Last month, I wrote about our nurse speaker, Tara Rynders (read it here), and promised you that there was more to the story. This is the second installment of my interview with Tara.

I know a kindred spirit when I meet one, and Tara and I share a love of dance. We both grew up loving dance. Not dance as in professional dancer, but dance as in a vehicle for expressing emotions, whether joy, grief, frustration, or in Tara’s case, compassion fatigue.

Compassion fatigue is the physical and emotional withdrawal experienced by those who care for sick or traumatized people over an extended period.

Her love of dance and her own experience as a nurse dealing with compassion fatigue led her to bring dance into her workshops as a vehicle for healing. It’s a program that is by nurses and for nurses and gets people out of their heads and into their bodies.

TARA RYNDERS, RN, MFA, BSN, BA

The Healing Power of Dance

   “I remember not really being able to have the compassion for people that I used to have.  I felt desensitized to their pain and their suffering. After that I realized that I was tired and that I was experiencing compassion fatigue,” she told me as our interview continued into its second phase.

“I realized that compassion fatigue and burnout were stealing the joy that we nurses can receive for caring for another human being.

“I’ve always used dance as a way to express my feelings and to heal,” she said, “even though I didn’t have the language for that then; it’s just how I was able to care for myself.”

Tara told me that it was dance that gave her a safe place in the midst of a tumultuous upbringing.

“And so it was dance I returned to when my mother passed away — I was 26 and she was 49. I felt like my entire world, my foundation, was gone.

“After she died, I felt like I had to run to what brings me joy right now,” Tara said, “because nothing was bringing me joy in this godforsaken world. And so I went back to school and got my master’s in dance.

“I was able to dance every single day. I created work, choreography around my grief. I could be with other people again. I was able to be in relationship with other people who saw me sad and cared for me and showed up for me.

“That was a really healing time and helped me bring together both my passion for healing and my passion for dance. I was able to see in real time how it was impacting my grief.

“But it wasn’t until my ectopic pregnancy when I almost died that I realized that this could also be helpful for other people. I realized how important nurses are — that they are everything to a patient. And I began researching patient outcomes, patient experiences. I wanted every patient to feel seen, and heard, and cared for, every time.

“Maybe if I could bring dance into my workshops, I thought, it would help nurses heal. We all move, we know how to walk. I asked myself can we use our everyday movements to create spaces of healing together?

“I knew instinctively, though, not to call it dance because people are very quick to say, ‘I’m not a dancer, I don’t like dancing.’ And so, we call it movement.”

THE CLINIC

    In 2017 she founded The Clinic, a six-week workshop series for nurses designed to combat compassion fatigue and burnout through resiliency training with the arts, music, dance, and performance.

“It’s based in play so it brings us out of our heads and into our bodies, and just like children, we get curious again and start thinking about things differently. We start questioning things. In the workshops we use a combination of theater and acting and role playing to address certain really deep and tough questions and issues at hand, but we do it through a playful lens.

“The hospital benefits from employees taking care of themselves because when nurses are caring for themselves, they are caring for their patients, and they are experiencing satisfaction as nurses. They’re empowered to care for others in a healthy way, which decreases turnover and increases satisfaction for both patients and nurses. Ultimately, everyone wins.

“This is a program for nurses, by nurses.  I think that’s important because you’re being seen and heard by someone else who has been through what you’ve been through, and although they may seem to be different stories, the underlying themes are the same.”

In one participant’s words: “Being able to move my body helped me move through certain pieces of my story that weren’t necessarily comfortable. Seeing other people struggle with the same things that I struggle with really helped. It built camaraderie. Everybody’s in a group, nobody’s going through it alone.”

“A really important component of this workshop series is that we’re gathering data for the IRB — Institutional Review Board,” Tara said. “Together with Dr. Janet Sohal, I am a co-principal investigator or (PI) in the Nurse Scholars Program with Kaiser Permanente in Northern California.  We are assessing the impact of the workshops on burnout and self-compassion. We will be adding one more year of workshops to the data and we’ll be able to publish in early 2025. Gathering this data will create evidence-based practices that can be used for nurses’ care, and it can also be brought to the bedside and used for the care of our patients.”

I think that the ideas Tara is sharing here create experiences that are hard to convey in words, so I strongly encourage you to watch this 4-minute video to get a glimpse of the possibilities. To learn more about bringing the benefits of Tara’s workshops to your organization, give me a call at 503-699-5031 or email barbara@speakwellbeing.com.

I’d say every nurse I’ve ever talked with has told me: “Once a nurse, always a nurse.” In nurse speaker Tara Rynder’s case, I’d add, “Once a dancer, always a dancer, and the combination is good for everyone.”

The Twirler

  That got me thinking back about the importance of dancing in my own life. I have sweet memories of dancing in the aisles of the auditorium of our local high school when I was little girl. My mother was a piano accompanist, and she would often spend Saturday afternoons practicing at the high school. I would tag along and twirl up and down the aisles of the empty auditorium, totally free of inhibition, while immersed in my imagination of stardom.

Today, anyone who knows me, knows I love my favorite exercise, Nia dancing. It’s not only good aerobic exercise, but the music and movements combine to benefit body, mind, and soul. Sometimes it inspires laughter, sometimes tears, but I can say I’m always glad I spent my time dancing.

   During the pandemic, I started dancing Nia online with my friends from Michigan, and we continue two times a week to this day. Last summer, when live classes were on break, I signed up for Nia on Demand, and I am loving it.  I dance to it almost every day. They offer short dance breaks (5 -10 minutes), and classes from 10 to 40 minutes long, as well as full 60-minute classes, and much more, with teachers from around the world.

If you’re looking for something fun to do that’s good for your body, mind, and soul, I highly recommend it.

Until next time, maybe take a dance break for your well being and those you love.

Barbara

For Your Well Being is published with the intention of bringing you insider speaker reports, exclusive stories about special events around the country, meeting planner tips, and fun stuff from the worlds of health and well being. Be well and be in the know!

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