2022 Annual Report: The Windhorse Legacy Project

The Windhorse Legacy Project (WLP) is a program of the Windhorse Guild, a non-profit 501(c)3 based in Boulder, Colorado (www.windhorseguild.org), which has a committed board of directors. The term windhorse, a symbol we adopted from a contemplative wisdom tradition, signifies the life force of true kindness that uplifts the human spirit. The Legacy Project is primarily supported by financial donations, with additional revenue from trainings and consultations.

I have served as the founding director of the WLP since 2002. For twenty-five years, I was a close student, colleague, and friend of Edward Podvoll, MD (1936–2003). Together with a small team, we co-founded the first Windhorse therapeutic center for the care of persons in extreme mental states in Boulder, Colorado. Since then, the Legacy Project team has taken on significant responsibility for the integrity and preservation of the Windhorse clinical approach.

 We are guided by an educational vision:

  • to preserve and evolve the clinical wisdom of Windhorse and to share it widely;

  • to mentor Windhorse teachers to ensure our future;

  • to cultivate the international Windhorse community of treatment centers;

  • to actively network with the world-wide mental health field.

For more detailed information about the Project’s history and work, please refer to the 2021 Annual Report available on our website here.

As Project Director, I am joined by our team:

Managing Editor, Skye Levy

Legacy Group: Polly Banerjee Gallagher, Matt Allen, Blake Baily

Summary of activities

2022 has been an inspiring and productive year for us. We continue to publish educational materials; build our community network of subscribers; connect with others in the mental health field; mentor Windhorse teachers; and cultivate the international network of Windhorse centers.

A.    Developing Windhorse Teachers:

  1. Continue mentoring the Legacy Group, who will assume future leadership responsibility for the Project.

  2. Continue mentoring twelve senior Windhorse teachers to promote their clinical, supervisory, writing, and teaching skills. These are the culture-carriers for the future of Windhorse.

B.    Publishing:

  1. I continue to devote significant time and energy to working with a small book-writing group, that includes a well-known author in the mental health field. We are researching the essential principles of recovery from extreme states of mind. This group will continue through next year with the intention of making a significant published contribution to the field. The WLP fund is investing in my time on this collaborative book project. This investment will be repaid with earnings from the book.

  2. We continue to build the WLP public website with new content, including the work of Windhorse teachers and like-minded luminaries in our field. This year to date, our site has hosted 5,500 unique visitors from 84 different countries, including Canada, the UK, Germany, Brazil, China, Pakistan, Japan, and Australia. This traffic has increased 27% from last year’s numbers. We have 650 active subscribers to our mailing list.

  3. We continue to publish archival works of Edward Podvoll, in print and other media, on our website. We work with a media engineer to remaster his and other teachers’ important audio recordings in our extensive archive. We published Dr. Podvoll’s book, Healing Discipline, in December 2020 which continues to be freely accessed world-wide. We will publish our second book of Dr. Podvoll’s, Joining Mindfulness and Awareness, along with his extensive lecture notes and the audio recordings of his 2003 seminar lectures which are the edited text for the book. This book will be a significant contribution to what is now known as the “mindfulness revolution,” especially as occurring in the psychotherapy field. This book addresses the challenge of how to proceed with integrity once one is fully present. As the author explains, it is the clear spaciousness of awareness that brings further intelligence and compassion to being simply present in one’s world.

C.   Supporting the Windhorse International Community:

  1. We continue to build the “Legacy Drive: An International Windhorse Library,” an online resource center confidential to the Windhorse international community. This will contain the accessible archive of Edward Podvoll, other Windhorse teachers, and confidential resource materials. This library will archive and provide easy access to our clinical knowledge base for generations of teachers, students, clients, and families to come.

  2. We continue to foster the integration of the ten Windhorse treatment centers by developing our next international conference; internally publishing the writing of staff, clients, and client families; offering consultation and dialogue; and bringing our culturally diverse staff, clients, and families together.

D.   Active Dialogue With Our Field:

  1. We continue to make our knowledge resources more known and available world-wide. Adapting the core principles and methods of our clinical paradigm to other treatment settings is an ongoing challenge. We are in dialogue with several well-known authors and researchers, as well as clients and front-line workers, in the mental health field. In turn, we are learning from their work. Together we are evolving the world-wide recovery movement and moving the ongoing paradigm shift toward whole-person medicine.

Funding

The expense budget for 2022 for the WLP is projected to be $25,000. This budget provides funding for: part-time Director, Managing Editor, Legacy Group; editorial and technical support; and program expenses. Income from donations is projected to be $20,000. Donations are made by a small group of long-term supporters, members of the Legacy Project community, and the Windhorse centers, as well as from publications in response to “suggested donations” for new materials we publish.

Jeffrey Fortuna