Self Care as a Vital Sign--sample

Self Care as a Vital Sign--sample

• 1.
  Self Care asthe 6 th Vital Sign: How to implement a self-care plan that leads to professional and personal vitality
• 2.
  Difference between ‘helping’and ‘companioning’ Stress often comes for those in service professions when we confuse what our job really is. To companion the dying patient and their families, we become an active participant in their grief journeys. Then, instead of ‘taking care of them’, we allow ourselves to learn deeply from their unique experiences. They become our teachers.
• 3.
  “ If theydon’t have scars… … they haven’t worked on a team.” --Balfour Mount, MD
• 4.
  To be indeep relationship with another… we learn to grow beyond the need to be loved, approved of or appreciated.
• 5.
  Difference between ‘helping/fixing’and ‘service/companioning’ Helping is based on inequality Helping incurs debt Helping implies brokenness Helping creates distance Service is an experience of mystery, surrender and awe (knowing that we are being used in the service of something greater, something essentially unknown.) We can only be of service to the wholeness and mystery of life.
• 6.
  “ We findour destiny on the path we take to avoid it…” Carl Jung Five universal addictions: Intensity (lots of drama!) Perfection (can be the enemy of excellence) Need to know (indicates lack of trust) Fixation on what’s not working (being hypercritical) To be loved and appreciated (rather than to be wide-open to whatever experiences that life brings us)
• 7.
  Seek first tounderstand “ Let my traveling companion in tough times be someone familiar with rugged terrain, someone acquainted with struggle, not theory, someone bruised into insight.” Balfour Mount, MD
• 8.
  Where… … inyour life did you stop singing? … in your life did you stop dancing? … in your life did you stop being enchanted by stories, especially your own life story? … in your life did you start being uncomfortable with the sweet territory of silence and solitude?
• 9.
  Symptoms of unbalanceDoing things we really don’t want to do, to be ok or accepted. Saying ‘yes’ when we mean ‘no’. Doing something for someone although that person is capable and maybe even willing, to do it for him/herself. Not being able to discern what we want, need or desire AND feeling incapable of asking for those needs to be met, even if we do know.
• 10.
  Broken hearts arenecessary to our work “ People often say, ‘How do you keep doing this work? You must have to harden your heart, so you don’t get too involved.’…I say, ‘No, we have to let our hearts be broken…they have to be broken open, because that is what compassion is…a broken heart.” --a hospice team member
• 11.
  From Rumi “How will you know the difficulties of being human if you’re always flying off to blue perfection?”