BRINGING HOME – From “Recovering Sanity”, E. Podvoll p.272
When you are beginning to have a significant contact with the patient, even thou no major communication might be taking place, you can still do things together “around the house”. This could be called the mundane aspect of basic attendance. Together, you might straighten up the patient’s disheveled room, or you might do it alone until the patient is able to join you.
In this stage of basic attendance you further join with the patient around the earthboundedness of home activities. This is not any kind of artificial work. Maintaining a household, a home-site, or a campsite is not some sort of therapeutic “make-work,” it is merely what needs to be done. It embodies the basic Windhorse slogan a household ecological bottom line: “Cline up after yourself”.
“Bringing home “ is the basic attendance term for synchronizing body and mind. It stems from understanding that synchronization can happen just now, in any activity, in this present moment. Because of this, real life actions are the basis for any therapy that would attempt to unify one’s mind and life. It is an anchor within the emotional tide of the thought – world.
by
“Recovering Sanity”
of Edward M. Podvoll
Shambhala Publications – November 2003
