Our students and healthcare providers sharing humanity.
I am teaching savansana, a relaxation pose that ends a yoga class. It is Sunday afternoon and everybody is lying flat on his or her back with eyes closed. The breathing in the room is gentle but steady. People are landing – students, healthcare professionals, and supporting yoga teachers alike. I am watching over the scene. In this moment, I know that I am lucky. I am gaining a secret view into a marvelous collection of humanity – grace and knowledge, caring and compassion, all wrapped into our weekend workshop entitled, Integrating Yogic Principles into Healthcare Delivery.
This class is the culmination of three days. After exploration of both the subtleties and the science of the mind-body relationship, the twenty-five healthcare participants experience one of Mind Body Solutions’ adaptive yoga classes. Seven of our dedicated, longtime adaptive yoga students agree to spend Sunday afternoon with us. I teach and the workshop’s participants assist our students during the beautiful, controlled chaos of one of our classes. Except our adaptive students are actually the teachers and the workshop participants are gaining an experience that they literally cannot have anywhere else in the world.
Savasana ends. As people roll to their right side and slowly sit up, I see tears in the eyes of more than a few healthcare professionals. These tears are precious. They are of hope and healing, of relief and remembering, all at once. After the class, we have a closing session. Two of the women are willing to share their tears They try to articulate why the experience of the class was so powerful. Of course, they struggle with words…describing the truth of shared humanity is nearly impossible. One says, “Being with these students so directly and authentically moved me deeply…no pressure of the clinical setting, just people working…together.” The other chimes in as tears fill her eyes again, “Just to lie next to them, sharing savasana, sharing the same experience…the grind of working in healthcare makes it so easy to forget why I do this in the first place.”
With these words, I know that this workshop has been successful. Healthcare workers are pulled in so many directions and are constrained by so many rules and restrictions. They have to satisfy so many different layers of people. What they really crave is to simply be with their patient. It seems so simple. Unfortunately, nothing is simple in our complex and over-busy world.
Infusing a mind-body approach into healthcare means helping caregivers remember; it means supporting their humanity; it means allowing them to land. When this happens, patients receive better care; achieve better outcomes; and ultimately live better lives.
Our training aims to help healthcare professionals transform the grassroots therapeutic relationship in a way that nourishes both patients and themselves. We don’t do this by simply imparting knowledge about the mind-body relationship. We also help them remember to connect and share with their patients.