The Windhorse Therapeutic Community
Background: Chuck Knapp and Jeff Fortuna lead the Windhorse Boulder senior clinician group in an in-depth study of our therapeutic community, in the summer/fall of 2015. We addressed the questions of:
◈ Why is it important to study therapeutic community?
◈ What is the history of therapeutic community in Windhorse?
◈ What are the core principles and practices of our therapeutic community?
◈ How can we integrate this study into our daily work and life?
Chuck and Jeff presented their provisional understanding and facilitated group dialogues on this topic, over a cycle of three sessions. Chuck and Jeff worked out a basic outline of the principles and practices of the Windhorse therapeutic community. Jeff then wrote drafts of this paper, weaving in contributions of many Windhorse people. The final paper is a result of this collaborative research. The author bears complete responsibility for the content of this paper. This paper is intended to open up further study and discussion, rather than as any kind of final word on the subject.
This project was jointly supported by Windhorse Community Services, Boulder, and the Windhorse Guild/Windhorse Legacy Project. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the “Guild/Archive Project” to support our continued work.
Introduction
The structure of this paper is a ground-path-fruition (g-p-f) analysis of the Windhorse therapeutic community. A simple metaphor for understanding g-p-f logic is that of an apple seed which is planted in the ground, its potential sprouting to life, nurtured by water and earth; the path is the growth of a sturdy apple tree through the seasons, again in relation with sun, wind, and water, expressing its potential; the fruition is the ripe apple which can be eaten, with its seeds returned to the ground to begin another tree, always dependent on causes and conditions. With our current study, the ground is our intention to create an environment of sanity that hosts the work with persons in extreme states; the path is dialogue, the dynamic and free interpersonal exchange of feeling, information, and energy directed toward learning and healing; the fruition is awareness that is kind, lucid, and ever-moving, on both personal and community levels. Each of the three main sections begins with a headline theme and commentary. Then, each dimension is supported by its “core discipline” as the focus of effort; is developed by its unique “leadership tasks”; is integrated by certain contemplative practices; and is sustained by its “binding factor” (these “healing community binding factors” are explained by Ed Podvoll in Recovering Sanity).
The area of healing community is so ancient, profound, and multi-faceted that it is beyond any particular logic or framework, such as this one, to fully describe it. Since the dawn of humanity, we have been sitting around campfires in communication circles. Circles became tribes. Community consciousness evolved.
Maxwell Jones, an early founder (late 1940s) of therapeutic community and a close Windhorse friend, observed that it is nearly impossible to write or speak about therapeutic community due to its complex, ever-changing transitional quality; and due to the fact that each participant has a unique subjective perspective on the community. Yet, we are confident that we can reflect on our experience and refine our shared understanding, which will enhance our awareness of community and protect its continuity. The entire thrust of this presentation is to clarify how the attitude and skills of basic attendance can be practiced on the community level. Since basic attendance means to synchronize body and mind in ordinary activity, then, at this level, we are exploring how to synchronize body and mind in communal presence and activity.
Legacy History
The first Windhorse team happened in 1981 in Boulder, Colorado. At that time, we were a small community of Naropa graduates in training and supervision with Ed Podvoll. We were also students of the vibrant academic community of Naropa University, founded by Chogyam Trungpa in 1974. We simply mobilized our close-knit group to respond to this first client, “Karen,” as a therapeutic team. Ed tells the story of this first team in Recovering Sanity. As more teams began to occur out of this inspiring experience, we naturally formed an extended community devoted to Windhorse work. We called this “Maitri Psychological Services” which was in existence 1981–1987. We came to realize we were part of a tradition sometimes known as “alternatives to the medical model,” which remains the dominant psychiatric paradigm of our modern age. In particular, there was a renaissance of alternative residential centers in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of cultural upheaval in the western world. This cultural awakening was partly catalyzed by the waves of interest in hallucinogenic experimentation. This inspired experimental treatments of psychosis, viewing its apparent chaos as a meaningful journey of self-transformation, analogous to the dream experience. The nihilistic reductionism of the medical model posits that psychotic (and dream) experience is empty of personal meaning. Ed Podvoll elucidates this influence of the hallucinogens in the Michaux parable (Recovering Sanity, chapter 4).
This alternatives tradition manifested in the work of Maxwell Jones and his several therapeutic communities; R.D. Laing (Kingsley Hall) who later inspired David Goldblatt (Burch House); Loren Mosher (Soteria House); John Perry (Diabasis); the Pocket Ranch group; and Stan Grof (holotropic breath work/spiritual emergence). Several members of the Windhorse founding group worked in parallel with Richard Warner an international expert on schizophrenia, to create an innovative hospital-alternative community residence with the Boulder Mental Health Center (Cedar House, renamed Warner House). In 1994, Dr. Warner published an edited volume, Alternatives to the Hospital for Acute Psychiatric Treatment (American Psychiatric Press), with papers from the major alternative treatment communities of that time, including Windhorse (“The Windhorse Program for Recovery,” Jeff Fortuna). These were the highlights of that renaissance in creative alternative treatment communities in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They displayed common qualities: time/staff intensive; “being-with” as opposed to “doing-to”; exaggerated patience with psychosis and the slow pace of change; human empathy as catalyst for recovery; minimal reliance on psychiatric medications; staying alert to the well-springs of sanity; seeing the work as an adventure in discovery and learning for all involved.
Richard Warner explains,
“There are common origins for many of these alternative settings for the treatment of acute mental disorders. The thread runs back through these revolutionary postwar developments in social psychiatry to an even earlier source—to the successful elements of early nineteenth-century moral management. There are common themes—active ingredients—in these alternative treatment programs and the models, from this century and the last, to which they are linked, which tells us something about the human needs of patients and the nature of the illnesses being treated. Now, as in the moral treatment era, effective psychosocial treatment settings used to be small, family-style, and normalizing. They are open-door, genuinely in the community, and allow the user to stay in touch with his or her friends, relatives, work, and social life. They are flexible and non-coercive and are often based more on peer relationships than on hierarchical power structures. They involve residents in running their own environment and using whatever work capacity the patient has to offer. The pace of treatment is not as fast as in a hospital, and the units generally try to provide a quiet form of genuine ‘asylum.’”
It is interesting to note that Ed Podvoll, in Recovering Sanity, re-examines the historical record from the “moral treatment era” referred to above. He found it to be a more insidious form of dominance of vulnerable people, using a “studied interpersonal silence” to expose and humiliate the person into submission to the consensus reality of the caretakers. Dr. Podvoll’s presentation of asylum mentality and awareness is a key discipline for Windhorse community and therapy practice.
Windhorse was founded near the end of that early period and is one of the rare survivors from that time. Those centers were founded by charismatic, visionary leaders, mostly psychiatrists, most often closing upon the founders’ departures. Windhorse is unusual in having survived the death of its own charismatic co-founder, Ed Podvoll, in 2003. The Windhorse Project has evolved over 34 years into a loosely organized international community of 6 centers: Boulder, Colorado; Portland, Oregon; San Luis Obispo, California; Northampton, Massachusetts; Turin, Italy; and Vienna, Austria. Each of these centers has its own founding group who imprinted their centers with unique patterns and character. The first community in Boulder was shaped by direct involvement with R.D. Laing, Maxwell Jones, Loren Mosher, and Chogyam Trungpa and his main student, Osel Tendzin. R.D. Laing showed us the balance between radical personal freedom and the ethic of “no harm.” Max Jones taught us the meaning of the “open system” and how the abuse of power undermines any therapeutic community from within. Loren Mosher emphasized the importance for community members to deeply feel a sense of belonging and membership and the critical importance of new leadership to carry on beyond the charismatic founder. Chogyam Trungpa had founded two experimental healing communities in the early 70s based on the “maitri space awareness practice” that he developed with Suzuki Roshi. Windhorse carries on the work of those early maitri communities, as well as Chogyam Trungpa’s teachings on contemplative psychology, psychotherapy, and environmental treatment. Chogyam Trungpa introduced the Windhorse founders to his Buddhist “sangha” (the community of meditators) and shared his vision of creating enlightened society. Osel Tendzin, Chogyam Trungpa’s main student, tirelessly helped us apply Chogyam Trungpa’s teachings to our therapy work from the perspective of non-ego. Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa’s son, carries on this Shambhala lineage and remains a spiritual friend of Windhorse (The Shambhala Principle, 2014). Ed Podvoll wove his numerous influences into Windhorse. He transmitted his 20 years of work with the Chestnut Lodge and Austen Riggs psychoanalytic communities, known for their open explorations in scholarship, intensive psychotherapy, and intensive mentor relationships, in vibrant communities of scholar-healers. In Recovering Sanity, Ed writes movingly of his living on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation and participating in their sacred medicine ceremonies. In addition to these seminal influences, there are many other people who have influenced our development. For example, Connie Packard, a co-founder of the Windhorse Northampton group in 1992, introduced us to council practice in 1994, and showed the way to work with families of clients. She authored “The Windhorse Guide For Families” which completed the root trialogue of client-staff-family.
All of these humanistic influences come out of the philosophical schools of radical introspection, interpersonal phenomenology, and existentialism, rather than out of the logical positivism that underlies modern scientific empiricism. Our traditions emphasize knowing through fearless exploration of the depth and range of human experience, no matter how sacred or profane, by whatever means are necessary. This unruly tradition stands in contrast to the “cool, objective” inquiry of the scientific method. The medical model of mental illness comes out of the biological reductionism of the various models of brain/chemical imbalance and malignant illness determinism. An over-reliance on psychiatric medications logically follows. The ideologues have been busy in the last few centuries.
Ed writes:
“There is a wisdom within the history of caring for insane people that is not well known, yet contains the freshness and simplicity needed to meet the current crisis [of few resources for the great social need for mental health care] … Motivation toward an alternative, more natural and homelike treatment is a long and venerable tradition within psychiatry itself. ”
We are immensely grateful for these influences that are forged into the living legacy of Windhorse. All of this heritage background meets with the foreground of the community experiences of each staff member, client, and family member. Current Windhorse community members participate in a wide variety of spiritual, athletic, academic, and occupational communities, experiences we naturally bring to our specialized social fabric. The Windhorse communities develop as an expression of the dynamic relationship of the members’ personal experiences and beliefs about community with our rich heritage. It is up to us, each of us, to engage that relationship. The Windhorse communities evolve with the changing cultural and environmental conditions of the time. These modern conditions include increasing levels of: reliance on technology and social media for communication; legal availability of marijuana; societal dependence on prescription medicines; financial stress; generalized anxiety and fear in the social environment; speed and complexity of modern life. Windhorse may be something of an anachronism with our valuing: patience with clients’ changes; empathic bridging to the alienated ones; process over goals; non-medical approach to major mental disorders; mindfulness practice; and an allegiance to sane healing community. We continue to develop the unique therapeutic community dimension, which is the work of renewal for each generation. We have been able to sustain ourselves in communities based on a shared vision, core principles, and practices of personal development and interpersonal healing.
I. GROUND: The Field of Intentions
Our personal intention is to be a genuine, real, and true person who can effectively attend to other people in need of help. Our shared intention is to create a sane environment for healing, growth, and learning that supports the Windhorse work with people in extreme mental states and life situations. When multiple Windhorse teams are happening at a certain time and place, that group of practitioners naturally gives rise to the emergent phenomena of therapeutic community. We are “community-minded” people, first with our teams, then programs, and then with our emerging community. When we have the experience of the working team, of doing basic attendance with the client/family and with each other, we realize that naturally carries over to the emerging community. Having felt the power of the team intention to work in the same direction, we begin to experience the power of group intention on the much greater level of the community. Since we intend to work with our own minds as much as with the minds of our clients and their families, this tends to promote the sanity of teams and community. One’s personal work is supported by contemplative practice, which further clarifies our intentions and priorities.
A diverse group of people gathers with each person balancing the interplay of self-focused and altruistic motivations. This is a dynamic field of intentions … some dark with greed, fear, confusion, and pride; some light with generosity, courage, clarity, and humbleness. We constantly breathe these in and out. After all, we are only human, just like our clients, which is common ground. Yet, we yearn to align our intentions/motivations toward wholesome community and for an organization that can protect our Windhorse work and way of life. We intend to align toward the greater good. We share an unshakeable confidence in the intrinsic healing capacity of all living systems, from individual life forms to complex groups. This means that the troubled person is an active, responsible agent in his or her recovery of health. With such alignment, our ground is an invitation for everyone to come as you are … be welcome, take your ease, find your place as guest and friend. The organization is the container that protects this hospitality. The metaphor of the organization-community as a cast iron cauldron (as opposed to one of stainless steel) suggests a container in which madness and recovery are slow-cooked, with the pot then taking on some of those flavors. This metaphor shows that the community takes on intense forms of confused-aggressive energy and absorbs those energies into our social fabric for us to work with. For example, one such energy form is the chronic stress of the high-arousal states of fear (activated flight-fight-freeze system) that is the background of extreme mental states. It is essential for the health of the community to slow and relax this contagious force of high-arousal stress. A Windhorse community can be a challenging place to work and live. It is the strength of the community that rouses our shared life-force, the social windhorse energy, the health of this ground.
a. Core discipline: align group intentions toward fostering a balanced and sustainable therapeutic and work environment; the organization and its leaders maintain the community “household” in which we live; such precise attention to detail fosters natural decorum; train in cleaning up after oneself … and sometimes others;
b. Leadership tasks: the directors and coordinators attend to the fair and visionary distribution of limited resources among the people and their functions; they promote free circulation of communication and information in all directions;
c. Ground binding factor: the constant work to maintain the health of the total environment of facilities, finances, employee relations, and relations with people and organizations beyond our boundary;
d. Contemplative practice: emphasizes grounding attention in body and environment; simplicity; mindful attention to detail; discovery of maitri as loving kindness to oneself and others; basic attendance skill of Being Present “to your body and its gravity; to the texture and quality of the space around you; and to the mental activity that is in continuous interaction with that environment.” (Recovering Sanity, 268)
II. PATH: Practice Open Dialogue
The path of the therapeutic community is the way of sane human interchange. This is where the intention to create healthy community meets the dynamic reality of communication among the people. Interpersonal dialogue has the power to transform a community into a therapeutic process. This depends on how open our dialogue practice is, and how open, loving, and “safe” (fair and just) our organizational environment is. There is a high value placed on genuine and whole-hearted listening to each other, which we call “sympathetic resonance.” Listening, with full presence and engagement to another person, is an act of generosity. We can openly take in what each of is saying and come to appreciate the diversity of points of view and each person’s unique life experience.
Fully active listening provides a wakeful space in which people and situations can evolve and realize their potential, in the same way that full acceptance actually promotes change. Shifts of perspective can happen as we genuinely respond to others, and we come to realize that no one person is the center of the world, even though each of us tends to feel that way. The primacy of experience, and its expression with care and tact, sparks enormous energy and creativity in open dialogue. The therapeutic community has a variety of places (e.g., community meetings) and methods (e.g., council practice) to promote the free exchange of feeling and information. A principle of open dialogue is that everything can be talked about, nothing is forbidden from being commented on. Feed-back and feed-forward are woven into the ongoing process of the community. A greater value is placed on truthfulness than on being right or powerful. Honest dialogue grows the sturdy tree of life, at the center of the community.
a. Core discipline: open up dialogue; the communication skills of the way of council naturally carry over into daily encounters; listen with respect and respond truthfully; be curious about the emerging interpersonal process;
b. Leadership tasks: group facilitators attend to the process of interpersonal dialogue, and to group dynamics; invite all persons to speak; protect against over-agendizing meetings; facilitation is more like being a midwife to the birth of a process than driving a group ahead of itself; facilitators sensitively guide the process with active engagement, rather than controlling the process from outside; the staff meetings such as senior clinician group, and team supervisor/psychotherapist/ team leader/basic attender and housemate group meetings have facilitators; each team meetings is co-facilitated by the leadership of that team;
c. Path binding factor: the practice of dialogue and its skilled facilitation is the path that balances a focus on process and outcomes, that appreciates genuine communication as the way of realizing plans and goals; one must do the work of showing up and fully participating in team, work, and community meetings and face the irritations they bring and the opportunities for surrendering personal territory; rigid and heavy-handed hierarchy blocks the path and disperses community Windhorse energy … the courage to be honest and truthful uplifts our energy and opens the way forward;
d. Contemplative practice: emphasizes engagement with others, opening the heart to exchange and compassion; basic attendance skill of Letting In. Letting In is based on tonglen which is the practice of compassion that is taught in the Buddhist healing tradition, known as “sending and taking.” Tonglen is a personal meditation training, which naturally carries over into community life, bringing a lightness and permeability to interpersonal boundaries. Edward Podvoll and many of us feel that tonglen is the most profound practice for developing compassionate Windhorse communities.
III. FRUITION: Cultivate Awareness
The members of the therapeutic community look into things. We have established the ground of aligned intentions to work together. We walk the path of genuine dialogue as a search for what is true and right. We can then discover the fruition of personal and shared awareness. It is our intentions and the practice of dialogue that directs where our attention goes and what it will focus on. We can have awareness at deeper levels that clarifies the causes and conditions of how a situation came to be, what is happening now, and what the best courses of action are. We can give voice to experience. We can relate more from the intuitive-feeling level, and less from the conceptual level of trying to be smart and right. Awareness is not a mind-only abstraction but embodied awareness. Speak in a full-bodied way. Social learning, as the ability to learn from others and with others, begins to become a reality, beyond just a virtuous idea.
The cultivation of awareness is each person’s responsibility and comes to be appreciated as ongoing and open-ended. “Fruition” does not mean arriving at a destination or a final resting place, but rather constantly opening into and waking up to the inter-subjective field that we are embedded in … and that we co-dream into creation all the time. Let us be ready for sudden freedom from fixed mind. We can wake up to what is happening. Ed explains, “The ‘instinct of sanity,’ that which gives rise to all experiences of islands of clarity, is seen to be preeminent among the other instincts that drive our intentions and behavior, and is raised to its proper place in our ability to care for people” (Recovering Sanity, 353). An environment of clear awareness is invoked in the Windhorse community by our courage and discipline.
a. Core discipline: Cultivate awareness through personal contemplative discipline and interpersonal dialogue; clinical supervision provides opportunities for exploring who one is in relation to the work with others; tune into experience and the feeling-level; avoid over-theorizing and interpretation; constantly synchronize body-speech-mind in ordinary activity;
b. Leadership tasks: Directors, coordinators, facilitators, and supervisors model awareness and freedom of inquiry; each person takes responsibility for cultivating and protecting his/her own awareness, as well as for our tendency to project out our own version of what is happening; seek what is true over being right or personally secure or admired by others. We are all both leaders and followers when it comes to awareness. Leaders within the community may be mature in one or more of the three levels of administration, facilitation, and teaching/supervision;
c. Fruition binding factor: Study the principles and practices of therapeutic community; support the development of teachers who can carry the culture and practices of Windhorse work into the future and across generations; support the development of the directors, coordinators, and facilitators as cultivators of awareness in us and in our community;
d. Contemplative practice: Emphasizes environmental awareness; insight into psychology of mind; understand group dynamics; for the adventurous types, learn and do maitri space awareness practice and dream awareness practice; recognize community as social space awareness practice which heightens sanity and neurosis in the mirror of mind-awareness; basic attendance skills of Recognizing (the history of sanity) and Learning (that basic attendance is a means for one’s personal path of becoming a more responsive person).
Engage the Windhorse therapeutic community by establishing the ground of intention, walking the path of dialogue, and appreciating the revelations of awareness. Fearlessly join in.
Ed asked himself, “Is there a fourth binding factor that keeps the whole situation of work/practice/study together?” He provides some guidance,
The spiritual binding factor is the most important. The spirituality of a community attempting to live productively and creatively together is very earthy. It has to do with sharing the earth together, and working the earth together. Relaxing one’s personal territory and being able to open up to the experience of others is the fruition of true community. Thus, a spirituality that recognizes and relates to a world of experience beyond the confines of ego is the bottom-line individual and collective discipline of genuine community. (Recovering Sanity, 309)
What could this mean, to “surrender personal territory”? This does not mean to dissolve oneself into the transpersonal trance of a group-mind, however seductive such a prospect of oneness might seem to be. That seduction plays on the edges of intolerable, blinding tensions from being in committed relationship with distinct individuals of diverse perspectives. The sudden compulsion comes to just get it over with. At such peak moments, one can pause and feel one’s way into the layers of “it.” We may then find the freedom gate to the choice point of releasing or tightening. Giving up territory refers to giving up (to surrender) possessive fixations of me, my, and mine at the inner level of mind and awareness. Territoriality can happen on the levels of body (my office, my schedule, my livelihood), speech (my clients, my friends and enemies, and my emotions about them), and mind (my point of view, my role status, my authority). Those objects and experiences are not the real problem. Rather they are good resources, our richness. The problem is the “me” (grasping) and “mine” (fixation) that stakes them out as personal territory, which we then have to defend. We can be so tense in hyper-vigilant defensive mode, which we automatically project into the environment as a field of tension. This is how the seeds of the six realms are sown and come to fruition. We can lighten up on that, or rather on “this,” on me. Ironically, this letting go of holding territory allows one to relax into being more freely oneself, and to transform the loneliness of a small territory into courageous aloneness in a larger world. We can then relate with a world of experience beyond the confines of ego. We begin to realize that we are embedded in a field of intelligence beyond me and my thoughts. This strength makes tonglen practice possible. We can actually project our richness out, and take on/breathe in our own and other people’s territorial sufferings and fixations. Surrendering territory leads to the discovery accommodation, which is a spacious, open acceptance of things as they are. This is described in the basic attendance skill of “Letting Be,” where Ed introduces the notion of equanimity. The “Windhorse Guide For Families” describes this in the first guideline: “Attitude: Cultivate Acceptance and Respect.” This means we can allow situations to develop beyond our control, to allow people and situations to expand to their natural ripening, to their fullest extent, and speak for themselves. Without defending territory, we become more patient, kind, and awake to the environment. Accommodation frees up the energy of what is happening so the healing encounter is more lively and spontaneous.
In Boulder Windhorse, we study the notion of “shunyata” (Sanscrit term meaning “emptiness”) in the context of psychotherapy, and now in therapeutic community. Ed uses this term in the title of his Appendix I, “Psychotherapy As an Expression of the Spiritual Journey Based on the Experience of Shunyata.” Another related expression he uses in Recovering Sanity is suddenly free from fixed mind in his discussion of the penetrating clarity of sane doubt. Shunyata refers to the emptiness of grasping and fixation, meaning we can relax our tight grip on me and mine, and open our mind-awareness beyond our precious personal sense of territory. Emptiness is more than just absence. It is to realize that the apparent “power” of grasping and fixating on personal territory is a futile illusion. Here, shunyata means freedom from the prison of holding personal territory. One direct route to a glimpse of shunyata is simple mindfulness meditation, which reveals gaps in the hold that discursive thinking has on our awareness. Actually, mind-awareness is more agile when unburdened from excessive thinking, big ideas, and heavy concerns.
Being able to loosen up one’s hold on personal territory makes working with conflict easier. We all agree that conflict among us will happen and must be acknowledged. We have to be aware of the tendency to overly align our intentions just to keep the peace. We will have diversity of points of view, and there can be a majority pressure to surrender to consensus, especially if a strong leader is pushing for that. Max Jones outlines the importance of “risk-taking” in social learning. He defines the risk-taker as:
Someone who has an innate capacity, perhaps acquired by living in a “free” environment, which allows the person to question, interact spontaneously and without his own internal censorship. The risk-taker role has two dimensions: it reflects the commitment of the individual at risk, and at the same time tests the integrity and commitment of the person in authority who is being challenged. (Max Jones, “Synthesis”)
Perhaps the risk-taker is the voice of doubt that frees from fixed mind in a person or a group. This can happen suddenly, or more gradually, as an island of clarity. Such clarity can even penetrate any doctrinal stagnation about Windhorse itself. It has been suggested that we identify a handful of core principles that would apply in all Windhorse circumstances that can carry the community forward. The conditions we work with are in constant change yet are there primary reference points that can carry us forward, long into the future? For me, this is a mystery of a living lineage empty of blind doctrinal fixation.
The idea of “spiritual binding factor” suggests that community members would share some particular doctrine or religion. A spiritual doctrine can create group cohesion with a sense of security as group territory that demands to be defended. Windhorse is a big ideological tent that accommodates people who have some feeling for basic attendance, both its giving and receiving. If anything, we should be creating a refuge for endangered healing lineages from any quarter. Of course, Windhorse is inspired by Chogyam Trungpa and other influences described earlier, but this does not mean one has to be a Buddhist to be an insider. Even today, Windhorse people continue to explore what can be integrated into Windhorse, whether older or modern psychoanalytic schools, Wilbur’s integral theory, the Finland Open Dialogue approach, Native American traditions, the Tibetan medical tradition, styles of dream work, and various contemplative traditions such as yoga and tai chi. Such attempts at integration take time and mutual openness, and do not always take root in the community ground. This big tent may seem rowdy or confusing to some people, who ask, “Well, what do you believe in common?” We believe in the goodness of earth; in the goodness of the human heart; that people can recover from madness. We believe sane community is a fragile beauty worth protecting. Windhorse is a nonsectarian healing service community, free of any exclusive spiritual doctrine. Awareness does not need allegiance to special thought forms in order to function well. It is worth repeating: our traditions emphasize knowing through fearless exploration of the depth and range of human experience, no matter how sacred or profane, by whatever means are necessary. For years, Ed wore his favorite deep purple t-shirt inscribed with the phrase “we must go to extreme measures.”
Ed’s reflects on the “final binding factor” of therapeutic community:
“Historically, ‘therapeutic community’ was meant to be an ideal democratic process, and it left little room for the final binding factor: natural hierarchy. No community can survive without the presence of teachers or elders who can transmit the wisdom of the community and train others to become teachers. In this way the practices of the community can stay alive and have a continuity beyond the teachers. Just as the presence of a knowledgeable team leader catalyzes an individual therapeutic home, such leadership responsibility is crucial in larger treatment communities. The continuity of Windhorse-style treatment, and projects like Friendship House, are dependent on skillful team leadership. It is my opinion that in the whole field of mental health there is no higher priority than the training of new team leaders. (Ed’s italics). ”
The saving grace of being a teacher in Windhorse is that, compared to the difficulties of the clinical work and the extensive bodies of knowledge available to us, no one of us actually knows very much. There is little cause for pride in the teachers, although we can go there out of fear. The truth is, we are all students of the work, constantly exploring and learning. The best teachers may turn out to be the best students.
As mentioned earlier, an extended international Windhorse community has spread over the last 35 years. Some of us elder members of most of those centers meet monthly in a “Windhorse world council.” We are old by experience and are some of the teachers and culture carriers in our centers. We are not a panel of experts and have no particular status or credential from being council members. We are simply a working team of committed students who are basically attending to our communities and to each other. We do not undertake to manage or govern the extended community. We do not engage in political and economic intrigue, nor try to enforce standards of practice and or stake out intellectual property. We are not a representative congress for the centers. We meet monthly in video-conference, to dialogue about what is of interest to us. Each center is its own autonomous community “household” and stands or falls on its own merits. This is the macrocosm of the personal experience of “courageous aloneness.” Many years ago, Ed shared his vision with me of such a loosely organized community of healing practitioners. “Loosely” means no central authority that oversees the members, and that we connect freely based on a genuine feeling of camaraderie. The Windhorse Archive, based in Boulder under the Windhorse Guild, is in place to preserve our heritage, and serve the international community. We are all bound together by our shared intention to bring out the goodness in our world.
◈ Ways to Follow Up: integrating study of therapeutic community into daily work life.
1. Facilitate group dialogue to study and explore the principles of therapeutic community, which brings focused awareness to the group itself, which impacts the participants. We are affected by this to the degree that we are fully present to the discussion. The participant-observer effect brings deep study.
2. Emphasize the primacy and diversity of experience in communal encounters … be wary of the pressure to get along at all costs, to just agree, to avoid conflict. Rouse the strength of courageous aloneness. Lean into conflict, take a risk.
3. Be curious about the idea that the clinical team, programs, and larger community are for the benefit of everyone. Just as we can tend toward over-focus on the client, we can tend toward indulging in an inner focus on staff experience and relations, and ignore the suffering of the client. One can express doubts about an over-focus in either direction. I recall an early Windhorse meeting with Ed when we were going further into our group process with rising excitement, and he suddenly said with a growl, “Let’s stop talking about ourselves.”
4. Create study sessions where the skills of basic attendance are first read in Recovering Sanity, and then discussed to see how each one of them can be applied to attending at the community level. For example, what does it mean to Be Present in community; what is the Discovery of Friendship in community? This is also a very useful study exercise to do for other aspects of Windhorse, asking how the BA skills apply to the housemates, the psychotherapy, social and vocational programs, and the administration.
5. Each group and clinical team can take time to reflect on how they are being facilitated … what culture is being created in that group? How are decisions made? What is the feeling level and how much room is being made for it? How prominent is the agenda? What kind of relationship are the facilitator and participants in? How are territory and resources being managed beyond ownership? Max Jones placed great emphasis on the role of the “facilitator” in the therapeutic community:
The term implies that the facilitator plays the difficult role of holding up a mirror so that the person or persons involved can be helped to see things as they appear to others. The facilitator must have the experience and skill to be trusted by all persons involved and the empathy to encourage the expression of feelings—only then will he/she be listened to by the people concerned, and social learning proceed. (Maxwell Jones, From a Closed to An Open System in a Mental Hospital, “Synthesis,” 142)
In Windhorse, the facilitator remembers and calls attention to the history of decisions/agreements made by the group; tracks the timing of the group, marking the beginning/middle/end of meetings; encourages all voices to be heard; acknowledge hurts when they happen; leave room for group process to emerge and avoid being over-focused on goals; builds toward consensus and shared decision-making.
Conclusion
The obstacles to developing a therapeutic community can be obvious or subtle. The forces of materialism are always shadowing around the edges, whispering “you do not have enough, others have more,” or “you are angry, and it’s their fault,” or “you are not safe, attack while you can,” or “speed up to stay ahead of the others.” The aggression of not wanting to be touched suddenly flares. The clients’ families and our internal critics demand more results for less money in a briefer period. Our patience is constantly tested. Heated words are exchanged … whom can we trust? In a therapeutic community we need to have a buoyancy, a palpable atmosphere of love and kindness and accommodation, since people are going to hurt each other, psychologically and emotionally. In that kind of atmosphere we are less apt to over-personalize the hurts: the personal boundary violation, the neglect, the empathic failure, the harsh word, the put down, the irritation, the misunderstanding, the control. Some kind of genuine positive regard has to permeate as the cushion and ground of goodness. If one ignores any feedback, then the “messages” (direct verbal feedback or more indirect) from the environment will get stronger, louder and more insistent … and more likely that hurt will happen when the feedback finally gets through. Surrendering personal territory and letting go of the habitual over-focus on one’s personal happiness and security, makes one less prone to over-personalizing hurt. Hurt is just part of the love-hate weather of community. The entire range of experience comes through and is on full display. We can open to that. We can work with that. We can relax with that. Let’s share the apple.
◈ Dedication ◈
This paper is dedicated to the people of Windhorse, with the wish that they may find their way in the future, in community, in friendship. May this paper provide some small ray of inspiration that those who are lost in the realms of madness may find their way home to their heart-friends.
Select Bibliography
These are recommended source materials for the study of therapeutic community in the Windhorse Project:
“Creating An Environment of Sanity,” Chogyam Trungpa, in The Sanity We Are Born With, Shambhala Publications, 2005.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, The Shambhala Principle: Discovering Humanity’s Hidden Treasure, 2014.
Edward Podvoll, Recovering Sanity, especially the section on “Healing Community: The Binding Factors” in Recovering Sanity, chapter 7, pp. 306–313.
Jeffrey Fortuna, “Maxwell Jones: A Recollection,” Journal of Contemplative Psychotherapy, vol. VII.
Maxwell Jones, “Synthesis,” in From A Closed to An Open System in a Mental Hospital.
Maxwell Jones, “Therapeutic Communities in Retrospect,” Journal of Contemplative Psychotherapy, Vol. IV.