Windhorse Community Services

Home-Based Recovery of Mental Health, Inc.

Windhorse Journal Entry #060: Community Programs during COVID: Nurturing Your Inner Hero

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Dear Friends,

Welcome to today’s Journal entry, which begins with a heartfelt conversation among Windhorse Community Programs members—moderated by Chuck Knapp and JoAnn Burton—about coping with the pandemic from the perspective of the Hero’s Journey, a notion made popular by Joseph Campbell. In addition to the podcast, we’re so pleased to be offering a paper recently written by JoAnn Burton, titled, Hero’s Journey of Recovery: A New Narrative for People with Long Term Mental Health Issues. Between first-person accounts of our experiences of the “hero’s journey” in the podcast, and JoAnn’s paper, this entry presents an unusual opportunity to learn about what we know to be powerful help for those of us on a path of recovery. [Read more…]

Windhorse Journal Entry #057: Lungta in the Time of Corona: Leadership During a Crisis

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Dear Friends,

It has been 8 weeks since we began responding as an organization to the threat of COVID-19, with significant alterations to how we go about our work. At that time, an already-scheduled visit and podcast recording with Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche proved to be auspicious. As a valued spiritual teacher, Rinpoche provided welcome words of inspiration and guidance on working with our worried minds while making practical decisions to ensure safety. (See Windhorse Journal entry #054 – “Taking Care in Pandemic: Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche’s Reflections on our Mental Priorities”.) Indeed, what can be drawn upon is one’s life force—called  windhorse (Tibetan: lungta) in Shambhala teachings: the unlimited energy of basic goodness and inherent wakefulness. And it’s at the heart of the following podcast discussion. [Read more…]

Windhorse Journal Entry #055: The Courage to Hope

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Dear Friends,

In Joanne Greenberg’s piece “In Praise of Not Knowing” she writes that while on the one hand, she would like to know what the future holds, on the other, it would rob her of essential qualities of life.

“Not to know implies the need to learn more of what can be known, and that implies a struggle to grow and change. Not knowing is the call to courage. I admire us because of courage – the courage to wake up, wash up, dress, eat breakfast, and go out, unknowing, into what Alan Dugan, the poet, calls ‘the daily accident’. Knowing everything, we wouldn’t need seat belts, but the biggest victim of knowing would be the loss of our most prized possession: Hope.” [Read more…]

Journal Entry #053: SCOTT’S PATH OF THE HEART: A commentary on the film, Autism: One Man’s Journey

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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 10th 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…]

Windhorse Journal Entry # 049: Basic Goodness, Tsewa, Basic Sanity: Part 2 of a Conversation on a Deeper Understanding of Trauma

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Dear Listeners,

In this second entry of the two-part podcast on trauma (first entry #27) we, Dave Dunlap and Polly Banerjee Gallagher, along with the moderator, Chuck Knapp, delve into personal examples and experiences of working with trauma. As Dave expressed in his introduction to our first podcast, “the discussion we engaged in captures only a small part of the story. We are not pointing to a single way to treat trauma, or even the idea that trauma is something that can be treated away.” With that understanding we continue our discussion recognizing that trauma is a vast and deep topic that is difficult to articulate cohesively without getting lost in a fog and missing the heart of what we mean. To our wonder, what came out of this discussion was our genuine connection to our shared experiences as human beings. [Read more…]