Deborah is a hospice nurse practitioner. During her 30-year career at the VA, she took care of more than 10,000 DYING veterans. They revealed a wound that lurked in their souls – a wound that was different than the PTSD that many of them had. Some Veterans called it a “Soul Injury”. Soul Injury is defined as: A wound to our sense of self – our real self behind the facade. Soul Injury has also been extrapolated beyond moral injuries that veterans sometimes sustain. The broader Soul Injury category includes marginalized populations that are often made to feel “less than” because of their race, their gender, their religion, or their sexual orientation. It includes childhood wounds that often persist a lifetime if they were bullied or made to feel “not good enough”. Soul restoration includes learning how to mourn losses and forgive hurts caused by us and hurts caused to us, otherwise, we stay stuck in the past. Grieving and forgiving free us to enter fresh into the present moment without unmourned loss/hurt and unforgiven guilt/shame weighing us down.
Few people have been with 10,000 dying veterans; five VA hospice nurses have. What these nurses witnessed is providing lessons for the rest of the world. The lessons are about how to attain personal peace, and ironically, these lessons have come from people who were trained for war and from people who were dying. The nurses discovered a phenomenon that has become identified as “Soul Injury®.” Led by Deborah Grassman, the five nurses left the VA to start Opus Peace, a non-profit organization with a mission of taking the Soul Injury® message to people who are not veterans and to people who are not dying. These pioneering nurses now provide educational materials and self- help tools to help people learn how to self-compassionately connect with the part of self-holding their pain and shame, allowing people to re-connect with their soul – with who they really are. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx