Meditation Matters in Everything that You Do…
Meditation matters in your life. It matters in your relationships and in your family. It matters when you drive the car and when you eat your meals. (starting to see the pattern here?) Meditation matters everywhere! It almost seems like I could start a Dr. Seuss rhyme here, “…in a park, on a train, in the dark, in the rain!…”
Previous posts on this site, as well as posts on other sites like What Meditation Really Is, The Promise of Mindfulness Meditation, and even on Richer Life, have stressed the importance of using your meditation practice in your everyday life. So, there should be no question of why you should use meditation in your work-life as well.
Meditation Matters in Healthcare
For those in healthcare, working in the hospital environment can present a “special” set of circumstances that make the integration of a meditation practice even more important. It’s not that healthcare matters more, or that nurses, physicians, social workers and others suffer more while at work. What is different between working within healthcare and many other jobs is the degree of human suffering that healthcare providers encounter while in the workplace, and how this suffering translates into personal suffering for those providers.
Meditation matters in healthcare because:
- Healthcare providers encounter more suffering than their non-healthcare counterparts. Due to the nature of the profession, healthcare providers see suffering in the forms of chronic illness, acute and chronic pain, terminal illness, and death…just to mention a few. Meditation helps our mind deal with suffering.
- The focus of healthcare is on providing compassionate care. While not always stated, an inherent component of all care is a compassionate presence. Meditation inspires compassion.
- If healthcare providers don’t show up emotionally, their clients or patients don’t do as well. There’s published research that emotional rapport actually increases patient outcomes. Meditation helps us to show up, present.
- The healthcare system is broken and in need of presence of mind. This may not be so different from many other industries these days. A lot of our workplaces are “broken” and attending mindfully to them is essential to our bringing change to our work environment. Meditation helps us to pay attention to our environment.
- There’s a shortage of trained professionals in healthcare. Nursing and doctor shortages have increased in the past years and it’s anticipated that by the year 2020, the nursing shortage will reach 800,000 in the U.S. and the physician shortage will be almost 100,000! Does that cause stress? Meditation helps to relieve stress.
Why Meditation Matters in Healthcare
Why do these five characteristics mean that meditation is necessary for healthcare providers? Dealing with suffering, being compassionate, paying attention, and dealing with stress are all attributes that have been shown through practice and even through research to be benefits of meditating. It’s kind of like getting the antidotes to many illnesses all in one package; like a vaccine for many ills!
While meditation is not a panacea for all of the ills associated with working in the healthcare profession, being less-distracted by thoughts and emotions, and being less stressed while in the workplace, allows one to more easily attend to the task of care-taking. And, since care-taking is our charge in healthcare, and since we’re not working with inanimate objects, or consumer products, it behooves us to attend to our care-taking in a manner that is “meditative,” that embraces an intention of compassion. Nothing brings us into the meditative and compassionate presence of mind better than meditation and contemplation.
Meditation Resources
Here are a few items that can help you to meditate whether you’re a beginner or already have a practice. All of these resources are aimed at helping you in your meditation practice and to do so with less effort and more success. Please let me know what else you need, that’s what I’m here for.
MEDITATION POSTS:
- What is Meditation? Sometimes It’s About Failure
- How to Meditate: Distraction in Meditation Doesn’t Matter
- Meditation Tip of the Week: Stop Meditating
- Meditation Tip of the Week: Meditate…Even When it Doesn’t Work
- How to Meditate: The Most Important Practice…Plus One Great Tip
MEDITATION AUDIO DOWNLOADS:
- Riding the Breath With the Mind
- Beginning With Your Thoughts
- Working With Our Thoughts (more advanced)
This site has tons of tools for learning how to meditate and be compassionate.
- Meditation audio for using your breath as the anchor of your attention during meditation.
- Ebook and two chapters from the book, Minding the Bedside: Nursing from the Heart of the Awakened Mind, on how to meditate.
- Here’s a pitch for my book, Minding the Bedside: Nursing from the Heart of the Awakened Mind. You can even buy it in a Kindle version! Why buy it? Because I really did write it for you. Because it’s a meditation book written just for nurses. And, because it has EVERYTHING that you need to learn how to meditate and to use your practice at the bedside.
Do You Need Something More?
I encourage you to look through the HUNDREDS of articles that I’ve written and especially check out my weekly meditation tips and other useful meditation materials provided for your health and well being. And please let me know if you’d like to discuss anything with me, have any questions or need clarification regarding anything that I’ve written about.
Thanks for this wonderful arlitce. One other thing is that a lot of digital cameras are available equipped with a zoom lens that enables more or less of a scene to generally be included by means of zooming’ in and out. These kinds of changes in focusing length are usually reflected while in the viewfinder and on large display screen at the back of your camera.