Originally published March 2023. Updated April 2026 to incorporate later reflections from a July 2023 reunion of participants.
SECTOR: Healthcare
EMPLOYEES: 40-50 multi-faith chaplains serving 47,000 staff
THE CHALLENGE
About NewYork-Presbyterian Pastoral Care & Education Department
NewYork-Presbyterian is an extensive and integrated academic healthcare system that serves and cares for patients in the New York metropolitan region, as well as nationally and globally. The hospital system offers a multi-faith Pastoral Care & Education Department consisting of chaplains, residents, and interns who provide religious, spiritual, and existential support in moments of illness, loss, moral distress, and crisis for healthcare workers, patients, and their families.
In spring 2020, NewYork-Presbyterian, like hospitals across the world, found itself facing the brutal beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic. While working tirelessly to care for patients and at great personal risk, frontline healthcare workers navigated an unprecedented amount of suffering and loss. The pastoral care teams found themselves responding to relentless waves of grief and trauma—theirs and others’—with nervous systems pushed far beyond normal capacity. As the people both patients and providers turn to in moments of crisis, chaplains are often the holders of holders. When those responsible for helping others metabolize suffering are themselves under strain, the effects reach beyond individuals into the conditions of care itself.
What began as compassion had shifted into compassion fatigue, as chaplains absorbed the existential weight of witnessing so much death while struggling to maintain their own sense of meaning and faith. The department needed tools that could work in real time, meeting the chaplains where the stress actually lived: in their bodies, their relationships with patients and staff, and in their daily work.
THE APPROACH
Anchoring Resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic
In April 2020, NewYork-Presbyterian (Weill Cornell) Pastoral Care and Education Department partnered with Lumos Transforms to provide the Resilience Toolkit to their multi-faith department. Jennifer Kent, a resident chaplain seeking ways to deal with the stress of the work, discovered Lumos Transforms’ free Anchoring Resilience for Turbulent Times public workshop. After repeatedly attending, Jennifer reached out to us, seeking to bring Anchoring Resilience training to the entire Pastoral Care & Education Department. The Toolkit’s approach was particularly suited to this moment, offering an embodied framework for the stabilization needed for first-stage trauma healing, as well as real-time stress navigation that didn’t require the pandemic conditions to change before the chaplains could restore some inner steadiness.
THE RESULTS
Sustaining the Holders of Care
In multiple sessions adapted for this multi-faith group, Resilience Toolkit creator and Lumos founder Nkem Ndefo held space for the chaplains to share what they were carrying and practically understand the stress and trauma arising in the pandemic, including the felt burden of bearing witness to profound suffering. These sessions helped chaplains build greater discernment and steadiness in the midst of extraordinary strain.
Rather than pathologizing their struggles, the framework helped them recognize their stress responses as adaptive reactions to genuinely overwhelming circumstances. They learned to understand when their responses helped them stay present with suffering and when those same responses began to harm their capacity to serve.
Two years later, in a reunion gathering, one participant reflected that during the original sessions they had felt forsaken by God, and that “we found God together in that room.”
Next, they learned to normalize their stress responses and use real-time stress-regulating tools that supported the body’s natural capacity to settle disproportionate responses, practices they report relying upon to this day.
The Toolkit practices gave them ways to stabilize that worked within the chaos of the pandemic, building their capacity for the sustained care their work demanded. The experience also suggested something broader: When those responsible for holding others have support to restore connection and shared presence together, the conditions for care itself can shift.
