dharmadoctors.org

As health care providers we find ourselves in a sea of pain and suffering. How do we deal with this fact? Commonly we close ourselves off to the true immensity of the suffering around us as a self-preservation tactic because we are afraid of what might happen were we to truly open. We wonder “how could I possibly survive and get through all the work if I really felt, deeply felt, all this pain?” But what is the cost of this closing? What is the cost to our own humanity and to the patients we are serving? How can we ever expect to deeply connect with our patients if we are unable to open to their suffering? And if we eventually come around to the insight that this is indeed an important skill, then the practical question arises, how do I do it?

The following paragraphs address this issue. They come from Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield’s book Seeking The Heart of Wisdom, The Path of Insight Meditation. 

Seeing the suffering in the world around us and in our own bodies and minds, we begin to understand suffering not only as an individual problem, but as a universal experience. It is one of the aspects of being alive. The question that then comes to mind is: If compassion arises from the awareness of sufefring, why isn’t the world a more compassionate place? The problem is that often our hearts are not open to feel the pain. We move away from it, close off, and become defended. By closing ourselves off from suffering, however, we also close ourselves to our own wellspring of compassion. We don’t need to be particularly saintly to be compassionate. Compassion is the natural response of an open heart, but that wellspring of compassion remains capped as long as we turn away from or deny or resist the truth of what is there. When we deny our experience of suffering, we move away from what is genuine to what is fabricated, deceptive, and confusing (p.124).

When there is resistance in the mind, compassion cannot arise, because we have in some way closed ourselves off from what is present. In the case of physical pain, our conditioned responses and habits of mind can easily be seen. They range from these subtleties of manipulation to the extreme of panic and denial. If we cannot relate directly and compassionately with our own pain during meditation, how can we do so with other, more intense sufferings that we find in ourselves, in others, and in the world? An important aspect of our dharma practice consists in clearly comprehending suffering and our conditioned reactions to it, and practicing opening to what is unpleasant instead of turning away from it. In this sense the practice of awareness is the practice of compassion; we allow ourselves to feel what is there with openness, connection directly to each moment’s experience (p. 125).