Episode # 60 - Care For The Healer with Dr. Casara Andre
Michelle Fox: [00:00:00] Welcome to Nourish. I am Michelle Fox Culinary Nutritionist Health Coach, and your host for this podcast. I teach a busy professionals, how to get more nutrition in their bodies. And how to have more fun in their home kitchens. If you struggle with consistency. Or sometimes forget to make your needs a priority.
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So let's dig in.
I am so [00:01:00] thrilled to have my friend and I can sincerely say my friend, Dr. Cassara Andre. She is in the house today to talk to us about caring for the healer, to talk about the relationship between animals and humans, to talk about just the love of mammals in all forms and I can't even get it out because like you can see I'm so excited.
So let's get into this so that I can ask all these questions and then you can get to know my friend as well as I'm getting to know her better as well. And so just to read her bio, Dr. Casara Andre is a healer consistently motivated by her desire to help all mammals of all species, that's human and veterinary, repair and sustain their health and well being.
A veterinarian by education and training, Dr. Andre's day to day mission is creating a safe [00:02:00] haven and incubator for ideas, opportunities within medical communities. She believes that unashamed curiosity leads to unexpected and exciting discoveries.
Yes, I think I need to read that one more time. She believes that unashamed curiosity, yes, leads to unexpected and exciting discoveries. Within the exploration of each new discovery, the importance of scientific scrutiny, rigor, and precision Is surpassed only by the importance of patient care, patient advocacy, and support of the patient's caregiver and family unit.
So, Dr. Cassara Andre and I've also got Chloe Dogg here with me today. Both of us say welcome to the show.
Casara Andre: Thank you so much to both you, my so dear friend, Michelle, and Chloe Dogg that I've not yet met in person, but have met many times on or a couple of times on video camera. [00:03:00] I'm so thrilled to be with you here this morning.
Michelle Fox: It truly is our pleasure. And so, as you know, we start the top of every show with A rapid fire game. And you are one of my playmates. So is it safe to assume you'll play this game with me?
Casara Andre: Absolutely. Bring it on.
Michelle Fox: Sweet. So, you know, we have to take advantage of the fact that you are a vet. And so, well, actually a vet in both ways, which I think we'll get into in a minute, but as it pertains to animals, this is the first time I'm asking these questions.
So rapid fire, here we go. I'm ready. Cats or dogs?
Casara Andre: Cats.
Michelle Fox: Giraffes or pigs?
Casara Andre: Ooh, that's a tough one. Pigs.
Michelle Fox: Horses or leopards?
Casara Andre: Leopards.
You kind of zigged to where I thought you might zag. I love it. I'm getting to know you better. Okay. Okay. So [00:04:00] beautiful. And so then, of course, I think this might be our one big bridge to tie it from the work you do and the work that I do with nutrition.
I would love to know a story from your childhood in the
kitchen. Oh, I would love to tell one of those stories. I have such an amazing memory. It's an amazing memory. I have no idea whether it's actually safe to do. So no one judge my parents that this was not something we should have done. But I remember that so I have two brothers.
It was a family of three kids. For some reason, I don't remember the scenarios around it, but just we really, really, really wanted to have s'mores and over a campfire. And for some reason, that just wasn't... possible. So again, I don't have sort of the surrounding memories, but I remember that we had a stovetop that actually had flame on it.
And we ended up that evening just doing a full cookout, like full campfire, marshmallows, chocolate, like graham crackers and everything [00:05:00] over the stove. And it was such an amazing memory because it was right at the time when my older brother was about to leave for college. He was about to I think it was going to California.
And then I was also about to start college. So it was this very big, like before a lot of things changed and sort of happened. I remember it as a really lovely end cornerstone to sort of that being at home, childhood memory, if that makes sense. So that's one of the ones that springs to mind first.
Again, no idea if that's safe, but it was amazingly fun.
Michelle Fox: And you will always have that memory. You just, you touched my heart. I too have two siblings and you totally brought back a memory I haven't had in a while, which, I mean, I happen to be the one to leave first, but there still is that shift of our bond
is forever changed once one kid leaves the house. And so thank you for touching my heart in that way. And shout out to my brother, Michael, and [00:06:00] my sister Andrea, because I know they listen to the show as well. Ah, so let's get into it. You, my friend, I don't even know if I've shared this with you face to face, but you are a healer to me, just in the way that you carry yourself and to bring our Yes, you are welcome.
And to bring our listeners in, you and I met just a few months ago at the Conscious, wait. Actually, do you remember what it was called?
Casara Andre: Yeah, yeah, I do. They're actually having a coffee meetup in a, in a couple of weeks. So I hope I get to see you there. It's the Conscious Entrepreneur Summit out of Boulder.
Michelle Fox: Thank you.
So yes, and you and I got to know each other kind of immediately at one of the Connection Dinners during that summit. And I just remember you kind of just held court. Like, I think there were eight of us around the table and you're like, yes. Let's talk about this. Let's talk about that. I'm like, and I kept [00:07:00] leaning in.
I'm like, I want to know what she's all about. And so I'm so grateful that we were able to connect afterward and build this friendship that we have. 100%.
So I also share that to say with a topic of today and the work that you do caring for the healer. Like when I even just say the word healer, what does that mean to you?
Casara Andre: You know, that's actually a really big question for my side because the team that sort of the founders of this nonprofit and I have spent a lot of time trying to put a definition to an archetype.
And for your listeners that can really resonate with what an archetype is, I think that will hit home. An archetype is Sort of that role that you feel like you're called to play, whether it's by training, by your genetics, by stuff life throws you just sort of the persona that you choose or don't choose to take on.
And it is across any discipline. So that's why it has important pieces to this question. [00:08:00] As a healer, we have chosen to say that it means that you're just trying to bring positive change into the world, but in a sustainable manner that you're thinking both of how you contribute to that change and what you're doing to make that happen, but also how does that change stay sustainable after you're no longer there ?As a group, we feel that there's a lot, a lot, a lot of things that need to change for the positive health of our planet and all the beings that are on it and that healers, anyone who takes on that choice to really lean in,
to run forward, to stand up when everyone's sort of else's sort of crouching down, like just to be able to be that archetype of being present and leaning in. It requires that you also are able to do that, that you'd have the strength of physical body of mental body of emotional body to be able to give that care.
So that's why we've really picked the care of the healer of the individual. Leading towards our mission of [00:09:00] planetary health, which can be really, really big when you hear that said, but we believe that those healers have an incredibly important role of making that happen.
And you keep using the word we, will you tell me a little bit more about the organization?
Michelle Fox: I mean, I know you're in a handful of organizations, but the one that comes to mind specifically is organization that helped with some of the wildfires, or excuse me, some of the I think you helped with the animals during the wildfires.
Casara Andre: Yes, absolutely. You have an exceptional memory. Yes. So when I say we, particularly as reference to care for the healer, I'm speaking about this probably group of 10, 12 people that really come from the veterinary side.
Care for the healer is not animal specific. Although if you look at some of our early projects, it kind of seems like we are, but most of the founders, including myself, come from an animal care background. But what's really unique about that as a founding board [00:10:00] and founding members is that we all share an industry that we know really well, and that we feel really passionately about.
So it's letting us start some of these. Pilot pilot studies pilot programs in an industry that we understand really well, and it's also an industry animal care industry that other people are able to connect to really strongly. So when I say we, I'm speaking about about 10 to 12 people who are with me on the founding board founders of Care for the Healer.
But it also does tie in really closely to my work with another nonprofit, the Front Range Veterinary Medical Reserve Corps. Now, that is a group that lives under a separate non profit, the Rocky Mountain Medical Reserve Corps, we're here in Colorado, we can't tell from all the, the mountain references, but the Front Range VMRC, Veterinary Medical Reserve Corps, our responsibility is to respond to animal related disasters in the eastern half of Colorado.
So in 2021, we were a pretty new unit, kind of just got our legs under us in terms of admin, who we [00:11:00] were, kind of all that structure in place. And if anyone's from Colorado or has been here a while, you will probably remember Marshall Fire that happened in Boulder County. So it was the really, really the first big, really big thing that we had responded to as a unit.
And while we weren't actually deployed to the fire zone, to the disaster zone, we really saw We saw what was missing. We really saw the hurt that came to the healers that were trying to help. The healers that couldn't help because they weren't prepared or didn't know what to do and particularly our community.
So pet parents, the animals that passed away in that fire. It was just this point in time where all of those things that we have been working on and trying to work towards came together and we still feel the aftermath of it today. You know, we're seeing on the news today, some of this that's happening in Maui and just hurting for those communities because we remember that in a very visceral, visceral way, but it also informs a lot that we're trying to do [00:12:00] in our programming, both from the vendor MRC perspective, kind of disaster focused, but bigger as care for the healer, what makes us able to respond in a resilient way to things that come up in the world in our lives.
And because our mission is planetary health, you know, we have to recognize that there's a lot to get through. It's not always going to be the fun, play with puppies, make everyone feel better. Sometimes it's really dirty. Sometimes it's really messy. And we believe that healers are particularly equipped to roll up their sleeves, get dirty and come out through the other side.
Michelle Fox: How powerful. And with that, I know in that example, you're talking mostly about the humans as healers who are helping to heal the planet. And I also know in your heart, you believe that animals show up as healers for us as well. Oh, wow. And Chloe's like raising her hand. She's like, yes, you're talking about me [00:13:00] again!.
Absolutely. And so in the work that you do, how do those kind of correlate or interrelate the animals and their, their humans, I would say?
Casara Andre: I'll speak about that in a couple of different buckets because I think that makes it easier to, to think about and to sort of digest. The first, the first important part is that planetary health, one health, combined health, whatever phrase gets attached to it, it means that the health of every organism is important.
Inseparable from those that are around it. That the shared emotional states of us as humans and our animals, that all that bleeds back and forth for positive, but it can also be negative. And just if we're thinking in the tone of disasters, the companion animals that live with us are at different risks.
because they live in our world, because they live in environments that we have changed. They live [00:14:00] in houses that they can't get out of. So just by being companions in our lives, they are at a different degree of risk. So from our veterinary perspective, that really drives what we want to do as human healers in caring for them.
But part of that is recognizing what they give back and that there is a bi directionality, a two way street of healing, instead of just trying to heal one thing and just hitting your head against it and trying until something works. We really support the idea of looking bigger, looking broader, having a decentralized view and saying, how can we make this Positive for everyone.
How can there be some mutual healing some mutual benefit so that we're actually amplifying any good that gets done. And so in that light, we think about animals as healers. Think anyone that has associated with a therapy dog who knows how to just with their presence with their stillness with looking at your eyes, their body, just being able to help you regulate as a human all [00:15:00] the way to like Chloe dog, our companion animals that are just such sparks of beauty in our life, just the privilege of having that soul in your household and just having them connect with you.
Anyone who has experience knows what I mean for animals as healers. But in addition, we also see humans that have a really tough time connecting with other humans. And that's a really big barrier to healing for their own physical healing, for their own mental healing, emotional healing. So thinking about what other species can do to help us as human species work through some of the hurts that we've had, especially those really long seeded ones.
So again, that's why it all merges for me because I am a veterinarian. And so my passion and my heart's, my soul's ethic is to make sure that these little mammals are taken care of. I do care about the reptiles and the birds as well, but I'm just particularly called to serve non human mammals. Just how much that they can give back.
When they're cared for appropriately.[00:16:00]
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Yes. And you actually helped me to see the connection between Chloe dog and I, because I think naturally I've always seen the joy that she's brought to my life, but then flipped, it was actually the conference I went to with you, which was, or where we met, which I remember she was sick that weekend.
And you just asked me a few questions and I was like, I think she got sick because she knew I was leaving and so since then I've started to not let her see the suitcases because I've noticed before that you get a little anxious when I pull the suitcase up from the basement. And so now I've learned I put her outside and then I like sneak the suitcases upstairs so she has no idea hopefully because I didn't realize how connected she was
to me in that way, before you kind [00:19:00] of ask some really good questions. And then my husband, when I mentioned to him, he's like yeah, she's
Casara Andre: attached to you. He's like
Michelle Fox: yeah, I feel like she's my therapy dog. And I think I might be her therapy mom or therapy human. I should say that bond,
Casara Andre: that human animal bond is such a beautiful, strong, intangible also at some times, but so felt like it's just this miracle beauty of how we're able to connect to animals and dogs in particular, or really companion animals.
But when we think about dog human connection their ability to, to be with us in partnership is amazing. In my early career I was a veterinarian for the military. So I did a lot of work with military dogs and that bond a working dog with their handler is very similar to what we have with our companion animals, but even, even more kind of in a, in a different light because they're very constantly throughout the day, just reading each other, going through some really tough situations with each [00:20:00] other as backup.
And then a lot of my work deals with how is the emotional state of both of those. Both sides of that team. What happens when that animal passes away or the human passes away? What happens when those bond, that bond is broken? So again, it's that bi directionality of something that is so strong and so beautiful, it deserves to be cared for, both in the life of those beings that are bonded.
But also when that bond is broken, you know, the grief is something that is beautiful as well, but it has to be handled really carefully. It has to be guided really gently and with a lot of awareness. So some of my work is not just an animal's lifetimes, but what they leave behind when they pass away. And how do we make sure that that life they live with us as well as that passing is as beautiful as it could possibly be.
Michelle Fox: Can you tell me a little bit more about that? You just got my heart. Cause one of the, my teenagers was teasing me about Chloe dog, not being around when they head off to college. And I was like, [00:21:00] I'm not even ready to go there yet. But now that I have you in my life, it sounds like this is going to be a graceful energy of maybe staying in connection when she leaves the physical body.
Is that what you're alluding to?
Casara Andre: Absolutely. A hundred percent. Think about that now with courage and with joy is really hard, but I speak about this to a lot of my clients who have dogs that I don't know Chloe's age, but are probably significantly older than she's so closer to that end of life.
Sometimes as humans, it's really easy for us to get trapped in the remembrance of, oh, we're not going to be able to do that anymore. No, she can't get old because that means she's not young, and that's closer to when I won't have her. But many times that means that we're missing the beauty of the season that they're in now.
And just like human health, which I know that you're so passionate about, particularly, particular age of females You know, you don't want to miss the moment that you're in and [00:22:00] for looking back to something that was also beautiful, not be able to see the beauty of where you are and then making sure that we're giving them the support that they need as they move towards that close of life.
You know, animals don't really worry about death. That's not really a thing in their cognition, but they worry about us worrying about them. And so as humans, as their caretakers, one of the really big things that we can do for their wellbeing is make sure that we are not putting our very human knowledge of, Oh, you're, you're going to live 10 years.
Instead, just living that 10 years with them and being grateful for what they bring into our lives in that moment. And then keeping our vow of making those 10 years, the most amazing 10 years that it could be. So that's, that's kind of like a very big broad topic, but something that I'm really.
Michelle Fox: And I love that reframing of staying in the moment and saying, yes, Chloe dog, you get to have the most amazing days of all the years that you've [00:23:00] blessed us with, as opposed to me thinking ahead of how sad I'm going to be like Thank you for that reframe.
That's beautiful. now speaking of grief, I know offline, you had mentioned that there's grief in the veterinarian community. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Casara Andre: Yeah, I will thank you first of all for the opportunity to speak about that because it is, it's an area of grief in professionals that I think it's quite hard for our clients to
think about when they come to us, and I'll explain that a little bit more. If we just take an end of an animal's life, so a loved companion animal, just treasured, beloved, when that end of life season begins to come, there's going to be some difficult things to think through. Difficult decisions because we have stewardship of their living lifetime.
So we do have euthanasia as an option in animals, which is such an amazing blessing to make sure that they can pass [00:24:00] peacefully and are not in pain. But it means that the human caregivers have some really, really tough decisions to make. And we don't always know the right answer. There are often financial decisions, family unit decisions, there's just a lot of things that can impact that.
But the ability to know that you have all the information that you need, that's the role of the veterinarian and the veterinary care team. Not to make that decision for you, and it doesn't even have to be end of life, this can be... for a surgery. I deal with a lot of amputees and that can be a really, really traumatic thing for a pet parent to think through because, Oh, we're taking my dog's limb.
This is, they're never going to be the same. They can't run the same. There's a lot of medical conditions where they do better with the limb amputation. So, it doesn't have to be end of life. That's not my point. The point is big things, but decisions that we take on as animal caregivers and what you want, what you need someone to have your back from that medical information standpoint, as well as well as having a team that you feel confident will give
that [00:25:00] same level of care and love to your animal when they're in those surgical procedures as you would want and as you do at home. So that's the veterinary care team. But what's really hard to think about is that your veterinary care team is dealing with all the same tribulations of life that you're coming from.
Have their own animals, have their own children. We're sort of In a really tough corporatization period of veterinary medicine that's just making some of those things really hard, but it's really difficult for a pet parent to see that their veterinarian might actually be in a lot of personal hurt. And so when you put all the emotions that come in with, we'll go back to euthanasia or a tough decision, like an amputation or a surgery, many times that caregiver, the pet parent has so much emotion in them and that's okay.
But many times that can come out in very unkind ways. And while we wish that wasn't true, I think we know and your audience will know that that's just That's just true. And as part of healers want to make [00:26:00] that better. But as a result, the veterinary care team usually ends up taking a lot of blame, a lot of accusation.
I'll just say this one phrase and kind of move on, but we hear a lot. You hate animals like you're doing this out of spite.. You know, you like to see animals suffer because you're not helping me. So a person in crisis, we know, you know, isn't thinking rationally and they can not mean that. But when you have a very empathetic person on the other side, I think you can just imagine how that feels.
So from that, what the work is, there's a lot of professional grief is the term that goes into that professional grief of, Oh, we didn't save the animal or that leg wasn't able to be saved. But professional grief when handled appropriately actually has a resiliency component to it. It says, man, we didn't save that animal, but we did what we were supposed to as a team, you know, we were there, we made sure that they were as safe as possible.
And then professional grief kind of bleeds into moral injury. The feeling [00:27:00] of I tried, but you're telling me that I hate animals and I just didn't do my job. So from that veterinary care team's perspective, there's a lot going on in that emotional context, as well as some not great care from some of our corporate agencies.
And so it's, it is a really tough time right now in the veterinary industry. Veterinarians as a whole have one of the highest suicide rates of any postgraduate profession because of some of these things that we're talking about. We see, and as we mentioned euthanasia before, we actually see our animals pass really quietly, really peacefully out of hurt into peacefulness.
We see our animals from birth to death. So we're often much more comfortable with lifetimes and life frames and what that means and other practitioners work are. So there's just a lot, you know, there's a lot there. But we also feel like we have some things that we want to try to make that emotional resiliency, that psychological resiliency, a little bit more robust.
Hopefully that answers the question. [00:28:00] I don't want to necessarily dive too far into some of those really tough topics. But again, I appreciate the opportunity to speak about them because it is very, very near and dear to my heart. And I think it's something that, you know, people need to be a little bit aware of.
And if anyone's interested, like it's definitely something that needs a lot of service, a lot of care.
Michelle Fox: Yeah. Well, and also just on the consumer side, I know a lot of people in my community have their own animals and perhaps maybe We haven't thought about how you, the doctors and nurses and people in the care team for the animals are actually feeling.
And so I so appreciate you bringing that story up just to give us more compassion for what you guys see literally every single day. That's not easy.
Casara Andre: Well, I'll also throw in there that part of the mask, which I think you'll know from just your work in emotional resiliency and human emotions, the ability to wear a mask is not always bad.
And [00:29:00] as a professional, I'm actually quite proud of the mask that I'm able to wear in clinical settings. It's not my role to let you see what's happening in my personal life when I am there for you and your family and this animal and we are going to make this decision together. Really, it's what comes after. It's the ability to say, I did that
well, now's my time. Now's where I connect with my colleagues. Now's where I have that time to be with my own animal that my, my family, I can go back to them. So it's really important point in this is not that the work is too hard. In fact, I think you, any speaking to any healthcare professional and definitely any veterinary healthcare professional, you would find a lot of pride, a lot of just joy at being able to be there when it's dirty and when it's messy and when it's bloody
and when you're in crisis and we can just be that voice of calm and okay. I'm here with you. Like, let's figure this out. We're going to make sure that it goes well, even if it's [00:30:00] euthanasia, I'm going to help you through this process. It's what comes after. So that care that gets given and in our world, we call it duty of care.
So if you give out that level of help, how do you receive that back from your community or some other
resource?
Michelle Fox: So I would love to lean a little bit deeper into that as well, because a lot of people who are listening are the caretakers of their families and or they're caring for a parent or they're caring for children. And so would you be willing to share maybe a tool or two that you lean on to take care of yourself as a professional woman?
Casara Andre: Absolutely. I will actually speak about some of the things that we're setting up. For our community now, because I think we're all learning this, not from a wealth of yes, here's our toolkit that we can just easily share and it works always. It's more coming out of sort of some desperation of everyone's dying, or leaving the field, and some of the statistics are really [00:31:00] devastating about what's kind of happening there, but I'm also a veteran.
So from both sides of those communities that I care a lot about the numbers of suicides, the numbers of PTSD, compassion fatigue, burnout, moral injury, they're really staggering. So what I think about when I approach this problem is a lot of blessing and a lot of gratitude that I think I have a particular problem solving mindset that I can say, okay, there's a lot going on here.
It doesn't seem to have an answer. Can we go to something that's more root? Can we go to something that's deeper down that actually creates resiliency instead of saying we don't want anything bad to ever happen. It can never be bad. It can never have a disaster. Instead, what I want to solve is how do we go into that with community?
How do you go into that with your colleagues? How do you feel proud of yourself and the other side, no matter what the outcome is, and then how are you resilient for the thing that comes next? So what we're really working on as a team is our ideas, such as [00:32:00] community morning having a time where you actually are okay with being really sad.
I'm sure I don't, I don't have a human children. I have a feline child. But I can only imagine that from a human child side, sometimes there's like, this is so hard. This should be working and it's not. And a lot of my, you know, we set up some support groups for them and just being able to share and say, You're not the only one.
Like this is what we signed up for to go through it being tough, but it doesn't make you a failure because it's not working, it just is inherently hard. And there's some toolkits that we're working on. I'll mention a couple of names if you're okay with that. Humbly is a group that focuses on resiliency in disaster.
Essentially, they have a set of cards that we work with pretty frequently with our team of just reprioritizing what am I focused on? What am I working towards? Am I eating? Am I sleeping? And so there's some toolkits that we found community morning, kind of in a virtual context so that, [00:33:00] like I mentioned, Maui that's happening in Hawaii, we're going to try to set up a couple of just community vigils.
It doesn't even matter that they know or don't know. The ability on our side to just say, I'm here. You may never need me, but I'm here and I'm not going to sit down and tell you like you tell me you don't need me anymore. So things like that really give resiliency to things we want to work on. You know, I live in Colorado and so there's modalities like cannabis and now psychedelics.
Psilocybin was just decriminalized in our state. So from a what's new, what can we change? You know, we are really looking for those things that haven't been examined before to say, can we really solve some of these root issues? And again, because my community kind of crosses veteran and veterinary the studies for MDMA and psilocybin, they're spectacular on the veteran side.
And so I'm really eager for that for my veterinary community, as well as my animal patient community. So again, there's a lot of blurring and all the [00:34:00] projects that I love working on, but in true answer to your question, I think it means really being honest with yourself about when you're tired that you are physically giving a lot when you help someone else balance. When you hold that calm and that poise.
It is physiologically costly and we know what that means we know the endocannabinoid system. We know the nervous, we know the systems in your body that allow you to remain calm in a hectic situation, but it is not a infinite supply. It is literally molecules that are used up in your body. And if you aren't honest about that, you do end up in a depleted state.
So that's what I would say first is being honest about being human. And embracing the grief and the joy and the tired and the excited and really living in that fullness of humans, because as humans, we cause a lot of damage in this world, but we also have a lot of power to correct it and make something better.
Hopefully that kind of answers your question. That was a couple of detours
Michelle Fox: in there. [00:35:00] Yes, and I just
want to say you were walking your talk, because after this huge psychedelic conference that you helped to host a piece of, I witnessed you hold up your boundaries and you said, Yes, I'm giving myself full on for you know, multiple days but afterward,
I'm going to have alone time and I'm not going to jump back into my inbox and I'm not going to jump back into socials. I'm taking time to rest and to decompress and so just watching you do that, it gives me more permission to ask for rest when I need it as well. So thank you for being a role model in that
Casara Andre: way.
Well, thank you for mentioning that because I will say in honor for the question that you asked previously, it doesn't make it easier just because you know that you're supposed to do it. Or like everyone's watching, I better sit down. It doesn't make it easier, especially when you combine [00:36:00] very forward, forward leaning people, the problem hasn't gone away and you still have that spirit of wait, there's work to be done, like, I need to be doing it right.
So the work that we're focusing on is saying, in order for you to do that well, instead of saying, no, you should just sit down. it's fine. Someone else will take care of it. Like that doesn't work for healers. That doesn't work for, you know, also there's the archetype of the defender. So I'm more on the veteran side of which I live and I'm like, ah, I can't sit down.
I must do something. You know, it is important to say to each other as colleagues, you are not doing the job you want to right now. You are not being the caregiver that you could be. You need to sit down. And there's no one else that can tell you that except your colleague. Does that make sense? Your family can tell you a friend can tell you, but until someone who's carrying the same load has been in the same spot and is essentially going to have to take your load while you put it down,
[00:37:00] that's the voice you need to hear. In order to do your work the way you want to and to be the effective healer, you need to sit down. And it's kind of hard to come back from that. Like, okay, I'm going to sit down, but then, you know, then you can do it with joy and then you can celebrate it. But sometimes it takes that colleague to say, you know, this isn't appropriate.
You need, you need to stop.
Michelle Fox: Amen. Amen. Ah, well. I already know I could continue talking to you for probably another day or so, but I want to be respectful of your time because as you are caring for the healers of the world and caring for everybody around you, I can't say enough how much I admire how much Big your heart is.
I won't hold on forever, but
Casara Andre: I will have to do another one. I am always on call for you. I would love to chat again.
Michelle Fox: Did you hear that Chloe dog? Dr. Andre said she's in. Yes. Okay. So so with that, [00:38:00] how can my community plug into your community? How can we support the work that you're
Casara Andre: doing? Thank you so much for that question.
Our nonprofit right now “care for the healer” is our biggest push. We are currently fundraising for a film, a documentary on professional grief in all healthcare providers but also including veterinary professionals, just to begin to put some words to this. But we're also looking for opportunities to serve.
So the same group of animals that we brought to the psychedelic science conference, we're now setting that up. In Denver, we have the harm reduction action center, which is a place where humans who are addicted to opioids or other substances can go for safe injection materials and have someone on site so that they don't overdose.
Situations like that, homeless shelters a couple of other organizations that we really want to be able to stand up quite tall within, in line with our animal healers and say, you may not have what you need from the humans that you're interacting with, but just try something else. We think that this [00:39:00] intersection with animals really can solve so many of those barriers.
So those are kind of our two big projects right now. So a documentary to explain more what we're talking about. Why are these weird people saying something? And then a sort of venue of acts of service for our community to give out and demonstrate what we think animals really bring to the table. So our website is careforthehealer.org,
and we have our Care for the Healer LinkedIn page, and those are sort of the best ways to stay in touch with us and see what's going on. And if you're an animal person, come out and hang out with some animals, because you're already kindred spirits. You're already part of the community.
Michelle Fox: You know, I love that.
And I will put all of these links in the show notes, of course. Is there anything else you want to say before we wind down?
Casara Andre: No, thank you so much for the opportunity. One to share space and time with you and Chloe. It's such a pleasure to chat with you. And I am grateful for any ears that listen to what we're working on because it is a planetary [00:40:00] health mission.
And anyone who is currently on the planet is involved in that.
Michelle Fox: Thank you. Thank you for this conversation and more important. Just thank you for showing up as you and for being able to do the work that your heart is called to like that takes courage in itself. So thank you for showing up every day to, to help us on this planet.
Chloe dog and I are very grateful
Casara Andre: to you both.
Michelle Fox: Love you so much. We love you back.
Big love! Thanks so much for listening to Nourish. Have you been driving, doing laundry or walking around the neighborhood? Sweet. I've got show notes for you. Hop on over to michellefox.com/podcast. When you are ready. I will let you know that on the page, you will find resources to support what you just learned on today's show. And then of [00:41:00] course you can grab some health supportive freebies as well.
Michelle Fox: If you enjoyed this episode, I would be honored. If you would leave a review on whichever podcast platform you are listening on. It will help me with my mission to build healthier communities. One person at a time and it will help you because you will be part of that mission.
I'll be back next week and I encourage you to keep showing up for yourself and know that you and your health matter.
