Touched By The Goddess
Yesterday I was going through some boxes in my garage when I came across an unlabeled box. It was full of very old pictures. This picture was on the top. And thereby hangs a tale……….
In 1962, when I was one of few women in my medical training program, my femininity was seen as a professional weakness, collectively denied not only by my male colleagues […]
Seeing The Angel In The Room
It was a Wednesday evening during the third session of The Healer’s Art, the course for first year medical students I developed at UCSF’s medical school 22 years ago and still teach there every year. The topic of the evening was Allowing Awe and Mystery in Medicine and the 70 or so first year students and 13 faculty who had gathered had broken up into small groups of six and scattered into separate rooms to share and discuss their personal experiences of the topic.
I was sitting downstairs in the large living room of the […]
Second Hand Rose
SOME THOUGHTS FROM SECOND HAND ROSE:
Something that you do not know about me? Every stitch of clothing I have on this minute was originally bought and worn by someone else. My cashmere sweater, my
Roberto Cavalli jeans and even my Dolce and Gabanna flats started life in someone else’s closet. As I sit here typing, women all over the world are out there shopping for my wardrobe in countries and boutiques I could not possibly visit, paying prices far beyond my budget. It’s been that way for years. Take for example one of my suits. I bought it at the […]
Becoming a Blessing
A blessing is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship where both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another. By making a place for wholeness within our relationships we offer others the opportunity be whole without shame and become a place of refuge from everything in them and around them that is not genuine. We enable people to remember who they are.
I […]
The Power of Wholeness
In 1962 when I graduated from Medical School the goal of medicine was cure. Anything less was considered failure. Yet many things that bring people to us cannot be cured. Fortunately cure is not the only successful outcome of our relationships to our patients. There is a great deal more to personal wholeness than physical health and more that medicine can offer beyond the curing of disease. Over time I’ve come to think of physical health not as a goal but as a means that enables people to pursue […]
Let There Be Light
This is the darkest time of every year – a time we sit together in the darkness awaiting the coming of the light. This year, darkness has reached out and touched every one of our hearts. The tragedy of Sandy Hook has caused many of us to wonder WILL THE LIGHT COME AGAIN. So, I have written a new story – for you – and for myself to remind us of possibility and of our own power to make a difference
In the process of recovering from kidney cancer, one of my patients […]
Beyond Perfection
The pursuit of perfection is built into every professional training. But wholeness lies beyond perfection. Perfection is only an idea. For most experts and many of the rest of us it has become a life goal. The pursuit of perfection may actually be dangerous. The type A person for whom perfectionism has become a way of life, is vulnerable to heart disease. Perfectionism can break your heart and all the hearts around you.
A perfectionist sees life as if it were one of those little pictures that used to appear […]
Some Thoughts on Stress and Calling
Those who do this work in medicine move towards situations that many others tend to avoid. When someone is in trouble or in need, especially someone a person doesn’t know, a lot of people tend to pull back or look the other way. But people who go into medicine have a different sort of response. We are magnetized into such situations, not because of what we know but because of something much older than our expertise, something that causes us to recognize that in times of need and trouble, we somehow belong there. I often wonder if this work […]
How Change Happens
Some thoughts on how change happens:
Like most of us I am a passionate change agent. After all, who would spend a third of their life accumulating all that knowledge and skill if not for the hope of making a difference? So it is surprising how long it has taken me to recognize the power of a simple story to make change.
I have always been a story teller. In the past this tendency was viewed by my medical colleagues as, to say the least, dubious. In Medicine a story is often dismissed as “anecdotal evidence”, a sort of second class […]
Feely Hearts
I’d like to share with you one of my favorite moments in the Healer’s Art, ISHI’s national course for first year medical students. The Healer’s Art is currently taught each year at more than 70 medical schools around the US and the world. The course offers a safe learning environment for students and faculty to explore together personal experiences of service, compassion, calling, mystery, awe, heart-centered healing relationship and reverence for life — vital and daily dimensions of doctoring not often discussed in medical training.
During the second session of this five-session course at every school that teaches the Healer’s […]
