firetender
Community Leader Emeritus
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In Hawaii, we call what I’m doing “Talk Story.” My purpose is to let you know where I’m coming from and see if we have common ground to begin some serious dialogue.
It was 1973. I was 22 years old and had just gotten out of jail. I needed to find structure. Even though it was a simple pot bust, I spent a year of my life in “the system.” This was Queens, New York. There was a sign out in the window of the Flushing Community Volunteer Ambulance Corps (FCVAC) asking for help. I had nothing better to do with my life except to find something to keep me out of trouble. Literally!
At the time, you only needed an American National Red Cross First Aid card (six or eight hours!) to attend to a “victim” in an ambulance, which was a converted hearse and most likely based at a funeral home on call rotation with the Police Department. Flushing was unusual in that it was community-supported and had two rigs and a backup. I applied. They asked the magic question: “Have you ever been arrested?” I answered honestly.
They declined my offer of help. I made the most important decision of my life. I wouldn’t let them say no. After six months of appeals, hearings, classes and staying in their faces and not letting them see me as a felon, to their credit, they brought me on board.
Every moment of my life since has been spent in exploring the world of the healer.
The world of the healer? How many of you are snickering and wondering “What kind of New-Agey crap is this?”
None of it!
I can say this from the vantage point of having had a career in EMS beginning when there was almost no such thing as EMS, having been one of the first State-certified paramedics in the country, and having been part of the shaping of a brand new profession through three states and over 12 years. If it’s helpful to you, at the time I left the field, the average “burn-out” rate of a paramedic was 3.5 years. I burned out on the politics, not the work.
Add to that an additional 22+ years of applying what I learned in the back of an ambulance to alternative, performance, and even shamanistic medicine. There is nothing that I've done in my life since that has not been influenced by my years as a medic. In short, I have been involved in the healing arts for over 38 years, and now am coming back to my roots to, hopefully, make an impact on the culture of the paramedic.
The truth is, I was a renegade. I was one of those medics who would not conform to the “Just stick to the facts, ma’am!” approach of Johnnie and Roy. From Jump Street I found myself in an incredibly emotionally rich, spiritually challenging, humanity testing, and, yes, even personally enriching way of being. I was compelled to live it fully, and in the process, learned how to experience myself as a human and still do the work.
Early on I recognized that the “profession” demanded that we work from our heads and side-step, deny, avoid or self-medicate ourselves out of anything having to do with our hearts. All around me I saw my peers grow protective shells that they couldn’t take off at the end of their shifts. I suffered as I grappled with my own demons as I tried to make an impact on the bureaucracies that supported a heartless approach to what is essentially one of the most human of all professions; living and working on the edge of life and death.
Most of the time, having made the choice to keep my heart open to the experience of being a human being in service to other human beings, I felt alone. The dominant culture (of allopathic medicine as a whole) discouraged me and my peers from talking about such things. Is it any different today?
The truth is, I was a burr in the butt of every company I ever worked for and every county that I worked in. In the beginning, it took vocal rabble-rousers like myself, from within the profession, to publicize inequities in the system such as inadequate equipment, outrageous hours (I started working 24 hours per day, five days per week for $600 a month!), skewed response times, priority given to “Code 1” routine transports, and “load and go” services that would physically prevent paramedics from rendering care.
Paradoxically, the only way to communicate about such “nuts and bolts” things – and accomplish change -- was to share the human experience with the people being affected by the services. So, that’s what I learned to do: speak about the things no one else would.
And that was only the beginning of a lifetime obsession with articulating the experience that I had in EMS and applying it to the broader (more esoteric) world of the healer. At the same time, there is not a “woo-woo” concept of healing that I’ve heard since that I didn’t test in the back of an ambulance!
Since, my life has taken many turns, most of them, lately, involved in the arts, and most with the intention of moving healing energy to benefit others. If you check out my website www.firetender.org you’ll find a free resource for you to examine your own relationship with the healing arts.
Hopefully, you’ll find things to consider and threads to follow that you haven’t explored before. You’ll also hear the voice of someone who knows pretty much every inch of your experience as a medic asking you to broaden your experience of yourself and apply it to the good of the very real human beings in your life. Another free resource, examining the essence of being a healer, can be found at http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Russ_Reina
So there are no hidden agendas, I am in the beginning stages of building an enterprise that’s based on providing free, useful information for healers of all stripes. Within that context, I’m offering products and services that will help individuals be more effective in what they do, no matter what they do, so that all of us will benefit. All of that is there to see on my website, and I think it will be clear my emphasis is on giving, not getting.
For right now, I only have one question for you, my Brothers and Sisters in EMS on this web site: Are you interested in exploring these aspects of EMS and your experience of yourself with me?
I would like to develop a safe space here for us to share some of the experiences we need to so everyone will benefit from the incredibly rich profession that has chosen us.
It was 1973. I was 22 years old and had just gotten out of jail. I needed to find structure. Even though it was a simple pot bust, I spent a year of my life in “the system.” This was Queens, New York. There was a sign out in the window of the Flushing Community Volunteer Ambulance Corps (FCVAC) asking for help. I had nothing better to do with my life except to find something to keep me out of trouble. Literally!
At the time, you only needed an American National Red Cross First Aid card (six or eight hours!) to attend to a “victim” in an ambulance, which was a converted hearse and most likely based at a funeral home on call rotation with the Police Department. Flushing was unusual in that it was community-supported and had two rigs and a backup. I applied. They asked the magic question: “Have you ever been arrested?” I answered honestly.
They declined my offer of help. I made the most important decision of my life. I wouldn’t let them say no. After six months of appeals, hearings, classes and staying in their faces and not letting them see me as a felon, to their credit, they brought me on board.
Every moment of my life since has been spent in exploring the world of the healer.
The world of the healer? How many of you are snickering and wondering “What kind of New-Agey crap is this?”
None of it!
I can say this from the vantage point of having had a career in EMS beginning when there was almost no such thing as EMS, having been one of the first State-certified paramedics in the country, and having been part of the shaping of a brand new profession through three states and over 12 years. If it’s helpful to you, at the time I left the field, the average “burn-out” rate of a paramedic was 3.5 years. I burned out on the politics, not the work.
Add to that an additional 22+ years of applying what I learned in the back of an ambulance to alternative, performance, and even shamanistic medicine. There is nothing that I've done in my life since that has not been influenced by my years as a medic. In short, I have been involved in the healing arts for over 38 years, and now am coming back to my roots to, hopefully, make an impact on the culture of the paramedic.
The truth is, I was a renegade. I was one of those medics who would not conform to the “Just stick to the facts, ma’am!” approach of Johnnie and Roy. From Jump Street I found myself in an incredibly emotionally rich, spiritually challenging, humanity testing, and, yes, even personally enriching way of being. I was compelled to live it fully, and in the process, learned how to experience myself as a human and still do the work.
Early on I recognized that the “profession” demanded that we work from our heads and side-step, deny, avoid or self-medicate ourselves out of anything having to do with our hearts. All around me I saw my peers grow protective shells that they couldn’t take off at the end of their shifts. I suffered as I grappled with my own demons as I tried to make an impact on the bureaucracies that supported a heartless approach to what is essentially one of the most human of all professions; living and working on the edge of life and death.
Most of the time, having made the choice to keep my heart open to the experience of being a human being in service to other human beings, I felt alone. The dominant culture (of allopathic medicine as a whole) discouraged me and my peers from talking about such things. Is it any different today?
The truth is, I was a burr in the butt of every company I ever worked for and every county that I worked in. In the beginning, it took vocal rabble-rousers like myself, from within the profession, to publicize inequities in the system such as inadequate equipment, outrageous hours (I started working 24 hours per day, five days per week for $600 a month!), skewed response times, priority given to “Code 1” routine transports, and “load and go” services that would physically prevent paramedics from rendering care.
Paradoxically, the only way to communicate about such “nuts and bolts” things – and accomplish change -- was to share the human experience with the people being affected by the services. So, that’s what I learned to do: speak about the things no one else would.
And that was only the beginning of a lifetime obsession with articulating the experience that I had in EMS and applying it to the broader (more esoteric) world of the healer. At the same time, there is not a “woo-woo” concept of healing that I’ve heard since that I didn’t test in the back of an ambulance!
Since, my life has taken many turns, most of them, lately, involved in the arts, and most with the intention of moving healing energy to benefit others. If you check out my website www.firetender.org you’ll find a free resource for you to examine your own relationship with the healing arts.
Hopefully, you’ll find things to consider and threads to follow that you haven’t explored before. You’ll also hear the voice of someone who knows pretty much every inch of your experience as a medic asking you to broaden your experience of yourself and apply it to the good of the very real human beings in your life. Another free resource, examining the essence of being a healer, can be found at http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Russ_Reina
So there are no hidden agendas, I am in the beginning stages of building an enterprise that’s based on providing free, useful information for healers of all stripes. Within that context, I’m offering products and services that will help individuals be more effective in what they do, no matter what they do, so that all of us will benefit. All of that is there to see on my website, and I think it will be clear my emphasis is on giving, not getting.
For right now, I only have one question for you, my Brothers and Sisters in EMS on this web site: Are you interested in exploring these aspects of EMS and your experience of yourself with me?
I would like to develop a safe space here for us to share some of the experiences we need to so everyone will benefit from the incredibly rich profession that has chosen us.
