A journey towards indigenous knowledge in social work practice: a research practicum at Sturgeon Lake Health Centre
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This research practicum report explores the story of a spiritual journey that occurred alongside my learning during a research practicum at Sturgeon Lake Health Centre. My experience showed me that I had a lot of deep spiritual healing and balancing to do. The journey is about reconciling the physical reality with the spirit. In this report I explore who I am as a highly sensitive person and as a sentient being. I explore the epiphany moments I experienced on my journey. Those moments occur when knowledge becomes knowing based on experiential knowledge. To explore this, I use the autoethnographic method of storytelling. The epiphanies are a result of “value walking”, which is a technique that helped me to balance my physical being and my nonphysical or spiritual being. I moved from a deep-seated set of Western values, which places more emphasis on the physical reality, towards Indigenous values, which focuses on the spirit. I compare my spiritual journey with the journeys of three others and find many similarities. Spiritual journeys are healing. In this report, I explore how my experience of healing is applicable to social work as it relates to competency as a helper.