40 Days of Compassion

Compassion: If one were to practice compassion for Lent, what would one be doing? Since Lent is a classic time to pursue spiritual values, it is a relevant request to study compassion. We all know that the time of Lent is the time of the “passion of Christ.”

My dictionary suggests that synonyms for compassion are found at “pity.” Then I realized that we are in a can of worms here; that perhaps I cannot get out of. The word itself comes from “hurt” and “suffer.” These are words that likely mean one thing to one person, and another to one such as I, who believes in personal responsibility. WE HAVE FALLEN INTO THE SYMPATHY, EMPATHY, VICTIM BARREL. I do not want to be here. I really want to get beyond concept.

This is one of my favorite quotations from the Course in Miracles:

The real meaning of the crucifixion lies in the apparent intensity of the assault of some of the sons of God upon another. This, of course, is impossible and must be fully understood as impossible. Otherwise, I cannot serve as a model for learning.

One of the reasons I like this quotation is for its shock value. It is a wake-up quotation for sure. Spoken by the man who redefined compassion on the planet.

I think I will just have to tell my own story of what compassion means to me. As a medical doctor, I went to school until I was 29 years old and basically loved the scholastic and academic experience. The Success Path. Looking back at it, I now realize that I had more common sense when I went in than when I came out, and yet I value my education highly.

After I was in practice a certain number of years, I realized that one of the main things I got our of my 8 year medical specialty training was the utterly profound distinction between a patient’s complaint and objective anatomical or laboratory “proof” that there was a known pathological basis for the complaint.

Any treatment was based on altering the anatomy or physiology of the patient. If no pathological findings were made then the patient did not have “anything wrong” with them. Very little instruction was given to me in school as to how to deal with such patients except to reassure them that they were “normal.” If this did not disappear the symptoms then I was at a real loss as how to proceed. If I were a specialist, then I would refer them back to their personal physician who then was faced with the same problem. Guess what rolls down hill.

The problem that I encountered in my professional practice is that two to one, the patients who came to see me were in the group that had “nothing wrong” with them and I was untrained as to how to deal with them. Seventy percent of my clients were not qualified for the doctor care that I had studied so long in school, and somehow this did not seem strange to me. [See above my comment about common sense.] I really thought that there was something wrong with the patients who had “nothing wrong” with them except a complaint. It was a prejudice I had acquired in school. No one told me to acquire it, it just happened.

The above is the dilemma of the physician in the Western world who is trained in and believes in the Pathology model. Not only do we believe in it, we are scrupulously trained to believe that this model is the only valid model. Any deviation from this belief is immediately suspect in the Western trained physicians circle. We are trained at crisis intervention and until it happens we are not trained to do anything except wait.

One day, in May 1976, [how many of you were even born then] I had a sudden flash of intelligence that introduced me to the wellness model. In a month I knew I had to pursue this model about which I knew nothing. I did realize that if I could give up my prejudice against the Seventy Percent and listen to them with new ears. [which I did have from the sudden flash] then, I might get somewhere. [I made a short video of one vivid memory that is in this blog. ]

<www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGl-MNM5MEw>

I could learn how to intervene safely in a preventive way. No longer did I have to wait for the crisis that would surely come usually under unfavorable circumstances. The ticket one used to have to play in my medical practice of actually being sick changed to how the sickness could be prevented.

I learned to get something meaningful out of each encounter with a patient and not just to look for altered anatomy or physiology but at the whole person and what their struggles were and what they meant to them. I soon found out that each patient was showing or teaching me how to gain the mastery that was left out of my medical education. I was learning how to do it on the job and my compassion was leading the way.

Out of compassion I developed a new way of being for myself and my practice. This soon extended to my family and friends, and I am searching for ways to extend to all of society.  I see that non-judgmentalness and compassion are highly related.

Sometimes I think it is vital to distinguish emotions, and here, in the case of compassion in distinction to the other words above, it is not. What I really felt was love and respect for my patients and myself and my calling. This is what I have to teach about compassion.

Thanks for your attention.