Beatitudes Community
Log in
Log in

Year: 2017

From Physical Therapy to Personal Fitness

Wed, January 25, 2017 Published by

Graduating from physical therapy is a good reason to celebrate and there’s no better time to start a fitness program, even if you’ve never been physically active. Regular exercise will help you maintain your therapy results and will keep you feeling good for a long time. Create a plan to stay active and fit, even when you don’t have a therapist watching your every move.

Start Smart

Physical therapists usually discharge patients with home exercise instructions. Before you finish therapy, ask any questions you have about exercises you should and shouldn’t be doing. You should have a clear understanding of which exercises to do, how to do them, how often, for how long, at what level and how you should feel while exercising.  As you begin exercising on your own, go easy. Follow your therapist’s instructions to increase your exercise level to avoid injury and discourage setbacks.

The benefits of exercise last only as long as you stay active, so keep a copy of your exercise plan where you’ll see it every day. Track your progress to keep yourself honest. Otherwise, you may end up right where you started, with pain, limited function or injury.

At Home

Beginning your post-rehab personal fitness program at home is a great idea for convenience, privacy, and affordability. Set up your home exercise space with safety in mind. Clear your floor of slipping and tripping hazards and make sure you have a stable surface to sit, stand or lie on and something to hold onto for balance.

Gym Time

You may wish to exercise at a local gym or recreation center, especially if you already belonged to one before you underwent physical therapy. If your home exercise plan calls for using exercise equipment or machines, working out at a gym is a convenient way to go.

Step It Up

When you’re ready to move beyond your post-rehab exercise program, schedule a few sessions with a certified personal trainer specializing in post-rehab training. Doing so decreases your risk of injury and pain as you continue to build strength and fitness.

Speak Up

Once you begin your personal fitness program, you may have some questions. You might try some of the exercises and realize that for some reason, they don’t feel right to you. Instead of ditching the entire plan, contact your physical therapist or trainer. Some simple adjustments to your routine could make all the difference.

Thermometer or Thermostat

Tue, January 24, 2017 Published by

Are you a thermometer or a thermostat?  It’s a question Jesus would ask even though they didn’t have them in that day.  How many say thermometer?  Thermostat?  How many say what the heck am I talking about?  A thermometer reflects its environment; it shows what the temperature is – if it’s hot outside, it says it’s hot; if it’s cold, it says it’s cold.  A thermometer is in a constant state of fluctuation. It can be “up” and “down” within hours. It is a reactionary instrument. It is informational, relaying valuable news to the reader, but lacking the ability to change that news. It exerts no influence on what’s around it – rather it is influenced by it.  It doesn’t take much to be a thermometer—all you have to do is be agreeable.  All you have to do is to go along with what everyone else wants.  All you have to do is think of your own comfort and ease.  When others around you are joking – all you need to do is to be quiet, to not make waves – you may even join with them in a gentle put down.  How many times are we caught up in thermometer life? God did not intend us to be mere thermometers.  Paul said, “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  He knew how easy it is to just reflect the world around us, allow our lives to be influenced by life’s temperature around us. A Peanuts cartoon shows Peppermint Patty talking to Charlie Brown.  She says, “Guess what, Chuck.  The first day of school and I got sent to the principal’s office.  It was your fault, Chuck.”  He says, “My fault?  How could it be my fault?  Why do you say everything is my fault?”  She says, “You’re my friend, aren’t you Chuck?  You should have been a better influence on me.”  Peppermint Patty has a thing or two to learn about personal responsibility but she has a point.  We do have an influence, for good or bad, on our friends, on our family, on those around us.

There is value in gauging and knowing what the temperature is around you; what people are thinking and saying. It can be helpful to know the current conditions that influence our society. But we are not just in the news reporting business. We can make news and create history. We  can be thermostats, take initiative in changing what is wrong in the world.  A thermostat has power, it sets the temperature, it changes things.  Someone who lives a thermostat life is an influencer. It is well connected and cannot function alone. It has a power source to activate it and sends electronic messages to a furnace that supplies enough heat to raise the temperature in the room. The thermostat is set to a determined temperature regardless of room environment. It is in partnership with a furnace that can cause real change.  We can be influencers or we can simply speak of how bad things are.  We can lament the state of things and do nothing or we can become a catalyst for real and lasting change.  Are you a thermostat or a thermometer?

 

A Beautiful Tapestry

Mon, January 23, 2017 Published by

With the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday still fresh in our hearts and minds, I am reminded of one of the greatest reasons I love being a member of Beatitudes Campus.  We are a beautiful tapestry of all different types of people.  All unique and unrepeatable in our own ways.  Much like our country, we have woven together the best of the best from all sorts of backgrounds, heritages, races, religions, countries, sexual orientations, physical abilities, educational backgrounds and ages.

Did you know we have Beatitudians from a multitude of countries?  Even more from faith affiliations other than Christian.  Racially, we are the living metaphor of a perfectly woven tapestry with nearly 60% of us identifying as other than Caucasian.  We are Democrats, Republicans, Independents and no political affiliations.  We are male and female and some who identify with neither.  We are young, old and older.  We are straight, gay, bi-sexual and transgender.  We are single, married, divorced and widowed.  We have children with two parents at home, single parents, married without children, grandparents raising grandkids and some of us are happily single forever. We are educated with advanced degrees and some with high school educations only.  We speak English, German, Spanish, Chinese, Hungarian, French, Romanian and some languages you have yet to hear.  We are financially wealthy, middle class, and some of us are just struggling to make ends meet.

Some of us remember every minute of our life and will tell you about it, and some of us have watched those memories slip away, but we can still feel them inside of us even if we cannot tell you about them now. We walk unassisted, with canes, with walkers and use mobile chairs to get to where we want to go.  Not a person in this community is valued anymore or any less for who we are.  It does not matter where we live on campus, which department we work in, whether we are staff, resident or administration, we are all equal.

What makes it even more beautiful is that we continue to weave more diversity into our tapestry whenever the opportunity is available to us.  We yearn for new threads to be incorporated into our growing cloth.  We know our diversity is one of our greatest strengths as a community.   As a Campus, we come from a faith heritage that sees every child of God as that unique, beautiful, unrepeatable and loved beyond love creation.  How can we not see our coming together as a community as anything less than the most beautiful as all of the different threads of our histories and heritages come together?

So want to see something beautiful?  Just look around you and see all of the amazing people who make up Beatitudes Campus.  And they see you as beautiful as well.  It doesn’t get more beautiful than this.

Hello Beatitudes!

Wed, January 18, 2017 Published by

I was asked to write my first article while Jon Schilling was on vacation.  Since I’m one of the newest full time employees, I thought that it would be best for me to take this opportunity to introduce myself to Beatitudes Campus.

I am a personal fitness instructor, certified by the National Academy of Sports Medicine since 1996.  I worked as a fitness instructor in various Health Clubs and Medical Clinics. Most of that time I worked at Mountain Shadows Resort and Golf Club in Paradise Valley.

I am a new full time employee, but I am not new to this campus.  Many of you know me from my previous positions.  I started working here for Beatitudes at Home in July, 2012.

I later became the group instructor in the Functional Fitness class.

I left Beatitudes at Home to work in a physical therapy clinic in 2013 for two years, but I continued to be the instructor for the Functional Fitness class.

From the beginning, I made it clear that I enjoyed working with the people in this environment and that I wanted to work here full time.  The average age of my fitness clients, over the course of my 20 year career, has always been 50+ years old.

My new position title is Fitness Specialist.  My duties include Fitness Center Attendant, Personal Fitness Instructor and Group Fitness Instructor.

Now that I am here full time, I will channel all of my studies into fitness training for residents 65 years and older.   This means that I will find the best ways to address age related physical illnesses and injuries.

I am gathering as much literature on dementia as I can find, so I can create effective workout strategies that best serve residents who may suffer from this terrible disease.  I also want to be able to offer useful tips to help friends, relatives and caregivers to communicate with them through troubling times.

The physical therapists who work on campus are wonderful!  I have a good relationship with them.  Residents who have suffered from an illness or injury that work with the campus therapists may want to extend their physical rehabilitation long after they have been discharged.  I can do one on one fitness sessions to extend the physical therapist’s treatment strategies within my limitations as a Certified Fitness Trainer.  It has been three months since I have been a full time employee on Campus.  I DO NOT need any more time to analyze my decision to take this position.  I already concluded that I made the BEST decision to join this team.

I feel very comfortable with the staff and the residents.  I enjoy getting opportunities to share laughs with everyone, especially when I “goof up” during my fitness classes.

If I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you yet, please stop me in the hallways, come to one of my fitness classes or stop by the Fitness Center.  I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO IT!

The Stories Of Our Faith

Tue, January 17, 2017 Published by

Researchers at universities in Durham, UK, and Lisbon, Portugal, recently suggested that the origins of the stories of Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin stretch back four thousand years. When the Brothers Grimm began to compile such fairy tales in the nineteenth century, their project fostered a unity between the various German speaking states. The notion that deep in the woods was a boundless store of common stories affirmed the emerging identity of what became a united German people.

That’s how a bunch of stories combine to form a powerful narrative. When the people of Judah found themselves in exile in Babylon, they looked deep into their collective soul to discover how they’d come to be there. They looked at their collection of chronicles; of how God created the world, called a people, saved them from famine and slavery, made a covenant with them, and gave them land, king, and temple, before things then went astray.

But then, as with the Brothers Grimm, came the crucial moment: the exiled people of Judah looked at those accounts together and witnessed a faith which taught that God would save them as before, and that, most remarkably of all, they were as close to God in exile as they had been in the Promised Land. When the early Christians compiled the New Testament seven centuries later, they discovered the same truth, that God had found a way to save them again and they came to see Christ’s suffering, not as God’s abandonment, but as the closest humanity had ever come to God’s heart.

When I say I’m a Christian, I’m naming the story of which I believe I’m a part, and in which I find meaning, truth and purpose. I don’t pretend to believe that everyone shares my convictions. I’m not too interested in people telling me what they don’t believe, but rather in what they do believe – what story they feel a part of, and most importantly, how that story converges to clarify their identity and purpose.

Story turns to faith when people believe that God has entered their story. Faith turns to life when people say, ‘There’s a part for me in that story too.’

Legacy Left Behind

Mon, January 16, 2017 Published by

There are many reasons we should honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy.  Not only was he a transformational spokesperson for nonviolent activism during the Civil Rights Movement, he was an inspirational leader whose legacy continues to help pave the way to inclusion which we hold near and dear to us here at Beatitudes Campus.  He was a visionary who was persistent, who knew when to push forward and when to pull back, and was someone who knew how to show compassion to those very people who were fighting against him. Below are a few excerpts from Jeff Goins’ blog entitled 5 Lessons from MLK on Living, Leading, & Communicating at http://goinswriter.com. Jeff blogs what many of us think and feel:

“Martin Luther King, Jr. left us a legacy, teaching us as much through what he did as what he said. Maybe more. One of the many lessons Dr. King exemplified was the effectiveness of a life lived out loud, one in which a person’s words and dreams are backed by considerable action.  He showed us our lives must be lived intentionally and without regret, that words mean something and we must speak up in the face of injustice. He taught us that it is one thing to say you have an idea and quite another to act on it. And the man’s courage still inspires millions of people today.

I’m glad Dr. King spoke up and then acted. The world is a better place because of it.

Telling the truth is dangerous

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

There is nothing safe about being honest, nothing comfortable about doing the right thing. If anything, when you are committed to saying what needs to be said, it will likely get you into trouble.  But the fruit is worth the pain.  You’re the one who has to decide this, though. Choose wisely before opening your mouth, and be aware of the consequences. Because as with MLK, this may cost you your life.  But of course, if you don’t speak, it could cost you something far greater.

The first person you need to convince is yourself

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

MLK often spoke about the importance of believing in yourself before trying to convince others to do so. He knew that if we doubt ourselves, so will others. He also knew human beings cannot act according to their identity until they believe it about themselves.  In the field of creative disciplines, we see this to be especially true. “A writer is a writer when he says he is,” says Steven Pressfield.  There’s something about the power of declaration via our voices that forces our hands to act. This may be the most important lesson Dr. King taught us: we are what we are when we decide to be it.

May we honor MLK’s memory by boldly being and believing who we are, then acting on it.”

 

New Year – Great Time to Update Your Information with HR!

Fri, January 13, 2017 Published by

Did you have a life change in 2016?  Moved?  Married? Divorced? New significant other you want for an emergency contact? Please stop by HR today to let us know about any life changes.  We want to especially make sure your home address on file is correct before W-2s are printed in case we have to mail to your home. Did you claim exempt in 2016? If so, you need to come to the HR office and fill out a form stating you want to remain exempt or change to have taxes taken out. W-2s are ready and available to be picked up in HR from 7AM-4:30PM Monday-Friday. All W-2s that are not picked up by Friday January 20th with be mailed out. You may only pick up your own W-2. You may not pick up your employee, spouse, or child’s W-2. The new year is also a great time to update emergency contacts and life insurance beneficiaries if needed! Thank you for your assistance!