One area that I’m not sure is talked about enough in classes or supervision (possibly in mentorship though), is what it feels like to be an SLP. There are conversations about stress and time management, about the various demands of high caseloads and low resources. But coming forward to engage with a person struggling with complex communication needs and their families often fundamentally features sadness. How a person internalizes that or processes that or copes with that is a very personalized experience. I am not a therapist or counselor, and I make that clear, but these are the thoughts I extend to students (typically by email), about my own values around self-awareness and being present for emotions as part of being healthy.
“On an airplane, in the event of an emergency, they always stress that anyone traveling with someone who may need assistance should take care of their own oxygen mask first. Because if a person was in the effort of putting someone else’s air mask passed out before they got the chance, there are now two (or more) people at risk. In short: you have to take care of yourself to be able to take care of others.
It has been a big, emotional, demanding week. There’s been a lot going on within PSU as the semester stampedes to a close, and there’s been a lot going on in the world. I encourage you to be mindful that these may have real impact on your energy, focus, patience, creativity, problem solving. Your well-being may be fatigued right now on more than one level. Please take care of yourselves.
There are lots of ways to do that and I certainly would never argue that there’s a best way. This is a link to giving yourself a moment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6eFFCi12v8. I have also recently read that even just taking a minute or two each day to look at a beautiful picture (of anything), helps.
Move, eat, sleep, breathe, talk, pray, dance, draw, be still: whatever. Invest in your well-being.
Airplane rules,
j.
The following is a set of readings about self-awareness that resonated for me; but, again, this is an entirely personal process.
Transformative Power of Crisis (Alter, Alter, & Hendrix, 2010), which I like very much. The chapters are short, which makes for easy reading. I don’t have a bookmark in it, I just open it and read wherever that is for as long as I like. I re-read a fair amount, but that’s okay. What I read tonight particularly resonated with me, and I wanted to share it with you:
>
> “At the end of our three-minute meditation at the beginning of the session, Dominic reported that he had so many ‘thoughts, feelings, and scenarios’ playing through his mind during it that he ‘couldn’t meditate at all.’
> ‘How do you *know* you had all those thoughts, feelings, and scenarios playing through your mind?’ I asked.
> ‘What do you mean?’
> ‘*Who* knows, and is able to report to me, that you had all those thoughts, feelings, and scenarios playing through your mind?’
> ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
> ‘Are you confused right now?’
> ‘Yes.’
> ‘How do you *know* you’re confused? *Who* knows that you’re confused?’
> ‘I do.’
> ‘You *know* that you’re confused?’
> ‘Yes.’
> ‘And who’s reporting it to me?’
> ‘I am.
> And what are you reporting that you know?’
> ‘That I’m confused.’
> ‘Who’s ‘I’?’
> “I am.”
> “And you’re confused?”
> “Yes.”
> “I thought you just said you’re the one who *knows* that you’re confused.”
> “I do.”
> “Well, which is it? Are you the one who’s confused or the one who knows he’s confused?”
> “I am confused, but I also know that I’m confused.”
> “Then you are two beings. You are what you are, which right now is confused, and you’re also something inside that seems to *know* what you are, and the *knower* is *not* confused.” (p. 55-56)
> The Two-Step
> “Guide our feet into the way of peace…” Luke 1:79
> If meditation involves gaining access to the Inner Witness who observes all our feelings, but therapy involves getting in touch with our feelings, which is more important — to observe or to feel our emotions?
> Both.
> When we walk we step first with one foot and then with the other; alternating between the two feet, we go forward. In the same way, on this journey of self-transformation we must alternate between two feet. One foot is meditation. Through meditation and other techniques of self-awareness, we establish and keep strengthening our identification with the Inner Witness, the eye at the center of our storm of feelings, the one inside who’s watching our feelings in a state of perfect peace. The other foot is the feeling of those feelings. Because there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed on this journey — and that includes all our emotions — we must sometimes go into that storm and be willing to feel the feelings that are whirling about in it. That’s a major step in overcoming them.
> It takes a brave person with a strong and steady consciousness to walk into that storm and face the swirling buffets and blasts of the primal energies that are our feelings. Stepping with one foot, we walk into the storm and feel the feelings in it. Stepping with the other foot, we walk out of the storm, into its center, and watch it peacefully from there. Like the systole and diastole of a heart, pumping in and out, or like the high and low tides of the ocean, we engage in a back-and-forth process. Stepping first with one foot and then with the other, feeling our feelings, watching our feelings, we go forth, we propel ourselves forward, to the Self. (p. 61).
End blip.