Wednesday 7 October 2015

Students in Health-care Professions Resist Maturation?

     "Mindfulness is a natural, but underdeveloped, universal human capacity to see more clearly, & as a natural result, relate with greater wisdom & kindness to ourselves & the world." http://jglovas.wix.com/awarenessnow#!Yet-Another-Definition-of-Mindfulness/c17jj/5614f3e60cf25fa7fe2bac4b

     Yet only ~1% of dental, dental hygiene, and other students in health-care professions sign-up to take a free 8-week Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course. Interestingly, students in law, social work, and clinical psychology, as well as practicing mental-health professionals are very interested.
     Being truly "too busy" vs simply giving mindfulness a low priority are not easy to separate. One would hope that a central concern in training health-care professionals is helping them mature into healthy, functional adults to enable them to be, on graduation, healthy, functional adult health-care professionals. One would hope that both students & educators are actively engaged in this process.
     But the widespread, often highly energetic resistance to all courses (medical humanities, communication skills, & other behavioural sciences) that attempt to promote a healthy maturation process, reflects many individuals' fear & misunderstanding, toward the normal, healthy human maturation process. http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/search?q=discontents
     We're simply NOT all at the same level of psycho-social-spiritual maturity. Yet all wisdom traditions maintain that each of us has at least the potential, or seed of perfection, within (having been created in the image and likeness of God; having the seed of Buddhanature; etc).
     What we need is a wide range of acceptable means to nurture that universal human seed of perfection. For many, the world's major religions offer comfort & community, but sadly, only a small proportion of followers make full use of religion as an actual living wisdom tradition ie to thoroughly improve their lives.
     Each individual seems to need to, if not "hit rock bottom", then at least experience the basic unsatisfactoriness of life (dukkha). Until then, most of us tend to mindlessly, desperately chase after success / status / possessions / vacations etc, "too busy" to take serious interest in maturing to our full potential as human beings. 
     Mindfulness is rapidly gaining popularity as a welcoming, easy-to-approach, effective gateway to psycho-social-spiritual maturation, available equally to religious, non-religious, and anti-religious.

Public Gardens, Halifax, NS, Canada