Kaiser Symposium and Resilience

The Kaiser palliative RN symposium where I was speaking about resilience for pro caregivers...and my book...was easy (and went quite well) once I stopped reading my notes and spoke from my heart.  I don't know how many times I need to learn this lesson—speaking with people, not at them.  

It is so easy at bedside in hospice (or supporting my bereaved) to still my noisy mind, listen deeply and respond from that place...or let the space be empty.  In good design, they call it "white space".  

But... it feels so different when sixty-five palliative nurses are watching you, waiting for my amplified words to fill the gap between us—my words.

Oddly, it's not. As a chaplain and a woman of (growing all the time) faith, I agree with the radical French Jesuit theologian, paleontologist and geologist, Teilhard de Chardin, when he said: 

                            "We are spiritual beings, having a human experience."  

If that is true (and I have ample life, bedside and death bed evidence of this), then there is just one of us here, or at minimum we are nuclear family. My point about speaking up (and speeches)  is that we are all among family—all the time.

Sweet, right? (And, it's a better tactic than imagining  all of you/us naked...)