ISHI has run a monthly physicians' FMM group in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1998, and this has been the living laboratory for the Finding Meaning in Medicine format. Since 2000, many physician FMM groups have been starting and meeting successfully throughout the US. We have refined an approach that requires almost no preparation and is very easy to organize and run. In starting your own Finding Meaning in Medicine group, we suggest the following:

• Personally invite several physician friends to meet in your living room or other pleasant and professionally neutral space one evening a month for 2-3 hours.
• Select a topic central to the deeper meaning of our work as physicians, such as compassion, listening, mistakes and forgiveness, grieving, and healing. You select the topic for the first meeting; thereafter the group chooses the topic for each subsequent meeting.
• Tell your colleagues that the "admission ticket" to each meeting is a story from their personal or professional lives, or a story or piece from the world literature, or a poem or work of art or music, or an exercise — each person brings something to share related to the evening's topic.
• As an organizer all you need to do at the meeting is share your story or experience, and see that everyone has a chance to talk.

Each Finding Meaning in Medicine meeting is organized as a conversation and a discovery process. The stories people bring will often surprise both teller and listeners with their depth and relevance, inspiring everyone to further explore the meaning of the topic through sharing their experiences. Physicians in the Bay Area group often comment that for first time they feel safe and non-competitive with fellow physicians. The secret seems to be in providing an experience of "harmlessness" in the meeting; a place of respectful listening that doctors can trust no matter who attends or what the topic.

The genuine community and support that the FMM physician groups offer is powerful and transformative. Supporting one another in this way is a great alternative to waiting for our medical centers to recognize our stress and respond to our needs. As we express what makes medicine meaningful to us and receive the appreciation and support of colleagues, we discover in ourselves the very qualities we are seeking to restore to our professional lives and to medicine as a whole.