Introduction to the Resiliency Workshop
Welcome to a better day.
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Eight inner, generative guides for your mind, body, heart ...and spirit to find your way back home – back to your resilient center.
They are gifts to you ...and my daily rules to remind me that no matter what is happening out there, which at present might constrict and challenge, I can grow a life that is well & wonderously made through the power of sweet small steps.
Eight Simple Daily Practices- the Daily Eight
It's all you need to FEEL well & wonderously made (ahem...) because we are. The secret is to remembering better...but that is a later rule (No. 20). Right now, you are on the frontlines*, and that is not easy. Caring for yourself and another matters, especially when your others are infirm, and so do you matter.
When we caregive, we are a lifeline for ourselves and them, too.
Superpowers, Rules or Gifts?
When I was caregiving my own mother, practicing these eight made whatever was in front of me easier ...and more fun.
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This micro-video will explain the body, mind, heart & spirit approach to resiliency & the process.
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Whether it's:
Wherever you find yourself, these practices are centering. They are ordinary yet somehow extraordinary, too...because what good is a superpower, if I don't use them? |
This resiliency workshop is about using them ...with a bit of fun, too.
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What you can expect: micro-videos
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Resilience is like a shower... daily practice is optimum.
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I will be accompanying you on this journey via micro-videos such as this one, which detail the eight resiliency concepts.
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SWEET SMALL STEPS are powerful.No matter what stressors you find yourself within. Incrementally, you can, with these gifts, return to your LOVELY ENOUGHNESS at center – your center...and that, my friend, makes it a better day You can also (and always) email me with your thoughts and questions: RevEmHager@gmail.com |
What qualifies me to be your guide?
This micro-video is a five minute bio about me & why this workshop was created. |
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Listen to the two Audible audios as introduction
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NOTE: you can read along with the book's text at bottom... but after a listen,
return to the middle Sections 3 & 4 to complete the Process (No. 3) & Journaling exercises (No. 4) for this section. It's a DIY journal with pages for you to print out...See for yourself by clicking on the icon for the Journal or Process.
Introduction to the Book & this Resiliency Workshop
How you DO caregiving matters...to your own health & theirs…
Intro - The Most Important Question
Einstein said it was the most important question anyone could ask themselves…
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Process: Your journal
The exercise is about ASKING...
"Is the world a friendly place? It is about NOTICING. It is not about wresting with how to CHANGE your answer. This exercise is about the important work of being AWARE of what your answer is... (or a TIME when, perhaps, your answer was different ...say when you came into this world...& when it changed.) Or perhaps its is 'friendly' in one area but not another. This question is about SEEING. We need to have clarity around what our expectations are for our next moment. Attitude is altitude. Perspective is so helpful when we are 'in the trenches of love". How about this, when in your life did something happen to you, which you thought was catastrophic, (or rotten or terrible) or just negative and then...over time... it turned out to be that important change that set you on a better path? It is NOT about JUDGING yourself as smart or wise, naive or innocent, lucky or not... etc. It is about more acceptance of 'what is" or just not resisting...because it uses too much energy, which I can better used on something I can affect and, perhaps, change. |
Print out the journal pages.
Write about a moment in your life when it truly did feel as if the universe was a friendly place:
• How did that feel?
• How did it support you?
• What was it like?
Click on the above icon to see the Journal pages for this section.
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This micro-video will walk you through the process.
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What would it mean to you personally if the world truly was a friendly place?
How would it impact your life right now? What would be different? What would be the same?
More questions are on your PDF Journal pages - download by clicking on the icon below. Journal about this on the pages provided or in the journal of your choice.
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Questions to write about ...because your experience matters.
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Write in a journal you already have or make this DIY resiliency journal to consider your experiences more thoroughly.
1. How would you answer the question "is the universe a friendly place?" 2. Are you willing to explore the possibility that the universe is a friendly place and how that can support you during this time? 3. On a scale of 1-10 what is your stress level? On a scale of 1-10 what is your |
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willingness to try something new? Do either of these answers surprise you?
5. What is the most challenging part of your day? 6. What is the most rewarding? 7. What is one inner resource you wish you had more of right now? |
Click icon above to download & print the journal pages for this chapter.
You probably have everything you need to make it: a printer, a 3 hole punch and a loose leaf binder... Download the PDF pages at below: |
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5.
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Chapter Read: Introduction |
Caregiving Could Kill You...
Caregiving could kill you, and it could be the best thing you have ever done, which it was for me. I will remember with satisfaction for the rest of my (hopefully) long and healthy life. Which‐ ever it is, twenty-four/seven caregiving is not business as usual. It muddles everything. Its life stressors are off the charts. When I was caregiving my mother, her dementia mixed it up even more.
Yet, even if caregiving is only for a month, or two—a year or twelve, even if there is no dementia, this showing up in the trenches of love changes you. It can push your buttons to the extent that you may think you, yourself, are demented. It is an impossible task, which we do however we can but it is dangerous work. Statistically, we are more likely to fall sick ourselves (which I did)...and in some cases more likely to die from the delayed stress of post death caregiving (which, happily, I did not).
As we face complicated decisions and the burden of managing, we ourselves become vulnerable. It is DIY, learn as you go, a little more each day, because we must—but caregiving is dodgy work. We tend to allow the life and death necessities of our loved ones to take priority. We must—and yet we must not. How will we walk with them to the end (of love, life or illness) unless we do? Sound impossible? Yet, millions of us do it every day.
It’s Also Possible that Caregiving Might Save You...
This book may save you by avoiding some serious mistakes, which could damage you. However, at minimum, it will give you a reasonably good shot to be in the healthy and satisfied caregiver category. These notions are my rules and gifts to you. They generate solutions from your core; solutions, which fit who you are and what is appropriate for your family and situation. They are inside-out principles, not those imposed upon you with completed solutions.
This book is an offering of gifts that helped me recover from being a caregiver.
I also use them at bedside every day as a hospice chaplain. It is my hope that they are spoken in ways that make sense to you in a spiritual but practical framework. As an Interfaith hospice chap‐ lain, this is my solid ground--to not know. I support people of any faith, or no faith and all the rivers that run between those two extremes at bedside and in bereavement. It is not my job to take sides but to have confidence that there are no sides. However, it is not important for you to believe as I do. As AA friends say, the rules work ‘when you work them’. However, as it did me, they may also seep into you like storm water becomes groundwater and simply amend you.
As we face complicated decisions and the burden of managing, we ourselves become vulnerable. It is DIY, learn as you go, a little more each day, because we must—but caregiving is dodgy work. We tend to allow the life and death necessities of our loved ones to take priority. We must—and yet we must not. How will we walk with them to the end (of love, life or illness) unless we do? Sound impossible? Yet, millions of us do it every day.
It’s Also Possible that Caregiving Might Save You...
This book may save you by avoiding some serious mistakes, which could damage you. However, at minimum, it will give you a reasonably good shot to be in the healthy and satisfied caregiver category. These notions are my rules and gifts to you. They generate solutions from your core; solutions, which fit who you are and what is appropriate for your family and situation. They are inside-out principles, not those imposed upon you with completed solutions.
This book is an offering of gifts that helped me recover from being a caregiver.
I also use them at bedside every day as a hospice chaplain. It is my hope that they are spoken in ways that make sense to you in a spiritual but practical framework. As an Interfaith hospice chap‐ lain, this is my solid ground--to not know. I support people of any faith, or no faith and all the rivers that run between those two extremes at bedside and in bereavement. It is not my job to take sides but to have confidence that there are no sides. However, it is not important for you to believe as I do. As AA friends say, the rules work ‘when you work them’. However, as it did me, they may also seep into you like storm water becomes groundwater and simply amend you.
Gift No. 1 is from both the books: Begin Again as well as the Field Guide. Available for purchase from Amazon, Apple and IngramSpark.
The Distillation: Inner Generative Guides to Find Your Way Home
When you take care of a loved one, the rules change. These offerings are the distillation of my mother’s and my experience here in the trenches of love...because what we went through counts for something and your experiences do, too.
All these ideas are evergreen, resilient, and self-generative (perhaps like a firefly is self-generating with its own light). It is my hope that they guide you, as they have me, in ways that access more love and balance.
Grief (and change) is not an enemy—though I feared it for years. It can do the heavy lifting of renewal, if we let it. Be assured, the drip, drip, drip of incremental loss of a loved one through a long illness, or dementia is grief--anticipatory grief is very common in caregiving. It, and its more intense and disturbing cousin, death grief, can leverage your inner resources (and these notions)—to do the essential work in letting go of what’s not working and, possibly, renewing your life.
I like Thich Nhat Hanh’s succinct accuracy in describing this spiritual paradox. His title says it all: No Mud, No Lotus. In other words, the blooming of the lotus is directly related to the opportunities of the muck in which it grows—the nutrients in that compost. They are dependent on each other. Hint: you are both the lotus, and the hot mucky mess (i.e. that enzymatic poetic alchemy of the Earth). I call it quantum compost.
Am I nuts to say that grief can help us?
No, I am only wise in the dirty ways of my trenches, (which may look a lot like yours...). I think of it as composting that shit (hitting the fan...), the dead elephant (in the room) and the miscellaneous shoulds (which are liberally offered by the well-meaning, but frequently clueless).
Grief is medicine...and torture:
The Thirty-one Gifts are My Rules...
If I could have time-traveled back, to have had these rules as a guide, I would have had more fun, done better caregiving (of myself and my mother), and been less stressed-out. I also believe I would have been quicker to recover from my losses because I grew more resilient as I cared for her—not less.
I tried to care for Betty with eyes and heart open to a higher purpose but, truth be told, I barely kept from misplacing her in some foreign city. I did not care for my mother perfectly, but I resolved each day to do it better. I am not saying it could have been a dance (that would be demented...), but it doesn’t have to be a death dirge.
When my mother, Betty, passed, I wrote until I was empty, then groped my way to a new life. As a hospice chaplain, where I find myself, I am honored each day by the bedside stories of bravery on the frontlines of love. Life is messy. Any caregiver knows that there are trenches here that are so deep they can threaten our own lives. These same experiences may also nourish us. As a former landscape architect, I have come to see it as the garden of change. The circle of care—love, caregiving, loss, grief, bereave‐ ment, and renewal—is best seen, I believe, as seasons where the light promises to come round again--and it does.
These gifts will help you spring back—daily.
Some ideas might be new to you, or some simply reminders of
what you already know to be true. Adding more joy and love into
the way we give care changes our world and, especially, your beloved’s remaining and precious life. The qualities that I brought to the life and death decisions of caregiving impacted my life, even after my mother’s passing.
We have earned this wisdom but if we don’t add it to the next moment and practice, we are all Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, repeating errors in habitually comic and tragic scenes, while we loop or learn how to love (Andie McDowell) and get out of our own way. We re-live the moments of our lives daily over and over, until we germinate or die. This book is a field guide to weeding and planting a new life because this is your season, too, which is something we tend to forget as loyal caregivers of our beloveds.
You are not alone...and (probably) not going crazy.
If you are one of the 44 million unpaid caregivers on duty in the U.S.A. right now, you are already on your journey. Many millions of us are dual-processing our day jobs and watching over our beloveds who are struggling with illnesses. The notions offered here will help you navigate this best and hardest trip any human being may ever walk with another—to the end of time. They are about caregiving and giving care as a renewing pair and
that changes the planet.
The field guide is a short book and, later, a longer story as a memoir...
It took me eleven years of caregiving, and another six years of grief to parse these experiences, to get to a place of renewal. I have condensed these seventeen years into a short book because who has that kind of time? I need these rules for balance (separate of our memoir: girlQuantum, which will come later) to remember a better life for myself—the one I came here to do—moment to moment.
That is the kind of time we have—moment-to-moment.
Caregiving holds its own kind of hope and grief in a dynamic balance. Its anticipatory grief pulls us into a land between where we must start telling (and re-telling) our story to ground us and make our changing experiences feel real. We are storytellers. We need stories to live. When someone dies, a story ends. Loss compels us to speak so we can make sense of our new world. It is what the bereaved must do to move through to a less dismal place than the hard winter of grief.
Your caregiving life might be outwardly confined by honor and responsibility, but with these rules, you are free in the places that matter. Your inner landscapes will be well-made, colorfully planted and ready for spring as the seasons of life offer us.
My goal for this field guide is to accompany you but it is your jour‐ ney. We must learn to ignore those who discount our experiences and say, they have been there. (...They have not been you, or there.) Caregiving is a mythic underworld, which is linked to our inti‐ mate inner world where it’s good to have a sympathetic guide with you—me. The ‘evidence of things not seen’ is not illusion, but very, very real—here in the trenches of love and loss. You are not alone, but accompanied by a crowd of witnesses––or perhaps just Betty and me (but it is enough).
Best blessings on your journey,
Rev. EM Hager
RevEmHager@gmail.com
When you take care of a loved one, the rules change. These offerings are the distillation of my mother’s and my experience here in the trenches of love...because what we went through counts for something and your experiences do, too.
All these ideas are evergreen, resilient, and self-generative (perhaps like a firefly is self-generating with its own light). It is my hope that they guide you, as they have me, in ways that access more love and balance.
Grief (and change) is not an enemy—though I feared it for years. It can do the heavy lifting of renewal, if we let it. Be assured, the drip, drip, drip of incremental loss of a loved one through a long illness, or dementia is grief--anticipatory grief is very common in caregiving. It, and its more intense and disturbing cousin, death grief, can leverage your inner resources (and these notions)—to do the essential work in letting go of what’s not working and, possibly, renewing your life.
I like Thich Nhat Hanh’s succinct accuracy in describing this spiritual paradox. His title says it all: No Mud, No Lotus. In other words, the blooming of the lotus is directly related to the opportunities of the muck in which it grows—the nutrients in that compost. They are dependent on each other. Hint: you are both the lotus, and the hot mucky mess (i.e. that enzymatic poetic alchemy of the Earth). I call it quantum compost.
Am I nuts to say that grief can help us?
No, I am only wise in the dirty ways of my trenches, (which may look a lot like yours...). I think of it as composting that shit (hitting the fan...), the dead elephant (in the room) and the miscellaneous shoulds (which are liberally offered by the well-meaning, but frequently clueless).
Grief is medicine...and torture:
- Grief clarifies what is important to you like nothing else...
- Grief removes pretense and fosters (slapping us up side the head with) authenticity
- Grief clears space from false ideas and notions that are no longer working but ones for which we have yet to let go.
The Thirty-one Gifts are My Rules...
If I could have time-traveled back, to have had these rules as a guide, I would have had more fun, done better caregiving (of myself and my mother), and been less stressed-out. I also believe I would have been quicker to recover from my losses because I grew more resilient as I cared for her—not less.
I tried to care for Betty with eyes and heart open to a higher purpose but, truth be told, I barely kept from misplacing her in some foreign city. I did not care for my mother perfectly, but I resolved each day to do it better. I am not saying it could have been a dance (that would be demented...), but it doesn’t have to be a death dirge.
When my mother, Betty, passed, I wrote until I was empty, then groped my way to a new life. As a hospice chaplain, where I find myself, I am honored each day by the bedside stories of bravery on the frontlines of love. Life is messy. Any caregiver knows that there are trenches here that are so deep they can threaten our own lives. These same experiences may also nourish us. As a former landscape architect, I have come to see it as the garden of change. The circle of care—love, caregiving, loss, grief, bereave‐ ment, and renewal—is best seen, I believe, as seasons where the light promises to come round again--and it does.
These gifts will help you spring back—daily.
Some ideas might be new to you, or some simply reminders of
what you already know to be true. Adding more joy and love into
the way we give care changes our world and, especially, your beloved’s remaining and precious life. The qualities that I brought to the life and death decisions of caregiving impacted my life, even after my mother’s passing.
We have earned this wisdom but if we don’t add it to the next moment and practice, we are all Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, repeating errors in habitually comic and tragic scenes, while we loop or learn how to love (Andie McDowell) and get out of our own way. We re-live the moments of our lives daily over and over, until we germinate or die. This book is a field guide to weeding and planting a new life because this is your season, too, which is something we tend to forget as loyal caregivers of our beloveds.
You are not alone...and (probably) not going crazy.
If you are one of the 44 million unpaid caregivers on duty in the U.S.A. right now, you are already on your journey. Many millions of us are dual-processing our day jobs and watching over our beloveds who are struggling with illnesses. The notions offered here will help you navigate this best and hardest trip any human being may ever walk with another—to the end of time. They are about caregiving and giving care as a renewing pair and
that changes the planet.
The field guide is a short book and, later, a longer story as a memoir...
It took me eleven years of caregiving, and another six years of grief to parse these experiences, to get to a place of renewal. I have condensed these seventeen years into a short book because who has that kind of time? I need these rules for balance (separate of our memoir: girlQuantum, which will come later) to remember a better life for myself—the one I came here to do—moment to moment.
That is the kind of time we have—moment-to-moment.
Caregiving holds its own kind of hope and grief in a dynamic balance. Its anticipatory grief pulls us into a land between where we must start telling (and re-telling) our story to ground us and make our changing experiences feel real. We are storytellers. We need stories to live. When someone dies, a story ends. Loss compels us to speak so we can make sense of our new world. It is what the bereaved must do to move through to a less dismal place than the hard winter of grief.
Your caregiving life might be outwardly confined by honor and responsibility, but with these rules, you are free in the places that matter. Your inner landscapes will be well-made, colorfully planted and ready for spring as the seasons of life offer us.
My goal for this field guide is to accompany you but it is your jour‐ ney. We must learn to ignore those who discount our experiences and say, they have been there. (...They have not been you, or there.) Caregiving is a mythic underworld, which is linked to our inti‐ mate inner world where it’s good to have a sympathetic guide with you—me. The ‘evidence of things not seen’ is not illusion, but very, very real—here in the trenches of love and loss. You are not alone, but accompanied by a crowd of witnesses––or perhaps just Betty and me (but it is enough).
Best blessings on your journey,
Rev. EM Hager
RevEmHager@gmail.com
PREFACE: The Most Important Question
The Most Important Question
When we are in our own tender valleys of caregiving, we may or may not find other people’s stories about their compar‐ ative caregiving challenges all that helpful. In fact, it can be very painful and confusing. Have you experienced an acquaintance or a friend ask you how you are, and as you open your mouth to say, they launch into their own story of a similar experience? They are themselves still grieving and may not even know it.
AFTER YOU HAVE ACCOMPLISHED YOUR GOALS AND GOTTEN caregiving behind you, (either your sweet old someone is now well, or has safely moved on and into the great mystery), you will be okay. (Their outcome is not up to you, only the love that you have shared is on your plate.)
OUR STORY TIME-TRAVELS BECAUSE MY MOTHER DID. IT WAS ALSO A prizefight. Our lifelong argument erupted as many things, but at its core, there was only one—a worldview: Betty’s vs. mine. It was intimate and public: confused and loud. It was a multi-year, many-round championship boxing match, which we had from Tulsa to San Francisco, over the answer to this question:
“The most important question a person can ask is, "Is the Universe a
friendly place?” — ALBERT EINSTEIN
I say yes. The rules help me remember that friendly providence in the garden of change.
- Print out your journal pages... Click the icon to the left. The questions are an adventure...into you. What gives you more energy? What depletes it? Good to know about yourself...
Enjoy.
A Sound Meditation ?
Sound is interesting to add to a meditation practice...or help begin one.
I started these YouTube offerings as my COVID-19 support to a stressed out world.
Here is a 20 minute sound meditation that takes another 8 minutes to introduce the idea of listening to the still small voice of our inner Wisdom.
May it support you as it does me.
* A note about the Frontlines (of love):
Since we are just getting to know each other, perhaps I need to clarify something. There are two books, as you can see below: Begin Again is (mostly) an expanded subset of the first section of the Field Guide. Both have an Audible audio book version.
Since we are just getting to know each other, perhaps I need to clarify something. There are two books, as you can see below: Begin Again is (mostly) an expanded subset of the first section of the Field Guide. Both have an Audible audio book version.
The first section in both books is called the Frontlines, which tends to slap us into survival mode, as it did me. Begin Again is what this Resilience Workshop is focused upon.
When there, we can't easily think about more. Don't worry about more, right now. Try these first eight. Get re-centered. It will make the small and the big stuff, easier - not easy but easier. That's enough for right now.
Begin your journal.
Think about what a 'Friendly Universe" could be like for you. Einstein thought it was the most important question that anyone could ask. So do I.
After that, the Gift No. 1 will be coming your way in a few days in your email.
Best Blessings,
Rev. EM
Reach out at RevEmHager@gmail.com
When there, we can't easily think about more. Don't worry about more, right now. Try these first eight. Get re-centered. It will make the small and the big stuff, easier - not easy but easier. That's enough for right now.
Begin your journal.
Think about what a 'Friendly Universe" could be like for you. Einstein thought it was the most important question that anyone could ask. So do I.
After that, the Gift No. 1 will be coming your way in a few days in your email.
Best Blessings,
Rev. EM
Reach out at RevEmHager@gmail.com
"I read it all night. It was funny and useful." - A.W.
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TWO BOOKs AND AUDIBLE Recordings:
BEGIN AGAIN has the first 8 gifts... The Field Guide has ALL the gifts...
Both are about caregiving as a circle of care–& that includes you. on Amazon, Apple, IngramSpark
© COPYRIGHT 2017-2021 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PRIVACY POLICY
BEGIN AGAIN has the first 8 gifts... The Field Guide has ALL the gifts...
Both are about caregiving as a circle of care–& that includes you. on Amazon, Apple, IngramSpark
© COPYRIGHT 2017-2021 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PRIVACY POLICY