The Orchard: PTSD Solutions. An intro & overview to Article Parts 1 & 2.

By Combat Veterans and Edited by Dr J Paul Rand, MBA, CPCN

The Orchard: A private applied research and learning "Therapy Park" in Seattle, Washington

This book is written using a process of therapeutic well-being through action, or applied-learning, methods. Therapeutic recreation, or TR, was discovered by humanistic psychologists in the late 1970ies (see Rand, 2014; see also Carruthers & Hood, 2007; Hood & Carruthers, 2007). The book is intended to serve as a creative guide and framework for your own personalized therapeutic reflective-meditation. The purpose of a reflective meditation is to engage in very specific activities to maximize well-being.

Being well does not mean happiness. Being well, does not mean being pain free. Being well, instead, is an essence, or the lived experience connecting an individual’s walk through four key domains of life and seven elements of life clinically known by an umbrella term of “well-being.[1]” The elements are the focus of for this reflective center and meditative recreational experience. Elements of well-being are long-range opportunities rooted in positivity.

You will read this book while walking through The Orchard; the instructional process specific to enhance your opportunity to awaken, balance, and cultivate an essence of being-well… This simple three part journey will help you find-right and real ways to REACH forward (Rand, 2018; Rand, Gold, Rankin, & Schulze, 2018; Veteran-Success, 2016; see also Rand, Rankin, Schulze, Bonefield & Anderson, 2014; Rand, 2013; Rand, 2011; Rand, 2009). What does it mean to be RIGHT and REAL?

               Well-Being, the big picture, starts with a conscious choice that life is not a game, that it is a lived experience where you are exposed to events that help and hurt. Finding RIGHT or getting RIGHT is a term our veterans and I coined in 2009. It led to a scene in American Sniper where a veteran encouraged his hero to come to the VA to help guys “get right.” This concept was reported by veterans as part of the Riding4RIGHT program in 2011 as being influential in overcoming their struggle of PTSD. As noted earlier, every first creation starts with a REAL idea. We use recreational evidence aligned to lived experience (REAL experience) to create a consistent method to Review engage, align, create Heuristic (REACH) results to create a project or program that helps others 4RIGHT.

               4RIGHT is not a lecture nor direction in how one should live, it is a process to join with others in a shared interest (recreation), a shared meaning (to get-right), within a safe environment (member owned events and programs) to help others find RIGHT, get RIGHT, and engage in the necessary applied learning therapy they select to “be-well” in their daily lives on a new pursuit of living well-being.

To define the focus unique to true for each individual, the concept of REAL-REACH, 4RIGHT ideas, programs, and success systems (the Orchard as a whole is one of several applied-sciences success systems) is to live, learn, and lead your legacy. What is most profound to keep in mind, on this journey through the Orchard, is that all research, methods, and information shared with you have been contributed first by participants. After all, a legacy is less about you and more about the next individual. It is paying it forward, by living forward to report back to others in a way that inspires them to overcome life challenges.

This has then been further vetted and tested at the highest academic research standards possible. The efforts were not just in hard-science laboratories, but also through on-going, continuous learning methods of application and observation. In the end, the concept of well-being is rooted in the self. But, upon starting a journey into attainment of the be-well essence, you will expand to influence those around you. Therefore, the more you invest in this simply-lived experience, the more apt you are to leave your legacy.

Research has been conducted with a number of other participants over the years; however, to fully take advantage of this science-based system, one must choose to engage in the Veteran-Success applied learning experience. 

Here is short-list of success outcomes:

·        A homeless Vietnam veteran began his battle with lung cancer at The Orchard; ten years later, he is alive and well.

·        A homeless Iraq veteran launched a business while engaged with The Orchard and Riding4right program; he overcame PTSD resulting from a traumatic first marriage and the war. Today he is remarried, happy, healthy, and gainfully employed through his own business. 

·        A suicidal participant found God in The Orchard in rather profound manners; he has since focused on coaching and training others in spirituality.

·        A female struggle from Bi-polar disorder overcame her need for medications; conquered her sex addictions, and found right within the relaxation of The Orchard.

·        A spouse of a suicide casualty, the true living victim, was plagued by haunting – real and imagined – until finding comfort within The Orchard. She is married and is finally able to re-engage former friends, the very ones who shunned her for nearly a decade while she struggled to release the chains to her former spouse.

·        A recent veteran attendee took three months at The Orchard. Divorces. Alone. Reflecting. Upon his departure – with a firm a handshakes he said, “I get it now. What I needed to find by coming here. I found right. I will be well now.” He is well – observed from a distance, being well a man now no longer plagued by the war.

·        A female veteran was supported through her transition from homelessness to housing with the support of veterans participating the program built at The Orchard.

·        A veteran widow who lost her basement to flooding in the Midwest had the entire 2000 foot space remodeled into a female veterans outreach and training center, entirely through veteran labor and gifted material as a result of the REACH programs conducted by veterans working at The Orchard through the Veteran-Success applied learning system.

The results of The Orchard were first recorded in 2007.

The success at the Orchard occurred prior to any learning of the esoteric history of the Rowan Berry ... just as we say there is no atheist in a foxhole, only you can decide if the Ancients knew something about the Tree of Life we have simply lost sight of....

? 2019 | ORCHARD-PRESS, a division of RSolution Publishers & in cooperation with LINKED-IN, Strategic Learning Alliance, and Saber-Mountain Press.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law with specific reference and citation. ANY USE OF THIS CONTENT WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR, PUBLISHER, OR ASSIGNS IS ILLEGAL.

[1] (Rand, 2018; Rand & SLA, 2013; Rath & Harter, 2007; see also Covey, 2004).