“Hi all! Happy Wednesday!First, on the positive front, I was very pleased to see XXXX working hard to get the message out that despite XXXX dropping their masking requirement, it is still one of the best things we can do to keep our families, neighbors, and city safe…
This is one of the reasons I write about mindfulness. It is a pause button. A way to relax your brain, build up some serotonin, and reduce your SUDs (subjective units of distress). I’m a rank amateur at it, although whenever I try, I notice my mood gets a wee bit better. Also, it’s free. And I can do it in any quiet area (shout out to the teams for the relaxation rooms upstairs!!). Our Wellness chair, Dr. XXXX, had asked me to include a link to a daily meditation and I haven’t found a daily one I can share this way, but XXXX did find us XXXX: It has daily 3,5 and 10 minute meditations you can use offline. It even has two different voices (although “Steven’s” accent I find a bit distracting). Feel free to try it out. Better yet, if you have one you like more, please send it my way and we’ll distribute.Just as a reminder, there are still many great CHIM (Cultivating Happiness in Medicine) resources for employed or non-employed docs and APC’s. Resources attached.“
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That is condensed from an email i received in early October from one of the hospitals I work at in the US. It part of a daily email that the hospital medical director has been sending out every single day since the COVID-19 pandemic began with medical updates, hospital status (how full we are, what supplies are running low, etc), statewide numbers of infections, etc. And because its been very hard on all of the medical personnel, this particular medical director often includes a little bit of, for lack of a better word, cheerleading, or “moral support.” This particular email had a longer paragraph about this as well as some concrete suggestions regarding mindfulness with even a suggested website and app that one can use. Its nice. And probably true. And useful.
And I would posit that it is a “grown-up” example of what I was talking about in my previous post about poetry and literature being taught in US schools to “lift the thoughts of Man.” For starters, we Jews have a way of dealing with the difficulties of daily life, our own sort of daily meditation. Three times daily, actually. Its called davening (or prayer.) Many are not familiar with the structure of Jewish prayer because they’ve not been brought up with it, but as I have grown to make use of it more, I have learned that it can be a very meditative, centering experience where one can be alone with their thoughts, needs, desires, expectations and fears. Alone, or with God. Or nature, or fate, or the summation of all the vibrating quantum fields which make up our interconnected reality. You choose. The point is that we have our own tradition which allows us to, as the email states, “relax your brain, build up some serotonin, and reduce your SUDs (subjective units of distress).
Of course, the medical director can’t say that. He can’t actually recommend that the doctors at the hospital start davening, praying, to maintain their mental health. That would be completely insane – he would be fired instantly. Nor can he recommend that people read Psalms, or that they read some Christian hymn. That would be totally nuts.
But it’s OK if he recommends that people study Buddhist meditation under the secular guise of mindfulness.
The problem is similar to the one i noticed in the school in my prior post, where in that case students but in this case adult physicians, are being taught or counseled to use only half of the available arsenal for dealing with the challenges of life. The solutions offered must necessarily be restricted to “secular” solutions and must consciously exclude anything “religious,” when at least historically many of those tools came from religious sources. In the case of adult physicians, I suppose if some of them happen to be religious, then they can, on their own, partake of their own private religious solutions. Its just that you’d have to work pretty hard to get to the point where you’d be capable of that. Especially after coming out of a secular schooling system as per my prior post.
I suppose that because the US is at its core a Christian country, that the separation of church and state is most concerned with separating Christianity (or perhaps “judeo-christian stuff”) from the state, so that other, more foreign, exotic religions don’t really seem to Americans to even be religions at all. Maybe that’s why the proliferation of yoga and other eastern meditation traditions aren’t interpreted in the US as such.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Eastern traditions of meditation and mindfulness. There’s not. They can be quite nice and helpful. And I’m not mad at the medical director for sending out that email. I totally get where it came from and why he sent it. Its just that since being in Israel I’ve noticed that even though there are a lot of non-observant Jews here who also love Eastern traditions, the overall culture allows people to partake of the rich heritage of Jewish texts, poetry, song, etc to help maintain their mental health without worrying that they will run afoul of the separation clause.
You might say that it just reflects different cultures – that this is Israel’s culture and it’s just different than the culture in America. And why wouldn’t it be? They, after all, are different countries anyway. But I think it’s more than just having different cultures. I wonder if the separation clause has unintentionally left a vacuum in the mental well being of society. And because there is no natural, indigenous culture to fill that vacuum, and because the major Western religions are barred from doing so, America must turn, even subconsciously, to other religions which we just don’t call religion, because if we did and therefore couldn’t use them either, then there would be nothing left but an intolerable vacuum.
It may be that at the time of the founders the populace was sufficiently religious on their own that this did not bother them, because they all had their own religious traditions which they used on their own – they didn’t need specific instruction or guidance either in school or at work. Everyone just knew all the hymns, or psalms, or poetry, or whatever tools they had from the variety of religious traditions that made up early America. And perhaps it was organized religion’s own fault for becoming too overbearing, too politicized, too controlling, too stifling, that it eventually fell by the wayside. I’m not making a value judgment on the way things turned out.
It’s just that when you see it from over here, you appreciate that religion is more than just religion. It incorporates culture as well. And to have an entire society deliberately without that aspect of culture, results in…well, it results in the medical director of the hospital recommending Eastern meditation traditions to the medical staff. Not really so bad, I guess, and yet nonetheless indicative of the fact that something might be missing.