Enacting Care
We are passionate about cultivating the right conditions in our bodies, extended nervous systems, minds, and worlds for taking care of ourselves and those who live with dementia. We believe our body is our original home, and the rich soil from which our embodied mind grows. We believe that we can use all the resources and capacities of this home to connect with ourselves and others. We urge caregivers to enact care in and through our bodies by getting in touch with bodily experiences, minding our bodies, and using these experiences as the means by which to find empathy and compassion for ourselves and others and build a shared world of mutual care.
News
- Why do we need to attend to dignity in care?We can all think of moments at the end of life of people we know, friends or loved ones, when a medical care provider missed an opportunity to recognize the dignity of the person before them. I have seen this happen many times on clinical units in hospital settings. I have also seen it happen …
- When is the most compassionate action choosing death?Stories have lives that go far beyond the lifetime of any of us who listen to them or retell them. As a child, I remember loving to hear stories told by my family members. My parents used to spend time reading to me before bed, and I remember that I loved to hear the words …
- Mom keeps falling down and won’t use her caneMy mother has received treatment from the doctors at the Mayo Clinic for the past few years because she was finding that she was forgetting things and sought out treatment. She first went to see a neurologist at UF Health who diagnosed her with Alzheimer’s. She didn’t feel like she had a good connection with …
- How can we use the weeds of our mind to fertilize our spiritual growth?One of my favorite distinctions in doing mindfulness practice envisions the person sitting in mindful meditation as a gardener. Roshi Shunryu Suzuki says that the person who sits in mindfulness pulls the weeds of distraction in order to bury them by the plant of our mind to nourish the growth of single-pointed concentration. We use …
- How can we integrate our sadness and happiness after we lose someone we love?The essential skill in dealing with distress is learning how to make choices around how we can use your nervous system to curate experiences. What the hell does that mean? Let’s begin with the basics of two arms of the autonomic nervous system. We all have a sympathetic arm that enables us to recognize threats …
