Some days you go home carrying something you can't set down. The shift replays on the drive. You give everything you have to the people on your team or the patients in your care, and there isn't much left for the people you love.
What you carry is real. It matters. And you are not carrying it alone.
Healthcare recruited you because you care, then asked you to bury what it costs to sit with suffering and handed you a word, burnout, that blames you for a wound the system inflicted.
One Mountain, Many Paths is a field guide for the people who carry other people. Across every faith tradition, and none, we arrive at the same handful of practices for standing beside someone who is ill or in pain. This book hands them back to you as relief, before anything else.
The first chapter is yours to read, free.
Chapter One
The Ninth Floor
Free to read. No cost, no catch.
Read Chapter One free
Tell me where to send it, and I'll put the chapter in your inbox.
I'll send the chapter and an occasional note. No countdowns, no selling. I'll tell you when there's news.
Who's writing this
I've spent more than twenty-five years as a clinical psychologist, sitting with more than 25,000 patients. I've led hospital teams, managed budgets in the millions, and stood in the hallway after a code with nurses who had nothing left to give. In 2011 I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and learned the other side of the hospital bed. I know what it is to carry patients, to carry the people who carry patients, and to be carried.
I write and speak for the people who carry other people.
Patrick Swift, PhD, MBA, FACHE
The One Mountain, Many Paths™ series
One Mountain, Many Paths™ is a book and lecture series.
Book One — One Mountain, Many Paths: Common Sense for the Spiritual Traveler (2007). The first book in the series. It won a Nautilus Award and a Small Press Best Books Award.
Book Two — One Mountain, Many Paths: A Field Guide for Healthcare Workers and Leaders Who Carry Other People. The new volume, awaiting an agent or publisher, and the one whose first chapter is yours to read above.
Further volumes are planned.