Why be Mindful?
I would like to share reflections from decades of experience caring for patients. My work in Internal Medicine gives me the privilege of caring for people with a wide variety of illnesses and concerns. After working clinically, I trained as a yoga teacher in order to address some of these ailments more proactively and mindfully. My lessons from practicing breathwork, mindfulness and yoga, led me to wonder, could these practices enhance a person’s coping skills? Could this translate into controlled hypertension? If we learned how to move and play, could we have less back pain? Could we delay or reduce the number of joint replacements due to morbid obesity? What if patients had less sleep apnea and less heart failure in their younger years? Could we improve sleep hygiene? Being well in our bodies and choosing more nutritious foods as fuel might positively impact patient’s health on the front end-before the medication list grew to multiple pages, and result in a better quality of life. If we invested in cultivating the ability to deeply rest, could we better understand the body’s innate ability to heal? Could we parent without a device in our hands, teach our children games, songs and stories of where we came from, so they could understand resilience?
Maybe if we could influence this from a primary care view, we all could suffer less? And if not, might these skills, nonetheless, offer ways to handle pain, loss, and illness with more grace. This has proven to be a vital tool in the many ways I interact with my patients and has been essential for me to continue this work without burning out from the volume and acuity of what we do each day.
Experience: Would you like to learn to better manage the competing demands we face? Our world is begging us to find new ways to interact, to learn from each other and to live together. Mindfulness practices, like yoga and breathwork, have been shown to align strongly with our ability to be present and in turn, improves our ability to function well. We can use mindfulness to help ourselves, our peers and our patients.
How do I get started?
• How to DO this? First have a family meeting and agree to some new rules: what time to shut off all personal devices? Maybe 7 pm or 8 pm? Turn them off and put them in a basket in the next room. Then use 15 to 30 minutes to explore meditation, journaling, listening to music or just getting quiet. This is your time!
• Commit to starting or expanding a meditation or journaling practice. https://anchor.fm/barbara-ann-morrison4
• Writing a letter to an old friend, family member or colleague might just bring you back to why you do the work you do.
• Set aside 1, 5, or 15 min each day to be quiet, unplug from electronic devices and practice breathwork or meditation. Start small and work your way to longer intervals. .
• Do it every day for 21 days and watch your practice become a habit. Most importantly recognize all the good work you do, feel the difference you make in patients’ lives and know that you are appreciated.
