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He had great faith in you...

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He had great faith in you...

“He had great faith in you, and you let him down…” These words landed, heavily, in the middle of my chest. These words brought pain, they were a tool to bring pain, and they did their job well. I cannot know the state of mind within the one who spoke those words, but I imagine they came from a place of great worry, great pain, and great anger. I have spoken words like this myself on occasions, more than I would care to remember at any given moment, and when I have used words like this with others, they were designed to hurt. It is from this place of seeing the pain, that I began to wonder about why anyone would choose to be a physician, and I realized it’s because no one really knows what they’re saying yes to when they pursue this career.

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A Different Point of View this Christmas…..

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A Different Point of View this Christmas…..

And so, I find myself wondering what to write in this missive.  The year has been good, full of love and learning, growth and understanding, and yet in this moment, we are sad, we are mourning, we are dancing with grief.  It is strange how a recent event can colour the feelings that you carry for a year, how a single moment in time can mark that year in your mind, how a single event becomes the moment that may name that year.  It happens all the time… oh, that was when Sam was born, that was the year I started medical school, that was the year we got married, the year when grandmother died, these single moments are large enough in our psyche that they colour the memory of the year. 

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Good luck, bad luck...

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Good luck, bad luck...

Sometimes we are simply too close to be able to see clearly, it is as if our breath fogs the glass we want to look through, we need to get some distance. Is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? it is hard to know. As I look back on life, I look back on things that in the moment seemed terrible, but as I reflect on them from where I am now, the view is so much different. I remember clearly the scene from “the dead poet’s society” when Robin Williams asks the students to stand up on their desks to change their point of view. As I look across my life, I realize I am moving from desk to desk to desk, and looking around, and the view, is always, different.

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In this moment...

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In this moment...

It was another weekend of training in Hakomi.  We were working on figuring out our resources (those things in our lives that help us get through tough times).  It was the second day of training for this block, and my student therapist asked how things were going, “day by day, usual days, usual stuff.” “Why don’t you take me through a usual day then, how do you start seeing your patients? “. I begin to recount how I work without a nurse, and that I go up front to pick up my patients. She asked me to stop, slow down, and really focus on what I do when I prepare to get a patient, and as we work through that, I came to see what a resource I have built over the last 10 years.

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Where the fear comes from...

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Where the fear comes from...

What is it that hold me back?  What keeps me from being all that is within me?  It is a funny question for me to ask, given the work I am doing to help others finds their way through this briar patch.  I know, deep inside, that this answer is within, but as I sit here with this question, my mind provides me all sorts of reasons why I cannot step into that place, and as I look at these reasons, they all circle around fear, the fear of rejection.

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Needing to be helpful.....

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Needing to be helpful.....

Sometimes Medicine wants more than you can give, and there are many times in the past when I’ve given Medicine everything I had and a little bit more. These days, I give medicine what it deserves and nothing more. I don’t spend myself into debt for Medicine, I don’t empty my emotional banks to make sure that Medicine is full, I do what I can and when I get to the end of what I have to give Medicine, I stop.

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The inner child...

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The inner child...

He is watching me as I go about my morning.  I can feel him just below the surface, noticing what I am up to.  He is ever curious, this little one, and lately he has not been far away.  I can hear his questions about what I am doing, why I am doing it, and what it all means.  He is always asking ‘Why?’ and as often as I can, I work to answer his questions.  He did not used to visit me at all, and for the longest time, I did not know he existed. 

Noticing grief

Noticing grief

What else can you do… It is here already, and it will be here for some time. I can either turn and face it or attempt to ignore it, either way it will influence me. And so, I decide instead, to observe how it dances across my life in this moment, this grief that I feel so deep in my heart. It has been not even a week yet, and already this grief feels like it has been here forever. I watch how I must be careful so that I can act and interact with people without spreading grief far and wide. I notice how my reserve, my wellspring of compassion, is somehow more shallow these days, no doubt a side effect of using this reserve, this compassion upon myself and my family. It is an interesting experiment, this watching, and it is teaching me so much.

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Sorrow and the teacher...

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Sorrow and the teacher...

Something was missing as I walked in to the house, something was just not right.  It took me a moment as I closed the door to realize, my greeter was not present, and then I remembered, she would not be coming to see me any longer.  Her time with us had come to an end, and in that moment, the sorrow that had been lurking near the edges of life came in the door with me and settled into my heart. 

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Compassion returns

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Compassion returns

There she was, it had been so long since I had caught sight of her, I wasn’t sure at first if I recognized her, she had changed so much over the years, or had I? She was peeking around the corner checking in to see how I was doing. I am surprised she still visits me, after the way I treated her all those years ago.  If I let myself, I can easily remember those days. Those had been rough days, when it wasn’t safe to have her around anymore.