Healing the Healers: Creating Sacred Space for Healthcare Workers

Anu Gorukanti always knew that medicine was more than a career — it was a calling. Inspired by the Jesuit teachings from her medical school training, she entered the healthcare sector with deep love for humanity, hoping to build relationships with people in sickness and in health.

But the reality of modern healthcare turned that love into an unbearable weight. More than exhaustion or bureaucracy, what drained Anu the most was moral distress — the anguish caused by situations where she was unable to provide the care she knew her patients needed due to limited resources. After tending to more than 20 patients, including some severely ill, one night, she asked herself a painful question: “Why am I the only one here?”

To make sense of these grueling shifts, Anu called Laura Holford — a nurse and longtime friend. Laura also felt the weight of the system. She spent her time at patients’ bedsides, holding space during some of their most vulnerable moments, wracked by fear and physical struggle. She, too, had to make impossible choices due to staff shortages.

During one shift, a patient screamed in pain for help, but Laura had another patient with more urgent needs. “It goes against everything in your spirit,” she said. “You sign up to do this work to walk toward human suffering, not to turn away from it.”

Hospitals recognized that burnout — a syndrome characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a low sense of personal accomplishment at work — was a problem. The National Academy of Medicine found 35-54% of nurses and physicians and 45-60% of medical students and residents among the U.S. healthcare workforce report symptoms of burnout. Hospitals attempted to offer solutions: wellness workshops, yoga sessions and stress management webinars. Yet, these solutions felt like band-aids on a wound that ran far deeper.

Anu and Laura weren’t just tired; they were spiritually drained. The work, the calling, that once felt sacred had become transactional. The problem wasn’t just burnout; it was a loss of connection — to themselves, to their patients and to the very reason they had chosen this career.

One day, after a particularly grueling shift, Anu called Laura to decompress. She described how a patient had died without access to an in-person Spanish interpreter to communicate the withdrawal of care. Despite her frantic attempts to escalate the issue in the hospital, she was met with rejection. In a city with available resources, the system still chose not to provide an interpreter. The patient passed away, Anu helped the family through their grief — then she was expected to move on immediately. “There was no debrief, no acknowledgement that this happened,” she recalled.

Talking with Laura on her drive home made her feel better — not in a temporary way, but in a deep, spiritual way. In that moment, Anu realized, “Oh, this [conversation] is the sanctity of the work that brought us to healthcare.”

Anu and Laura continued these conversations, sharing the complex and impossible situations they faced. Anu spoke about her frustration toward the healthcare system.

“The ideals that brought me to healthcare were rooted in my own spiritual grounding, but the healthcare system had no value for them,” she said. Laura expressed the immediate mental health toll the job took on her. “I started experiencing panic attacks, which I had never had before,” she admitted. They questioned how they could continue working under these conditions.

Both Anu, inspired by Buddhist philosophy, and Laura, guided by her Christian beliefs, turned to spirituality as a result. After difficult shifts, they shared rituals, meditative practices, and contemplative prompts that allowed them to affirm one another’s experiences. Over time, they realized that being able to witness and support each other was what made the work sustainable. So, they took action: they invited others into these sacred conversations.

Their first gathering brought together 30 women from diverse faith traditions and medical specialties across the country. They introduced reflective practices that helped participants deconstruct and process moral distress as spiritual injury, create space for them to reconnect with themselves and others and reimagine a new model for healthcare. Seeing how deeply this resonated, Anu and Laura recognized they were meeting a critical need in healthcare. This experience led them to create Introspective Spaces a social enterprise dedicated to building reflective spaces for healthcare workers.

Their goal was not to teach stress management techniques. Rather, they endeavored to form a sanctuary where healthcare workers could reconnect with the Sacred nature of their work and their own inner lives. “My dream is for Introspective Spaces to be a spiritual home for healthcare workers,” she shared. “A place where they can bring their whole selves, reflect on their experiences, witness each other and be part of a community of care.”

For Anu, the Buddhist concept of sangha — a spiritual community that nurtures collective healing — became the foundation of Introspective Spaces. In Buddhist practice, sangha is not just a gathering but a sacred space where suffering is shared, wisdom is passed, and burdens are carried together.

Through her medical training, she often struggled with feelings of isolation or disillusionment with the systemic inequities in the healthcare system. It was years before she recognized this as moral distress — and that she wasn’t alone.

For Laura, the inspiration came from Jesus’ teaching about serving others as if serving Him. “If the system were built on the idea that everyone has inherent and equal dignity,” she said, “it would transform how we care for one another.” For her, nursing was an extension of this belief. It was a way to live out teachings on compassion, like those found in the book of James: to “care for the widows and orphans.” However, the healthcare sector in practice felt different. The relentless pace left little room for reflection, and she quickly experienced her own moral distress and spiritual injury, feeling powerless in the face of systemic issues.

Through Introspective Spaces, Anu and Laura began leading workshops, retreats, and book clubs where healthcare workers could pause — not just to rest, but to reflect. These gatherings fostered deep contemplation, allowing participants to process their experiences through their own spiritual worldviews. In these moments, something shifted. The burdens of individual healthcare workers were no longer held in isolation; they became communal. The act of speaking, of listening and of sitting in silence together was a form of shared flourishing.

Introspective Spaces was not just helping healthcare workers recover from burnout but igniting a paradigm shift. It challenged the idea that medicine was merely a profession, that healing was just a service, that people were just bodies. It restored the understanding that care is a Sacred Act.

One nurse, after attending an event, wrote to Anu and Laura: “When I first became a nurse, I had this hope and vision of finding a community of healthcare workers with whom I could reflect on the spiritual meaning of our shared work. I had forgotten about this dream until recently, when it occurred to me that it has been realized in all of you!”

Today, Introspective Spaces has reached over 500 healthcare workers across hospitals and communities nationwide. The group has established communities in Austin, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, the East Coast and Pacific Northwest, with more plans to expand. Their work has sparked conversations about how institutions can move beyond wellness initiatives to create real spaces for healing.

Looking ahead, Anu and Laura dream of growing Introspective Spaces even more — not just as a program, but a movement. They envision a healthcare system that treats both patients and providers as whole beings, where love is not just an abstract ideal but the very foundation of care. As they share on their website, “Our wildest dream is for all people in healthcare to live authentic, engaged, and meaningful lives rooted in caring, contemplation, and courageous action.”

What began as a conversation between friends evolved into something so much more: a model for how institutions, of any kind, can be reimagined through a sacred infrastructure to better serve all participants. In a healthcare system driven by data points and efficiency, and burdened by bureaucracy, Introspective Spaces offers the vision for an alternative.

Laura and Anu’s work is not just healing individuals; it’s cultivating the conditions for collective renewal. They are reminding us that sustainable change begins and ends with community. What might be possible if our systems were built to care for the soul as much as the body? How could the world change if love, not efficiency, was the organizing principle of care?

By Suraj Arshanapally