Windhorse Community Services

Home-Based Recovery of Mental Health, Inc.

Journal Entry 029 Attending Community

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Welcome!

In this podcast, Jamie Emery and I explore our connection to Windhorse Community Services, a community we have been members of for over three decades. Windhorse is an intentional community and clinical service that works with people who experience the complexity of extreme states. It is a place that stretches, grows and cultivates health. It is a place to overcome loneliness and isolation—where people come to feel valued as they are.

The Windhorse community is a diverse array of families, clients and staff who have joined in partnership to explore the workings of community and how it can promote health. What draws us together and binds us is deeply personal and yet universal… [Read more…]

Journal Entry 028: Creating Therapeutic Community

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Photo by Lori Heintzelman

Dear Friends,

Our latest Journal offering is a written piece from Windhorse senior clinician and long-standing (now former) director, Jamie Emery. Reflecting on the origins of the Windhorse approach, Jamie takes us on a personal journey of the first attempts at building a therapeutic community in support of a client with multiple mental health and associated challenges. He emphasizes the necessary ingredients of such an endeavor: the structural needs of such a community, based in a client’s home, as well as the attitude of mutual learning and respect necessary for all members of the community. He also speaks to how important this community becomes to all involved—not just the client—and the difficulty when a team must change or dissolve, especially if dictated by outside forces… [Read more…]

Journal Entry 027: Integrating the Personal Experience of Trauma

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Polly Banerjee Gallagher and Dave Dunlap

Dear Listeners,

The following discussion on trauma captures only a small part of the story.  It is the honest and heartfelt accounts of two individuals (and Windhorse clinicians)—Polly Banerjee Gallagher and myself. We were chosen to share our stories, not because we are special or that our stories are unique, nor that we have completed a process of working with our traumas. Rather, we speak because the experience of trauma is ubiquitous; it is known to all.   And in sharing we desire for you who listen to find some peace in your own stories.

However ubiquitous trauma is, it does not manifest in a single form.  Trauma is as unique in its expression in our lives as we are in our expression of ourselves in the world… [Read more…]

Journal Entry 026: Trauma’s Story: Integrating Trauma with the Help of Basic Goodness 

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Polly Banerjee Gallagher

Dear Friends,  

This paper is a heartfelt offering based on my own experience of trauma and my clinical relationship to others around their trauma. It is not intended to be instructional, scholarly, or comprehensive in regard to the vast topic of trauma. In writing, I used a storytelling—almost dreamlike—approach to the topic in order to highlight my curiosity about trauma as a story we tell ourselves. Just like a dream, memories of trauma and its ongoing effect on us is not solid and cannot be pinned down. In recounting a dream, we can notice subtle and not so subtle shifts in our interpretation. In the same way, we have an opportunity work with our trauma in such a way that we can discover options and opportunities to manifest our story in the direction of healing…   [Read more…]

Journal Entry 025: Tsewa – The Human Heart Connection

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From Left to Right: Jeff Fortuna, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Chuck Knapp

Dear Listeners,

Welcome to this second entry of a two-part series featuring our dear heart friend, the Venerable Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. We will be listening once again to his teachings on tsewa—a Tibetan term which most closely translates in English to “love.”…

If love is an aspect of life in which you find any value and in which you’d like to gain more clarity, you’ll want to hear Rinpoche’s gentle, open-hearted, and very practical guidance. And if you’re listening from the perspective of someone interested in mental health, this is all about the radical mind health that’s abundantly available to us as human beings. As I stated in the introduction to part one (Entry #010), these teachings are some of those rare gems that speak from the deepest roots of human sanity and intelligence, while being accessible and immediately applicable to our day-to-day lives… [Read more…]