Compassion & True Mental Health

     "Compassion goes beyond empathy to the heartfelt yearning, 'May you be free of suffering and its causes. How may I help?'"

       B. Alan Wallace. "The Attention Revolution. Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind." Wisdom, Boston, 2006.
 
     How often am I actually compassionate? Maybe in a healthcare setting, but outside of that? All too rarely to be truthful. Compassion is the opposite of our default individualistic, competitive, adversarial, self-centered way of being.
     Yet a part of us deeply understands that compassion is healthy & natural. And we can cultivate the mental balance in which compassion naturally resides.

 

Shahnewaz Karim, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

A Wiser Way to Manage Our Mood

     "cultivating one of four qualities of heart: loving-kindness, compassion, empathic joy, and equanimity ... is especially helpful for balancing our emotions and for opening our hearts. If we know how to work intelligently with our emotions, we can avoid many obstacles that might otherwise hinder our pursuit of focused attention."

       B. Alan Wallace. "The Attention Revolution. Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind." Wisdom, Boston, 2006.

     See also: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/06/sadness-and-lostness-as-mood.html

BonsaiZG1   www.dpreview.com

Competence Navigating Liminality

     The ongoing joke in the British comedy, 'Doc Martin', is that this former surgeon is phobic about blood. Whether his own or his patients', he gags, and often vomits at the sight of blood. He's ridiculed about this, particularly by his former surgical colleagues.
     Sadly, many health-care professionals have a similar visceral aversion to their own & others' inner life, existential matters, the meaning of life etc. Many of us are frightfully incompetent in this liminal arena, and therefore avoid it at all costs - negatively impacting our own, our loved ones' and our patients' quality of life. 
     See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/search?q=existential
     and: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/search?q=avoidance

     Of course most of us can learn to skillfully, safely navigate our own inner terrain. Meditation practices have been perfected over thousands of years. Mindfulness meditation is evidence-based, tailored to educated professionals, readily approachable, and widely available.

Martin Clunes as "Doc Martin"

Why Can't We "Get Through" to Some People?

     It doesn't matter how many times, or how many different ways you advise some people to modify their opinions & behavior, they insist on thinking & behaving as before, even though their behavior is disruptively offensive to the people around them. They're not ready to hear / see / feel reality.
     Learning is typically slow (& behavior change much slower), mostly through trial & error. Most of us are simply incapable of learning from other people's mistakes, we have to make them ourselves, suffer the consequences, sometimes for an entire lifetime. 
     We're far, far, far less wise than we think. We don't trust even our family & closest friends - we're the only ones who know! Then, only after we hit rock bottom, do we realize they were trying to help us, & we were stunningly stupid. Until then, hubris keeps us insisting that, contrary to all evidence & logic, WE ARE RIGHT, everyone else is wrong. So we "save face" - but only in our imagination.
     Yes, we've all been there, more than once! We're ALL slowly learning to walk upright - without dragging our hairy knuckles!!

     See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/06/obviously-suffering-colleagues.html
     and: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2014/04/avoidance-health-care-professional.html
     and: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/06/transformational-learning-like-aging-is.html

 

megawatt298   www.dpreview.com

Avoidance & the Health-care Professional

     Don't we just love to think, talk about & act on biomedical scientific minutiae - details. After all, compulsiveness is one of our defining characteristics - see: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2014/04/a-call-for-greater-self-awareness-in.html
     Mention anything about the bigger picture of the psychosocial realm, and most of us become as uncomfortable as young children in a sex-ed class. And those of us who try to initiate mature conversations about the psychosocial "elephant in the room" are avoided as carefully as our elephant. See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/search?q=avoidance and: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/search?q=Medical+humanities+and+their+discontents
     Trying to avoid life's complexity, constant change & other mind-blowing challenges, is immature, ineffective YET sadly typical, even within healthcare education. Inevitably, it becomes impossible. Like trying to ignore the "oil is low" warning light on our car's dashboard, sooner or later, all hell breaks loose - see: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/09/when-our-whole-world-collapses-around-us.html
     Sooner or later, we have to learn that deep self-reflection & self-awareness is safe, unavoidable and essential. We must get to know & live from our core values, for our deepest most meaningful essence is our actual operating system. See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/05/time-to-re-set-operating-system.html and:
http://www.johnlovas.com/2014/04/allowing-elephants-to-pass-through.html and: http://www.johnlovas.com/2014/04/core-purpose-philosophy.html 

A Satisfied Mind

How many times have you heard someone say,
"If I had his money, I could do things my way."
But little they know, that it's so hard to find
one rich man in ten, with a satisfied mind.

Once I was winning in fortune and fame,
everything that I dreamed for to get a start in life's game.
Then suddenly it happened, I lost every dime
but I'm richer by far, with a satisfied mind.

Money can't buy back your youth when you're old,
a friend when you're lonely, or a love that's grown cold.
The wealthiest person, is a pauper at times
compared to the man, with a satisfied mind.

When life is ended and my time is run out,
my friends and my loved ones, will leave there's no doubt.
But one thing's for certain, when it comes my time,
I'll leave this old world, with a satisfied mind.

The Behavioral Science of Interprofessional Education Oct 16-18, 2014 Meeting

     “This lovely small conference is of interest to medical educators interested in promoting a humanistic orientation to care.” 

       Ronald M Epstein MD        
       Professor of Family Medicine, Psychiatry, Oncology and Nursing        
       Director, Center for Communication and Disparities Research        
       University of Rochester Medical Center

     See: www.absame.org

A Call for Greater Self-awareness in the Health-care Professions

     "... there is no doubt that compulsiveness is the hallmark of the physician's personality. In a poll of 100 randomly selected physicians, ... all 100 declared themselves to be 'compulsive personalities.' Eighty percent possessed three of the five criteria for the diagnosis given in the DSM3, while 20% satisfied four of the five criteria, which include 

     • restricted ability to express warm & tender emotions,

     • perfectionism, 

     • insistence that others submit to one's way of doing things, 

     • excessive devotion to work & productivity to the exclusion of pleasure & the value of  interpersonal relationships, &

     • indecisiveness. 

     While it would be an exaggeration of the truth to declare that all physicians are diagnosable as having compulsive personality disorders, it is probably accurate to assert that compulsive traits are present in the majority of those individuals who seek out medicine as a profession. Hence, the normal physician may be described as a compulsive physician.

     ... another grand paradox on which to reflect is that those individuals (ie we) who are so vulnerable to feelings of helplessness choose a profession where they are repeatedly reminded of their inherent impotence in the face of disease and death."
 
       Gabbard GO. The role of compulsiveness in the normal physician. JAMA 1985; 254(20): 2926-9.

     Existential issues in healthcare: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/search?q=existential

PEB   www.dpreview.com

If Only We Could Better Understand Each Other

     “As for the story itself, it was entitled 'The Dancing Fool.' Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: 

     A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.”                    Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

 

numnuts   www.dpreview.com

 

Rapid-fire Words - Hilarious OR Hurtful

     An infinite number & variety of thoughts pass through our minds at a rapid pace - like a wind storm blowing dust particles through an open archway. Relatively rarely, we instantly verbalize one of these dust particles. Being unformulated, extemporaneous statements are "out of character" for the speaker, and can have surprising, unpredictable effects. Words, after all, can be powerful.
     At best, such spontaneous verbalizations can be hilariously funny, helped enormously by the rapidity with which they comment on an event. And precisely for the same reason, these can be devastatingly hurtful. In either case, there's no time to actually examine & filter what's being said - to consider it's effects.
     Unfortunately, once something hurtful is verbalized, those hurt by it may assume that the hurtful statement was intentional and encapsulates who the speaker is, what that speaker is "all about". But this is rarely so.
     Only after we ourselves commit such blunders AND actually realize it, do we start forgiving others, and realize that these usually are truly "out of character." People are far more complex, & far more decent than we tend to assume immediately after we're hurt by - OR we ourselves hurt others with - a few random words.