RISHI’S TENDING THE FLAME RETREAT and TRAINING WORKSHOP
MEANING, MEDICINE & RESILIENCY
Educational goals and objectives:
Goals:
Clinicians and healthcare paraprofessionals will be enabled to:
- Recognize meaning of their work as an aspect of their professional lives
- Access the deeper collective meaning that underlies the practice of medicine
- Witness the commonality of meaning that underlies a diversity of medical expertise
- Form an authentic community of shared meaning among colleagues
- Identify themselves as embodying the lineage values of medicine
- Legitimize openness and dialogue with colleagues in the area of meaning
- Explore non-cognitive language and communication
- Recognize the importance of continually enlivening their sense of meaning in their professional work
- Experience the power of symbolic language to elicit an awareness of meaning
- Discuss the relationship between meaning and expertise
- Discuss the connection between meaning and professional satisfaction
Objectives:
Clinicians and healthcare paraprofessionals will be able to:
- Describe and demonstrate the use of the major tools and strategies of Affective Domain learning
- Explain and apply the skill of generous listening to uncover deeper meaning in daily work
- Exemplify the habits of interaction which build authentic professional community
- Practice two personal self-care tools to articulate and refresh their sense of meaning in their work
- Incorporate symbols to strengthen themselves and refresh personal and professional meaning in the workplace
- Share the personal meaning of their work with their colleagues
- Listen respectfully and generously to their colleagues speak of the personal meaning of their own work
Learning Methods employed:
- Large group instruction
- Small group experiential exercises
- Reflection and contemplation
- Personal exploration through symbols
- Large group discussion and sharing in a discovery format
- Formation of community through the discovery of shared meaning, values, and vulnerabilities
- Journal writing
A PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY-BUILDING DISCOVERY MODEL:
FINDING MEANING IN MEDICINE/NURSING/RESIDENT GROUPS
Educational Goals and Objectives:
Goals:
Clinicians and healthcare paraprofessionals will be enabled to:
- Recognize meaning as an aspect of their own professional lives
- Access the deeper meaning that underlies their practice of medicine
- Explore a personal relationship to the core meaning of their profession
- Witness the commonality of meaning that underlies a diversity of medical expertise
- Form a sense of community of shared meaning among colleagues
- Identify themselves as part of a lineage of shared meaning
- Legitimize openness and dialogue with colleagues in the area of meaning
- Explore non-cognitive language and communication
- Recognize the importance of continually enlivening their sense of meaning in their professional work
Objectives:
Clinicians and healthcare paraprofessionals will be able to:
- Use story-telling from their professional or personal lives to articulate and refresh their sense of meaning in their work
- Use of world literature or poetry to deepen their personal and professional satisfaction in their work
- Create a safe, non-judgmental, non-competitive interactions among colleagues
- Be able to deepen the level of meaningful dialogue among colleagues
- Discuss the meaning of their work with their colleagues
- Listen respectfully and generously to their colleagues speak of the meaning of their own work
- Discuss the connection between meaning and professional satisfaction
- Develop and maintain a personal sense of covenant and service
- Activate more of these values in patient relationships
- Strengthen their individual capacity to see meaning in the stories of their patients
- Organize and implement a Finding Meaning Group (if attending the Sunday training workshop)
FINDING MEANING TOPICS MAY INCLUDE:
- Service/Covenant
- Compassion
- Suffering
- Forgiveness and Mistakes
- Grief and Loss
- Mystery and Awe
- Humility
- Integrity
- Collaboration
- Gratitude
SERVICE AS A WAY OF LIFE
Educational goals and objectives:
Goals:
Clinicians and healthcare paraprofessionals will be enabled to:
- Discover and share the commitment to service that underlies their work
- Formulate a personal commitment to their practice
- Make a personal commitment to their practice visible among professional peers
- Legitimize openness and dialogue with colleagues in the area of service, calling and mission
- Recognize calling as an aspect of their own professional lives
- Explore a personal relationship to the core values of compassion, service, harmlessness, courage, love and reverence for life
- Experience belonging to a community of service
- Understand the importance of actively preserving their professional commitment, calling and sense of meaning in their work.
Objectives:
Clinicians and healthcare paraprofessionals will be able to:
- Discuss their experience of Service, Mission, and Lineage with colleagues
- Write a personal statement of their professional mission
- Read their personal Mission Statement aloud to their colleagues
- Hear their colleagues read their own personal Mission Statement aloud
- Discover and discuss the commonality of commitment to service that lies beneath the diversity of expertise and experience.
- Learn a journal technique to preserve and strengthen the experience of service in their week
- Learn a simple powerful tool of stress reduction
- Discuss the relationship between calling, commitment, and professional satisfaction
- Define calling in personal terms.
Learning Methods employed:
- Large group instruction
- Experiential and discovery model learning
- Reflection and contemplation
- Expressive techniques: writing
- Small group interaction
- Peer mentoring
- Establishment of a community of inquiry