Table 2 Provider approach for facilitating healing pathway themes

Provider as a Facilitator

I feel like I’m a teacher, a facilitator. I’m here to facilitate, to educate to help people have more productive lives. (Conventional)

I view my role as a facilitator, meaning I have skills, I create an environment. I help that happen. (Interdisciplinary)

As a facilitator. As one who helps, not one who does. (CIH)

Compassionate Presence

I try to remind myself to be compassionate, be a good listener, to try not to be judgmental as much as possible. To really be there and hear what the patient has to say. (Conventional)

You know, people who are in the field of human touch…there’s a compassion and a love that develops that opens your own heart in service is the only way I can put it. You can’t help but feel for them. (CIH)

Creating Healing Space

It’s an environment that is calm, nurturing, and people walk in with that attitude. In a medical setting I fight the ‘get them in, get them out’ attitude. It’s the pressure put on us by the medical society. (Conventional)

Because of the needs of the persona and the needs of the body, getting back to healing, I do consider myself a healer, small “h”. Not with the big ego, not like I touch you and you’re blind and now you see…But healer in the sense that I have cultivated myself to create a healing space where when somebody walks in their being immediately relaxes. And they feel safe, and they feel comfortable. (Interdisciplinary)

I hold a space, which makes it possible for people to lift out of where they are into something better and that gives them a perspective and an ability to look at themselves. (CIH)

Engaging the Whole Person

We normally see our patients every four weeks to six weeks…we really get to know the patient; we get to know their lifestyle…what’s going on in their lives. (Conventional)

…getting the knowledge medically and knowing the body physically, knowing the anatomy and educating myself enough to be able to speak it in lay terms and spiritual terms, has brought that bridge together and integrated every part of ourselves, emotional, physical, mental, spiritual and all levels and putting all that together makes a nice package to facilitate a nice session of healing. (Interdisciplinary)

Internalizing Shared Healing Experience

I feel like they are my sister or my brother, it’s such an intense connection, it’s a spiritual connection, is what it feels like, and it feels like such deep compassion. Compassion’s not even really the word for it. It’s like a soul connection. (Conventional)

It’s going on a vision quest. I think the most important thing is giving the conventional health care provider the opportunity to explore their own inner life and their own life as a vision quest. On a much deeper level than just intellectual. I think it needs to be spiritual, I think it needs to be emotional. I think it needs to be physical. (Interdisciplinary)

Oh sure. I can feel their emotions and sometimes you feel like what they’re going through. I can feel their feelings and then I feel my own. (CIH)

Self-Care

I go home and stay with my family and play with my kids. I do some gardening and some stuff and that releases the pressure. (Conventional)

If something really negative happened maybe I’ll sponge a room out. But often, I am washing my hands or just taking a few breaths. (Interdisciplinary)

At the end of a full day before I leave and lock up my office, I sit in my treatment space and I kind of just go over my day and let everything kind of go. (CIH)