Faltas described how the Centre had quickly adapted in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to continue to provide its vital rehabilitative services to children with disabilities from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. 

“We used to have more than one patient in a room, but now we have separated our dormitory into individual rooms,” in the Centre’s inpatient program, he said. “We bring [groups of patients] all in one bubble and they leave in one bubble, so as to prevent any cross infection of the virus between them and our staff, who, thank God, are already vaccinated. But if this is going to increase, there is the risk that they will be infected in this bubble. And then we will have to, not shut down the operation of the inpatient [program], but send everybody home and then figure out how we would do this.”

That kind of adaptability and resilience is part of the Centre’s DNA. Faltas explained that a mother and family empowerment program evolved at the Centre 20 years ago. Many children needed ongoing therapy every day, but they could not be treated every day at the centre due to conditions of the military occupation and a lack of means. So while the children came for treatment, the staff trained the mothers to be shadow therapists to continue the therapy at home.

That system has been very successful and is still used, but the pandemic required more adaptations. It is a very intensive therapy program that requires mothers and children to be part of the inpatient program initially for assessment, diagnosis and the development of a customized plan of care, Faltas said. Children used to come to the Centre for 15 days and go home on weekends. “Because of COVID-19, we reduced it to 12 days, and it is continuous, so they don’t go back home during the weekend, they continue their therapies. … When they are referred to us by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, there isn’t enough financial coverage. The ministry of health will pay for 12 days once every few months but says it cannot pay for every day. So we do the intensive [therapies] with them and you see big progress happening.” Follow up used to happen through an outreach program in which therapists met the families in different partners centres throughout the territory. 

At the start of the pandemic last year, “we stopped the inpatient from mid-March to mid-May, but we continued with the outpatient [care],” Faltas said. “We were forced to think how we could do things differently because some parents were afraid to show up even for outpatient.”

“Immediately we started to follow up with the patients virtually, especially in the West Bank.” 

The staff found that there were some useful benefits to virtual follow-up visits. “You are in real time following up on the home program. You are doing the therapy with the mother or the father virtually through a video call to ensure that the therapies are done properly. So in this way, we make sure that we don’t break the therapy process for the child, especially [important] during their critical development ages,” Faltas explained.… “Making parents shadow therapists in this way, you see that you have maximized the impact on the child. Now, with the virtual therapy, we are even maximizing a little bit more.”

While the virtual therapies cannot replace the crucial inpatient program, Faltas said, “Our virtual therapy has taught us what are our possibilities, our capacities, what we can do, so definitely it is going to continue to be a component for follow up.”

Unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority has not recognized the virtual therapy and will not cover costs associated with it. “We fundraise in order to do the followup with the children in the West Bank,” says Faltas. “We are doing the ministry a big favour. We’re saving them money in a sense because if we do the virtual therapy it’s on us. Then if a child needs seven admissions during three years maybe the child will need only four because we have been doing virtual follow up.”

Funding is always a challenge for the Centre, which generates 75 to 80 percent of its income by selling services to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, to the Israeli Ministry of Health, to the Israeli medical funds (insurance companies). The Centre fundraises the remaining 20 percent (about $1 million) through the Anglican – Episcopal world, as well as other donors, both institutional and local individuals. 

Asked what gives the staff the greatest satisfaction, Faltas said, “Definitely when a child reaches one of their targets.… A child will start to speak for the first time, a child will be able to walk for the first time, or to be able to use his or her hands, to be able to use a fork and eat, to make them independent. This is what we do…. These give a lot of joy to us and to our therapists.”

T

he Child Rehabilitation Centre is the heart of the Jerusalem Princess Basma Centre. 

Children (from birth-15 yrs) with a range of congenital, neuromuscular and developmental disorders receive rehabilitation services, alongside social and emotional assistance.

Children from Jerusalem are treated on an outpatient basis; children from the West Bank and Gaza enroll in two to three-week residential programs.

For these patients, the Centre offers: physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, sensory therapy, hydrotherapy, music therapy, therapies for autism and psychosocial support.

The Diocese of Ottawa will show its support for the Centre with a donation from funds raised on May 27 at the Bishop’s Gala.

The post Virtual therapy brings important care into patients’ homes appeared first on Perspective.

“Typically what people do is use a small version or a printed version of that pattern and they trace it with their finger, calling it a finger labyrinth, but what we’re doing in our programming is trying to find different ways of getting to that same quiet meditative and community place,” Barbara Brown explained when five members of the guild met with Crosstalk for an online conversation. On Dec. 22, Brown and fellow guild member Caroline Balderston Parry led a virtual online gathering to mark the winter solstice, asking attendees to prepare a candle, an orange and four cloves (a symbol of the sun and four directions), and a handful of freshly gathered evergreens. We’re “trying to weave together a kind of experience that parallels what it is like to be in a group walking the labyrinth together,” she said.

But winter presents another opportunity. “We are about to do our first snow labyrinth program.

“On Feb. 22, the Cathedral Labyrinth Guild is creating a snow labyrinth in Britannia Park. Unlike our usual labyrinths, this one will allow for social distancing; it will have a oneway path that leads into the centre, and then continues out by a different path.  

“We will also host an online program on February 22 at 7 pm.” 

(See the Cathedral website or Facebook Events for details).

About Labyrinths

Labyrinths are ancient patterns found all over the world. Although the word labyrinth is used interchangeably with maze, they are not the same. The guild’s webpage explains that “Mazes are a kind of puzzle with multiple paths and decision points, and sometimes high walls. Labyrinths, by contrast, are unicursal: a single path twisting and turning through several concentric circles or circuits to arrive at a central goal, without walls or other obstructions to visibility. There are no ‘wrong turns’ in a labyrinth.”

“In the Middle Ages, monks started drawing iterations of the labyrinth that incorporated the cross, so the pattern became more complex,” Brown explains. “A labyrinth that people gravitate to is one that was laid in the floor in the year 1200 at [the Cathedral in] Chartres, France, just north of Paris. That pattern has the cruciform incorporated into it, and at the centre there is a large circle with a rose pattern, so there’s all kinds of symbology involved in the labyrinth.”

People who could not make pilgrimages sometimes walked labyrinth paths. The labyrinth at Christ Church Cathedral in Ottawa is same pattern that is in Chartres. 

“People come to the Cathedral from all sorts of spiritual [backgrounds] and cultures. …. It’s a great way for people to get drawn together,” Diane Perazzo said.

Brown describes the whole labyrinth guild program as an outreach program. “While it is housed and held within the Cathedral, both the people who are part of the guild and the people who come are beyond the Cathedral community.”

We asked each of the guild members taking part in the interview to describe some of their experiences with labyrinth walking.

Barbara Brown

I was first introduced to the labyrinth at the Lumiere festival here in Ottawa. Ruth Richardson had set up a candlelit labyrinth with paper bags on the baseball diamond in the evening. I was there with my children who were 6 and 9 at the time. I had never seen a labyrinth, didn’t know anything about it. …Ruth gave us the 30 second introduction and … walking the labyrinth, I found myself in a kind of other space, very quiet, very interior space. I came out of that experience, looked around and there were no less than 50 screaming children running the labyrinth. It really got my attention. …

My experience of a snow labyrinth is always an individual one because I am the maker. I’ve rarely stumbled on one out there in the world, but I go out with the intention of making one. I am a visual artist and my visual art practice really helps me and has given me the skills to make these labyrinths…. I’ll make a labyrinth in the snow for the aesthetic purpose of taking a photograph, so it’s that overlay of this very human pattern informed by nature but overlaid on the landscape. [My other intention] is to give over to the experience of finding your way, remembering the pattern and having that very personal interplay in a physical way with the landscape, with the weather, with the sun, with the trees, with the setting. I find labyrinth walking keeps your brain busy at a sort of perfunctory level that allows you to access a more liminal or less rational part of your brain, so that experience is always a welcome one.

Diane Perazzo

A few years ago, I lived in a home further south out of Ottawa where we had room in the back to make a labyrinth.  We would have people come [to a gathering in February to celebrate Candlemas] and we’d have lanterns and we would do this beautiful snow labyrinth and then we would have a campfire in the woods. Oh my goodness, for me it was such a combination of community, spirituality, an opportunity to be outside during the cold months.

…Apparently, …when you walk a labyrinth, it’s a brain-balancing activity because you always turn yourself equally, as many times as you do the in and the out of the labyrinth. … I get such a sense of well-being when I have walked a labyrinth, one that’s designed in a geometrically proper way. 

… My involvement with the guild is fairly recent.. Caroline happened to invite me to a self-care gathering. I think it was about two months after my dad [an Anglican minister] passed way, and I had such a release of emotion at that time. I had no idea how much I bottled up inside of me. It was incredible. I’ve never had an experience like that since, but it was such a complete letting go of so much that I had been carrying.

Caroline Balderston Parry

Somewhere along the way, I got the idea of pausing on each of the petals of the flower shape in the middle of the Chartres model and listening for some kind of guidance or message, so now I’ve really ritualized that. I walk in a sunwise-clockwise direction. I pause on each of the petals. I do a little turnaround 360 degrees and listen to see if I have a message. I remember that and go to the next petal, so that I will get a series of affirmations of different kinds. When I am in my garden, I just turn to the four directions, so this morning I literally got “All is well” and then I went to the song, so the second direction was “Safely rest” and the third was “God is nigh” and I think the last message was “All Shall Be Well.” 

…There is definitely a balancing thing that goes on. Particularly in the big 11 circuits, you lose track of where you are. You are sort of close to the centre. You can’t quite tell how long it is going to take you. You are without bearings and yet you trust that this is a single path…. You can’t get lost…. So you just trust and then you find “Oh, here am I entering the centre” and then going out the same thing “Here am I leaving.” 

And in between … it’s a kind of shorthand of three or four Rs – As you stand at the mouth of the labyrinth, the gate in as it were, you remember your connection to all of creation and to whatever your spiritual orientation might be (and that comes from Matthew Fox in Creation Spirituality). When you feel like you’ve made that connection, then as you walk in you are doing the other three Rs. You are releasing anything that’s on your mind or a concern. You might be saying a prayer for a particular person, so you are thinking about them and releasing them into the circle. Or you might just be letting go of the shopping list or whatever. And when you get to the centre, you receive, you are listening for that message. So it is remember at the mouth, then release, receive, and then as you are returning … you are thinking about how you can respond to that message. What does it carry for you in the next hours or days? It is a very useful set of guideposts. 

Chris Hume
(Carleton Place Community Labyrinth)

I’ve just been on an amazing and interesting journey. …

Trusting the path is kind of saying that came to me early on with one of the books that I was given about labyrinths and it is something that I just keep close to my heart… Back in 2012 walking the labyrinth up at Burnstown, I was going into it, being open-minded. Was there anything that was going to be presented to me on my walk that day? Two phrases occurred to me: Take time for creativity and… make time for creativity. It was so strong that message, I thought “Okay I will.” Shortly thereafter, I was in Montreal and I stumbled upon a mosaic artist who was teaching courses, and I started going to those courses. I am now in my dining room, which is like a mosaic studio. I have created mosaics with an ancient labyrinth in them. I have also gone into the labyrinth just asking for a visual or an image when I am in the centre and come out and done a series of sketches of mandalas that have become different forms of art. So for me, there’s a real creative process tied in with it all.

Elspeth MacEwan

I find the labyrinth powerful when it comes to grief. There are times when you are crying on the labyrinth and there are times when you are laughing and it is just so exuberant with joy, so it is the full range of emotional experiences. And there’s a child part of me when I am out doing the winter labyrinth, I am like a kid in my snow pants, but then I might be listening to Hildegard von Bingen spiritual music, so I am this old woman, an elder, and I am a child at the same time on the same path.

Winter labyrinth at Gracefield

Mystery…
a liminal space, a magical time
Walking in darkness, subtle light, the moon…
An ancient path, alive with the spirits of all who have walked here before,
and all who walk with us.

At Gracefield Camp, in the January chill, a dozen of us don our parkas and snow pants, light our hurricane lanterns, and venture out into the night, while others cozy up to the fire with their knitting and sip hot chocolate. We make our way along the edge of the forest, silent but for the sound of boots on crisp snow; it’s a familiar path, yet stark and strange. Nestled in the forest, this labyrinth is usually snow-covered during the winter months; in the summer months, it is an exquisite garden path, always delighting walkers with new blossoms and surprising visions. In the dead of winter, a map, a pair of snowshoes and an hour or so of purposeful wandering in the waning afternoon sun unveils it. To a winter labyrinth keeper, this is a spiritual exercise, a pleasant time of preparation.

Stillness now, then a cold breath of wind.
Ann was with us the last time we made this journey. We carry her light too, remember her singing, her voice thin as she was approaching that veil…

Heaviness of grief.
blanket of snow
Warmth of community,
well-worn paths of friendship.

— Elspeth MacEwan
Cathedral Labyrinth Guild

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