8 Caregiving Foundations Workshop

8 Caregiving Foundations Workshop

Expand your capacity to offer
sustainable, joyful, and effective care

An 8-week online course

January 10 - February 28, 2024
Wednesdays, 3-5 pm PST

This workshop is full

let us know you're interested in future workshops

The 8 Caregiving Foundations Workshop

Today’s caregivers face unprecedented challenges. Whether professionals or open-hearted family members, we're asked to quietly carry great burdens. Systems of care often don’t prioritize compassion; however, for us, compassion is foundational. How do we maintain our balance in such extremes? How do we not get swept away?

This course will answer these questions and support caregivers in a nourishing community of connection. You'll learn contemplative tools each week that can be applied right in your own work and life. Whether you care for people, families, organizations, or the earth herself, you'll come away from this course with everything needed—within yourself—to face caregiving challenges with confidence, stability, and compassion.

What you will learn

Contemplative care leads with the heart and responds with expertise. It is rooted in an intention to serve, a commitment to explore the human condition, a willingness to be with suffering, and a desire to understand the nature of life and death. It is expressed in the most ordinary ways: kind speech, gentle care, patient listening, and with the skills unique to each caregiver’s history and life. There is no checklist of contemplative skills. Each act arises to meet the need at hand, even if that takes the caregiver outside their comfort zone.

This course draws upon The 8 Caregiving Foundations, which Jonathan Prescott created to share what he's learned from decades of contemplative study with many teachers, patients and families. They are voiced as caregiving aspirations to remind us that our skillfulness is always growing even though we are already enough just as we are. Each caregiving foundation begins with the words 'Living in the balance between' to remind us that balance and equanimity are the foundations of contemplative care.

The 8 Caregiving Foundations

Living in the balance between self and other, I embrace healthy boundaries as a foundation for sustainable, compassionate care. I am open to seeing and transforming habits that undermine clear boundaries and lead me to feel swept away and burned out.

Living in the balance between competence and compassion, I aspire to share myself along with my skills. I allow the infinite resource of compassion to arise in me and make my technical expertise meaningful and relevant. Even as I continually improve, I trust that right now, I am enough.

Living in the balance between giving and receiving, I see that receiving is itself a generous act. I accept the healing energy of beauty, peace, and support that are available in all circumstances so that I can respond with gratitude and generosity. Those I care for are my precious teachers. Life is my school.

Living in the balance between firm and soft, I will honor my limits firmly so that I can respond softly. As I learn to see and accept myself as I am, I know that I can remain flexible in dangerous winds only when I’m securely rooted in my own truth.

Living in the balance between results and futility, I accept that not all results are measurable. I trust mindful awareness to guide my actions, knowing that when my actions are good, positive results ripple out in many directions, even when those results are beyond my view.

Living in the balance between the ideal and the real, I embrace life as it is. I aspire to live in the fullness of reality without hiding behind ideology. I trust that even the most challenging moments invite me to respond with love.

Living in the balance between well and unwell, I turn compassionately towards my own changing nature. I embrace decline in order to learn compassion. Aware that everything changes, I will bear witness to the fires of loss within and around me, knowing that I am well even when I am not.

Living in the balance between life and death, I see that all things come and go in every moment. I will transform my fear of death so that I can offer a calm presence during natural cycles of birth and death, grief and joy.

core concepts

Loving boundaries are the foundation for sustainable, compassionate care

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Sustainable giving requires conscious receiving

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Being guided by our own internal goodness is the surest measure of our results

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Compassionate action is based on embracing reality

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Knowing that you are enough allows you to share your self along with your skills

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Being firmly rooted in yourself allows you to flow gracefully with life

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A sense of wellness is available to us even when things aren’t as we’d like

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Becoming intimate with birth and death teaches us how to love

What to expect each week

Our weekly 2-hour online sessions help you integrate the 8 Caregiving Foundations into your life and work. Cohorts are small so that you have personal contact with fellow students and teachers. Each session enhances your learning with discussion, activities, and contemplative practices, all offered at a pace that is refreshing and spacious.

SELF AND OTHER

You'll learn a boundary model that is effective, memorable, and easy to apply.

YOU ARE ENOUGH

You'll touch the wisdom of your own goodness and know that you're fine just as you are.

GIVING AND RECEIVING

We'll explore how to live in the balance between giving and receiving and learn to see that our receptiveness is a kind of generosity.

FIRM AND SOFT

You'll learn to stand firmly in your core values so that you can meet challenges with flexibility and grace.

MEASURING RESULTS

Trusting your own good intensions is a key to sustainable care.

MEETING LIFE AS IT IS

You'll learn to recognize when your preferences get in the way of reality. Right now, it's like this....

BREATHE, MY DEAR. IT'LL BE OK.

You'll explore how to touch wellness, even when you or those you care for are unwell.

BIRTH AND DEATH

Becoming intimate with birth and death teaches you to love.

meet your teachers

jonathan prescott

karla johnston

Questions? Send us an email

let us know you're interested in future workshops

Wise Caregiving is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization (EIN 82-0730492). All donations are tax deductible and help us train effective, joyful, and sustainable caregivers.