Need some help with your selfcare? Head over to the Wellbeing Resource on our website (qnis.org.uk)

Capacitar is a Spanish word meaning empower.

And that's certainly what Capacitar does for all those who take part in the programme. It has the strapline Healing Ourselves, Healing Our World.

Clare Cable speaks to Reverend Ali Newell from Capacitar Scotland about what Capacitar is, who it's for and how it works.

Key Takeaways

• Capacitar is a global grassroots movement founded by Dr Pat Cane.
• It involves a variety of self care practices from Tai Chi, breath work all the way to head and finger holds. They can be performed on yourself or others.
• The popular education approach of Capacitar means that rather than positioning themselves as experts or gurus, practitioners share what works for them in a spirit of humility and open collaboration.
• The practices are not about perfection, rather taking the time out and doing them.

More about Reverend Ali Newell

Ali Newell recently retired from being Associate Chaplain at Edinburgh University where she led eco-spirituality courses, Capacitar courses, nature and mindfulness courses and ran interfaith pilgrimages for peace.

She is a trained counsellor and mindfulness teacher and has taught Capacitar practices for trauma healing and transformation for 10 years after training with Capacitar founder Dr Pat Cane.

For the last 2 years she has been training QNIS nurses in Capacitar practices for wellbeing.    

Resources mentioned in this episode

Capacitar Scotland - you can sign up for the newsletter here

QNIS Capacitar practices

You can find a whole suite of useful wellbeing resources to help you on your self-care journey at our website.

Wellbeing Resource (qnis.org.uk)

These resources do not replace professional advice; they are a series of tools that people or groups can use for self-care or self-management. If you’re in need of significant help or support here’s where you can go. 

Hello, and welcome to this podcast. My name's Claire Cable, Chief Executive and Nurse Director of the Queen's Nursing Institute Scotland. QNIS has been supporting community nursing and midwifery since 1889. While our work may have changed since then, we continue to support and champion community nursing and midwifery at the heart of enabling health and recovery in every community in Scotland. As caring professionals, we often neglect our self-care, which, when unchecked over time, can lead to burnout.

These pressures are exacerbated by the current stress of unprecedented demand on our health and care services. Not to mention the cost of living crisis we find ourselves in. Every day, we are seeing the impact on individuals, families, and colleagues. We can't change any of that, but it means that taking time to check in with ourselves is even more important. This series of podcasts seeks to inform and inspire by introducing you to practices which may be familiar, perhaps with a fresh perspective by offering firsthand stories of the benefits for others. It's an opportunity to pause and take a few moments to reflect.

In today's episode, we are delighted to welcome the Reverend Ali Newell, and we are going to be talking about Capacitar, a word which means empower in Spanish. And Ali will tell us a bit more about that in a minute. Ali has been involved with Capacitar Scotland for over 10 years. She's been privileged to welcome the founder of Capacitar, Dr. Patricia (Pat) Cane, to Scotland on many occasions, working with Pat to deliver trainings.

As associate chaplain at the University of Edinburgh, Ali offered Capacitar sessions for staff and students at the university. She's an experienced retreat leader and sees Capacitar as a wonderful opportunity to engage with practices of well-being that connect us across the world through a network of others. So, Ali, welcome to the QNIS Podcast. We're delighted to have you with us. And I wonder if you would start by telling us maybe a little bit more about yourself and how you came upon Capacitar, but tell us what is Capacitar?

The story of Capacitar is a wonderful story, and it began with Pat Cane being in Central America in Nicaragua during the war. This was 1998, and she was involved in a community art project. But during the time there, she was also involved in self-care practices. So she was doing Tai Chi and acupressure. And the people there said, "We like the work you're doing in the community art project, but what we really are interested in is what you're doing for your own self-care. Can you teach us the Tai Chi?

Can you teach us the acupressure?" Which she did. And this then spread, and Guatemalan unionists became interested in it. She went down to Honduras after Hurricane Mitch after the disaster there and helped. And then it spread throughout Central America, throughout South America, into South Africa, Rwanda, Congo, Palestine, and then finally into the latest country with us, Afghanistan. So it spread over five continents and 45 countries. And what she was bringing was simple tools for people in energy well-ness practices.

So tell me, how did you get involved, Ali, and as a caring professional yourself, as a chaplain, what was it that drew you to the practices? What was it that made you think, "Aha, this is something important that I can use?"

Well, I had been very interested in well-being practices, and I was on a retreat where somebody was speaking about this woman, and it was this woman, Pat Cane, who was involved in bodywork. At that stage, I was a counselor. I was doing a lot of listening to people, but I was really interested in how the body responded and I felt I wanted more training in that area. So I went to one of her trainings in London and I thought, "This is marvelous," because it was such an invitation for people to access their own healing and find their own ways to heal.

So I wanted to bring her back up to Scotland and I did that, and that was about 15 years ago. Since then, we've been doing trainings here. But the strapline for Capacitar, which as you said, means to empower, to enliven, to bring alive, to awaken in Spanish. And the strapline is healing ourselves, healing the world. And that really also appealed to me because I was always interested in, yes, individual healing, but also what was it that helped us heal communities as well.

Ali, thank you. I absolutely love the story of Capacitar. I love the fact that it's such a grassroots movement and it has come from people across the world who have been looking to find practices to heal themselves and that they have been spread from person to person. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about the practices themselves and perhaps those that have been particularly important for you.

Yes. Well, perhaps we can start with Tai Chi, it's one of the most popular practices. And if you've ever watched Tai Chi, it involves the whole body and it's extremely calming and grounding, but it's also something because you're stretching, it's good for the circulation, it's good for the muscles, the joints. And in Tai Chi, usually, by the end, people feel a sense of uplift, they feel more relaxed, and they also feel centered. And I think this is one of the great things about Capacitar. It's bringing people into a sense of being present to being here and now. And the Tai Chi comes with visualization.

So it's not just the same as what you would get if you went to a regular class on Tai Chi. It comes with some visualization, which is also very helpful in changing people's moods, I think. But many people who are participating in these practices are there because they have experienced trauma or they've experienced really extreme stress. And one of the things that is happening, it's working with meridians and it's helping to release blocked energy. So when we're traumatized, we feel that in our bodies, don't we? And there's a sense in which we become frozen that the trauma, whatever it was, that fight-flight moment, it's frozen in our bodies. So these practices help to release and to allow the energy to flow more easily. And that's one of the reasons I think Tai Chi is such a wonderful place to begin in describing the practices.

So if I understand correctly, Ali, the Capacitar version of Tai Chi involves visualization as well. And how is it different in any other ways from the Tai Chi practices that one might find elsewhere?

There's very little, "You've got to do this perfectly." You just join in and you do it as best you can, and that's enough. And you enjoy it as best you can. So I would say that's a very big difference from trying to learn to do something in a particularly careful way, which would often happen.

Wonderful. So it's very grounded, very perhaps simplified to the point where people can teach one another rather than needed to be a certified expert.

Exactly. And the visualization very often connects with the elements and connects with nature. So for instance, you begin with your feet on the ground and you connect with the earth underneath you. And then if you're reaching up in one of the movements, you're aware of the sun's energy. So it connects with nature and that makes it also very appealing to people.

So, Ali, you've been working with QNIS and supporting many community nurses to learn Capacitar practices. From your experience in working with community nurses and midwives, can you maybe share some practices that you think might be particularly useful to community health and care practitioners?

Sure. Well, I've spoken about the Tai Chi already, but let me describe in a given day what might be good practices throughout the day. So the Tai Chi is a good one early morning, but so would sun salutation be good because, again, it's full of stretches and when you're waking up in the morning, it's lovely. And it comes with visualization again, the Capacitar version. Then there's Pal Dan Gum, which is drawing, as yoga does, from ancient practice, this time in China and Korea. And it is a little bit more lively than Tai Chi. It has some wonderful postures for feeling strong in yourself, feeling nobody will push you around. And then many, many different practices for joints and different areas in the body. So that's a good one.

Then if you were moving through the day and you were, say, maybe going in for a visit somewhere or just facing something that was a little bit more difficult but you had a few more minutes either sitting in your car or sitting in your office before you went, then I would say that a simple breath work practice would be very good just to calm and ground you. And these are very, very simple. Take a few minutes where you're breathing in and you're breathing out and you're just sensing the rhythm and you're coming into a sense of, again, the present moment and letting go of any stresses and strains. Or you might like to try finger holds. Now these are very good if you are feeling flustered or anxious about anything because they're, again, about managing emotions.

So you're releasing emotions and you're holding different finger and breathing in and then breathing out using the finger as a way of connecting with that emotion. So if I could just take a moment to describe that. The thumb is connected with grief. So you're releasing anything that's to do with sadness, pain, and grief. The second finger is to do with fear. So you're releasing what is to do with fear. And when you're breathing in, you're breathing in courage, you're breathing in a sense of resilience. The third finger is to do with anger. So you release that kind of negative anger and you breathe in a sense of calm or a sense of being able to be open to change because anger can hold within it an energy for positive change.

The fourth finger is the finger for anxiety. So again, releasing anxiety and breathing in strength and calm. And the fifth finger is the finger of low self-esteem. So we're breathing out any sense of negativity about ourselves and breathing in a sense of our value. So this would need to be explained in much greater detail, but you can see how that can be a very short practice to manage difficult emotions as we're en route to visits or a difficult session.

And I think the finger holds are just such a fabulous practice for all of us at any time, if we can't sleep, and children love them. I know that so many children's nurses and health visitors have used those practices often with their own children, but also with families who they support if they felt that's appropriate. So thank you. And just to let everybody know that all those practices are on the QNIS website.

Ali and her other colleagues from Capacitar Scotland have supported us in creating a series of short videos that will enable you to see all those practices so that you can follow along. So, Ali, I just wonder if you'd tell us a little bit more about, for you as an individual, what are the practices that make a difference to your day or your week? What are the go-to practices that are important to you?

I use all of those that I've mentioned, and maybe I could say a little bit more about some of the ones I haven't mentioned. So there are some that are very good for boundaries and some of the mudras are very good. Now, mudras are hand gestures. They're drawing from the east, from India. And some of them are holding very simple positions with the hands, but they remind me that I'm my separate person and I don't need to be entangled with someone else's stuff.

And that's so important for nurses and midwives. It's so easy to get entangled in other people's stuff. So thank you. That's a really helpful one to share.

And I would also mention the acupressure. I've used that a lot with others. And there's some very simple, again, points to hold that can make a big difference. In Pat's emergency toolkit, she has all the practices I've mentioned, and they're now translated into 27 different languages across the world. But the acupressure, there's one in there called the head, neck, shoulder release, and acupressure is particularly good for pain. It does help the emotional stuff too, but it's also good for just aches and pains in the body. And the head, neck, shoulder release is in that emergency toolkit because it's a very simple protocol to offer to someone else. The other thing that's in that toolkit, which I just love, I love the response that I get from people when I use it, these are the head holds.

And the head holds I find I could use if somebody was overwhelmed. So they would come in and you would hold maybe a hand on the front of their head and the other hand at the back of the head. And this is one that is really good, they say, for nightmares, for people that are traumatized as well. But it's just really good for simply calming someone down. And if I would have someone come into the room and they were really a little bit out of control and I would offer the head holds, I almost always felt that at the end of it, they would be able to have a conversation with me because they had calmed down enough to do that.

I love the head holds. And the beautiful thing about the head holds is that for anyone who is uncomfortable with touch, they can be offered without needing to touch by just holding hands in the area just above and back in front of somebody's head for someone who, for whatever reason, is not comfortable with that very gentle touch that the head holds can bring. So I think they're beautiful practices.

The other thing that's actually important to say is that all of the practices we can teach so that people can do them to themselves. So nurses who are in the way of touch, it's a little bit different and people are used to being touched by nurses, but when you're not working in that context, or if you're working the context of gender violence or more difficult situations, then people can do the practices to themselves. And it's very simple to teach that.

And I think they're really great for us to be able to do for ourselves. I certainly know that for me, sometimes I can feel the beginnings of a really nasty headache or just I've been sitting at my desk too long and that head, neck, shoulder release is just great when you've been sitting in front of Microsoft Teams for a protracted period. And that's the lovely thing about being able to share things that work for you. Would you just tell us a little bit more about that popular education approach? Again, it's wonderfully democratic. I'm sharing something that works for me with you rather than I am the expert, the guru, and I am teaching you as a recipient, which has that whole power with it. I wonder if you just tell us a little bit more about the popular education approach.

Maybe I should just mention that if you go on the Capacitar website and you go under who we are, or I think it's something like that, and then you click down and there's history and you open that, there's a wonderful video. It's about 15 to 20 minutes on the story of Capacitar, and it shows all these different countries. It shows people speaking from the Congo in South Africa and Nicaragua and El Salvador or Palestine saying why they're important to them. And these are all people who have learned the practices, use them themselves, and believe in them because there's no point in sharing something that you haven't found helpful yourself.

And then they've shared them with people in their village or people at their work or their families or whoever it is. And if you have a look at the pictures, often there are circles of people and they're offering the practices to one another. So I would say that we are teaching the nurses online, and sometimes it feels a little sad that they can't offer the practices to one another like the head holds or the acupressure. And we have to do them to ourselves when we're teaching online, but actually, it still works. So yes, the sense of this popular education is so that it can reach far more people that way.

Well, that's brilliant. And it feels so completely authentic that we're sharing things that are important to us, that enable us to manage our ourselves and are sharing them in a spirit of humility and a spirit of take what's useful, leave the rest rather than it being a prescription. And I think that's one of the wonderful things about Capacitar.

And maybe just to add in terms of this popular education approach, when we've been working with the nurses and sharing Capacitar practices, I think they have loved to see who it's also being used with. So it's being used with those working with refugees or refugees. It's being used with caregivers of all different types. It's being used by those who are working in mental health, substance abuse.

It's been used in all these situations of conflict and war and poverty and pandemic. That was really, wasn't it, Clare, what brought you into Capacitar, the realization that the nurses were so exhausted because of the pandemic? So I think it allows them to feel part of a much bigger thing because of this popular education approach.

And you're right, QNIS as a charity, absolutely, sort of dialed up. Our use of Capacitar during the pandemic because we could see the trauma that practitioners were experiencing and online we're able to offer rather homemade videos at that time as we all were recording videos in our back gardens to share the practices. And I'm just delighted that you've been able to work with us so that we've got some rather better quality videos on the QNIS website now to share the practices.

And just to let everyone know that the link to the story of Capacitar video is also at the end of the program for you to find. So finally, Ali, I wonder if you could tell me, if someone is listening to this podcast and thinking, "Oh, I'm intrigued, I'm interested to find out more," where would somebody start? Is there a couple of practices that you think, "Well, that's the one that I'd suggest you start with"? What would you recommend?

Probably the ones that I have been mentioning. So the Tai Chi, the Pal Dan Gum, the breath work, the finger holds, the acupressure. But perhaps as a way in, do you know there are many, many videos that Pat has done on YouTube where it gives little examples of this. So people could look to see, or they could go to the Capacitar Scotland website and see where they could actually link in to a practice because it tells you where it's happening.

Or if they were a nurse, they might like to go to the new videos that are coming out and they may be already up, I'm not sure, of the nurses doing the practices. So these would be ways for them to discover what would be something that would be best for them. And if you're in a team, there are certain practices that are great for that, like an uplift Capacitar practice. The one that gives a sense of lifting the energy is the drum massage. There's a lot of fun practices or a simple movement dance. There's things like that that can be good in a team.

Ali, thank you so much. We really appreciate your taking time to be with us. We also appreciate your generosity in the time that you've given with Capacitar Scotland to supporting community nurses to learn these invaluable bodywork practices. And we conclude this episode with contributions from Alison Bunce, Jenny Patterson, and Margaret Ann Williamson about their experiences of using Capacitar in their personal and professional lives.

My name's Alison Bunce. I'm a Queen's nurse from the 2019 cohort. I am the program lead for Compassionate Inverclyde, and I just wanted to share really the huge benefits I've had since learning about Capacitar. I first learned about it through the Queen's Nurse program where Clare Cable, the chief executive officer introduced some of the practices during our program and it really resonated with me. The whole notion about energy and how to empower yourself and others to move the energy, perhaps something that's been stuck, feelings that are negative like anger or frustration or whatever.

So when I got the opportunity to do the Capacitar training, I jumped at it and really, I have adopted, embraced, whatever you would like to call it, Capacitar into my world. I do it every day, twice a day sometimes, at 7:30 in the morning and 5:30 each night online. And really, it has just grounded me, has allowed me to be my better self, to feel calm, to really empower my whole being in a way that's been gentle and meaningful. But not only that, I've been able to do it with a group of people who gather every second Friday evening and we share together Capacitar.

I am Jenny, a midwife, and now a midwifery lecturer. I've been using Capacitar practices for over 10 years. My well-being and especially my confidence have been transformed. I've also shared many practices with mothers, midwives, and now with student midwives. Stress and trauma are sadly very much a part of maternity and the Capacitar practices, such as finger holds, breathing, and Pal Dan Gum are very welcomed. I personally do Pal Dan Gum every day. The grassroots aspect of Capacitar and the focus on those other than ourselves in the practices helps me feel part of a wider family of people.

Capacitar techniques are not complicated. And with some practice, they can easily be incorporated into your daily life. I particularly like using the finger holds. This is an easy technique that can be done sitting at a desk or in the car park in between visits or meetings. It helps me to center and contain my emotions, making it easier to move on to the next part of my day. I similarly find emotional freedom tapping helps me at the end of a difficult day to leave the baggage at work and make the transition to home easier.

I feel Capacitar has increased my awareness of the impact that a busy working life has on the body. And by being kind to myself and increasing the self-awareness, I can lessen the negative impact it has on me. At first, I was not confident in sharing Capacitar with others, so I started gently with friends and family. I then had the opportunity to share practices on the QNIS well-being lunches. This has helped me gain some confidence and I am now hoping that I will be able to offer some sessions to colleagues.

Thank you for listening. All the things that we've talked about are in the show notes, so do please connect in with the resources that are there. And for now, goodbye.