Journal of Sacred Work

Days 59-60 - Creating Your New Life Story

             "How do we learn to live love rather than spending our lives afraid? One way is to change our stories." - Inside Radical Loving Care 

            His father was a surgeon. Mark took the same path. When I met him he was in his final year of residency.

            The story Mark told himself was that he was his father’s son and would therefore be like him. There was one problem.

            Mark’s father had a terrible temper. He was attending the Medical Association program for anger management. If he failed to change he would be removed from the staff.

            Mark knew nothing about this. When he started copying the same behavior I called him into my office. “You’re not going to graduate if you don’t do something about the abusive way you are treating our nurses,” I told him

            Mark was stunned. “I didn’t think that mattered,” he told me. “My dad blew up. I thought it was okay.”

            “You need to decide who you are,” I said. “If your story is that you are a copy of your dad you’re in trouble.”

             Years later, Mark told me our conversation changed his life. “I was telling myself I was like my dad. I realized that didn’t need to be true.”           

          The most fascinating journey you can take is to create a new story around your life. Renown storyteller Minton Sparks (above) now helps countless people in this work.

             If you are a leader you can change the story of an entire organization.

            At a personal level, what do you want your days to be like right now?

            New story creation can be as simple as Monday morning. It’s part of America’s work culture to hate Mondays.

            Since there’s going to be a Monday every seven days why fret about it? You can change your life story by deciding to celebrate Monday instead of dreading it.

            The beginning of your “new story” adventure is to ask yourself questions: What parts of my story grow from Love? Which parts are informed by fear?

             If you are the one who decides how you feel why are you choosing to live fear instead of Love?

             Many people have never thought of their lives in this way. The process of doing so can lead to the finest awakening you may ever experience.

             But, the process can only succeed if you are completely honest with yourself. The deeper you probe the greater your growth will be.

             What is your story about your work as a caregiver? Do you think of yourself as both compassionate and competent?

             Why did you become a caregiver? What are the influences that have shaped your decisions since then? Who is shaping them now, you or someone else?

             Do you think of your job as hard labor or as a calling? Every job has tiresome elements. If these aspects dominate your tale it’s time to consider a new story.

             Do you tell yourself it’s your supervisor’s fault? Do you blame your team?

             What is the story of your work culture? What can you contribute to help change that culture so that caregiving becomes more of a joy?

             It’s hard to do this work alone. Group sessions with fellow workers or friends are crucial.

             The stories you tell your self and the way you tell them impact your world every day. Change your stories and you change your life. 

             If you are a leader, change the story of the culture and you will change the lives of the caregivers you supervise. If the story of your culture tolerates mediocrity, that becomes the truth in that culture.

             If the story becomes we are a culture of caring, than that impacts the behavior of every caregiver and every patient every day. 

             Imagine the impact that would have on patient care?

-Erie Chapman

Photograph: "Minton Sparks and JJ in Performance" - copyright erie chapman 2013

Days 56-58 - Healthy Teams

“…I learned at last what it means to love people and why love is worn down by loneliness, pity, and anger.” – Czeslaw Milosz

              We have all been members of teams. Since childhood, you have seen some teams succeed and some self-destruct because of the way some members are afflicted with “loneliness, pity and anger” - a kind of toxicity that always leads to trouble. You know what this looks like because you have experienced these feelings yourself.

             A failed team is like a broken fence. A few bad pieces affect the whole structure. 

             You may even have been a member of a toxic team - one where team members break into factions and focus more on sabotaging each other than they do on patient care. The primary responsibity for converting a toxic team to a healthy one rests with the team leader. 

             Meanwhile, every team tells itself a story about who they are. The story shapes the team's reality. 

             Eckhart Tolle teaches us that the ego always takes things personally. Our egos accumulate insults as wounds, many of which never heal. We are not our egos, Tolle writes.

             We can overcome our sense of anger and self-pity by stepping back from our egos and observing what is happening. This is a path to healing and a terrific exercise for team members in learning how to participate in healthy teams focused on patients. 

             Lists of steps are not the best ways to learn Love because they suggest that merely walking through the steps will, by itself, create a new culture of caring. Radical Loving Care lies deeper than surface steps.

             Still, there are guideposts that can be helpful for both individuals and teams.

             From a leader’s standpoint the idea of changing the entire organization, sometimes numbering thousands of employees is not only daunting but seems impossible.

             Radical Loving Care (RLC) teams make organization-wide change doable.

             Some teams are already passing The Mother Test℠. Imagine the impact on culture if every team reached this level.

             Every team leader and caregiver needs to understand the role of compassion and how it integrates with highest caregiver competence to become Radical Loving Care.

             It's a nightmare to be part of a toxic team. It's an everyday joy to participate on a team that celebrates caring by supporting each other in the sacred work of caregiving.             

-Erie Chapman

Days 54-55 Part I:The Pearl of Great Price

“To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.” -Robert A. Johnson

Rather serendipitously, there are circumstances when something may come our way at just the right time.  Perhaps, it is because we are ready, or rather receptive to receiving the gift. When these moments occur, I can feel it down into my bones, and I know that there is more to it than mere coincidence.

On a recent visit home, I had one such an experience.  My friend Laura and I have shared many meaningful conversations during our lifelong exploration and evolving spirituality.  We had a rare but lovely opportunity to be in each others presence. I was interested in sharing thoughts on the polarities in life and how best to integrate both the light and shadow.

We both acknowledged that in this stage of our lives, our mission is to reintegrate the lost and discarded parts of ourselves with a return to wholeness. She 'just happened' to bring along a little book for me to read called, “Owning Your Own Shadow” by Robert A. Johnson. What I discovered in these pages was a wealth of wisdom and an extraordinary gift.

We are born into this world whole but from a very early age we receive messages about right and wrong, acceptable or not, dictated by the group norms of civilized behavior. Johnson explains that in this cultural process we begin to divide our God-given characteristics into what is good and what must be hidden away, thus our shadow forms.

Sadly, some of our most precious characteristics are relegated to the shadow because as a rule commonplace, every day characteristics are society’s norm. Johnson likens the sorting out of our personality traits to a seesaw. He points out that there “is an inexorable law that no characteristic can be discarded; it can only be moved to a different point on the seesaw.” Regrettably, what our society refuses to acknowledge is that a balance must be maintained between our acceptable, saintly self and our refused shadow. The fulcrum at the center creates balance, wholeness;  our Holi.ness

This is similar to the mandala symbol whose center is unity and light. Just as there are polarities in nature, so it is with our psychological make-up.  We each have a blind spot or shadow that is with us all the time as a mirror image.

Personally, I resist the pressures of our culture to deny our shadow, for my intuition knows therein lays “the pearl of great price.” I notice that people 'push my buttons' when they need to paint a silver lining for any difficulty rather than offer acceptance. When this well meaning reaction occurs, I feel diminished; not heard. Yet, I recognize this must be something I don't like in myself because yes, I do it too. I am also acutely aware that my greatest gift, when out of balance, is also my greatest weakness.

Johnson postulates that to ignore one’s shadow is to store up and amass darkness. Also, a society that only acknowledges the light and refuses the dark will eventually manifest war, financial chaos and racial intolerance.

I agree with Johnson's thinking that any restoration of our wounded world will begin with individuals who have the courage and insight to own their shadow, rather than to project their darkness onto others with blame and intolerance. When we begin to befriend and reclaim our “inner enemy” we then have a chance to redeem our outer one.

Johnson concludes, “If you can touch your shadow –within form- and do something out of your ordinary pattern, a great deal of energy will flow from it”, and this is why I now pass this little book on to you, dear friend.   

~liz Sorensen Wessel

Above Pencil Drawing by ~liz

 

Days 52-53 - A Loving Leader

 
           South Florida is an interesting place to be a professional caregiver. College students and working folks go there to vacation. Others go there to retire. Everyone hopes that if they need to be hospitalized, the care will be as kind as the climate.

             As a young boy growing up in Florida Pat Taylor wanted to be an astronaut. An excellent student, he progressed through high school rapidly approaching his dream.

             The next step in his journey was the Air Force Academy. He secured the necessary appointment from a U.S. Senator.

             All that was left was a routine physical.

             Days after the physical exam, he received a surprising note. He had failed the rigorous physical test not because of a major problem but because of an orthopedic issue so minor he didn’t know he had it.

            Millions of us have scoliosis. It doesn’t get in the way of our regular lives. But if you want to get into the Air Force Academy it’s an automatic dis-qualifier.

             His dreams of becoming an astronaut dashed, Pat wondered what to do next. During one of his summers at Notre Dame, he got a position as a hospital orderly. He loved it.

             Duke Medical School came next followed by successful residencies at two more prestigious training programs.

             “I was drawn to work in emergency medicine,” Dr. Taylor told me. “One reason may have been that I noticed that I was calm and clear-headed in the midst of chaos.”

             In his years of practice, Pat learned he was also good at business. In the course of winning his Masters, he discovered something else. He needed to practice his skills in team settings.

             “Doctors don’t receive much training for leadership in teams,” Pat shared. “As a doctor, everyone looks to you to make the call.”

             As he had in other areas, Dr. Taylor developed his leadership team skills so well that he became President and CEO of Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale. There, he has been working hard at developing a culture of loving care among the three thousand employees and physicians on staff.

             “Attention to matters of the soul is crucial in a non-profit Catholic hospital,” Pat says. “That’s very important to me. It’s at the core of my being.”

             How does a leader integrate a compassionate soul with the rigorous demands of leadership in a hospital setting?

             Dr. Taylor offers a fascinating metaphor based on his fluency in Spanish. “When I was first learning another language, I would hear the Spanish sentence and translate it into the English I already knew. After awhile, I didn’t need to take that step. Speaking Spanish became natural.”

             This is how he believes tough-minded caregivers can learn compassion. When they first practice it, they have to translate it through the language of competence they already know. After regular use, the practice of compassion with competence becomes natural.

             Moving from his young-boy dreams to be an astronaut to his adult career practicing his calling as a physician-CEO, Dr. Patrick Taylor has become a successful example to all. Every day and night, he strives to live his calling to be a loving leader. 

-Erie Chapman

Days 49-51 - Finding The Hard Balance - The Actress-Doctor

            Artists look to create or capture particular kinds of balance in the world - in pictures, paintings, sculptures and poems. Caregivers do the same. 

            Lunchtime is a great occasion to hear stories that teach about caregiving. In the doctor’s dinning room one day I say next to a physician three years into her practice as an internist.

             I asked her my favorite question: “How do you give loving care?’

             She thought I was asking about compassion (instead of loving care which is competence and compassion.) She looked at me the way caregivers sometimes do when approached by someone with no first line care experience.

             “I start my rounds at 6:30 a.m.,” she told me. “If I gave out compassion to every patient I’d be exhausted by noon. So I’m an actress. I pretend.”

             In fact, she was a first line caregiver. She was facing the daily demands of very sick people and I was not.

             I had no business judging her decision to pretend compassion instead of suffering with it. In fact, she deserved compassion for everything she had to endure each day.

             Still, I wondered which behavior would ultimately be more exhausting for her, pretending Love or living it?

             Where is the balance between “professional” behavior that maintains distance and compassionate behavior that draws near? At one extreme, the doctor signals a lack of genuine caring. At the other, getting too close to patients may interfere with clinical judgment.

             Obviously, we don’t want a surgeon coming into the waiting area and telling the family what he or she may be thinking: “Oh God! The blood in there was terrible.”

             We also don’t want this same surgeon approaching the family and getting melodramatic.

             The finest caregivers provide answers. “The balance point moves,” urologist Dr. Keith Hagan told me one day. “Because doctor’s training is so heavily clinical I think each physician has to develop compassion. Too many doctors are afraid of it. I lean to compassion because I know my clinical training will help me maintain the right professional balance.”

             Another veteran nurse told me, “I became a nurse because I believe in offering compassion to the sick. If I couldn’t be compassionate in my work I’d be burned out in a few months.”

             Real compassion drives the highest competence because real compassion wants the best for the patient. This doesn’t mean gushing.

             It means loving with grace and skill.

-Erie Chapman

 Photograph: "Pool & Chairs - Santa Monica" copyright erie chapman 2012

Days 47-48 Twilight

Note: This reflection is dedicated to my mom, Elizabeth Dorothea Sorensen, in this, her 97th year of life.

Twilight fills the sky in delicate etchings of trees reaching towards her opalescent hues. This in between space lends itself in little openings, inviting what may come. A small hush follows in silence. I pause to notice the wonder of it all, captivated by magical  luminaries that are ever changing before my eyes.

How keen my senses are to the colding air, sounds quieting and the feeling sacred. It is like this when we encounter anothers soul with a listening heart. A small space opens where walls crumble and you can really see; at least for a moment.

 
Peace

By -Hamza El Din

The world shines about me,

luminous as the moon, smiling like a rose,

and a sweet benediction

flows through everything existing.

How beautiful life is.
I marvel at people who are not in love with life.

You, my girl, are beautiful,

and your beauty,

like the beautiful thought of peace,

belongs to the eternity.

Detest war and destruction.

When you go to the riverbank,

and the sun sets in the evening,

the waters of the river will be rippling softly,

and from a distance, in the twilight, you will see white sails.

A song of the boatman will come from there.

'Today no suffering, no suffering.'

The world shines about me,

luminous as the moon,

smiling like a rose.

Contributed by Liz Sorensen Wessel

Watercoler By ~liz

Days 45-46 - Why Storytelling is Important

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. – Father Antony de Mello

          One of the sweetest experiences you had as a child probably began with four magic words: "Once upon a time..." It was so exciting for me that I even remember the way the "O" in the first word appeared large on the pages of the story books my mother opened before me.

          Since your childhood, imagine how many stories you have heard and told. Award winning spoken word artist Minton Sparks (left) tells her stories so well they have universal appeal, reminding us of how stories shape our lives.

   

          Dozens if not hundreds of stories fill your days because your take on the world is shaped by the stories you tell yourself. For example, do you wake up telling yourself the story that you don't like your job, or that your boss is a jerk, or that you would be happy if only you had a new car? 

          The stories we tell signal what we value. If we want to change our world view, we need to look at the stories we are telling ourselves and others.

          Rami Shapiro wrote in the book Hasidic Tales, “The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves determine the quality of the selves we imagine we are. The stories we tell about others determine the quality of our relationships with them.” 

          One of the most successful ideas that have emerged in the teaching of Radical Loving Care is what I call The Mother Test. This test helps wake up leaders and first line staff spiritually by giving them a tough challenge. The idea for it arose from an encounter that is now an important story. 

    The Mother Test: If your mother were a patient in your organization, would every single person give her the loving care you think she deserves?

          Most people skip over the definition of The Mother Test too fast. Yes, it is a variation on the Golden Rule. But in a complex caregiving setting, what does it mean to treat every patient the way you want your mother to be treated?

          An orthopedic surgeon signaled the difficultly in understanding the importance of loving care during a discussion we had in a hospital I was leading. “This loving care stuff is nice,” he told me, “but if a patient comes to me with a compound com-minuted fracture of the tibia how does that help? The leg doesn’t need loving care. It needs my skill.”

          “The leg is attached to the patient and the patient needs loving care,” I answered.

          He seemed unimpressed. This talented physician could not see the point until I took the discussion one step further.

          “What if the patient is your mother,” I asked.

          His response suggested an earthquake change in his the story he told himself about his own caregiving. “Oh, well,” he said, clearly startled, “if it was my mother then I would certainly want her to receive all the love in the world.”

          The Mother Test was born in that moment. Every patient is someone’s mother, father, sister, brother, child, friend. Every patient’s humanity calls for love.

         But, can hospitals ensure this kind of love from every caregiver all the time? The answer is that all of us are inclined to conform to the culture in which we live and work.

          On the first day of kindergarten, we all look around to determine how we are supposed to behave. We take our clues from the teacher and our fellow classmates and act accordingly.

          Caregivers new to their environment do the same thing. They look around at their new work setting and observe their teammates. If the culture tolerates mediocre care, it can be hard to sustain a personal standard of best care because your teammates are likely to give you a hard time.

          It is the responsibility of leader to establish environments where loving care is celebrated not frustrated. After all, the leader never knows when his or her mother may need Radical Loving Care.

-Erie Chapman

Days 42-44 - Principles of Radical Loving Care

   We all look for summaries of concepts. Most of us need to distill ideas into a set of principles or steps. 

   Radical Loving Care is the application of the Golden Rule to caregiving. I've made an effort to list twelve principles that describe the basis of what this means.

   I would be grateful if you would let me know if you have additions or subtractions or like it as is.

 

1. LOVE: Live Love not fear. We are all children of Love, not victims of fear.

 

2. RLC DEFINED: Radical Loving Care is the practice of The Golden Rule in a health care setting.  

 

3. RLC BALANCE: RLC puts compassion in balance with competence to create healing experiences. It shines through stories like The Good Samaritan.

 

4. THE MOTHER TEST: Every patient should receive from every caregiver the kind of care we want for our mothers.

 

5. SACRED ENCOUNTER: Radical Loving Care is present when need is met with Love rather than indifference.

 

6. CULTURE IMPACT: The biggest determinant of caregiver behavior is work place culture.

 

7. CULTURE CREATION: Passing The Mother Test requires establishing cultures that consistently reinforce loving care.   

 

8. STORYTELLING – Stories signal values. The biggest indicator of loving culture is seen in the stories that are told.

 

9. SERVANT’S HEART: Caregiving is a sacred calling practiced by those who have a servant’s heart.

 

10. LEADER’S ROLE: The first responsibility of a leader is to take care of the people who take care of people.

 

11. POSITIVE LANGUAGE: What we love matters, not what we fear.

 

12. RENEWAL: The practice of Radical Loving Care requires constant refreshment & renewal and is nurtured by ritual.

-Erie Chapman

[This list appears in the forthcoming book, Inside Radical Loving Care.]

 

Days 40-41 Sacred Circle

Mandala is the Sanskrit word for sacred circle, there is no beginning and no end, a universal symbol for God as an all-inclusive Love without distinction. 

Representative of life, mandala symbolism has polarities or opposites. For example, night and day, joy and sorrow, sun and moon, birth and death, love and fear. Yet, through our experiences we realize the value of not seeing our world in simplistic black and white, "either or" terms. In ever increasing awareness, we create space for the "both and" possibilities that is part of the fullness of life. The center of the mandala is white, symbolizing pure spiritual light, unity, love and forgiveness, wholeness and healing; accepting all that is, both light and shadow. 

Once while skimming the shelves in a used bookstore, I came across a book called, "Dreams" by Carl Jung. I was struck by the beauty and symbolism of the intriguing mandalas drawn by some of his patients.  In that moment, I knew that I was going to draw mandalas for the rest of my days; that was 15 years ago.  The expression of my spiritual journey became inextricably bound to the sacred circle.

Pema Chödrön offers her perspective, “Each person's life is like a mandala- a vast, limitless circle. We stand in the center of our own circle, and everything we see, hear and think forms the mandala of our life. We enter a room, and the room is our mandala. We get on the subway, and the subway car is our mandala, down to the teenager checking messages on her iPhone and the homeless man slumped in the corner. We go for a hike in the mountains, and everything as far as we can see is our mandala: the clouds, the trees, the snow on the peeks, even the rattlesnake coiled in the corner. We're lying in a hospital bed, and the hospital is our mandala. We don't set it up; we don't get to choose what or who shows up in it. It is, As Chögyam Trungpa said, "the mandala that is never arranged but is always complete." And we embrace it just as it is.
Everything that shows up in your mandala is a vehicle for your awakening. From this point of view, awakening is right at your fingertips continually. There's not a drop of rain or a pile of dog poop that appears in your life that isn't the manifestation of enlightened energy, that isn't a doorway to sacred world.”  

Mandalas are expressed everywhere in nature, from a cellular level, to the iris of your eye and out beyond to the stars in our cosmos. We recognize that our life experience is filtered through our minds visioning. We can be curious about the lens through which people explore their inner and outer realm of their universe with a submerged sense of knowing.  

My brother John saw the world through the lens of architecture. He was keenly aware of how things were built, the quality of craftsmanship, the angles and lines of design. He noticed the intricacies and beauty in the details.

Sponge Bob Square Pants colors the imagination of my six year old granddaughter Rejie’s daily life. She knows by heart all of this character’s dance moves and his lines in every episode of the series. My husband, Woody sees through the passage of time with a fascination for history.

Letter writing and thoughtful gestures of remembering people by sending a card for every occasion is the caring eyes my mom has shown throughout her 97 years.

Photographer and film artist, Dane Dakota looks through the camera lens into the divine essence of  nude female Beauty. Minton Sparks sees in vivid pictures of storytelling.

Erie Chapman sees through sacred eyes, the Holiness of your caregiving.

How does your heart see?

~liz Sorensen Wessel

Above mandalas by ~liz

Days 35-39 - The Path to "The Light" - Our Most Sacred Journey

 

   What if your soul is asleep?

             Life’s natural pain can cause us to pursue every kind of anesthesia. Patterns can hypnotize. Monotony tranquilizes our courage.

             Meanwhile, as we use ten percent of our potential, our life passes.

          Resting on a lamp-lit sofa, I read about a woman who lived fully awake - a being of light. Because of her nightly rounds to check on the wounded in the Crimean War the most famous image of Florence Nightingale casts her as “The Lady With the Lamp.” 

             “I close my eyes to see,” artist Paul Gauguin wrote.

             The world’s light shines without. The light of our spirit shines from within.

What The Explorers Teach Us

             We know that Nightingale's lamp symbolizes the search we all pursue to find “The Light.” The light Nightingale sought was a system that would bring healing to all those in need. 

             Nightingale was an explorer. The journeys of the world’s saints and pioneers offer fascinating stories that can electrify your personal search.

             Explorer Ponce de Leon spent his career searching Florida (which he named) for the Fountain of Youth. Columbus, of course, sought a new route to India.  

             In both cases, the explorers found something different and more important than what they sought. Yet, neither recognized the value of their discoveries.

             Your light shines before you now. Can you see it with your eyes closed?

             Perhaps most renowned of all searches in the Western world has centered on the pursuit of the mystical cup that, according to legend, Jesus used at the Last Supper and Joseph of Arimathea later used to catch the blood of Jesus. Touched by Jesus, this vessel is the Holy Grail of legend – a thing so precious that many lives have been lost seeking it.  

             But, we have to make our way through traffic and too many patients each day and may feel we don’t have time to bother with such stories. However, when we look at our own story don't we want it to include our own pathway to "The Light?"

Isn’t it time to break the patterns that have trapped us in ruts?

“The Old Patterns”

             “Once you start to awaken,” John O’Donohue writes, “no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realize how precious your time here is.”  

             Frustrated, tired of trying, or perhaps believing there is no such path, you may have given up. Yet, if you are reading this, you may well be continuing your travels.

             Good. There is no more important journey than our one towards the light. If we give up, we fall into the half-light of a world devoid of real meaning.

             The single most riveting truth is this: The light is always there, waiting for us to find her. We must rediscover our path to her every day. 

             O’Donohue’s eloquence beckons us: “You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells.”

             Find courage. Or find your life caught forever in patterns that promise safety but deliver mediocrity.

             What does The Light look like to you? Is it peace and serenity? Does it lie in the eyes of a healed patient? Does it live in a glimpse of the sea? Does it flow from the music of a laugh or through the paint on an artist’s canvas? Does it circle your heart when you are in the presence of the one you love?

             All of these experiences tell us that although The Light may be awakened from without, it lives within.

             As Gauguin wrote, you must close your eyes to see it.  

-Erie Chapman

[The above essay is excerpted from the forthcoming book for caregivers, "Inside Radical Loving Care."]

Days 33-34 Our Hidden Gift

Note:  This reflection is dedicated to one of the greatest caregiver’s I have ever known, Peter Strand and is in loving memory of his precious, dear wife, Colleen.

 When serious illness strikes a member of the family everyone’s life is thrown off balance.  Suddenly, without warning, daily life has been disrupted and sometimes irrevocably altered. Encounters between a person who is seeking medical care and healthcare providers are very brief.  Patients and their family members are often left stunned when notified that they are being discharged so quickly  from the hospital. Frequently, they feel ill prepared to cope with the challenges of caring for their loved one at home.

 As the nurse arrives she (or he) knocks on the door and takes a deep breath while waiting for someone to answer who will hopefully, invite her in. As she crosses the threshold, first impressions matter. To be successful one must instill a sense of confidence and be perceived as capable, caring and trustworthy.

 The immediate task at hand is to peel the family off the ceiling (their anxiety so intensely aroused) with the assurance that, we are here to help you. Together we can do this, I will help you learn how, we will come as often as necessary for you to feel more comfortable; we will not abandon you. In the homecare setting, family members must learn how to administer IV therapy, care for incisions, tracheostomies, wounds, catheters, ostomies, feeding tubes and many things they never thought possible.

For those of us who have embraced the sacred trust of caring for people in need, we understand that it is the family members who are real caregivers. They are our heroes.  We recognize that the family members are living their loved one’s illness too. In healthcare, we only encounter the ill person/family for only a short time. We just experience little episodes of care in the trajectory of their lives.

Usually, it is a family member who provides care 24/7 with very little respite offered in our current healthcare model. Assistance with the basic activities of daily living and respite care for family members is desperately needed but not funded in our current healthcare system. Yet, I believe, this low tech affordable intervention holds the greatest promise for reducing unnecessary re-hospitalizations.

 As a nurse, in the unique field of home health for most of my 35 year career, I must say it is the patients and families who inspire me. They have taught me.  I have had the privilege of being welcomed into their lives during difficult times.  I have bared witness to incredible courage and fortitude in the face of adversity. They have shown me what it means to give of one self for the good of another. These are the encounters that awaken us to life’s poignancy and brilliance.

Surely we have an obligation to provide competent care. We receive education and learn skills to do our work proficiently. Once these skills and competencies are mastered a caregiver can begin the journey beyond tasks into the realm of true healing.

 Faced with the isolation and pain of illness, a person can feel invisible.  When we meet a person where they are, something happens.  The energy shifts as an opening forms for Light to enter in.  The greatest gift we can offer is our authentic selves. To give our full presence with a loving intention. It is in these moments that we experience healing, not only for the person in need but for the person who shows up for them. Both are changed by the encounter, both experience healing.

 

 

This is the hidden gift and Beauty in care giving.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Watercolor image, created by ~liz