fixed, but as lives to be honored. That mindset alone can heal. It changes people’s outcomes. It changes their futures. It can change entire healthcare systems.

Your choice to care and the choice to care made by your instructors and the leadership of this honestly remarkable institution. These acts of hope, acts of courage in a challenged world, they are choices that today are creating waves of positivity that ripple far beyond what the eye can see because you will wash and oh, you will have tales to tell.

The greatest of your stories are likely yet to be written. You’ve accomplished great things, and you are yet to become who you are yet to become, and along the way, you’ll be thanked. The first time, hopefully every time, somebody leaves your presence with sincere gratitude in their eyes. May it bring you to your knees with your own sense of gratitude that the world that you have accepted allows you to participate in the healing of the world.

You might not feel worthy, and you are. For that is the final act of being engaged in the wash. Transforming wash to washing. Bearing witness to the human condition, acting to better it. Doing so with service in mind and with humility, and always, always in gratitude.

We, the assembled, celebrate you. We are honored to simply be in your presence.

Esteemed graduates, we see you. We thank you for who you are and who you are yet to become.  Your accomplishments that we mark today help reveal who you have always been. Now with added knowledge and more tools at the ready. Today, you come to inhabit a space reserved for but a lucky few. The healer.

Whether your name will be known by many or by few matters not; we who are gathered here today see you. We see your purpose and your possibilities, even if you are still discovering them for yourselves. We honor you; we congratulate you, and we thank you deeply for choosing the paths you have chosen for the lives you will better along the way. You are the best of us.

Go forth, Class of 2025, wash, and help a fellow traveler heal. Take the next step, and the next step, and everyone that follows in gratitude. And in the doing, you just may save the world entire over and over again. May that be so, good luck.

About Dr. Russell Greenfield

Dr. Russell Greenfield is a nationally respected physician leader in Whole Health and Integrative Medicine, with a career dedicated to transforming how healthcare is delivered across academic, community, and national systems.

He is the co-founder of the Friendship Institute, serves on the Whole Health Education team for the Cornerstone Collaboration for Societal Change, and consults with communities nationwide that are building Whole Health models of care. His previous leadership roles include Senior Physician Consultant for the Veterans Health Administration’s Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation, Senior Director of Employee Whole Health at the Whole Health Institute, and Physician Executive and Medical Director of Integrative Medicine for Novant Health and the Weisiger Cancer Institute.

A graduate of one of the first Integrative Medicine fellowships at the University of Arizona, Dr. Greenfield completed his Emergency Medicine training at Harbor–UCLA Medical Center, where he also served as Chief Resident. He is board-certified in Emergency Medicine and Lifestyle Medicine, continues to see patients weekly, and has led integrative health initiatives across diverse healthcare settings.

Dr. Greenfield is also a published author and editor, serving as a co-author of Healthy Child, Whole Child, and as the editor of Dr. Andrew Weil’s Mind Over Meds. His work has extended beyond healthcare institutions, including consulting for the National Basketball Players Association.

Watch Dr. Russell Greenfield’s full address and the complete 2025 Commencement Ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/live/x-j0Dvg2a_4?si=JA-6NhfSQs-VZO6z&t=4951