A photo came across my feed recently. A sign, posted at the entrance to a patient care area at Indiana University Health:
"Please take responsibility for the energy you bring into this space."
I read it and sat with it for a while.
For those of us in the healing arts, something like this lands differently. It was written for everyone who walks through that door, visitors and staff alike. But I found myself reading it as something directed at me personally.
What am I carrying into the room?
Not just physically. Emotionally. The conversation I had an hour ago. The patient I could not stop thinking about after the last shift. The weight of a system that asks for presence when presence is the thing that gets used up first.
Compassion fatigue is one of the most honest and underacknowledged realities in healthcare. It is not burnout exactly, though they often travel together. It is the slow erosion of the capacity to feel alongside another person. And for those of us whose purpose is to bring something healing into a room, that erosion is not a small thing.
The sign does not ask its staff to pretend the weight does not exist. It asks them to pause. To breathe. To arrive with intention.
Acoustic Healing's professionally recorded healing music is, in part, an answer to exactly this. Not for the practitioner standing at the door, but for the room itself. The music does not need anyone to be at their best in order to do its work. It is already there. Creating a space that holds the patient, and holds the person caring for them.
The environment can do some of the heavy lifting. That is the whole idea.
What are you carrying today? And what would it feel like to walk into a room that already felt a little different before you opened the door? 💜
🎸 www.acoustichealing.music
🎸 www.thetherapeuticguitarist.com
💼 www.linkedin.com/in/david-villareal-rph-ccm-35963819
🏢 www.linkedin.com/company/acoustic-healing
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