Caregivers rise to their highest self when they live Love, not fear.
How do we nurture our lives so that we can live Love. Father Richard Rohr offers a crucial insight: "Self-help courses of any type...will help you only if they teach you to pay attention to life itself." (italics added.)
Radical Loving Care is learned from within before it is practiced without. This process continues in each moment that we "pay attention to life." Meanwhile, this writing helps point the way for all of us who care.
Sacred Encounters occur whenever Love meets need. Caregiving organizations were established to help heal us when we are ill or injured - when we are "broken."
Sacred Encounters always offer more than "fixing." Health care organizations defining themselves as repair shops degrade humanity. Those that describe their work as healing honor life.
One way to understand healing is to esteem the five key relationships in caregiving.
Caregiver to Patient:
This is the reason hospitals, hospices and nursing homes were established. When we are in serious need, we seek the help of competent and compassionate caregivers.
Caregiver to Caregiver:
Most organizations operate in teams. Teams succeed when caregivers honor and support each other.
Caregiver to Leader:
Caregiver well being is determined primarily by the kind of leadership offered by the caregiver's immediate supervisor. The number one responsibility of leaders is to take care of the people who take care of people.
Caregiver to Self:
This relationship is, of course, primary to all others in healing care. We cannot serve others unless we have first found Love within ourselves.
This Love within needs constant nurturing. None of us can live Love unless we can discover the Love that lives in our endless well.
Our spirits thirst for Love. We mistakenly look without when the well of living water flows from within. Love needs nurturing because our egos block Love's flow into our hearts.
The well begins to open when we recognize that our ego is in the way. As teachers from Moses to Jesus and from Jung to Tolle teach us, the way to live Love is not to condemn our ego but to put it in its place.
The ego takes things personally. Love honors the needs of others.
The ego seeks praise. Love is its own reward.
The ego demands constant feeding from without. Love lives naturally on the stream of light that rises from within.
Caregiver to Place:
Beyond those around us, we live in environments.
Come with me on my regular visits to Tennessee's Death Row and you will see a place that is the opposite of nurturing. Death Row prisoners live in concrete and steel twenty-three hours a day. They see the outside through a six inch by three foot slit.
During the one hour they are allowed "outside" they are hearded separately into cages. As one guard told me, "We don't let these bastards touch grass."
The fact that some inmates can find spiritual peace in such places testifies to the Beauty that lives within.
For the rest of us, the world around us is rich if we have found Love within. Art trains our eyes to see a range of colors in the same sky, to taste the aroma of spring, to hear the heart beat of the forest and the song of the ocean.
Flowers are delivered to patients because we know that Beauty is healing.
Place impacts healing. How we relate to our enviornment, along with the other four relationships, determines the quality of our lives.
-Erie Chapman
