heartmind.ca
excuse me
If you’re a Leonard Cohen fan, you’ll have heard this story. Here it is. Between songs during the concert that’s been touring the world for a few years (this is from the London recording), Mr. Cohen says: “Thank you so much friends. I was having a drink with my old [Zen] teacher, he is 102 now and this was, he was just, about 97 at that time and I pour him a drink and he clicked my glass and said: excuse me for not dying … and I kinda feel the same way.”
Excuse me for not dying? I’m not quite ready to make such excuses, I’m still hanging on. A few more things to do, experiences to live, questions to ask. As for writing a daily blog, something I’ve done for 3+ years, there’s no more juice for such self-displays. There’s little I might say which you don’t already know (or will figure out for yourself). Please excuse me.*
I’m happy to guide/lead/teach five meditation groups each week: at Fernwood Zendo, at a psycho-geriatric care home, on-line, and with people living with cancer and their partners. Plenty of opportunities to talk and to be still. ”He who speaks does not know” Lao Tzu wrote a thousand years ago.
* this blog will undergo a renovation to a more static website, same address. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll receive an automatic notification when it’s up — sometime in May. Thank you.
placebo power
Extracted from “Think yourself better” in The Economist.
Giving pretend painkillers can reduce the amount of pain a patient experiences. A study carried out in 2002 suggested that fake surgery for arthritis in the knee provides similar benefits to the real thing. And the effects can be harmful as well as helpful. Patients taking fake opiates after having been prescribed the real thing may experience the shallow breathing that is a side-effect of the real drugs.
One conclusion emerging from the research, says Irving Kirsch, a professor at Harvard Medical School, is that the effect is strongest for those disorders that are predominantly mental and subjective, a conclusion backed by a meta-analysis of placebo studies that was carried out in 2010 by researchers at the Cochrane Collaboration, an organisation that reviews evidence for medical treatments. In the case of depression, says Dr Kirsch, giving patients placebo pills can produce very nearly the same effect as dosing them with the latest antidepressant medicines.
Pain is another nerve-related symptom susceptible to treatment by placebo. Here, patients’ expectations influence the potency of the effect. Telling someone that you are giving him morphine provides more pain relief than saying you are dosing him with aspirin—even when both pills actually contain nothing more than sugar. Neuro-imaging shows that this deception stimulates the production of naturally occurring painkilling chemicals in the brain. Dr. Karin Meissner of the University in Munich concludes that placebo treatments are also able to affect the autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious functions such as heartbeat, blood pressure, digestion and the like. Drama is important, too. Placebo injections are more effective than placebo pills, and neither is as potent as sham surgery. And the more positive a doctor is when telling a patient about the placebo he is prescribing, the more likely it is to do that patient good.
Despite the power of placebos, many conventional doctors are leery of prescribing them. They worry that to do so is to deceive their patients. Yet perhaps the most fascinating results in placebo research—most recently examined by Ted Kaptchuk and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School, in the context of irritable-bowel syndrome—is that the effect may persist even if patients are told that they are getting placebo treatments.
mindful & compassionate service (Metta Institute)
A few years ago I completed the nine-month End of Life Practitioner Program with the Metta Institute in San Francisco. The intense experience helped me explore my relationship with living and dying and has since led to paid and volunteer work in hospice, seniors’,and integrated cancer care.
In the past, several colleagues expressed interest in the course, but were put off by the commitment to attend monthly workshops and retreats in California. Frank Ostaseski, the director of the program, just wrote to say it is now available in week-long modules. There are five such modules over two years, to be completed separately or combined for the Certificate.
Frank writes: The first 5-day course on Mindful & Compassionate Service points to a healthy, renewing and sustainable way for clinicians and other caregivers to work in the current environment. Our approach is mindfulness based, compassion focused, and relationship centered. Participants return with greater competency, and an ability to develop meaningful caregiver-patient relationships, and beneficial connections with peers. This leads to a workplace experience that is invigorating, rather than depleting.
The course is primarily aimed at health-care professionals — physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, psychotherapists, counselors, chaplains, social workers, physical therapists, massage therapists, experienced hospice volunteers, and others in the healing professions.
For full details on course contents, costs, faculty, and travel details, click here. The dates are Wednesday June 6 to Sunday June 10, 2012. The tuition $1,050. Register before May 1 to receive a one-time discount of $500.
ways of seeing the world
“Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.”
toujours la poésie
The door itself makes no promises. / It is only a door.
Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012)
conversing with our soul
While doing some exploratory gardening (finally a sunny day!), a neighbour came to chat across the fence. Our previous conversations had been en passant, typically about how-are-you, the weather, and such. Quizzing me about my work in cancer care, she remarked, “That’s what you’re good at. I can tell.” Her words touched my heart at the same place where compassion resides. Yes, this is what I do, this is what I’m good at, this is what nourishes me. And what might “this” be?
I find my/self moving towards a kind of service to self and others that’s guided by what Parker J. Palmer describes as “no fixing, no saving, no advising, no setting each other straight” (p. 115). I find myself at ease with “not knowing” in the presence of another’s pain and suffering. I note an increasing ability to “just be” and bring full attention to what’s being said and what might remain unsaid.
To paraphrase Palmer, as my listening becomes more open, and others begins to trust that they’re being heard, our encounters become more and more authentic and, in subtle ways, therapeutic. When that happens, we are able to move “beyond narcissistic self-absorption or fruitless recycling of self-referencing thoughts. We have a conversation with out own souls — one that might juts change our lives” (p. 122).
source: Palmer, P. J. (2004). A hidden wholeness: a journey towards an undivided life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. image: katesgarden.ca
all my teachers
Certain behaviors of others bug me — let me count the ways! Whether it’s people’s shoes I straighten out at the entry to the meditation room, bathroom lights left on by a friend who visits my home, or the paper pizza plates dropped on the street by passing high school student … occasions for getting annoyed abound.
Yesterday, while watching a YouTube interview with the head monk at a Japanese Zen temple, a light went on for me. Reflecting on the steady stream of Western students who come to his monastery, he spoke of the repeated effort of explaining the basics of meditation, again and again. “And so I remind myself that students are a reflection of my practice … they are a mirror to me … they are my teachers.”
With that in mind, I’ll continue to straighten shoes if that’s important to me; left-on bathroom lights are easily turned off, and picking up after others allows me serve my neighbourhood. Anything else, as they say, is added on, unnecessary. It solves nothing and poisons my view of the world around me.
unfolding
Two weeks since I last posted here — probably the longest time between posts since I started this blog 3+ years ago. When I paused in the past it usually meant that I was having doubts about the blog’s usefulness; a state of mind usually born in depression. But with depression in check (see previous post), I’ve been making fresh tracks along the path of teaching and learning. Little time or inclination to ruminate.
- The meditation group at InspireHealth, an integrative cancer care centre that’s recently branched here from Vancouver, is growing in numbers and camaraderie.
- Half-way through my first on-line course (in Gerontology: the study of aging), I’ve found a way to study that suits me to a T. Each week’s discussion question requires a 2-page response with references to the academic literature. Every other Sunday, nine students and their professor meet on-line for a lecture and group chat. Two papers have been submitted already and I’m surprised how much an “A” can mean when it’s accompanied by quality feedback.
still kicking
Fred Astaire
How long has it been since I last wrote about depression, that unwanted visitor who’s been barging in for 35 years. I’ve tried all manner of remedies, including talking therapy, meditation, St. John’s wort, exercise, reading, socializing, volunteering, and staying busy. And medication, albeit reluctantly. But I stopped a year ago, thinking I could (or should!) go it alone. Seems that I — along with others I’ve talked to — have this deep-seated idea that taking pills is a sign of weakness, a cop-out. But as my GP asked me long ago, “would you think any less of someone with diabetes taking insulin every day?”
So I’m “on” again and, after ten weeks, can report a gradually levelling of mood swings. Side effects are inevitable and a small price to pay. They include sleep disturbances, wild dreams, loss of libido, weight gain, and couple of others to intimate to report. But several times each day I catch myself smiling for no reason at all. Feeling at ease and, as hard as I try, unable to think of a reason why I should be happy.
I’m listening to Leonard Cohen’s Live in London as I write this. Between songs he explains that since his last concert there, ”I’ve taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, and Cipralex. … I’ve also studied deeply in the philosophies and religions … but cheerfulness kept breaking through.” And so it is with me. There are, to paraphrase Rumi, a thousand ways to kiss the ground in gratitude.
“age ain’t nothing but a number”
In prior posts I’ve fussed about getting old. Funny thing, really, since I’ve been aging since the moment I was born and for many years couldn’t wait to get older. Certain birthdays served as markers: 16 (drink beer in public), 21 (voting age), 25 (quarter century), 30 (can’t remember), 40 (Big O, woohoo!), 50 (half a century, quietly), 60 (no surprise party, please), and so on. If ageing is normal and natural, why make an issue of it now?
Being closer to death than to birth is a good place to start. Also a noticeable change in attitudes (hardening), libido (softening), and body mass index (approaching obese, on my GP’s computer screen). More and more, especially as I work with people with life-threatening illnesses and those near the end of their lives, I can taste the shortness of days remaining.
My reptilian response has been to resist, deny, object. Yet there it is. I’m 68.6 years old and as the saying goes, not getting any younger. A little while ago I decided to switch from denial to welcome. At one of my volunteer places, where older person with mental conditions live behind locked doors, I’ve begun to spend extra time getting to know a few. I sit and listen; hold hands if that’s what they like, we laugh, and mostly repeat conversations each time we meet. I look in their eyes, watch their expressions, study their movements. We’re aging together.
In a further act of facing the thing squarely, I’ve enrolled in an online course on Health in Aging (Gerontology) at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Three textbooks, weekly discussion questions, oodles of reading and writing, delving into the literature, chats online with teacher and class mates, papers to submit. I enjoy the subject and being a student. The structure forces me to look academically at my lived experience and observe others more carefully. Welcome everything, one of my meditation teachers used to says.
the title quote is credited to Jimmy Durante, also title of a song by American singer Aaliyah