We can all think of moments at the end of life of people we know, friends or loved ones, when a medical care provider missed an opportunity to recognize the dignity of the person before them. I have seen this happen many times on clinical units in hospital settings. I have also seen it happen …
Stories have lives that go far beyond the lifetime of any of us who listen to them or retell them. As a child, I remember loving to hear stories told by my family members. My parents used to spend time reading to me before bed, and I remember that I loved to hear the words …
My mother has received treatment from the doctors at the Mayo Clinic for the past few years because she was finding that she was forgetting things and sought out treatment. She first went to see a neurologist at UF Health who diagnosed her with Alzheimer’s. She didn’t feel like she had a good connection with …
One of my favorite distinctions in doing mindfulness practice envisions the person sitting in mindful meditation as a gardener. Roshi Shunryu Suzuki says that the person who sits in mindfulness pulls the weeds of distraction in order to bury them by the plant of our mind to nourish the growth of single-pointed concentration. We use …
The essential skill in dealing with distress is learning how to make choices around how we can use your nervous system to curate experiences. What the hell does that mean? Let’s begin with the basics of two arms of the autonomic nervous system. We all have a sympathetic arm that enables us to recognize threats …
Zen presents us with a very useful question. Over and over again we confront this question in our lives: where is newness and freshness experienced in our lives? What makes the approach of Zen and other contemplative traditions unique in their approach is that they suggest that we need to see both the positive and …
How do we work with ambivalence in our caregiving? Many of us who have caregiving roles have trouble using our negative emotions to help us deliver better care. We are taught in our social setting to value optimism and resilience. The roadmap to clinical success makes little space for wandering in deep darkness, depression, and …
A beautiful and evocative way to describe loss related to dementia is that it is ambiguous and confusing, kind of like walking along a path in mistiness and fog. If we are walking in these conditions and worried about where we are going or getting lost, which is a natural thing for us to worry …
Therapist and researcher Pauline Boss talks about dementia as an “ambiguous loss.” An ambiguous loss happens when we lose someone to disease or disappearance and we never really have a chance to grieve or mourn them. What makes a loss ambiguous is when a person is physically absent and psychologically present (a soldier lost in …
I recently read a paradigm-shifting book on the importance of recognition in contemporary life. In The Course of Recognition, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur narrates the history of “thought events” related to the concept of “recognition” beginning with how two French dictionaries define the term. This course of recognition provides a basis for understanding how recognition …
