Contributor: Dr. Dale Guenter
Summary:
A friend recently told me she had started a new contemplative practice. Every time the text alert sounded, she would take one long slow mindful breath before grabbing her phone. I wondered, could this very small, repeated event have a meaningful impact on my day, and maybe my patients, learners and family?
I’ve spent the last 15 years on a quest to improve a bad case of non-presence I think came on early in life. I wonder if any of these findings resonate with you.
Eckhart Tolle says, “To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer to the universe.”1 Some would call this presence. Or even open heartedness.
And from Richard Wagamese:
“I am my silence. I am not the busyness of my thoughts or the daily rhythm of my actions I am not the stuff that constitutes my world. I am not my talk. I am not my actions. I am my silence. I am the consciousness that perceives all these things.”2
The exam room is a highly charged microcosm of the many kinds of social interactions we have with individuals in personal and professional, clinical and teaching, family and leadership life. You could not design a better circumstance to ensure non-presence. We walk into a clinic room holding 19 other stories from this day alone, several awkward check lists to assist “understanding the person”, fear of ethical and legal booby traps, sophisticated clinical reasoning to tend to, a mountain of chores to complete, and the pile keeps rising. If we are lucky, we might have a glimpse of a human in front of us and a human within us.
An insightful research study examined how clinicians define presence.3 Presence as “the absence or opposite of distraction” is one I find particularly compelling. But seriously? Distraction is baked into our days. Can we really have any say in how distracting the distractions are?
Take Away Tidbits:
What is the trick here? Possibly the resounding message is growing our relationship with silence: noticing, then reducing (when we can), and unhooking from noise, mental clutter, static, disruption. Silence and stillness (which are not necessarily absence of sound) are the great mother of wisdom and presence. Some speak of “compassionate silence” when speaking of presence. This description by palliative care clinicians and a Buddhist teacher is worth a read.4 The goal of most forms of meditation practice are to improve presence. But done with intention (also called “contemplatively”), knitting, hiking, singing, athletic and infinite other activities can be the path. If you want to try the deep breath with every text alert, you might breath in “I Am Here”, and breath out “Here I Am”. Just an idea. Of course, the neuroscience to support the benefits of all this is rapidly piling up too.
As our quality of presence grows, we may hear and see differently, feel more, be less burdened by hard experiences, be able to hold meaningful silence, and have more mental and physical energy. Best wishes on the quest!
References:
- Eckhart Tolle – Stillness Speaks, 2003.
- Richard Wagamese. Embers – One Ojibway’s Meditations, 2016.
- CatieBrownJohnson et al. What is clinician presence? A qualitative interview study comparing physician and non-physician insights about practices of human connection. BMJ Open. Vol 9, 11 2019 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-030831
- Anthony L. Back, Susan M. Bauer-Wu, Cynda H. Rushton, and Joan Halifax. Compassionate Silence in the Patient–Clinician Encounter: A Contemplative Approach. Journal of Palliative Medicine.Dec 2009.1113-1117.http://doi.org/10.1089/jpm.2009.0175
- Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Heart-Mind Matrix: How the Heart can Teach the Mind New Ways to Think.
Tich Nhat Hanh – Making Space: Creating a Home Meditation Practice (and anything else by this author)