Caregivers can only offer others what they offer to themselves. Without this intimate clarity of self-awareness, we exhaust ourselves by imagining another’s pain and offering inauthentic responses. We risk being vehicles of pity rather than compassion.

Grief is a universal experience, one that we need to know personally. Grief circles us all like planets orbiting the gravity of our suffering. No one is spared. Steven Levine wrote, ‘If sequestered pain made a sound, the world would be humming all the time.’ We can only hear and address the humming of our patients’ sequestered grief if we’re willing to hear our own. If we’re deaf to ours, we’re deaf to theirs.
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I’d like to share five gates into our own grief so that we’re able to recognize and transform this most human experience. These gates are drawn from Francis Weller’s book The Wild Edge of Sorrow and modified based upon my own experience.
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“This too shall pass.”  My mother would comfort me with these words when I was facing something difficult, like an earache or an hour in the dentist’s chair.  And her words rang true – those challenges did pass and I was eventually restored to my preferred condition.  But I also remember greeting her words with skepticism.  “Why do I have to face anything unpleasant?  Don’t tell me this will go away eventually.  Take it away now!”
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Our relationship to the value of caregiving contains a paradox.  On the one hand, we hold as heroes those who care grandly:  Mother Teresa’s care for Calcutta’s poor, St. Francis’s protection of living creatures, and the Indian guru Amma’s 33 million hugs come immediately to mind.  But on the other hand, while we value the care given by parents, teachers, healthcare workers, childcare providers, custodians (and on and on) we don’t value that care financially.  The paradox is that we both value and don’t value caregiving.
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I’m privileged to be on retreat at Deer Park Monastery. Today is Lazy Day – a day in which the schedule is dropped so the monks, nuns, and lay residents can relax. I’d like to use this lazy interlude to share lessons from the monastery that caregivers may find useful.
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The buzz on my belt brought an adrenalin rush.  The ER was paging and that meant trouble because they don’t call the chaplain when an 11-year-old boy breaks his arm or an elderly woman falls.  They call when death is in the house.
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I arrived to find Stephen, a middle-aged man, lying on a gurney surrounded by the experienced and efficient ER staff.  A CPR tag-team circulated blood through his lifeless body while others placed tubes and IVs and called out regular progress reports.  After some time, the lead physician said, ‘I’m calling it.  Time of death:  2:14 pm.’ 
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Thanks to the Northwest Dharma Association for publishing this article about our recent Contemplative Caregiving Retreat.  We’re planning a longer follow-up retreat for 2017.

A Day of Exploring Contemplative Caregiving