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

How I Feel Affects My Decisions & Patient Care

     "Historically, the prevailing view in medicine is that clinical decisions should be objective and free from contextual affective issues: one could not be objective and rational if emotion entered the reasoning process. Indeed, many of us would consider it a professional virtue to be able to rise above the emotional pull of clinical situations, to deliver cool, clear, analytical judgments. However, despite what we might believe, our feelings (affect) intrude into almost every decision that we make. Our daily interactions with others are influenced by conscious or unconscious social transference phenomena which are affectively polarised in ways that range from subtle to substantial. Similarly, specific clinical situations provoke lesser or greater degrees of affective valence. In fact, our first response to anything is an affective one that governs the future direction of our relations — we tend to trust our first impressions and stick with them. To then understand the role that affective state has in clinical decision making seems important. 

     The best evidence might be degraded when it is unconsciously passed through an affective filter."
       Croskerry P, Abbass AA, Wu AW. How doctors feel: affective issues in patients' safety. Lancet 2008; 372(9645): 1205-6. 


     "Within mindfulness, the busy physician may find a practical place to begin. Through the cultivation of mindfulness, the busy physician can find clues to the self and to the other, as well as to the aspects of inter-being that not only set the intention of the medical encounter but also provide boundless information and the basis for right action."
       Physician, Know Thyself, Michael Krasner, Shambhala Sun, September 2007.

 

snellius   www.dpreview.com

Sadness & Lostness as a Mood; Lacking Meaningful Moral Values

     “this sadness and lostness as a mood … results from the inability of our culture, or certain segments of our culture, to confront the deepest questions about who we are: ‘I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values.’”

     “This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values.” David Foster Wallace 1993

       Dreyfus H, Kelly SD. All things shining. Reading Western classics to find meaning in a secular age. Free Press, NY, 2011.

Photo: kzaz2   dpreview.com