Part of My Story

When I was a young boy my mother explained to me that my aunt Elaine, her older sister, was "different".  Probably Elaine was coming for one of her rare visits and my mother wanted me to be prepared, so I wouldn't be confused or frightened, or misbehave.  My memory of Elaine is that she was different, but mostly in ways that delighted me as a child.  She was quicker to laughter than the other adults- a very loud and sloppy laugh.  She was also more honest and outspoken.  Certain adult hypocrisies I had noticed but dared not mention, she would speak with a fearlessness that astonished me.  "Marilyn, why are you cooking more pancakes?" she might ask, and then say, "You already asked if anyone wanted more and everyone said no."  To my mother, it seemed to me, her sister was an embarrassment.  In my young mind I was putting together the idea that proper, sane adult relations depended more on politeness than truthfulness.  I was secretly on Elaine's side. 

As I got old enough to be told, my mother shared the story of how her sister had been a beautiful, intelligent young woman.  She had been the homecoming queen for her high school, got excellent grades, graduated, got married, and gave birth to her son.  Then something went horribly wrong.  She went crazy.  She started talking nonsense and acting wild.  It terrified my mother to see her sister that way.  Elaine was put in a psychiatric hospital and remained there for many years.  To my mother it must have been as if Elaine had died.  My grandmother was devastated and implored my mother, "Marilyn, you must be strong so that you never lose your mind".  She took this advice to heart.  My mother has always had an extraordinary ability to look on the bright side of things, and away from the darker side.  She is a tenacious survivor, a beacon of strength, and a great example of how to get through tough times...although perhaps at a hidden cost.

One of the most powerful examples of this came when my father died of cancer.  I was 11 years old.  I saw no traces of grief or fear in my mother.  She was very practical in her response.  Within a few months she was seeking a new husband at singles clubs.  She still had four young children to care for, and a partner was a necessity.  She was not about to waste time by sulking over her loss.  Within nine months my new stepfather and two older stepsisters moved into our house and my life was suddenly very different.

This time in my life was confusing and disturbing in ways that I couldn't even recognize until years later.  I was in grief over losing a father I had never really known, but I didn't have any way to understand my feelings, or express them.  My father was gone and we never talked about him.  His pictures disappeared.  It was like he had never existed.  What was important was to just get on with life.  We had to follow my mother's example and be strong.  It didn't occur to me until I was in my mid-thirties, when my mother finally shared with me her mother's plea; that this was so that we would not "lose our minds".  She certainly would not have been able to care for her children from inside a mental hospital!  Steering clear of her grief was my mother's way of taking care of us.[i]

While my father was dying, my oldest brother was serving his country as a Marine in Vietnam.   I don't know for a fact why he chose the Marines, but I imagine he was trying to earn the recognition and approval that seemed so difficult for my father to give.    My father was an Annapolis graduate in the same class as President Jimmy Carter.  He had also been a Golden Gloves boxer and served in the Marines after Annapolis.  Living up to his standards of masculinity was not an easy task.  When my older brothers argued, my father would take them to the basement and have them put on boxing gloves to sort it out.  When the next-door neighbor picked on my younger brother, he would prod me into fist fights in his defense.  Toughening up his sons was my father's way of expressing his care.[ii]  When my father died in 1966 Pat came home for the funeral.  I remember how sharp and important he looked in his uniform.  He seemed to be trying to carry something that had gotten too heavy for Dad. As it turned out, it was also too heavy for him.

Not long after my father was buried and Pat had returned to duty, he began to have trouble.  He had briefly been a machine gunner in a helicopter, and then was on several post-battle details where they had to pick up all the mutilated bodies.  In one letter he described trying to pick up a friend whose brains fell out of his skull onto his (my brother's) feet.  Sometime after that Pat began to "preach peace and brotherhood", and refuse to obey orders.  He was due to be "dishonorably discharged", except our grandfather (my father's father) stepped in to provide legal representation.  Grandpa was the head of a large corporate law firm and had been a district court judge in Des Moines, Iowa.  Due to his considerable influence he was able to change the discharge to an "honorable" one.  In part, this involved psychiatric evaluations that determined my brother to be mentally ill.  His diagnosis upon discharge from the Marines was paranoid schizophrenia.  It always seemed a brutal irony to me that my brother's sane response to the insanity of Vietnam was considered crazy.  For my mother this outcome must have been a mixed blessing to say the least.

I only saw my brother Pat a handful of times after that.  He became a transient, homeless person, roving aimlessly back and forth across the country.  Sometimes he would camp out and grow marijuana in the hills of southern California, sell his crop, and give most of the money away.  Occasionally he would work odd jobs, but nothing steady.  To my knowledge he had few friends.  There was a girlfriend and talk of marriage once, but it passed.  Eventually he became a trucker, but even that was shaky.  He had at least managed to keep himself out of hospitals and institutions, but in many ways he must have reminded our mother painfully of her sister. 

In 1994, after losing his job as a trucker, Pat checked into a motel in southern California.  He called our mother and they talked for a while about how things weren't going so well for him.  It didn't seem there was much my mother could do.  A few days later his body was found in the motel.  The autopsy eventually indicated an overdose on amphetamines.  It was unclear whether or not this was intentional.  When I spoke with my mother about Pat's death, the first thing she said to me was, "He's really better off".  When I heard this I was stunned and outraged.  How could she say such a thing?  Is a suffering person (my brother!) really better off dead?  Then I reflected on it.  Her grief must have been so deep and unbearable that she believed she might lose her mind if she touched it directly, and this was absolutely forbidden to her.  In her mind the costs were too high. 

My last memory of Pat is of us lifting weights together at a gym in Capistrano Beach during a visit out there in 1980.  Because I seem to be the sentimental one in the family, my mother sent me his cowboy boots and billed rattlesnake skin hat, which I keep in his memory.

Having a crazy aunt, a crazy brother, losing my father at a tender age, and not being supported in grieving such a loss, were formative experiences that I carried undigested as I approached adulthood.  To put it mildly, I was a troubled and searching young man.

After one year at Edison Community College in Fort Myers, Florida, I dropped out and went on a road trip with my high school buddy, Glenn Mickley.  We bought a big box of a bread truck and converted it into a mobile home of sorts.  Taking off from Fort Myers, we headed north and then west.  We had the general plan to "travel around the country", but everything was quite loose and spontaneous.  Winding through the southern states, picking up hitchhikers, listening to music we had pre-recorded on a reel-to-reel stereo system, we were living the free and adventurous life.  We stopped at the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert on our way out to the west coast, where we ran out of money in San Francisco.  We got jobs working at a Pancake House in Walnut Creek, lived in the parking lot in our truck, ate free Pancake House food, joined the YMCA for showers, and saved up our paychecks for a month before we hit the road again, heading north toward Washington.

On this northern leg of our trip we stopped at Lake Mendocino.  It was a gorgeous, clear blue day and we hiked around the lake all day.  I recall how vivid and sacred everything seemed- the sky, the water, the trees, the very dirt.  It seemed the world had been cracked wide open and I was given a glimpse behind the surface of things to an exquisite beauty and holiness that completely stunned my mind.  When we returned to the truck in the afternoon, I remember sitting on the ground and thinking about how free I was.  I could do whatever I wanted.  There were no parents or teachers or anyone to say what I should do, where I should go, how late I could stay up.  As I felt the full liberating force of this, another realization moved across my mind.  "Herrick- wherever you go, you are your own warden, if you feel imprisoned it is because of you."  Something like that.  Had I not gone to such extremes to free myself of all external constraints, I'm not sure I would have ever realized this at the depth that I did that day.

Eventually Glenn and I made our way through the Midwest, up along the Great Lakes, down the Eastern Seaboard, and back to Fort Myers.  Our adventure lasted about a year.  During that time, like many of my contemporaries, I was reading the writings of Alan Watts[iii] and Carlos Casteneda.[iv]  I fancied myself a mystical, song-writing poet in search of Truth, creative expression, and Liberation.  "Eastern philosophy" seemed to be my backup.  In other words, I was a typical aimless hippie, lost in the American landscape of the mid-70's.  Still, there was something to it.

In 1975, working as a stock boy in a local department store, I again became restless.  My younger brother was having trouble at home with our step-father and toward the end of his junior year of high school he decided to run away.  We hatched a plan to move to Kentucky together, where my friend Glenn's uncle Clifford lived and would help us set up.  Jeff left a note on our parent's bed that simply said, "No news is good news", and we packed our few belongings in Jeff's station wagon and drove 1,000 miles to Lexington.

Clifford helped me get a job on the grounds crew for the University of Kentucky, and Jeff got a job in a pizza parlor.  We scraped up enough money to make a down payment on a trailer and Clifford signed for a bank loan.  We set it up out in the country.  It was a strange life.  It was extremely cold that winter and because we hadn't insulated the trailer well enough everything froze- the water in the toilet,  the dishes in the kitchen sink, and all of the houseplants.  Our only source of heat was a woodstove, and it just wasn't enough.

We had begun going to an open house Buddhist meditation at the home of Bill Gordon, who was a professor at the University of Kentucky.  Fortunately Bill was sympathetic to our plight and invited us to move into his very large home and be a part of his dharma study group.  Over the next several months I established a regular meditation practice, including all day practice sessions every Sunday. 

So in 1976, at the age of 20, after two years of studying Eastern philosophy and spirituality, I became a student and practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism under Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.  Fortunately I had found something better than drugs for exploring the nature of my own mind and a method for looking further into the insight I had gained at Lake Mendocino. For a year I lived in the dharma study group household in Lexington and maintained a regular meditation practice.  In 1978 I did my first dhatun (a month-long group meditation retreat).  For the first time I was able to glimpse the craziness of my own mind and how it produced all kinds of unnecessary confusion and suffering. 

In 1980 I moved to Boulder, Colorado in order to be close to Chogyam Trungpa and the Buddhist sangha (community) that was thriving there.  I enrolled at the University of Colorado, working on an undergraduate degree in anthropology.  I was completely fascinated by how different people could be around the world and through the ages.  I passionately believed that there was not just one "right" way to be and anthropology gave me a way to think about this.  It gave me a way to appreciate human diversity.  Maybe I was particularly interested in this because I couldn't imagine myself conforming to the expectations of my own American culture, or becoming the kind of man my father had been and would have expected me to be.  I felt like a misfit. 

In my wildest imagination it had never occurred to me to become a psychotherapist or counselor of any kind, but in retrospect I can see how I had made myself ripe for picking. 

 I got my first job as a mental health worker in what seemed to me to be a fluke in the summer of 1980.  I was riding a bus, coming home from an unsuccessful attempt to get a job with the Forestry Department, when I asked the driver how he got his job.  I was desperate for work.  He explained what kind of license is required and where to go to apply.  Then a woman behind me said that if I was looking for work, the local psych hospital needed kitchen help.  So I caught a transfer and went right to the hospital.  It turned out they didn't need any kitchen help, but they did need mental health workers.  I had never heard of such a thing, but it sounded interesting and I really needed a job.  I assumed that one would need extensive education, experience, and skills to do something as fascinating and important as work with insane people.  Not just anyone could do it?  But they were interested in me, even though I had no experience whatsoever and was still a year shy of getting my bachelors degree in anthropology.  And in 1980 ten dollars an hour was good pay.

In my first minutes on the job I was sent into the "secure room" to keep a man company while he ate his lunch.  I was told that he had been alone in this small, stark room with only a mattress on the floor, for well over a week already.  I had no idea why he had to be there or what he had done.  I had no idea what I was supposed to do or say, aside from "keep him company".  One might think I should have been afraid.  I wasn't.  It was a bizarre situation to me, but I had spent a lot of time on the road and seen all kinds of unusual characters.  I was more curious than afraid.  A chair was brought in for me to sit on, but I sat on the floor so we could be talk more easily.  It just seemed the polite thing to do.  This young man, roughly my age, sat up on his mattress, put his lunch tray on his lap, and we began to talk.  Another more experienced worker stood just outside the open door, I suppose just in case anything went wrong. 

I don't remember what we talked about, only that he was slightly sarcastic, but engaging.  It was my first experience of being a part of the "system" and it felt odd to be so immediately seen as the enemy.  It made sense to me that he would be angry about being locked up and resent the fact that I held a set of keys, so I did my best just to talk with him.  I think I asked him how he wound up in such a situation and what it was like.  I had no particular agenda except to get to know him and try to relieve his apparent loneliness with a friendly voice.  After half an hour I was wondering why it was necessary for him to be locked in that dreadful room.  He didn't seem dangerous and despite his angry edge, he did soften and warm as we talked.  But lunch was over and it was time for me to leave and for the door to be locked.

As I came out of the room the more experienced worker stopped me.  "I liked the way you worked with him," he said.  He then went into an analysis of what I had done and why it was therapeutic.  I didn't understand a word of what he was saying, but it made me realize that the professional world had all kinds of complex theories about the "work" of being friendly, and how that improves another person's mental health. 

Later that first week on the job, I did a graveyard shift and in the morning I had to round up patients so the nurse could give them their medications.  It went smoothly until an elderly woman refused to open her mouth for the nurse.  She was mute and immobile, sitting on a chair in the hall.  The nurse was trying to push a pill through her closed lips and telling her in loud, irritated tones how important the medicine was.  Then she went and got a tongue depressor, came back and tried to pry the woman's mouth open by slipping it between her teeth.  It didn't work.  The woman still would not talk and had a determined look on her face.  Suddenly the nurse started slapping the woman on the cheeks with the tongue depressor and yelling at her about how important the medications were.

This nurse was my supervisor and I had only been on the job a handful of days, but I knew immediately and in every fiber of my being that what she was doing was just plain wrong.  "Stop it!" I nearly shouted.  "Even if she has to take these meds, there's got to be a better way to do it."  She let out a big, exasperated sigh and retreated to the nurse's station, the glass enclosed battle station and refuge for staff.  I followed her in.  "You just don't know about these people", she said.  "Maybe I don't", I said, "but I know that's not the right way to treat them".  It pretty much ended there.  I imagined I would get further reprimanded, written up, or fired, but I didn't.  In retrospect I regret not reporting her, but I'm doubtful she would have been fired, which should have been the case.

This event became paradigmatic for me.  It seemed to encapsulate the fundamental relationship between patients and hospital staff.  Almost always the hospital seemed like an oppressive, coercive place where recovery from mental illness was a miracle of individual resourcefulness, despite all the "professional care".  Even so, I enjoyed being with the patients, hearing their stories, and learning about extreme states of mind.  This job that I had gotten by "fluke" began to stimulate something deep within me and seem less like an accident and more like a calling.  I felt I might have something valuable to offer. 

A major part of the training that the hospital provided was how to restrain patients.  There was a way to assess when and how patients "escalate" into dangerous behaviors.  I was taught how to call staff together (a kind of SWAT team), coordinate the team by "assigning limbs", give verbal cues to the patient and the team (i.e. "we're done talking now."), and how to take a patient down, bend them into a pretzel, get them on a restraint bed, and lock straps around their wrists and ankles.

 In addition to the regular "four point" restraints we also had something called the "body bag".  It was a thick, green canvass device with stiff slats and straps that was wrapped around patients to hold them so they were completely immobile.  I used to get shivers just looking at it.  The rationale for its use was that it made people feel secure and comforted.  My observation was that it made people wild with claustrophobia until they experienced whole-body submission and resignation.  It wasn't obvious to me that this was a good thing.

Doing restraints was the most disturbing part of my job as a mental health worker.  Every time I went to work I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach just thinking I might have to restrain someone.  It didn't always go smoothly.  Over time I experienced being kicked, bitten, spit on, punched in the face, hit with objects, and seeing the same happen to others.  Once a young man butted me in the face with the back of his head and I had to have several hundred dollars worth of dental work to repair chipped teeth.  Psychiatric hospitals were traumatizing environments for me, but my connection and fascination with the patients kept me coming back.

I gained a reputation that some staff appreciated and others criticized.  Because restraining people was so traumatic, I looked for ways to avoid it.  I looked for the earliest signs of potential trouble and spent time with a person before they escalated.  I also opted for the "talking the patient down" approach, beyond the point that others thought was safe.   This often worked.  Sometimes it didn't, but I always felt it was worth the risk.   I observed, conversely, that some staff provoked patients into an episode that seemed to justify their initial opinion that they needed to be restrained.

I recall a young woman who had been restrained a few times, including once after spitting and taking a swing at her psychiatrist.  After that restraint, the psychiatrist required that staff secure her to a chair with restraint cuffs and place a sheet of plastic (a spit screen) between them whenever he came for a session with her.  As bizarre as this seemed, it was merely an exaggerated form of the kind of relationship I saw between psychiatrists and patients.  Doctors had complete control and maintained impenetrable barriers.

In addition to the physical management of the "milieu" (a fancy, clinical-sounding word indicating the inhospitable hospital environment), we were given instructions about how to maintain a professional persona when interacting with patients.  The main thing was to avoid any "self-disclosure".  In other words, don't talk about yourself.  Reveal nothing about your personal life.  The rationale for this never made sense to me.  It seemed based on fear and distrust.  The assumption was that patients would inevitably use information against staff, would use it to avoid their own issues, would be overwhelmed by the burden of knowing staff were also people, would somehow call us at home or show up at our houses and wreck havoc.  My experience was that none of these things happened.  As long as I exercised the same kind of common sense and discretion that one uses with new acquaintances and friends, there was no special reason to fear or distrust people just because they were patients in the hospital.  As a matter of fact, some self-disclosure seemed necessary in order to establish any kind of therapeutic relationship.

What had begun as a fluke turned into eight years of work in psych hospitals and gave me an up close education about how psychiatric medicine was practiced.  Whether it was four-point restraints, the body bag, the "soft restraints" of medications, the seclusion room, the locked doors, or the mandatory schedule, the priory seemed to be to control people.  Psychiatry knew what was wrong with them, what caused it, what they needed, and how they ought to be.  When good things happened it was mostly due to the caring hearts of individuals and not as a product of the way the system worked.

Often during my years of work in psychiatric hospitals I would remember my dear aunt Elaine.  Was this the world she had had to live in for so long?  Was she restrained, slapped with tongue depressors, humiliated, disempowered, and treated as sub-human?  How had she survived?  How had she managed to get out and maintain any shred of dignity and sweetness as a person? 

In 1982 while visiting my grandparents in Des Moines, I went to see Elaine at a nursing home where she had been for a while.  It turned out she had recently been transferred to a hospital, as she had bone cancer and her pelvis had spontaneously fractured.  I hadn't seen her for many years, so when I walked into her room I was initially shocked to see that she was so thin and frail.  All of my memories were of her being heavy set and robust.  My reaction was dispelled, however, when she immediately brightened up and said, "Oh Sweetheart, you're one of Marilyn's boys aren't you."  "Hi Aunt Elaine.  Yes, I'm Michael."  I held her hand as she lay on her bed and we talked about the family, about her life over the past several years, and about her current medical condition.  She seemed so grateful for my visit and eager to connect.  It turned out that she was refusing to have her pelvis set, because she was afraid of how painful it would be.  I was shocked to discover that no one else in our family even knew she had cancer, and the hospital staff had no knowledge of any family to notify.  They wanted to set her pelvis against her will and seemed relieved that I had shown up, because as a family member I could sign something that would allow them to do this.  Having worked in a psychiatric hospital for a couple years at that point, I was more sensitive to how patients can be treated in ways that disregard their wishes.  I told the doctor that I wanted to talk with my aunt about it.  We were given some privacy and Elaine told me about all of her fears.  I listened closely and then told her what the doctor had told me about why he wanted to operate.  She didn't buy it.  Finally, I told her that I would not sign anything; that it was entirely up to her.  She was greatly relieved and thanked me profusely.  I felt extremely sad to leave her there like that, but I had to go.  We parted with tears in both of our eyes.  Later I found out that she had voluntarily elected to have the operation to set her pelvis.  Sadly, however, she lived only a few more months and I doubt that the pain was worth it.

In 1981, after my first year as a mental health worker, an auspicious coincidence would change the course of my life.  A young woman had been a patient at the hospital for several weeks, expressing psychosis in an especially energetic and imaginative way.  In plain, politically incorrect language- she was extremely crazy.  She was also, to me, extremely likeable.  Her psychiatrist was not a regular hospital psychiatrist, but was allowed to continue treating her during her stay.  His name was Dr. Edward Podvoll.  He was different than the other psychiatrists.  His relationship with this young woman (Karen)[v] seemed more direct and casual.  He spent long periods of time visiting with her in her room.  Karen seemed more attached to him than other patients seemed to their psychiatrists.  She called him "Dr. Love".  Other staff gossiped critically about Dr. Podvoll when he would leave, saying how strange he was.  I liked his style.  Eventually I also found out that he was the Director of the Masters degree program in Buddhist and Western Psychology at Naropa Institute.  Naropa was a small liberal arts college founded by Chogyam Trungpa, which has since become a fully accredited university.[vi]  Given my four years of study and practice, I found this quite intriguing.  Suddenly I could see another way to strengthen the connection between my meditation practice and this new line of work. 

Eventually Dr. Podvoll decided that Karen needed to come out of the hospital.  The problem was that she had not "re-compensated" to the point that was necessary for the hospital to feel secure about her discharge.  He had to come up with a reasonable plan.  One day I was told that Dr. Podvoll had put a team together and that they would be coming individually to take Karen out on passes.  That's what they did.  The more she got out and spent time with these people, the saner she seemed to become, until finally she was released.  The plan was for her to move into an apartment with a paid housemate who would be a part of the team that would continue to work with her.   It wasn't clear what they would actually do, nor did anyone know that Karen was the first client and this was the first team of the Windhorse Project.

What I knew was that I needed to enroll in Naropa's Masters degree program and learn more about how contemplative practice and psychotherapy fit together.  I started the program the next year and graduated in 1984.  Through the course of my studies and experiences in that program, many of my deep intuitions about how to relate with people in extreme states of mind were validated.  There was an alternative to the hospital and all of its modes of control.  Patients are people and all people have the potential for sanity and insanity.  Genuine relationships are healing and rigid professional personas are antithetical to compassion.  The quality of one's environment can either strengthen or diminish mental health.  Self-reflection and transparency are crucial if one aspires to be helpful.

By the time I graduated from Naropa, the Windhorse Project was well underway and was then called, Maitri Psychological Services.  Maitri is a Sanskrit word that means "loving kindness".  Such language was unheard of in the hospital.  I continued as a mental health worker in different hospitals, but my earnest desire was to work with MPS.  On numerous occasions I asked Jeff Fortuna, Dr. Podvoll's main student and one of the founding members, if there were any openings.    The answer was always, "No, not right now." Meanwhile, in 1985 I began volunteering as a counselor on a Windhorse-style team at the Boulder County Mental Health Center, where I had done my internship.  Paul Cashman, who was on faculty at Naropa, and who was also a founding member of Windhorse, was leading this team.  This is where I began to learn about "basic attendance"[vii] with a young man I saw for three hours a week for the next three years.[viii]

Then later in 1985 my perseverance with Jeff paid off.  I could take a housemate position and so get on board with Windhorse.  As one of two housemates, living in a house with one Windhorse client, I also continued to work an evening shift at the hospital.  This provided a daily, intimate view of the contrast between two distinctly different ways of responding to people in extreme states of mind.  It was a rare educational opportunity.

Working on a Windhorse team confirmed many of my earlier intuitions about how to be with people in extreme states of mind.  It also confirmed that much of the control and professional distancing of the hospital was not necessary.  At the same time, some of my naïve ideals were put to the test.

After about ten months of being a housemate for a young man diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he entered an intense manic phase.  The team mobilized as much as possible to contain his rapidly expanding energy and behavior.  He seemed on the verge of violence and reckless abandon, picking fights with strangers and walking into neighbor's homes.  It was actually a relief for me to go to work at the hospital to get a break from the intensity of the home front.  After several sleepless days, including nights when I feared for my own safety, we decided that we could no longer manage the situation.  The police were called and this young man was taken away in handcuffs, eventually winding up in the state mental hospital. 

The entire team was heartbroken and many difficult questions arose for me.  Was it always possible to provide adequate care in the community?  Could physical restraint always be avoided?  Are medications always a bad way to go, or are they sometimes necessary?  What is the limit to what a genuine relationship can accomplish?  This experience shook me up.  Yet I continued to believe, as I do now, that people in extreme mind states can live in the community, genuine relationships are healing, coercion and control should be the last therapeutic resort, and that helpers need to take a self-reflective journey with the people they serve.

Having now described my experiences in the hospital, at Naropa, and with MPS; I now want to back up and share another early and profoundly formative element in my personal and professional life.  Shortly after enrolling at Naropa I began to read the work of Ken Wilber.  In particular I read his first two books, Specturm of Consciousness and No Boundary.  So while I was having a potent experience of both western and eastern approaches to psychology and compassionate service, and feeling the mighty clash of these apparently opposing titans, Wilber seemed to be offering one possible way to make some sense of it all.  This was not simply an intellectual conundrum for me.  It had a direct bearing on how I would choose to show up for the people I worked with, as well as how I understood and engaged in my own practices for personal and spiritual growth.  This was huge for me.

In 1987 Dr. Podvoll resigned as medical director of Maitri Psychological Services in order to focus on completion of his book, The Seduction of Madness.  All the teams disbanded and the work ended.  I continued to work at the hospital and in 1988 I married my wife, Lyn.  Our relationship came together while we worked together on the same Windhorse team, she as a housemate and I as a team counselor.  We soon moved away from Boulder, had two children, Sayre and Eben, and re-settled in New England.

From 1988 until 2001 I worked in various settings.  I was the clinical supervisor and assistant director for an outpatient adolescent counseling center.  I worked for several years as a home-based family counselor.  I did emergency services work and ran groups in a partial hospitalization program for a community mental health agency.  Although I have worked with many wonderful people, none of the settings have been as satisfying to me as my Windhorse experience. I have witnessed the rise of managed care and the increasing medicalization of treatment, both of which seem antithetical to the deep and comprehensive approach to working with people that I learned at Naropa and enjoyed at Windhorse.  While I have always tried to bring a contemplative approach to my work, lack of organizational support or vision, over time, made it increasingly difficult to be and do what my heart told me was right.  After twenty years in the field I began to feel demoralized and found myself deep into "burnout".    I began to think about getting out of the field altogether. I had had enough.[ix] 

When my interview for a job as a mortgage broker did not land me the position, I began to reconsider what I ought to do with the rest of my life.  I had attempted to leave this work several times, never successfully.  It seemed my calling just would not let me go.  I was stuck with it.  Doing something to help those in extreme states of mind was simply my karma, like it or not.  But my own extreme states of mind, in terms of burnout, seemed like an obstacle, to say the least.  How could I answer this calling and not destroy myself in the process?  I thought private practice might allow me the freedom to work in consonance with my deepest impulses, if I did not rely on managed care insurance, but setting it up while supporting my family was just about impossible.  It also seemed like a lonely way to work.

I had been aware that Jeff and Molly Fortuna, two of the original founders of Windhorse in Boulder, had established Windhorse Associates in Northampton, Ma.  Just maybe I could reconnect and "come home" so to speak.  It would mean moving my family and resettling in a new area, but for me it seemed like a matter of life or death.  Lyn actually first suggested the idea to me, and the more I thought about it, the more right it felt.  So we moved from New Hampshire to Massachusetts and I resumed my work with Windhorse.  It is impossible to express the extent of my gratitude for all of the people over time who have contributed to creating and maintaining the Windhorse approach.  Since returning I have experienced renewed energy and inspiration for this calling.  I feel held and challenged in ways that have spurred my growth as a person, and given me another opportunity to do meaningful work. 

Meanwhile, ever since the early 80's, I have also continued to study the work of Ken Wilber.  I have had many years to contemplate his evolving integral vision and work out how to apply it in providing care to those struggling with distressed states of mind.  It turns out that Podvoll's vision of Windhorse is very much in alignment with the integral approach.  At the same time, the integral approach includes some further dimensions and possibilities for care that Podvoll did not explicitly address.