Mana for the Doctor's Soul

Physicians and other healthcare professionals naturally extend compassion to others; they want to ease suffering. This deep urge calls many into Medicine as their vocation, despite realizing that the path will be difficult. Compassion for others is part of our very nature.  We're often uncomfortable or unfamiliar with extending this same compassion towards ourselves, though. We may have grown up in families who valued outer achievements over inner experience. We know how to work hard, and push through pain. We've few (or no) real-world models for approaching life in any other way, or even imagining that we deserve love and compassion ourselves. While serving these up generously for others, we don't even include ourselves at the table.  Enter an onslaught of online information about self-compassion, as if it's the answer for every ailment. Since our whole world seems to be starving for compassion, the topic's popularity makes sense. Naturally, my physician clients st...

I've recently returned from a week-long, silent Vipassana (Insight Meditation) retreat. Called "Convergence" and run by teachers and staff from Spirit Rock Meditation Center , it was held at the Angela Center near Santa Rosa, CA.  The "convergence" they spoke of was bringing Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) together with the Buddha's teachings in vipassana tradition.  This usually doesn't happen so openly in MBSR courses, even though many teachers have personal experience with Buddhist practice. My own private "convergence" included Ho'oponopono as well.  :-) At its heart, Insight Meditation is the practice of mindful awareness in any moment. You can use anything -- breath, body sensations, emotions, sounds, etc. -- as foci of attention.  This tradition recognizes that the mind's productions are often comical and obsessive -- even sometimes tragic because they distract us from current experience.  It encourages us to notic...

  People's experiences with Ho'oponopono are very individual.  For instance, after practicing this for awhile some feel peace, some feel nothing at all, and some might notice that they feel worse -- at least temporarily. Given our varying sensitivities, it's easy enough to understand the first two.  But feeling worse with a spiritual practice like Ho'oponopono?  How can this be? It might even scare some people away from doing it. My own experience has been all three (as well as others) at different times.   In this practice, we're adopting a world view that differs from most other cultural norms: accepting 100% responsibility for everything that shows up in our lives.  For many, this is a deal breaker and they get no farther.  After all, how can we be responsible for things we've never even been involved with in this lifetime?  Afghanistan?  Iraq?  Massive oil spills?  Patients committing suicide, or dying of cancer? We ...