Episode 95: “Feed Me To The Birds” with Dr. Gina Belton, Psychology Faculty at Saybrook University
Dr. Gina Belton, Core faculty in the Mind Body Medicine Program and Specialization Coordinator for Contemplative End of Life Care at Saybrook University.
Gina Subia Belton, Ph.D., is core faculty in the Mind-Body Medicine Program and Coordinator for the Contemplative End of Life Care Specialization. She is a transdisciplinary educator who teaches in Transformative Social Change, Integrative Social Work, and Ph.D. Psychology programs. Raised in California by generations of Elders and Ancestors, long before "the border crossed them," her Chicanx and Mescalero Apache identity is alive in Mezistaje consciousness, grounding her ethnothanatological research and decolonial praxis. Dr. Belton is the inaugural Chair of the President's JEDI Council at Saybrook University.
Gina Belton's teaching-learning philosophy is rooted in contemplative pedagogies and decolonial praxis, inviting students to turn toward deep learning through focused attention, reflection, and awareness practices, in learning as liberation. This teaching-learning experience is cultivated eco-psychologically to engage a student's coursework, research, and dissertation journey in such a way, that contemplation of feelings and insights, invites the connection of content with their learning and lived experience. Barbezat and Bush observed that "as students find more of themselves in their courses, they will make meaningful and lasting connections" to their scholarship and thus their lives and the lives of others. Gina is a sought-after dissertation committee member for her collaborative and compassionate support as well as her embodiment as a critical Indigenous researcher and her subject matter expertise in decolonial praxis, decolonizing approaches to research, thanatology, ethnogeriatrics, and qualitative research methodologies, which include Indigenous and critical methodologies, narrative inquiry, autoethnography, phenomenology, and community-based participatory action.
What End of Life Means for Dr. Gina Belton and How One Should Prepare for It?
It all starts with stories. One of the main ways Dr. Belton teaches is by sharing stories. It is not just an exercise and checking off the boxes. Dr. Belton knew she always meant to be a midwife but what she did not know it was meant to be at the end of life and not the beginning. She started by catching babies. The only way for her to become a midwife in the United States and in California was to go to nursing school. However, because of her cultural experiences, she recognized before she began the initiation, she had already had some cultural responses to the end of life with her own family’s experience. Dr. Belton comes from a lineage that recognizes that suffering is a part of being human and that end of life is inevitable. If you’re born then you’ll die. It is also important to recognize that our love and our relationships with those who are our beloved don’t end when we die. Moving forward to her initiation which was indoctrination, Dr. Belton had to leave all the beautiful, resonant, cultural awareness about end of life behind when she entered nursing school because she now had to be indoctrinated in the Western biomedical model, and their views of the end of life. As she was moving through the indoctrination, she was very fortunate that she was in one of the thirteen holistic nursing programs in the country that was psychologically oriented so some of the indoctrination wasn’t too restrictive. There are practices still in those environments of care that are attached to those views. When she became a labor and delivery nurse and was helping with childbirth, sometimes the babies die and mothers die in childbirth. She found awareness when she realized that she is no longer in an experience of indoctrination, this was her initiation to midwifery and the end of life. This is due to the many times she has held mothers who had held babies with their first breath also being their last breath. She has held entire families when their surgeon comes out and has to notify them saying the procedure didn’t work. Some of the most sacred aspects of the initiation were when Dr. Belton was practicing forensic nursing. This is when you take the DNA evidence because the person who is on the exam table is no longer alive as the person they were before the accident or assault. It brought a call forward to her that experience and even if she were to call on it today, she states that she is profoundly impacted by recognizing the depth of intimacy that it brought forward in her. Dr. Belton would tell her students in a gentle way, all the statistics of the end-of-life nursing education consortium and relate them to her experiences.
How Do You Help Someone Who is Not Prepared to Have The Discussion With Respect to End of Life Counseling?
It is important to recognize that the end-of-life experience is a continuum and that it is not linear. It is important to notice your emotions and asks yourself a question. Who are you sad for? Are you sad for yourself that you are misunderstanding? Are you sad, or do you want to show other people that you’re sad? The Western idea of dying is all about thinking we are born, then we’re going to have an arc of life, then maybe if we are lucky, we will get to old age and have this gentle kiss with hospice at the end. It sounds like a fantasy but that is not the reality of the world and life. There is just death, it is not good but it is not bad. It is all just about death. It is how a person dies that can have these qualifiers. See who else is experiencing this with you and interpret it as if it is an awful death or a significant or profound but it all depends on the perspective. People are active agents in the process of constantly changing or constantly engaging our humanity. It is constantly shocking and changing, evolving, actualizing it instead of a passive mechanism or parts upon which doctors or workplace systems act. Since we are active agents in our own lives, the thought holds that we cannot be reduced to components.
Is The Idea of Decolonizing Praxis At The End of Life Important?
This is important to respect and trust your own life. It is about agency and relationality. Indigenous knowledge systems acknowledged relationality. Relationality is the awareness of interdependence. This is this invisible spile protein that reminded all of us in the last two years and continues to remind us that we are all connected and interdependent. This is a decolonial praxis. A way to support this is by honoring and recognizing life regardless of whether it is you or a loved one to the last breath. The existential-humanistic foundation actually holds that we are actualizing every opportunity. We have the option to choose so if we choose to show up for those circumstances then that allows us to actualize our most precious selves or find our true face. These contribute to a very meaningful life which then when we come to our last breath we ask ourselves did I love well? and was I loved well? Supporting someone at the end of life from a de-colonial praxis is you loving well. When asking what makes meaning in our life, it is gonna comes from a contemplative approach. When we think about what is a contemplative approach to end of life as a specialization because we could be doing what many institutions are doing. The thing that is missing is the capacity to meet this experience in a way where we can touch someone’s existential.
Contact Dr. Gina Belton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gina-belton-phd-2a68b228/
Learn more about Saybrook University:https://www.saybrook.edu/
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