Episode 2 - Spiritual, RN
May 16, 2023
About This Episode
Working in health care means sometimes experiencing tragedy or being left with more questions than answers. Our hosts speak with Alex Peltz, a chaplain at Northwestern Medicine, to explore the role that spirituality can play in helping you care for those parts of you that might be outside of body and mind.
Episode Guests
Alex Peltz
Alex Peltz is a staff chaplain on the Spiritual Care team at Northwestern Medicine. He received his Master of Divinity in Buddhist studies from the University of Chicago.
Working in health care means sometimes experiencing tragedy or being left with more questions than answers. Our hosts speak with Alex Peltz, a chaplain at Northwestern Medicine, to explore the role that spirituality can play in helping you care for those parts of you that might be outside of body and mind.
Episode Guests
Alex Peltz
Alex Peltz is a staff chaplain on the Spiritual Care team at Northwestern Medicine. He received his Master of Divinity in Buddhist studies from the University of Chicago.
transcript
Saklak [00:00:00] I am Alyssa Saklak.
Masnari [00:00:06] And I'm Laurin Masnari.
Saklak: [00:00:08] On Better, RN, we get real about nursing.
Masnari [00:00:11] The good and the gritty.
Saklak [00:00:12] We talk to real healthcare experts.
Masnari [00:00:15] With the goal of becoming better.
Saklak [00:00:17] For our patients, our colleagues.
Masnari [00:00:18] Our family, our friends.
Saklak [00:00:20] Our partners and ourselves. Lauren. What's the topic today?
Masnari [00:00:27] Today we're talking about spirituality and all things spiritual.
Saklak [00:00:31] This is by far my favorite topic within the wellness wheel and domains.
Masnari [00:00:37] I feel like this is right up your wheelhouse. You're so connected to the things around you in a way that I never experienced in real life before and it is so special. I think even from when we first met, there's just this aura — and I'm being serious — there's this aura around you that you're just so connected to the things that are close to you, and it's really special. I don't think everyone has that. I think a lot of people try to do that, but it's not successful all the time.
Saklak [00:01:00] Well, I appreciate that. I don't think you've ever told me that before.
Masnari [00:01:04] It's confession time on the podcast.
Saklak [00:01:06] I hope that our listeners can feel the energy of our guest that we're going to have on today. Alex Peltz is a member of the Spiritual Care team at Northwestern Medicine. He is a staff chaplain and has his Master of Divinity in Buddhist studies.
Masnari [00:01:21] I can't wait to talk to Alex today because you and I both have such a great relationship with him in a little bit of a different capacity. Right, so, we worked with him really closely for Nurses Week last year, but I've worked with Alex, for a handful of debriefs with my staff on the unit that I manage, and No situation —we know this — no situation is the same, but somehow Alex always brings this consistent calming presence to these debriefs and these conversations with my staff. The thing that he does really well is meets people where they are. He lays the foundation and just lets people give and take whatever they need, which is so special, and he doesn't push one thing or the other.
He's just so consistent in communication and really brings something special to my unit, and I know other units that he has been on as well. We are extremely lucky to have him at Northwestern Medicine.
Saklak [00:02:07] Absolutely. I don't know that I've asked some of these questions to him, even though we have a history and you know, he is, been there numerous times for our unit.
Masnari [00:02:15] Alex started as an intern here and now he's full staff, He's seen the growth and the change that the Spiritual Care Department has gone through. So, I'm excited to dive into that today too. I am so excited for this. This is going to be good.
Saklak [00:02:29] Today we're in the studio with Alex Peltz. Laurin and I have had the pleasure of working with Alex last year during Nurses Week, and we will love to hand it off to him to do a little introduction and maybe, your perspective of Lauren and I.
Peltz [00:02:42] That's, that's a really hard one. You're not, not giving me any softballs.
Saklak [00:02:45] Not here.
Peltz [00:02:46] My name is Alex Peltz, like you said. I am a staff chaplain here at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I work in the general medicine line and I am also a night chaplain, so I have kind of a funky schedule where I'll be on for three nights a week, and then the next week I'll be on for three days.
I got my Masters of Divinity at the University of Chicago. This is not just a position you can walk into. There's a lot of reading and training. My own kind of spiritual background, I grew up as a Jewish person. I was bar mitzvahed and I, I found my way into Buddhism. So that's a little bit of my own personal practice.
But I'm also just a philosophy nerd in general. I like music and books and video games. And I'll, I'll generally talk your ears off about anything if you'll let me. I've been fangirling over Lauren and Alyssa, so I'm very excited for this.
Masnari [00:03:28] You're very easy to talk to.
Peltz [00:03:30] Thank you.
Saklak [00:03:31] So, I think we need to talk about the elephant in the room, which is spirituality, why we came to you to talk to us today, and how spirituality has a major impact on our health and well-being.
Masnari [00:03:43] Can you help us define, what does the Spiritual Care Department do and what does spiritual care mean?
Peltz [00:03:49] This is, of course, a question that people have been trying to answer for a very, very long time. You know, spirituality and medicine have been intertwined since basically the beginning of both. You think about shamans and that kind of thing.
Those were the medical professionals of their time. In the modern day, when I think about spiritual care and when we think about the practice of spiritual care, I think what is useful is to approach it rather from the lens of spirituality first, to go from the other end and to look at care, and to look at care from a holistic angle. When I say holistic, I mean every part of the person. So that's body, that's mind. And that's whatever might not fit in those two. Or we might have trouble categorizing that difficulty, those things that don't fit easily into one or the other... That is, I think, where we have the opening for spiritual care, right?
I think about what we do in relation to something like therapy, something like talk therapy that you could get with a psychologist or a psychoanalyst. What we do is very similar to that in a lot of ways. We are there to be listeners. We are there to hear people non-judgmentally, empathetically, to support them. And to kind of raise their concerns and their values to the front. What we can do that I think is maybe discouraged and, and psychologists, you know, you wouldn't ask a psychologist like, “Is it going to be OK?” Because a psychologist can't tell you that. You can ask a doctor, “Is my heart going to be OK?” You know, “What's going to happen to my lungs?” And that's a very different kind of answer. But when you're asking that big existential question like, “Am I going to be OK?” You know, are, “Are things going to be alright in the end?” That is where you can turn to spiritual care and say, “OK, this is a big question. We have to take it apart. What does it mean to be OK to you? What are you worried about when you say, are things going to be OK? What does ‘OK’ mean? What would you like to come out of this situation?”
And so, spiritual care is approaching care holistically from that lens and starting with that as a basis, saying, “How can we take your values, your ideals, your spirituality, and use that as a tool to strengthen your physical health and your mental health?”
Masnari [00:05:50] I took some notes when you were just talking. I wrote down, you said, what doesn't fit in this duality of mind and body. It's the idea that there's so much more than that and it's not just black and white. There's not always a yes-or-no answer for things, which Alyssa and I share a lot of similar qualities, but we also are very different in the fact that I love a yes-or-a-no answer.
That's why I like medicine so much. I think because there's so much reason and logic behind it, that is easy for me to understand. But the spirituality, how you so beautifully explained this move away from this duality, puts things in a great perspective, I think, and is opening a lot of doors for this conversation.
Saklak [00:06:28] My question as you spoke, and I think for a lot of the listeners, is can you have health without spiritual health? Or can health exist without acknowledging kind of the spiritual wellness of things?
Peltz [00:06:40] The answer is yes, I think it is, it is very possible to be a person who feels totally healthy in mind and body and for whatever reason, whether it's intellectual, whether it's whatever's going on, you don't have a sense of the spiritual in those terms. I'm not going to come to you and tell you like you need to have a strong spirit to be healthy. That being said, I think that it's kind of my stance, and I think that it would be the stance of a lot of people in my department and of spiritual care departments in general, that it is an essential and an inherent part of the human experience that we, we have that thing that is neither physical nor mental. Whether we call that spirit or not is a totally different question. But if we're asking about that thing, if the question is, can we have health without having that, I don't think the answer is yes.
Saklak [00:07:25] I think you spoke so well and I love that you opened it too, because, I think a lot of people are maybe averse to spirituality, whatever we want to call this. Right? And so, I think that allows us to kind of hold the space for all things to exist.
Peltz [00:07:37] Absolutely.
Saklak [00:07:38] For everyone's definition to be seen and I, and that's what I love so much about your department and really my relationship and experience with working with spiritual care here. I want to recap last year’s Nurses Week. Laurin, I think you really started the relationship with Alex.
Masnari [00:07:52] Yeah, so last year when we were working to plan Nurses Week in 2022 at Northwestern Medicine, we were thinking about what do people need? We're, we're returning back to normal, but we still have all of these things that happen in the acute care setting locally and in the world. And people needed a space, we thought, to grieve and to kind of process this complex emotion that we had. So, we developed this concept of a remembrance room. So, this was in one of our conference rooms here. We had a video, a few videos playing on a loop that the Media team helped us put together that kind of recapped all of the incredible things that we had done as Northwestern Medicine throughout COVID. And we had some great stories from nurses, some awesome stories about folks that were able to discharge home, but then it was also a space for people to reflect on the things that they had missed out on. You know, you missed out on a life event. You missed out on a funeral. You missed out on the birth of a niece, of the birth of a nephew, big life events. What did you miss out on? And kind of seeing collectively all of the things that not only we dealt with in these walls, but that people dealt with at home. And we involved the Spiritual Care team, and Alex was awesome and sat in that room with people and kind of helped the process through some of those emotions. So that was my perspective of it.
Peltz [00:09:03] The word that came to my head as I was remembering it, as I was hearing your description of it, was this very human space. Not that we don't exist in human spaces, but it was, it was a very, very different kind of ambiance where it was just like humans getting together as humans. Humans who happen to be nurses, humans who happen to be clinicians, holding each other and holding themselves in a way that really was powerful, and I think really did build community in a meaningful way.
Saklak [00:09:28] The next question, that I'm like dying to ask is, we have a lot of new grad nurses coming into the workforce and even nurses who've been here for a while, maybe are not as open to exploring the concept of spirituality and spiritual wellness, what would be your advice?
Peltz [00:09:45] Your spirituality is your own. Your spirituality is about what makes you feel alive, what makes you feel connected to nature, to other people, to yourself, to something divine. If you have that belief, whether it's God, whether it's the universe, you know, whatever that higher thing is for you and because of that individualism, because of that uniqueness, finding your own spirituality is this like lifelong journey of self-discovery and self-exploration. And most importantly, it's about being curious about yourself and being curious about the world around you and the people around you.
And the way that we can cultivate our spirituality is just to be present with ourselves, be curious about our experiences. Right? Like one question I would ask to nurses who want to explore their spirituality is like, what, important to you? Like, why did you become a nurse outside of financial considerations or anything like that? Clearly, you're doing this because you have some beliefs about the world and your place in it. And so, what are those things? Because you're not doing it for no reason. and when we can talk about what those reasons are and what those values and those ideals are, that's when spirituality becomes something really real and something really true and grounding and meaningful. If I had like one practice that I would prescribe, I would say just like go for a five-minute walk every day. No headphones.
Saklak [00:11:07] Mindfulness.
Masnari [00:11:08] A question I always ask when I'm interviewing them for a position on my unit is, I frame it in a way that nursing school is heavy. Whatever you have going on in your personal life is potentially heavy. How do you take care of yourself outside of school and work and all of these other things that are competing for your attention? What would your answer to that question be?
Peltz [00:11:28] For me, um, I am a big-time meditator. I need to meditate every day. Meditation's maybe not for everyone, but I know for me, like if I sit just with myself, just observing my thoughts and not acting on them for 15 minutes a day, it makes such an enormous difference. Communicating with friends, having people to rely on, being able to see myself in a community with others, recognizing that I'm a human being and that the emotions that I have, the stresses that I have, the sense of like, “Oh, I could have done this, but I didn't.” Those are all human things, and we're only human, and I promise you talk to anyone else on your team, and they have either had feelings like that or are currently going through those same feelings. The spirit speaks in community, right? And so, when we're in community and when we can be real with each other, whether that's, you know, someone we come home to, whether that's someone we go out to meet with, that's spiritual and that's self-care, and that's mindfulness and that checks all the boxes.
Saklak [00:12:26] I think you spoke to a beautiful point about the community and it makes me think about the diversity of spirituality and how cool that is to connect with other people's definition of that and how they explore that. And when I think about nursing in specific, are such a community and when we go through hard things together, one of the things I've seen you in as debriefs after codes or adverse events on the unit. And I think that is so tremendously important that we experience that and hold the space for one another and for each person's spirituality to do whatever it needs to kind of find some closure or process through that. I think a lot of people are so uncomfortable in those situations, especially if you're new to that environment. Any thoughts or tips on those debriefs that we have can you kind of explain your process behind the debriefs and how do you hold that space for such a diverse group of spirituality and in humans?
Peltz [00:13:18] Those moments of getting everyone together and staring this thing in the face are super powerful and super conducive to team building. My process in thinking about debriefs is that my role in that sort of scenario is that I am the person who gets to come in and put my foot down and say, “Everyone. Stop what you're doing for 10 minutes. Like we're going to sit here and take a deep breath and like just talk for a little while.” It really is nothing more and nothing less than that. And so, the fact that when we come together and when we provide that open space, these things will naturally bubble to the surface, I think is indicative of the fact that it does feel good to talk about these things together. And there is always that little, you have to break the seal. No one wants to be the first person to talk. It's always awkward. So, if you are a, a new nurse listening to this and you're scared about a debrief. This is entirely for you. This is entirely for you to say what you need to say or to not say what you don't need to say. Whatever piece you need to speak, whatever needs you have that you need to voice, whatever frustrations you need to vent. Like this is the space to do it.
Saklak [00:14:21] And I just want to add for our potential community that we serve, that are listening or our patient population, I think honoring that space for that human that we care for, whether it was one interaction or several, I think that is the most beautiful aspect of it as well. And honoring that, you know, our patients don't always know what we do to help take care of ourselves. And to me that's kind of like the epitome of what it is.
Masnari [00:14:43] When I started at Northwestern Medicine, I was under the impression that the Spiritual Care team or the Spiritual Care Department was here for the patients of Northwestern Medicine. Spiritual Care team has had, in my opinion, like a rebrand in the past couple of years to say we're not just here for the patients, we're here for every member of the care team. Can you talk a little bit about what are the different opportunities for engagement there?
Peltz [00:15:07] When I think about the ways, that, that chaplains or Spiritual Care team members and nursing teams can interact and can support each other, there's sort of two main branches. The first one being with patients themselves. That's kind of what we were talking about a little bit. We can be there to pray with them, to talk with them, to provide an empathetic presence that on a surface level can sort of, give nurses more room to do the sort of medical things they need to do. We are experts in listening. We are experts in holding space. That is a sort of surface-level, face-level thing. Going a little bit under that, we are trained in things like medical decision making and in things like de-escalation. So, we can serve as advocates and as interlocutors between patients and care teams. I think about circumstances like, a clinician talks to a patient and the patient says, “You know, I'm going to pray about it.” Or, “If God wills it.” That might be very scary for someone to hear. We are the experts who can go in and say, “OK, this person is saying I need to pray on it. They're speaking in a spiritual register. Here's what that means to you. Here's how we can proceed.” So those are kind of some things on the patient front. On the nursing front, you know, we talked about these debriefs and we talked about the support that we can provide, but just to blow that out a little bit further, we are here to provide that third aspect of the holistic care outside of the spiritual and outside of the mental.
Nurses are people who have spiritual needs as well. We are very happy and we're very proud to be there and support nurses, as they deal with the things that you see on a day-to-day basis. Everyone listening to this, thank you for what you do because, it's, it's not an easy job and you guys are carrying a lot of heavy things. We would love to help you carry those. We would love to help you to process those things, to integrate those things into your practice so that you can say, “Hey, this thing felt weird, felt bad at the time, but you know, it's been a few days I talked to the chaplain about it and now I can see this is what I'm taking from this and this is like a valuable experience for me.” We are there to help you process, to help you integrate. There are some things that you need to think about that are on this ethical level, or are on a moral level, or are on a philosophical or a religious level. And we are people who, who are here to talk about that. We are people who are trained to talk about that kind of thing.
Saklak [00:17:21] My heart is just, is singing right now, Alex. Thank you so much for putting words to the things within health care that we can't always explain and for being that support system in your team. Thank you so much for joining us here today.
Peltz [00:17:36] It's really an honor and a pleasure, so, thank you for having me on.
Masnari [00:17:39] Thanks, Alex. You're wonderful. You know how much we appreciate you, and your whole team and everything that you do for our patients and my nurses and my entire team. So, thank you. Thanks for tuning in.
Saklak [00:17:55] Better, RN, is brought to you by The Woman's Board of Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
Masnari [00:00:06] And I'm Laurin Masnari.
Saklak: [00:00:08] On Better, RN, we get real about nursing.
Masnari [00:00:11] The good and the gritty.
Saklak [00:00:12] We talk to real healthcare experts.
Masnari [00:00:15] With the goal of becoming better.
Saklak [00:00:17] For our patients, our colleagues.
Masnari [00:00:18] Our family, our friends.
Saklak [00:00:20] Our partners and ourselves. Lauren. What's the topic today?
Masnari [00:00:27] Today we're talking about spirituality and all things spiritual.
Saklak [00:00:31] This is by far my favorite topic within the wellness wheel and domains.
Masnari [00:00:37] I feel like this is right up your wheelhouse. You're so connected to the things around you in a way that I never experienced in real life before and it is so special. I think even from when we first met, there's just this aura — and I'm being serious — there's this aura around you that you're just so connected to the things that are close to you, and it's really special. I don't think everyone has that. I think a lot of people try to do that, but it's not successful all the time.
Saklak [00:01:00] Well, I appreciate that. I don't think you've ever told me that before.
Masnari [00:01:04] It's confession time on the podcast.
Saklak [00:01:06] I hope that our listeners can feel the energy of our guest that we're going to have on today. Alex Peltz is a member of the Spiritual Care team at Northwestern Medicine. He is a staff chaplain and has his Master of Divinity in Buddhist studies.
Masnari [00:01:21] I can't wait to talk to Alex today because you and I both have such a great relationship with him in a little bit of a different capacity. Right, so, we worked with him really closely for Nurses Week last year, but I've worked with Alex, for a handful of debriefs with my staff on the unit that I manage, and No situation —we know this — no situation is the same, but somehow Alex always brings this consistent calming presence to these debriefs and these conversations with my staff. The thing that he does really well is meets people where they are. He lays the foundation and just lets people give and take whatever they need, which is so special, and he doesn't push one thing or the other.
He's just so consistent in communication and really brings something special to my unit, and I know other units that he has been on as well. We are extremely lucky to have him at Northwestern Medicine.
Saklak [00:02:07] Absolutely. I don't know that I've asked some of these questions to him, even though we have a history and you know, he is, been there numerous times for our unit.
Masnari [00:02:15] Alex started as an intern here and now he's full staff, He's seen the growth and the change that the Spiritual Care Department has gone through. So, I'm excited to dive into that today too. I am so excited for this. This is going to be good.
Saklak [00:02:29] Today we're in the studio with Alex Peltz. Laurin and I have had the pleasure of working with Alex last year during Nurses Week, and we will love to hand it off to him to do a little introduction and maybe, your perspective of Lauren and I.
Peltz [00:02:42] That's, that's a really hard one. You're not, not giving me any softballs.
Saklak [00:02:45] Not here.
Peltz [00:02:46] My name is Alex Peltz, like you said. I am a staff chaplain here at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I work in the general medicine line and I am also a night chaplain, so I have kind of a funky schedule where I'll be on for three nights a week, and then the next week I'll be on for three days.
I got my Masters of Divinity at the University of Chicago. This is not just a position you can walk into. There's a lot of reading and training. My own kind of spiritual background, I grew up as a Jewish person. I was bar mitzvahed and I, I found my way into Buddhism. So that's a little bit of my own personal practice.
But I'm also just a philosophy nerd in general. I like music and books and video games. And I'll, I'll generally talk your ears off about anything if you'll let me. I've been fangirling over Lauren and Alyssa, so I'm very excited for this.
Masnari [00:03:28] You're very easy to talk to.
Peltz [00:03:30] Thank you.
Saklak [00:03:31] So, I think we need to talk about the elephant in the room, which is spirituality, why we came to you to talk to us today, and how spirituality has a major impact on our health and well-being.
Masnari [00:03:43] Can you help us define, what does the Spiritual Care Department do and what does spiritual care mean?
Peltz [00:03:49] This is, of course, a question that people have been trying to answer for a very, very long time. You know, spirituality and medicine have been intertwined since basically the beginning of both. You think about shamans and that kind of thing.
Those were the medical professionals of their time. In the modern day, when I think about spiritual care and when we think about the practice of spiritual care, I think what is useful is to approach it rather from the lens of spirituality first, to go from the other end and to look at care, and to look at care from a holistic angle. When I say holistic, I mean every part of the person. So that's body, that's mind. And that's whatever might not fit in those two. Or we might have trouble categorizing that difficulty, those things that don't fit easily into one or the other... That is, I think, where we have the opening for spiritual care, right?
I think about what we do in relation to something like therapy, something like talk therapy that you could get with a psychologist or a psychoanalyst. What we do is very similar to that in a lot of ways. We are there to be listeners. We are there to hear people non-judgmentally, empathetically, to support them. And to kind of raise their concerns and their values to the front. What we can do that I think is maybe discouraged and, and psychologists, you know, you wouldn't ask a psychologist like, “Is it going to be OK?” Because a psychologist can't tell you that. You can ask a doctor, “Is my heart going to be OK?” You know, “What's going to happen to my lungs?” And that's a very different kind of answer. But when you're asking that big existential question like, “Am I going to be OK?” You know, are, “Are things going to be alright in the end?” That is where you can turn to spiritual care and say, “OK, this is a big question. We have to take it apart. What does it mean to be OK to you? What are you worried about when you say, are things going to be OK? What does ‘OK’ mean? What would you like to come out of this situation?”
And so, spiritual care is approaching care holistically from that lens and starting with that as a basis, saying, “How can we take your values, your ideals, your spirituality, and use that as a tool to strengthen your physical health and your mental health?”
Masnari [00:05:50] I took some notes when you were just talking. I wrote down, you said, what doesn't fit in this duality of mind and body. It's the idea that there's so much more than that and it's not just black and white. There's not always a yes-or-no answer for things, which Alyssa and I share a lot of similar qualities, but we also are very different in the fact that I love a yes-or-a-no answer.
That's why I like medicine so much. I think because there's so much reason and logic behind it, that is easy for me to understand. But the spirituality, how you so beautifully explained this move away from this duality, puts things in a great perspective, I think, and is opening a lot of doors for this conversation.
Saklak [00:06:28] My question as you spoke, and I think for a lot of the listeners, is can you have health without spiritual health? Or can health exist without acknowledging kind of the spiritual wellness of things?
Peltz [00:06:40] The answer is yes, I think it is, it is very possible to be a person who feels totally healthy in mind and body and for whatever reason, whether it's intellectual, whether it's whatever's going on, you don't have a sense of the spiritual in those terms. I'm not going to come to you and tell you like you need to have a strong spirit to be healthy. That being said, I think that it's kind of my stance, and I think that it would be the stance of a lot of people in my department and of spiritual care departments in general, that it is an essential and an inherent part of the human experience that we, we have that thing that is neither physical nor mental. Whether we call that spirit or not is a totally different question. But if we're asking about that thing, if the question is, can we have health without having that, I don't think the answer is yes.
Saklak [00:07:25] I think you spoke so well and I love that you opened it too, because, I think a lot of people are maybe averse to spirituality, whatever we want to call this. Right? And so, I think that allows us to kind of hold the space for all things to exist.
Peltz [00:07:37] Absolutely.
Saklak [00:07:38] For everyone's definition to be seen and I, and that's what I love so much about your department and really my relationship and experience with working with spiritual care here. I want to recap last year’s Nurses Week. Laurin, I think you really started the relationship with Alex.
Masnari [00:07:52] Yeah, so last year when we were working to plan Nurses Week in 2022 at Northwestern Medicine, we were thinking about what do people need? We're, we're returning back to normal, but we still have all of these things that happen in the acute care setting locally and in the world. And people needed a space, we thought, to grieve and to kind of process this complex emotion that we had. So, we developed this concept of a remembrance room. So, this was in one of our conference rooms here. We had a video, a few videos playing on a loop that the Media team helped us put together that kind of recapped all of the incredible things that we had done as Northwestern Medicine throughout COVID. And we had some great stories from nurses, some awesome stories about folks that were able to discharge home, but then it was also a space for people to reflect on the things that they had missed out on. You know, you missed out on a life event. You missed out on a funeral. You missed out on the birth of a niece, of the birth of a nephew, big life events. What did you miss out on? And kind of seeing collectively all of the things that not only we dealt with in these walls, but that people dealt with at home. And we involved the Spiritual Care team, and Alex was awesome and sat in that room with people and kind of helped the process through some of those emotions. So that was my perspective of it.
Peltz [00:09:03] The word that came to my head as I was remembering it, as I was hearing your description of it, was this very human space. Not that we don't exist in human spaces, but it was, it was a very, very different kind of ambiance where it was just like humans getting together as humans. Humans who happen to be nurses, humans who happen to be clinicians, holding each other and holding themselves in a way that really was powerful, and I think really did build community in a meaningful way.
Saklak [00:09:28] The next question, that I'm like dying to ask is, we have a lot of new grad nurses coming into the workforce and even nurses who've been here for a while, maybe are not as open to exploring the concept of spirituality and spiritual wellness, what would be your advice?
Peltz [00:09:45] Your spirituality is your own. Your spirituality is about what makes you feel alive, what makes you feel connected to nature, to other people, to yourself, to something divine. If you have that belief, whether it's God, whether it's the universe, you know, whatever that higher thing is for you and because of that individualism, because of that uniqueness, finding your own spirituality is this like lifelong journey of self-discovery and self-exploration. And most importantly, it's about being curious about yourself and being curious about the world around you and the people around you.
And the way that we can cultivate our spirituality is just to be present with ourselves, be curious about our experiences. Right? Like one question I would ask to nurses who want to explore their spirituality is like, what, important to you? Like, why did you become a nurse outside of financial considerations or anything like that? Clearly, you're doing this because you have some beliefs about the world and your place in it. And so, what are those things? Because you're not doing it for no reason. and when we can talk about what those reasons are and what those values and those ideals are, that's when spirituality becomes something really real and something really true and grounding and meaningful. If I had like one practice that I would prescribe, I would say just like go for a five-minute walk every day. No headphones.
Saklak [00:11:07] Mindfulness.
Masnari [00:11:08] A question I always ask when I'm interviewing them for a position on my unit is, I frame it in a way that nursing school is heavy. Whatever you have going on in your personal life is potentially heavy. How do you take care of yourself outside of school and work and all of these other things that are competing for your attention? What would your answer to that question be?
Peltz [00:11:28] For me, um, I am a big-time meditator. I need to meditate every day. Meditation's maybe not for everyone, but I know for me, like if I sit just with myself, just observing my thoughts and not acting on them for 15 minutes a day, it makes such an enormous difference. Communicating with friends, having people to rely on, being able to see myself in a community with others, recognizing that I'm a human being and that the emotions that I have, the stresses that I have, the sense of like, “Oh, I could have done this, but I didn't.” Those are all human things, and we're only human, and I promise you talk to anyone else on your team, and they have either had feelings like that or are currently going through those same feelings. The spirit speaks in community, right? And so, when we're in community and when we can be real with each other, whether that's, you know, someone we come home to, whether that's someone we go out to meet with, that's spiritual and that's self-care, and that's mindfulness and that checks all the boxes.
Saklak [00:12:26] I think you spoke to a beautiful point about the community and it makes me think about the diversity of spirituality and how cool that is to connect with other people's definition of that and how they explore that. And when I think about nursing in specific, are such a community and when we go through hard things together, one of the things I've seen you in as debriefs after codes or adverse events on the unit. And I think that is so tremendously important that we experience that and hold the space for one another and for each person's spirituality to do whatever it needs to kind of find some closure or process through that. I think a lot of people are so uncomfortable in those situations, especially if you're new to that environment. Any thoughts or tips on those debriefs that we have can you kind of explain your process behind the debriefs and how do you hold that space for such a diverse group of spirituality and in humans?
Peltz [00:13:18] Those moments of getting everyone together and staring this thing in the face are super powerful and super conducive to team building. My process in thinking about debriefs is that my role in that sort of scenario is that I am the person who gets to come in and put my foot down and say, “Everyone. Stop what you're doing for 10 minutes. Like we're going to sit here and take a deep breath and like just talk for a little while.” It really is nothing more and nothing less than that. And so, the fact that when we come together and when we provide that open space, these things will naturally bubble to the surface, I think is indicative of the fact that it does feel good to talk about these things together. And there is always that little, you have to break the seal. No one wants to be the first person to talk. It's always awkward. So, if you are a, a new nurse listening to this and you're scared about a debrief. This is entirely for you. This is entirely for you to say what you need to say or to not say what you don't need to say. Whatever piece you need to speak, whatever needs you have that you need to voice, whatever frustrations you need to vent. Like this is the space to do it.
Saklak [00:14:21] And I just want to add for our potential community that we serve, that are listening or our patient population, I think honoring that space for that human that we care for, whether it was one interaction or several, I think that is the most beautiful aspect of it as well. And honoring that, you know, our patients don't always know what we do to help take care of ourselves. And to me that's kind of like the epitome of what it is.
Masnari [00:14:43] When I started at Northwestern Medicine, I was under the impression that the Spiritual Care team or the Spiritual Care Department was here for the patients of Northwestern Medicine. Spiritual Care team has had, in my opinion, like a rebrand in the past couple of years to say we're not just here for the patients, we're here for every member of the care team. Can you talk a little bit about what are the different opportunities for engagement there?
Peltz [00:15:07] When I think about the ways, that, that chaplains or Spiritual Care team members and nursing teams can interact and can support each other, there's sort of two main branches. The first one being with patients themselves. That's kind of what we were talking about a little bit. We can be there to pray with them, to talk with them, to provide an empathetic presence that on a surface level can sort of, give nurses more room to do the sort of medical things they need to do. We are experts in listening. We are experts in holding space. That is a sort of surface-level, face-level thing. Going a little bit under that, we are trained in things like medical decision making and in things like de-escalation. So, we can serve as advocates and as interlocutors between patients and care teams. I think about circumstances like, a clinician talks to a patient and the patient says, “You know, I'm going to pray about it.” Or, “If God wills it.” That might be very scary for someone to hear. We are the experts who can go in and say, “OK, this person is saying I need to pray on it. They're speaking in a spiritual register. Here's what that means to you. Here's how we can proceed.” So those are kind of some things on the patient front. On the nursing front, you know, we talked about these debriefs and we talked about the support that we can provide, but just to blow that out a little bit further, we are here to provide that third aspect of the holistic care outside of the spiritual and outside of the mental.
Nurses are people who have spiritual needs as well. We are very happy and we're very proud to be there and support nurses, as they deal with the things that you see on a day-to-day basis. Everyone listening to this, thank you for what you do because, it's, it's not an easy job and you guys are carrying a lot of heavy things. We would love to help you carry those. We would love to help you to process those things, to integrate those things into your practice so that you can say, “Hey, this thing felt weird, felt bad at the time, but you know, it's been a few days I talked to the chaplain about it and now I can see this is what I'm taking from this and this is like a valuable experience for me.” We are there to help you process, to help you integrate. There are some things that you need to think about that are on this ethical level, or are on a moral level, or are on a philosophical or a religious level. And we are people who, who are here to talk about that. We are people who are trained to talk about that kind of thing.
Saklak [00:17:21] My heart is just, is singing right now, Alex. Thank you so much for putting words to the things within health care that we can't always explain and for being that support system in your team. Thank you so much for joining us here today.
Peltz [00:17:36] It's really an honor and a pleasure, so, thank you for having me on.
Masnari [00:17:39] Thanks, Alex. You're wonderful. You know how much we appreciate you, and your whole team and everything that you do for our patients and my nurses and my entire team. So, thank you. Thanks for tuning in.
Saklak [00:17:55] Better, RN, is brought to you by The Woman's Board of Northwestern Memorial Hospital.