Home-Based Recovery of Mental Health, Inc.
The Windhorse Journal’s mission is to inspire compassionate approaches to recovering sanity.
We do this by creating an evolving forum dedicated to exploring contemplative psychotherapy and the creation of therapeutic environments for the wellbeing of all persons involved. We envision this to be a rich dialogue among people with lived experience, family members, psychology professionals, and anyone interested in whole person-mental health and the diverse expressions of human sanity.
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
Dear Readers,
Tsewa is a Tibetan word that we explored in WJ Entries 009 & 010 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.
Rinpoche’s book on the subject of tsewa, Training in Tenderness (Shambhala Publications, 2018) is both friendly and powerful… [Read more…]
Dear Friends,
In one of our earliest Journal entries, 005, we introduced the existence of four principles as the core of the Windhorse approach. That entry focused on the first principle: the notion of Basic Sanity—and any mental health challenge as an overlay to that sanity. In our most recent entry, #022 – “Creating Environments of Sanity”, Chuck Knapp brought us to the second principle: We are inseparable from our environment. Here, Chuck hosts fellow Windhorse psychotherapists and team supervisors Gabrielle Bershen, Marta Aarli, and Jack Gipple in a discussion about this principle… [Read more…]
Dear Readers,
Beginning in the admissions process at Windhorse, when we first meet a potential client and their family, we often encounter a blizzard of variables around how someone’s extreme state experience came to be. We attempt to understand this from their perspective, doing what we can to learn the language of the individual and family system, all with the intention of determining whether we think we can possibly be helpful to them—whether or not they become our clients. Of course, at the same time, our potential clients are trying to figure out if we look reliable, whether we know what we’re doing, and if they’re interested in being in this kind of relationship with us. For these people looking for help, naturally flowing through this conversation is intense hope, fear, and uncertainty… [Read more…]
Dear Friends,
In our previous post, WJ 020, we shared an excerpt from the recent book, The Logic of Faith, by Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, Buddhist teacher/ student, writer, and long-time friend of WCS. Because of our contemplative roots, we often seek out the wisdom of those who ardently pursue the spiritual path of Dharma (i.e. teachings of the Buddha) to provide inspiration for our work. This post features part 1 of a conversation about that word “faith”—the discomfort and misapprehension it gives rise to. Elizabeth is joined by Gretchen Kahre (Windhorse Senior Clinician, and Elizabeth’s fellow student and close friend), and Chuck Knapp (Windhorse Co-Director). Besides allowing us to hear about Elizabeth’s initiation and evolution as a student/teacher of the Dharma, the dialogue invites us to reconsider our understanding of faith… [Read more…]
Dear Readers,
We are very pleased to present to you over the next month the provocative and refreshing voice of Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel. An author and teacher (although she defines herself as more student than teacher), Ms Namgyel shares insightful examinations with Buddhist and spiritual communities around the world. Her work seems to delight in rooting out assumptions, clarifying vagaries and reinvigorating stale definitions that impair our paths of development.
Elizabeth’s approach to opening up perspectives through courageous and honest inquiry dovetails nicely with the Windhorse approach to care and recovery. New pathways of relationship are found when we have the right tools of examination… [Read more…]