Experience Is Not Just What Happened

Why naming our experience matters - in care, supervision and for being fully human Years ago, in the hospital where I worked, there was a growing focus on patient experience.

A feedback tool delivered to patients by text message, had been developed to help the hospital listen more carefully to what patients were noticing. Things like comfort, amenities, wait times, admission processes, care, food, communication, and all the little details that can make a hospital stay feel either humanising or slightly like you have been misplaced in a system with fluorescent lighting.

My manager asked me to develop some resources to train the team of pastoral practitioners around the importance of patient experience. The invitation was simple enough: help the team understand why patient experience mattered and explore whether pastoral services could add value to the hospital and to patients through our unique way of being with people [and influence the patient experience scores].

At first glance, it sounded like another organisational task. Useful. Worthwhile. Necessary. Possibly involving laminated handouts.

But as I began to sit with it, something in me recognised that this was much deeper than a feedback form.

Because “experience” is not just whether the food arrived hot, whether the room was quiet, or whether someone explained the discharge paperwork without sounding like they were reading a spell from an ancient scroll.

Experience is what happens inside a person as they live through something.

It is the felt sense of being safe or unseen. It is the tightening in the chest when no one has time.It is the softness in the body when someone sits down instead of standing over you.It is the confusion of being called “dear” by five different people when you cannot remember if anyone has used your actual name.

It is the spiritual ache of wondering who you are now that your body, your work, your independence, or your future has changed.

That early project opened something in me. I began to see that patient experience was not only a hospital quality measure. It was a doorway into the whole human person.

And as tends to happen when you give me a doorway, I did not simply walk through it. I renovated the room, added cushions, brought in Hakomi, pastoral theology, Ram Dass, nervous system awareness, and possibly a cup of tea.

The Story is Not the Whole Experience

One of the things I have noticed over many years in pastoral care, supervision, therapy, and reflective practice is that when we ask people to name their experience, they often tell us the story.

And of course they do. The story matters.

The story gives us context. It tells us what happened, who was involved, what was said, what was lost, what was asked of them, what went terribly wrong, or what quietly broke their heart.

But the story is not the whole experience.

The story might be: “I had a difficult conversation with a patient’s family.”

The experience might be: “I felt my stomach tighten as soon as I walked into the room. I wanted to be helpful, but I also felt inadequate. I noticed myself trying to sound calm, but underneath I was afraid of getting it wrong. Afterwards, I felt heavy and strangely alone.”

The story might be: “The team has been through a lot of change.”

The experience might be: “I feel tired before the day even begins. I am holding more than I can name. I miss how things used to be, but I also feel guilty saying that because everyone is trying their best.”

The story might be: “I’m fine.”

The experience might be: “I am functioning. But I am not resting. I am smiling, but my jaw is tight. I am getting through the day, but something in me is quietly asking to be noticed.”

This is where the deeper work begins.

Not in dragging people into emotional excavation against their will. No one needs a pastoral practitioner with a headlamp and a shovel turning every meeting into a therapeutic intervention with a cup of tea.

But in gently helping people notice the difference between what happened and what happened in them. That difference matters.

Because experience is where meaning begins to form. And where there is meaning…. I was taught; there is spirit.

Experience is Holistic

When I speak about experience, I do not mean feelings alone. Feelings matter, but they are not the whole picture. Human experience is much more layered, more embodied, and more mysterious than “How did that make you feel?"- though honestly, that question has done some decent community service over the years.

Experience includes the body. Read that again!

The breath. The posture. The fatigue. The nausea. The sudden tears. The warmth. The numbness. The way the shoulders lift toward the ears when someone says, “Can I just give you some feedback?”

Experience includes emotion.

Grief. Tenderness. Anger. Irritation. Joy. Longing. Relief.

The unnamed feeling that sits somewhere between “I need a holiday” and “I may become feral if one more person asks me to be flexible.”

Experience includes thought.The meaning we make.The assumptions we carry.The old conclusions that rise before we can stop them.The inner commentary that says, “I should be better at this by now.”

Experience includes relationship.Who we become in the presence of another.How we reach, retreat, please, protect, perform, rescue, freeze, or soften.How we know ourselves through being received or not received.

Experience includes spirit.The ache for meaning.The question of calling.The sense of sacredness, absence, hope, despair, belonging, or estrangement.The strange grace that sometimes arrives in the middle of pain, not fixing anything, but somehow keeping us company.

Experience also includes context.The hospital.The workplace.The roster.The culture.The policies.The power dynamics.The team history.The family system.The unspoken rules.The workload.The room temperature.The fact that no one has eaten lunch, and everyone is pretending this is normal.

To name experience holistically is to honour the whole person in the whole situation.

This is invaluable in care professions because care work is never only task based. It is relational, embodied, ethical, emotional, spiritual and contextual.

We do not only bring our role into the room.

We bring our nervous system.Our history.Our assumptions.Our fatigue.Our hope.Our training.Our worldview. Our longing to be useful.Our fear of being useless.Our capacity.Our limits.

And so does the person in front of us.

Hakomi helped me Trust the Body

My study in Hakomi gave me a language for something I had already sensed in pastoral care: the body is not an inconvenience to spiritual care. It is often where the truth first whispers.

Hakomi, with its emphasis on mindfulness, nonviolence, organicity, unity, and mind-body holism, helped me pay attention to experience not as something to analyse from a distance, but as something to accompany with respect.

It taught me to slow down. To notice. To listen for the felt sense.

To trust that what is happening now in the body, in the breath, in the relationship, in the small gesture that may reveal more than the polished censored narrative.

This changed the way I understood reflective practice.

Reflection was no longer just thinking back over an event and extracting a lesson from it, like some kind of professional development juicer. Reflection became a way of returning to lived experience with kindness.

What happened? What did I notice? What did I feel in my body? What was stirred in me?What did I assume? What did I need? What did I protect? What became clear? What remains unresolved? What might this be asking of me now?

This kind of reflection does not rush toward improvement. It begins with recognition.

And recognition itself can be profoundly regulating.

There is something deeply human about being able to say, “Ah. That is what was happening for me.” Not as an excuse. Not as a diagnosis. Not as a performance of insight. But as a truthful act of presence.

Ram Dass and the Holy Ordinary

Around the same time, the work of Ram Dass also shaped me.

His teaching invited a kind of spaciousness. A way of being with human life that was honest, compassionate, humorous, and deeply present.

Not transcending the human but entering it more fully.

That has always mattered to me. Because in care work, there can be a subtle temptation to hover slightly above life. Maybe a little more righteousness, more enlightenment and more wisdom.

To be the calm one. The wise one. The professional one. The spiritual one. The one who can hold it all.

Authentic, healthy, person-centered care does not require us to be disembodied saints with perfect boundaries and no unresolved childhood wounds.

Read that again…. Thank God, really. Most of us would be out of work.

Real care asks us to become more present, more honest, more grounded, more able to notice ourselves while remaining available to another.

It asks us to become human in a way that can meet the humanity of others.

This is why Naming Experience Matters.

When we can name our own experience, we are less likely to unconsciously act it out.

When we can notice our own tightening, urgency, irritation, fear, grief, or over-functioning, we have more choice.

We can pause.

We can breathe.

We can ask, “What is mine here? What belongs to the other person? What belongs to the system? What is being stirred in the space between us?”

This is not self-indulgence.

This is ethical practice.

Why this Matters for People in Care Professions

For those of us who work in care, health, ministry, education, leadership, therapy, chaplaincy, supervision, community work, or any people profession, experience is not a soft extra. It is central to the work.

Because if we do not reflect on our experience, we may confuse our reaction with truth.

We may think we are being compassionate when we are rescuing.

We may think we are being clear when we are defended.

We may think we are being professional when we are numb.

We may think we are being helpful when we are anxious.

We may think we are holding space when we have quietly left our own body and are now operating from the neck up, possibly with a clipboard.

The capacity to name experience helps us become safer practitioners.

It helps us recognise the difference between empathy and enmeshment, between presence and performance, between intuition and projection, between responsibility and over-responsibility. It also helps us stay alive in the work.

Many people in care professions are highly skilled at noticing others and remarkably underdeveloped in noticing themselves.

We can track a patient’s distress, a client’s tone, a team member’s withdrawal, a family’s grief, a room’s emotional temperature, and still miss the fact that we have not taken a proper breath since Tuesday.

Naming experience brings us home to ourselves.

And when we are more at home in ourselves, we are less likely to use the people we care for to meet our own hidden needs for worth, usefulness, rescue, control, approval or redemption.

That sentence might sound slightly rude, but I am leaving it in because it is true.

Experience before explanation

One of the invitations I often offer in reflective practice is this:

Before you explain it, notice it.

Before you interpret it, feel it.

Before you fix it, be with it.

This is difficult for many of us because explanation gives us a sense of control.

We like to understand things quickly. We like frameworks, models, categories, and tidy summaries. I say this as someone who loves a good framework and has rarely met a reflective model I didn’t want to adopt, adapt, or turn into a handout. But experience often needs space before it can be understood.

Sometimes the first truthful thing is not an insight. It is a sensation.

“My chest feels tight.”“I feel heavy.”“I feel young.”“I feel angry, but I don’t think I’m allowed to be.”“I feel relieved, and that feels disloyal.”“I feel like I disappeared.”“I felt seen.”“I felt useful.”“I felt helpless.”“I wanted to leave.”“I wanted to rescue.”“I wanted someone to notice me too.”

These simple statements can open a much deeper reflection than a polished paragraph about what we think we should have learned. Experience tells the truth before the ego tidies it up for public viewing.

Patient Experience, Practitioner Experience, Human Experience

That original hospital project began with patient experience. But over time, I came to see that we cannot truly value patient experience without also valuing practitioner experience.

Not in a way that centres the practitioner over the patient. That is not the point. But in a way that recognises that care happens through people.

A burnt-out practitioner affects the experience of care. A defended practitioner affects the experience of care. A grounded practitioner affects the experience of care. A practitioner who can notice their own body, limits, grief, urgency and tenderness will offer something different in the room.

Patients and families may not know our internal process, but they often feel the result of it.

They feel whether we are rushed or present.They feel whether we are performing care or offering care.They feel whether we are listening for the answer or listening for the person.They feel whether they are a task, a problem, a story, or a human being.

This is why reflective practice is not a luxury. It is part of the ecology of care.

When practitioners have space to name their experience, they are more able to return to the work with clarity, humility and compassion. They are also more able to tell the truth about the systems they are working in.

Because sometimes the issue is not personal resilience.

Sometimes the issue is that the environment is asking too much, too often, with too little recovery, and then offering a wellbeing webinar with a stock photo of a pebble.

Naming experience helps us see both the personal and the systemic.

It helps us ask: What is happening in me? What is happening between us? What is happening around us? What is this context asking people to carry?

A Small Practice of Naming YOUR Experience

If you work with people, you might begin here.

At the end of a significant conversation, meeting, patient encounter, supervision session or difficult day, pause for a few minutes and ask: What happened?

Then ask: What happened in me?

Notice the difference.

You might gently complete a few sentences:

I noticed my body felt…I felt emotionally…I found myself thinking…I wanted to…I needed…I protected myself by…I was moved by…I am still carrying…I feel clearer about…I may need to return to…

There is no need to write an epic. We are not submitting this for marking. No one needs decorative adjectives unless they arrive naturally and behave themselves.

The invitation is simply to become more honest and more present.

To recognise that your experience is not an interruption to your work.

It is part of the wisdom of your work.

The Sacredness of being able to say, “This Is What It Was Like”

There is something deeply sacred about helping a person name what it was like to live through something.

Not what it looked like from the outside.

Not what the notes said.

Not what the policy captured.

Not what the feedback form measured.

But what it was like.

For the patient. For the family. For the practitioner. For the team. For the human being inside the role.

To name experience is to honour that life does not simply happen around us. It happens through us. It leaves traces.

In the body. In the heart. In memory. In meaning. In the soul, if that is language you can bear.

And when we make room to notice those traces with compassion, something begins to integrate.

We do not have to make every experience profound. Sometimes the most spiritual thing we can say is, “I was tired and needed lunch.”

But sometimes, underneath the ordinary, there is a deeper knowing waiting to be welcomed.

This is why I keep returning to experience.

Because experience is where the human person is still speaking.

And in care work, if we are willing to listen there - gently, honestly, holistically, we may find that presence itself becomes a form of healing. Not because we have fixed everything.

But because someone, somewhere, was finally able to say:

“This is what happened. This is what it was like. This is what I carried. This is what I know now.”

And perhaps that is where reflection begins. Not as a professional task.

But as a way of becoming more fully human.