Transmission of Wise Caregiving leadership by Jonathan Prescott to Karla Johnston, with Michael Melancon and Monica Kingsbury, October, 2023.
Photos by: Claire Cudahy, Tahoe Daily Tribune ;  Kari Pollock, Jonathan Prescott, Ellen Simon, StockCake Creative  Commons

Jonathan Prescott, a longtime Washington state Buddhist chaplain, teacher, and leader in end-of-life care, is passing on to me, Karla Johnston, the leadership of Wise Caregiving.

Created by Jonathan in 2016, Wise Caregiving, a nonprofit 501c3, is a unique package of contemplative trainings, rooted in the dharma, to help caregivers support others with wisdom and kindness, while also keeping themselves inwardly healthy and balanced.

The year 2025 is a transitional year as Jonathan approaches retirement, and I receive transmission and leadership of our nonprofit. From teacher to student, a living, breathing continuation unfolds, modeled in the heart of our Zen transmission lineage.

As a board-certified chaplain and long-time Buddhist practitioner in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hahn, Jonathan has brought broad experience to his creation. After years working as a hospice chaplain, he created the Eight Caregiving Foundations, the basis of Wise Caregiving, through a distillation of decades of contemplative study with many teachers, patients, and families. Jonathan teaches in Washington and abroad and is presently navigating retirement and passing leadership of Wise Caregiving to me.

Wise Caregiving is an organization that is here for you, your loved ones, and your communities, in these unprecedented and demanding times. We walk beside those bearing the unbearable. We train caregivers to offer support that is wise, compassionate, and sustainable, while also caring for themselves.  Contemplative and concrete methods are the backbone of our curriculum. After nine years serving the state of Washington, we are expanding into workplaces, communities, and homes nationwide, with the ease of online offerings.

Are you searching for ways to practice wise and skillful compassion that don’t lead to burnout? Do you know someone impacted by addiction, or supporting those managing recovery and relapse? Are you a professional caregiver, trying to meet the stresses of a post-pandemic world? 

Perhaps you care for a loved one, and long for a compassionate community of support. Engaging with our Buddhist practice and our communities places us on the front lines, and perhaps you also need care. 

The Eight Caregiving Foundations meet you exactly where you are, cultivating skills unique to your history and life. Each week (Is this correct that they are distinct topics on separate weeks? Original was unclear on that point. Yes, this is correct, a Foundation a week is introduced and practiced with each week, after the initial introduction Week 1) one of eight topics is taught and applied, with restoring balance as the overarching theme. The topics are: Living in the Balance between Self and Other, Competence and Compassion, Giving and Receiving, Firm and Soft, Results and Futility, Ideal and Real, Well and Unwell, Life and Death. 

Please spend time with our curriculum outline and see if it’s a good fit for you. Help us spread the word! 

As my friend, mentor, and teacher, Jonathan has supported my dedication to practice the Bodhisattva vows, and enter each situation with an open and compassionate heart. He has tended my innate kindness, so I can offer care that is skillful and healing. There is no greater gift, and I’m honored to be Wise Caregiving’s continuation. 

Through partnering with us, the conditions of your life become the very means of awakening loving service. You, too, become a Wise Caregiving continuation, which means leading with your wise and compassionate heart. It means expressing the ancestral gifts in your own voice. Or as we say in Zen, tangling eyebrows with the ancestors: without ancestors, we lack wisdom; without descendants, ancestors lack the eyes and hands necessary to provide care for this ever-suffering world. We are but links in this beginningless Bodhisattva chain. We will not be the last.

Lao Tzu said, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears. When the student is truly ready, the teacher disappears.” 

Jonathan and I appeared for each other, and now we’re practicing side-by-side, living, receiving, and honing the Eight Foundations of Caregiving as an offering to those who wish to turn toward the hardships of life and find sustainable, loving action. We have directly experienced and witnessed the foundations’ ability to expand personal capacities and skills. 

When Jonathan retired as a spiritual counselor with Hospice of the Northwest in 2016, he was moved by the desire to give others the gifts he’d received. He had walked alongside more than 1,400 patients and families as they experienced illness, decline, and death. Jonathan’s teachers, patients, and co-workers had taught him how to meet these universal challenges. He founded Wise Caregiving to transfer and give what he has learned. 

As Jonathan goes through his own aging process, he has discovered that it’s not enough just to give away the contemplative caregiving skills. It’s now time to give away Wise Caregiving: the mechanism he created to share what he has received. 

My first introduction to the Eight Caregiving Foundations was in 2017, outside Deer Park Monastery’s Ocean of Peace meditation hall in Escondido, California. Jonathan was staffing a table in the parking lot with information about Wise Caregiving. I was drawn to the table by a yearning, to not only express compassion, but wise compassion. 

This longing to offer wise compassion had been a search of mine for as long as I could remember. I found myself uncharacteristically unburdening my heart to the man whose kind and open presence, and thoughtful questions, drew out my story. 

My father had recently died an early death, complicated by a lifetime of mental health despair. My young nephew was struggling with a heroin addiction, and I was a primary support to him and my reeling family. In 2014 I had founded Lake Tahoe Mindfulness Community and was just beginning to serve communities on the fringe. I felt adrift on an enormous sea.

The opioid epidemic was in full swing, and little did I know that COVID was just around the corner and would cause skyrocketing deaths from despair and overdoses. Jonathan saw in me a great desire to let wise compassion lead, and he also saw my struggle to find clear means to do so. The Eight Caregiving Foundations became my means: lodestars that would guide me in offering more effective and sustained support, for my family and my communities.

After leaving the Wise Caregiving table that day, what remained with me weren’t the words spoken, but Jonathan’s compassionate presence. During that 2017 retreat, I was ordained into the Thich Nhat Hanh, Plum Village Engaged Zen Buddhist tradition. Engagement is the expression of our vows, and upon ordination, we are entrusted to meet the world with our life experiences, our skills, and most importantly, our open and receptive hearts. 

Jonathan had ordained in 2005, taking the same vows, and putting them into action. As I watched my new friend, I saw our teacher Thich Nhat Hanh alive in him, embodied in Jonathan’s deep listening and authentic care for others. Transmission of the teacher’s lineage to the student is the heart of ordination, as the student becomes a living, breathing continuation. Our teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, was very present in Jonathan. I would start studying the Eight Caregiving Foundations, integrating them into all aspects of my life, professionally and personally, and eventually co-teach alongside Jonathan. 

While I live in South Lake Tahoe, CA, I also spend time in Washington state, and will continue the connections Jonathan has established in Washington while bringing the Wise Caregiving work into my hometown and beyond through online offerings.

Would you like to learn, practice, and integrate the Eight Caregiving Foundations in your own life, in your own voice? Please consider joining Jonathan and me for the Spring 2025 cohort online April 9 – June 4, from 3-5p Pacific. We would be honored to walk beside you, as you support and grow your loving service to your loved ones, communities, and the world.

May our caregiving journeys reflect the heart of compassion, ever flowing from a source always available to us in every moment.