Metta, Blessing the Patient, Presence and Intuition

My wife and I were on a very relaxed bicycling trail ride yesterday.  She related to me that recently after giving an energy or massage session, she holds the client’s head with her fingers over the third eye and intones:  

“May you be safe;  May you be healthy;  May you be happy;  May you live with ease.” 

I usually use Metta either as a meditation practice or in some situation where I don’t know what else to offer.  But, I had always practiced Metta in silence. 

http://enlightenedmdphd.blogspot.com/2013/02/gentler-meditation.html

What my wife was doing was blessing the patient at the end of the session. 

Interesting!

What came up for me is as a physician is that perhaps we need to do this after every clinical session, with every patient   How would that change our practice of medicine! 

I would probably get complaints from both my fundamentalist, and my atheist, patients. 

I have prayed with patients on a few occasions, when they have asked me to pray with them, always, within a Christian paradigm. 

Good practice for a child of Jewish Holocaust survivors! 

 

Larry Dossey is a physician who writes about the use of nondenominational prayer in medicine.  He describes:

Era 1 medicine as mechanical medicine, dealing only with the body.    

Era 2 medicine connected the body and the mind. 

Era 3 medicine is where we realize that consciousness is not confined to the mind-body, where we realize that consciousness is “non-local.” 

(Yay, another heretic MD!). 

http://www.dosseydossey.com/larry/QnA.html

http://www.dosseydossey.com/larry/reinvent.html

But how could we change the practice of medicine if we taught use of nondenominational prayer, along with presence and intuition, as part of medical school education?  Many of us do this.  But it is usually taught “on the side,” to select groups of students, under the right circumstances. 

http://enlightenedmdphd.blogspot.com/2013/04/presence-intuition-healing.html

We are moving in this direction.  I am not sure when we will get to Era 3 medicine as central to our teachings in allopathic medicine. 

I will again send a plea to the non-local universe for adopting Ken Wilber’s Integral Model as the basic map for medical school education. 

http://enlightenedmdphd.blogspot.com/2013/02/just-stranger-in-strange-land-part-2.html

We will get to Era 3 medicine.  I have no doubt. 

Just seems to be taking a bit too long for my liking. 

Guess it is time to go meditate on:  

            Accepting this world just as it is. 

            Realizing it will change.  

            And, being fully present, will influence that change.