Dear Friends,

We are pleased to continue to focus on our client Scott Klumb and his life with an autism diagnosis, which is documented in his autobiographical film. Our previous post featured a conversation between Scott and his psychotherapist, Jon Garson, prior to the March 10^th release of that film. Scott spoke about how he came to be both filmmaker and subject, boosted by a serendipitous meeting with Temple Grandin, well-known for both her own autism and advocacy for others. Her advice about forging an identity beyond diagnostic labels is manifest in the film.

In this post, Scott’s current Windhorse Team Supervisor, Chuck Knapp, reflects on the growth he has observed in Scott—a result of personal determination and the willingness of a supportive team and family to ride out the bumps with him.  [Read more…]

Dear Readers,

Yesterday, my colleague Jeff Fortuna and I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with our dear friend Joanne Greenberg. Many of you may know her as the author of the semi-autobiographical novel I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, and also as one of the very highly respected voices of authority around recovery from mental illness—the term she prefers over others such as mental health challenges. As we were leaving the hospitality of her wonderful mountain home, I shared with her that I’d be writing this introduction today and asked if she had anything to pass along about the use, or non-use, of psychotropic medication. [Read more…]

Dear Friends, 

Tsewa is a Tibetan word that we explored in Windhorse Journal entries 009, 010, 024 and 025—with the guidance of Buddhist teacher Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. Tsewa can be most simply described as the warmth and tenderness we feel toward others. Rinpoche encourages us to see tsewa as an experience we should cherish and one we should learn to trust as the skill most responsible for assuring our own happiness and the happiness of others. Kongtrul Rinpoche’s thoughts and instructions on the topic are far from simplistic, but rather deeply reasoned and profoundly potent in the face of the polarity, conflict, distrust and meanness that many of us perceive in today’s social interaction. He compares Tsewa to oxygen—as something fundamental and essential to our well being: “. . . our lungs always yearn for oxygen, our heart always yearns to be open, to give and receive tsewa.” [Read more…]