by Jerome Stone

Created on: September 18, 2009   Last Updated: September 22, 2009

As healthcare practitioners, we are often asked to put aside our own needs, comforts and preferences in deference to those of our patient or client. But there's a difference between doing so because it is our obligation, or even because we are concerned about the clinical outcomes, and because we truly believe that our patient's welfare is as important as our own.

For us, when we're compassionately present at the bedside, the truest definition of compassion should be in its action and in its manifestation, how we become when we're in our most compassionate nature and how our patients experience our presence when we're with them.

Normally, we see another as an-other, someone outside of who we are, different than we are and separate from our lives. Seeing another as another self, an-other-me, or at least as another precious human, capable of experiencing happiness and suffering, capable of experiencing joy and hope is at the root of a compassionate mind.

Sometimes, in healthcare, we lose that recognition. When our only experience of another is through their suffering, when we only know them as a diagnosis, or refer to them as the patient, while it protects us from the pain that they may endure, it separates us from another self, same as we are, and reduces them to an-other, other person, other suffering, other.

As we awaken to the compassionate nature of our mind, as we slowly dissolve the conceptual, judging mind, or at least as we learn to give it a rest; as we become more adept at remaining in the moment-to-moment awareness, and bring this awareness to bear on another human, a compassionate response and responsiveness will begin to develop. As we become more other-centric, and less self-centric, a compassionate mindfulness will become a progressive process where we find more unity and less duality between another and ourselves.

How often have we heard a patient, in sadness, cry out, what did I do to deserve this? How do we meet such suffering and pain? When we meet a person's pain with pity, they feel less than, diminished, pitiable. When we are able to meet another who is suffering with the recognition of compassion, that we all have within ourselves this root of suffering, we help to heal their self-flagellationand ours too!

To be mindfully compassionate emphasizes an aspiration to remain in an uninterrupted flow of selfless compassion. As unattainable as that may seem, simply having this as our motivation helps us to bring our mind back home, to the art and heart of nursing, that of helping and serving others.

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