An Overview of the Windhorse Project: An Approach in Process
I am currently the Director of the Windhorse Legacy Project and am also a senior therapist with the Windhorse clinical service in Boulder, Colorado. I am one of the original co-founders of Windhorse from 1981, and I have devoted my life to Windhorse since then. I am now seventy years old and the launch of our Legacy Project online resource center is an opportunity for me to take a retrospective look at the history of the Windhorse Project. Mine is just one of many possible perspectives on the project, so I will speak from my personal point of view.
This can be best be told as a story. I would like to apologize if any of the language I use, such as “mental disorder” or “mad,” is offensive to the reader. My heart is in the right place. My hope is that sharing my story of the Windhorse Project is an effective way to explain what it is.
The Development of the Project
In 1981, a small group of psychotherapists formed a home-based clinical team to support a client of Edward Podvoll, MD, in Boulder, Colorado. Members of this original founding group were graduate students and faculty of Naropa University. Dr. Podvoll was a psychiatrist who joined his classical psychoanalytic training with intensive contemplative experience during the last half of his life. He was a pioneer in the emerging field of contemplative psychotherapy at Naropa University. Our client had partially recovered from a serious psychotic episode in a local hospital. This team was simply a response to the need of Dr. Podvoll and client to have a setting to continue their therapy work together in the local Boulder community. Surprisingly, the experience of this team was as inspiring and instructive for us as it was effective for the client’s recovery. We were soon asked to develop more home-based intensive outpatient teams in Boulder.
Over the next six years, we evolved into a vibrant therapeutic community named “Maitri Psychological Services” which operated as a non-profit organization and was known informally as the “Windhorse Project.” The term “maitri” is a Sanskrit word that means “loving kindness to oneself” as the basis for kindness to others. “Windhorse” refers to a mythic horse, famous throughout central Asia, who rides in the sky and is the symbol of a person’s energy and discipline to uplift oneself. Windhorse is literally an energy in the body and mind which can be aroused in the service of healing an illness or overcoming depression. The principles of maitri and Windhorse remain the cornerstones of our healing approach to this day.
In 1987, we disbanded this therapeutic community as it seemed to have reached a natural end. It was well-known at the time that experimental communities like ours had life-spans of about seven years and were completely dependent on the presence of their charismatic founders. Hence, at the end of 1987, we thought our Windhorse work was over, but this was not to be. Dr. Podvoll devoted the next three years to writing his book, then titled The Seduction of Madness (HarperCollins, 1990) which describes all that we had learned in that original Windhorse community. (The second edition of this book, with new material, was published in 2003 as Recovering Sanity (Shambhala Publications), just before Dr. Podvoll passed away.) In 1990, Dr. Podvoll entered a twelve-year Buddhist meditation retreat in France.
In 1992, I moved to western Massachusetts to join a small founding group which established “Windhorse Associates” as a non-profit organization. Our Board of Directors was equally comprised of mental health professionals, people in recovery from mental disorders, and family members of people in recovery. Our Board itself was a bold experiment in collaborative governance. In 2010, “Windhorse Associates” in Northampton, Massachusetts renamed itself “Windhorse Integrative Mental Health” (WIMH). The Northampton community currently consists of 25 staff members and 19 clients. In 2010 WIMH opened a new center in San Luis Obispo, California, whose members currently consist of 23 staff members and 12 clients. In 2015 WIMH opened a center in Portland, Oregon, which currently has 28 staff members and 11 clients. These three centers continue to function under the one non-profit organization.
As this activity was unfolding on the east coast, in the early 1990s a small inspired group established a new Windhorse community in Boulder, called “Windhorse Community Services,” which continues to this day. This service is organized as a privately-held for-profit corporation which operates more like a mission-driven non-profit. This community currently consists of 60 staff members and 70 clients.
In 2000, Windhorse Elder Care was founded by two care practitioners working with clients experiencing old age and the dying process, often with mental health challenges. They were inspired to bring the Windhorse approach of therapeutic homecare to these challenging life transitions. This is a privately-held company. The community now has 80 staff members and 40 clients.
During a summer break from retreat, in 1994, Dr. Podvoll visited Vienna, Austria, to teach about Windhorse. Again, a small inspired group founded a Windhorse service which continues to this day. Windhorse Vienna functions as a non-profit organization, and they are completely supported by public funding. The Vienna community currently has 17 staff members and 25 clients. Two additional Windhorse centers have formed in Germany, in Frankenthal and Freiburg. The Windhorse Frankenthal community consists of 8 staff members and 12 clients. The Windhorse Freiburg community has 9 staff members and 23 clients. In 2009, a Windhorse center was opened in Turin, Italy, called “Accordo,” which continues to serve people in recovery and provide educational programs for mental health professionals. This community currently has 8 staff members and 3 clients.
Currently there are at least two new Windhorse-style communities developing in France and Germany.
Each center has a variety of additional members that help to create these as vibrant, diverse, multi-generational communities. Such members consist of: boards of directors, advisors, student interns in training, volunteers, graduated clients, previous staff members, and the families of clients and staff.
In 2001, the Windhorse Guild was formed as a non-profit 501C3 in Boulder, CO, which was intended to develop employment opportunities for clients with mental health challenges and provide education in the field of mental health care. The Guild now provides job training with transitional employment in their affirmative business “Mindful Works.” In 2002, I established the Windhorse Legacy Project as an archival and educational program under the Guild. The Guild is the environment in which the goodness of related mission-driven initiatives can be cultivated. The Guild and its Legacy Project continue to be supported financially supported by program income and donations from private individuals and foundations.
The Windhorse Project has grown to be a loosely organized international community of ten therapeutic communities in the United States and Europe, providing care for persons recovering from mental disorders. It is noteworthy that this extended community is self-regulating and does not have an overarching supervisory authority. We simply share a common approach to bringing out our own and each other’s sanity and to offer maitri-style care for people in extreme states of mind. Each community has developed within its own unique social, cultural, economic, and geographical ecology. The communities are small enough to maintain face-to-face recognition among members which anthropological research shows to be possible under a 150-member threshold. Each community has its unique qualities, structure, and character, and yet all are easily recognized as “Windhorse.” There is such a strong emphasis on learning and education in each of the centers that these can readily be called “teaching clinics.” The Legacy Project provides ongoing consultation, educational materials, and support to these centers. The extended Windhorse community has had several international conferences open to the public. There are too many gifted and committed people who have worked and lived in Windhorse communities to acknowledge and appreciate them all in this short introduction. Many community members have published papers on the work, which are now gathered and published on our Legacy Project website. The current reader will meet many of these members through their writings here on our website.
The Layers of the Project
I would like to explain in more depth what the Windhorse Project has become and convey something of the experience of working with people in this way. I sometimes think of this as the “Human Sanity Project”—we are constantly exploring the nature of sanity and how the human transmission of sanity can happen among us in the sane environments we create for learning and recovery.
In 2003, Dr. Podvoll returned to Boulder after completing a twelve-year meditation retreat. We enjoyed one final year together before he died. Reflecting on his life’s work, he said:
“Since I have been gone, the Windhorse Project has become a method, a community, and a movement.”
This was a very provocative statement which we have contemplated since then. I came to realize that there is a fourth element that Dr. Podvoll was a pioneer in developing: a unique psychology of extreme mental states and recovery. He articulated his deep understanding of this psychology in Recovering Sanity. I now think of his statement as “the Windhorse Project is a psychology, a method, a community, and a movement.”
◈ A Psychology
Each of us has a “psychology” we have developed as a conceptual framework by which we understand ourselves and our own mind and the way other people’s minds work. Our psychology is based on personal experience of our own minds, what we have learned from others, and general acculturation. These psychologies can be extremely sophisticated, an intellectual tour de force, or very simplistic.
The way we develop psychology in the Windhorse Project is through the lens of direct experience. Those of us who live and work in Windhorse generally have a personal mindfulness discipline, which helps us become familiar with how our mind is working or not working. We also have direct clinical experience in working with people in extreme states, with the intention of constantly learning from those relationships.
This psychology is based on the idea that confusion (both neurosis and psychosis) is inextricably linked with our intrinsic intelligence. So confusion and intelligence function together. This kind of psychology is a kind of a map. There are many details to this psychology: special terms, special ways of understanding psychosis through the eyes of the other person, through the sympathetic feeling for the other person. This psychology is not a conceptual overlay with the intention to control another person’s mind and behavior. Rather, it is a map that allows us to explore and grow and learn in direct healing relationships. So you could say it is a living psychology. It is a psychology that reflects the dynamic quality of life as an interaction of confusion and sanity. This psychology is based on an ancient idea: the mad person is a waking dreamer. So the psychology of dreaming, our secret night life as well as in daydreams, is directly available to us as a paradigm for understanding mental processes of health and disorder. Extreme mental states may be intelligence running wild, but they are still intelligence which can be aroused and clarified so that the person can be an agent of their own recovery. Moments of intelligence and recovery are actually happening all the time, which we call “islands of clarity.” It is our exacting intention to create home-based environments that recognize and build on such islands of health and intelligence.
◈ A Method
Out of this psychology we have developed methods and means to apply our understanding which are known as the Windhorse work. We have developed the discipline of “basic attendance” as our core therapeutic method, which is grounded in interpersonal mindfulness and awareness. This is a practice in synchronizing all aspects of ourselves to be in service of another person. We quickly discovered in the first Windhorse team that basic attendance was best done in a group. It is the concerted effort of a whole group of people who practice basic attendance—with the client and with each other—that constitutes the work of the healing team. Learning and recovery is then cultivated in the entire team which the client participates in, rather than being solely focused on. Each team member is paying kind attention to each other, which creates an environment of kindness. This discovery illuminated our primary question: How to create a sane environment for recovery?
There are all kinds of ways of conducting a Windhorse team, as you can well imagine. The Windhorse Project has grown in complexity as it weaves in new contemplative practices, results of clinical research, and pharmaceutical advances. But the simplicity of the attendant synchronizing their being in the service of another person in order to see the world through the eyes of that person, through the heart of that person—that kind of exchange and openness, that kind of kindness and daring, makes the work very vital and real.
◈ A Community
In each particular locale, multiple Windhorse teams began to emerge, forming what we call a therapeutic community or an open healing community. That is an extended social event which creates the need for a social environment and organization in which those teams can thrive and support each other. The skills and means of developing a therapeutic community and supportive organizations are detailed and vary by locale. There are papers on this website that explain more fully the principles of our approach to community. The development of the Windhorse Project is told in the story of the evolution of this extended international network of therapeutic communities.
It is interesting that one basic operating intention for our community life is honesty. Within the teams and the community, there is a search for personal and social truth. There are obviously layers of truth. Here we are talking about discovering truth as a process of social learning that emerges from open dialogue. We have an abiding trust that the goodness of trying to discover what is actually going on, what we are actually experiencing, with minimal bias, and giving voice to that will create the conditions for health to emerge. The community begins to take root in its own unique environment—geography, climate, culture, politics—and its peoples’ stories are rooted to that place. Each is free-standing in its own ecosystem. Yet together the communities share a common understanding and a common feeling, because when you meet Windhorse people, you realize that they are naturally practicing basic attendance with you. We have a kind of shared connection around concern and care for each other. One might think this is idyllic. In some ways, it is.
◈ A Movement
There are at least two antidotes to one’s community becoming too in-dwelling and self-snug. The actual work with the person in recovery, the person struggling with an extreme state, can be very rugged, challenging, and demanding. That seems to constantly create chaos, which keeps the communities paying attention, vital, and realistic. Intensity and chaos keep us honest.
The other antidote to the potential for in-dwelling is that the world at large, our human society on planet earth, is also struggling with insanity. In creative ways, the Windhorse communities that have grown as psychology, method, and community, expand as a movement outwards to try to effect the greater social world and also the physical environment. The greater environment is also chaotic and calling for our caring attention. There are many other people and groups around the world that are working to evolve mental health care and to promote wholesome inclusion of persons with mental disorders in society. This is known as the “world-wide recovery movement” which, in turn, participates in the whole-person integrative revolution taking place in medicine. Windhorse is proud to be a part of that global movement.
At the heart of the Windhorse Project is a movement toward the protection and continuity of human sanity, including the human transmission of sanity through the generations. Many of us now, having grown up, matured, and now aging within Windhorse communities, are concerned about the preservation of legacy. Of course, we have our immediate concerns about our own Windhorse legacy and how to preserve and share that wealth of experience. For example, a primary focus of the Windhorse Legacy Project is the training of teachers of our approach. But we also care about the legacy of human sanity altogether. So that is a significant movement into the future, a social movement into the future ... to make sure we have a future. Dare we even wish for a sane future?
Guided Experience of Windhorse
I would like to end this essay with a guided meditation that conveys some of the feeling and basic principles of Windhorse work. Mindfulness meditation is a way that we can create the personal conditions for our intrinsic sanity to be felt and expressed. In the Windhorse Project, we are so interested in contemplative practice because it creates sane ground for the practice of the healing arts. We are not particularly interested in becoming more calm or happy, as such. In fact, we understand mindfulness as “mind protection.” Dr. Podvoll writes in his epilogue to Recovering Sanity:
“This presentation of mental breakdown and recovery points to a general rule of mind: Some kind of mental discipline of being present, of nowness, or of mindfulness is necessary to maintain the health of the mind. This is not a matter of psychology or spirituality—protecting the mind is like protecting one’s own eyes. It is precious, and ultimately it is one’s own natural responsibility. Even in the midst of psychotic exaltation or disaster one can learn to hold one’s seat and maintain one’s dignity. This, along with gentle human companionship, is the key to recovery.”
I would like to offer to the reader the following guided meditation as a progression through three stages. It is sufficient to simply read the text slowly with pauses along the way to simply feel and experience what is being pointed to.
◈ Being Present
Please assume a seated posture.
Feel your feet on the floor.
You can feel the weight of your seat.
See if you can take a good, upright posture with a straight back.
The head is upright, and the eyes are open.
The gaze is resting down in front of you, and the jaw and face are relaxed.
You can bring your attention to the movement of your breath.
We are resting the mind on the movement of the breath. It is a natural breathing.
When you find yourself beginning to think, or become distracted from the breathing, gently return your attention to the movement of the breath.
There is a certain dignity in being upright and alone.
Each of us is in our own place, in our own home.
Just stay with that for a few moments.
◈ Empathic Exchange
Now we are going to expand our mindfulness to include those people near to us.
Feel the presence of those persons known to you. Surprisingly, each of the other people feel
themselves to be at the center of the world, just like us. Each person has a history of survival.
Allow yourself to open up to the other people around you.
This kind of awareness has a quality of kindness.
We have so many ideas and judgments about other people, which we can let go of now.
Just be aware of the sheer presence of all those around us, both near and far.
Be touched by the others.
Just be with them now for a few moments.
◈ Environmental Awareness
Being fully present and open to other people may feel overwhelming.
On that basis of overwhelm, we can now expand our awareness even further.
We can feel the space of where we are sitting, in which things are happening.
We are in a beautiful landscape.
The sky may be cloudy or clear, and in either case the sun is shining on us.
So we are tuning in to our natural environmental awareness.
Feel how sensitive your mind is, and how open it is to surroundings.
This space is not a void. This space is accommodating us and is clear.
This clear and accommodating space joins with our own awareness. Feel that.
This space of our awareness is clear with the capacity of knowing.
We are awake and we know it.
Just stay with that for a few moments.
We have gone through the three stages: Being Present, Empathic Exchange, and Environmental Awareness. These stages simply highlight aspects of our intrinsic health and intelligence. They are also antidotes that protect us. Being Present protects our attention from becoming fragmented and separating from our direct bodily feeling, and so we become lost to ourselves. Empathic Exchange protects us from the crucial liability of extreme states where we lack awareness of other people’s feelings and states of mind and are unable to learn from others. Environmental Awareness protects us from being swept away by our mind’s projections and losing touch with our surroundings, to the point where we cannot function in ordinary reality. As we go about our daily life, we can always rely on remembering to pause, be mindful of our breathing, and to re-collect ourselves. It just may be that we can rouse our health and intelligence in the service of another person, thereby making our world a saner place.
The future of the Windhorse Project is open. It is up to the Windhorse community members whether our approach will survive, how it will evolve, and how we can share it widely with others. Many of us are keenly aware of the importance and fragility of our young tradition, as the founders age out. We live with a creative tension between practicing in new modern ways, practicing in old established ways, and practicing in ancient timeless ways. In all ways we strive to arouse the healing power of Windhorse energy: goodness of home, of mindful attention to detail, of genuine human kindness, and of living in tune with our environment. It is my sincere wish that the Windhorse Project will thrive for generations and that this Legacy Project website will remain a vital and interesting place to learn more about human sanity and how to promote it.