Mindful Practice CME - Ron Epstein MD & Mick Krasner MD - Oct 14-17, 2015

A retreat-like workshop designed to improve the quality of care that clinicians provide while improving their own resilience and well-being. It offers an experiential learning environment, with a focus on developing the capacity for self-awareness in stressful and demanding situations.

Designed for medical practitioners (physicians, NP's, PA's) and others involved in medical practice and education. No prior experience is required, however, experience with meditation or other contemplative practices is desirable.

Session themes include communication with patients/families, responding to suffering, difficult decisions, errors, professionalism, medical education, compassion, self-care, resilience and burnout.

Course Directors: Ronald Epstein, MD & Mick Krasner, MD

Mindful Practice: Enhancing Quality of Care, Quality of Caring and Resilience

WHEN

Wednesday, October 14, 2015 3:00 PM  -  Saturday, October 17, 2015 2:30 PM

WHERE

Chapin Mill Retreat Center

8603 Seven Springs Road, Batavia, New York 14020

Additional Program Details and Online Registration:
http://www.cvent.com/events/mindful-practice-enhancing-quality-of-care-quality-of-caring-and-resilience/event-summary-dc41c4d9f876475ba56e7c0136413fd2.aspx?i=9a66c0e6-41f4-4953-89fc-37e1952e69e5

Which Path of Aging Are You Choosing?

     One can cultivate progressive growth in wisdom & quality of life as one grows older, regardless of external circumstances. We've known about aging wisely for thousands of years: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/search?q=aging

     Yet, many of us slip mindlessly, passively, through a life unexamined, into progressive decline. The following poem laments such wasting away:

Growing Old by Matthew Arnold

What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Yes, but not for this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more weakly strung?

Yes, this, and more! but not,
Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!
'Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,
A golden day's decline!

'Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
The years that are no more!

It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young.
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man. 

Poem from: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/matthew_arnold/poems/135

Laetitia Guichard, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

Deeper Teaching, Deeper Learning

     Our consciousness is flooded with data, a great deal of which can be categorized as distraction or outright spam. Anxiety keeps us focused on the future; depression on the past. Mindfulness - our natural wisdom - rarely has a chance to manifest.
     "Ellen Langer writes that perhaps one of the reasons that we become 'mindless' is the form of our early education. 'From kindergarten on' she writes 'the focus of schooling is usually goals rather than on the process by which they are achieved. This single-minded pursuit of one outcome or another, from tying shoelaces to getting into college, makes it difficult to have a mindful attitude toward life. Questions of "Can I?" or "What if I can't do it?" are likely to predominate, creating an anxious preoccupation with success or failure rather than on drawing on the child's natural, exuberant desire to explore.'"
     Fortunately, contemplative practices are increasingly being introduced into all levels of the education system. It is possible, indeed foolish not to, intentionally cultivate our inherent natural wisdom.
     "The (contemplative) exercises are relatively simple and mainly conducted in (students') own minds, relating directly to their personal experience discovered through attention and awareness, yet these private investigations yield increased empathy with others and a deeper sense of connection around them.
     Formally legitimizing their experiences changes students' relationship to the material being covered. In much of formal education, students are actively dissuaded from finding themselves in what they are studying. All too often, students nervously ask whether they may use 'I' in their papers. A direct inquiry brought about through their introspection validates and deepens their understanding of both themselves and the material covered. In this way, students not only more richly understand the material, but they retain it more effectively since they have a personal context in which to frame it."

       Barbezat, Daniel & Allison Pingree. (2012). Contemplative Pedagogy: The Special Role of Teaching and Learning Centers.  In James E. Groccia and Laura Cruz (Eds.), To Improve the Academy, 31, 177-191. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.