New York Zen Buddhist Contemplative Care Retreat

I just spent an amazing 4 days in a beautiful old nunnery an hour's drive north of New York City. I was joined by 80 other "contemplatives", some also students in the Zen Centre's Foundation program, and some from the community. The land was beautiful and NY is still in the peak of fall leaf colours.

I was surprised that we had designated "speaking times" and designated "silence times" each day, and we tried to move smoothlessly between them. This is harder than it sounds. Each day was broken up into digestible chunks of time of around 10-20 minutes. We started each morning with Zen zazen, which I've now learned starts with striking a bell three times, 20 minutes of silent watching the breath, striking the bell 2 times and bowing, taking a few minutes break with a few dharma words, and then repeating. I could pick out the Zen practitioners in the crowd with their perfect posture sits. The rest of us (Tibetan, Theravaden, or Mindfulness meditators) shifted more often or slouched somewhat as we sat.

The rest of the day was spent cycling between silent meditation sits, dharma talks, and intense dyad work. The dyad work was familiar to those of us in the Foundations course, and consisted of asking each other a single question over and over, replying to the question till nothing else came out, thanking the speaker, and then asking the same question again. Over and over for 10 long minutes, and then reversing roles. It was profound, to say the least. One of the most profound questions for me was "what am I attracted to?" and "what am I repulsed by? Maybe it was influenced because of spaciousness of the person working with me, but I uncovered layer after layer of those onions in the short period that was 10 minutes.

Interestingly, I participated in one dyad with a partner who was new to this dyad work, not in Foundations, and really didn't seem to get what to do. She kept trying to dialogue with me about my answers, and didn't just keep repeating the same one. And of course, the answers didn't go anywhere. I was disappointed with that pairing, but it simply made my other pairings sweeter.

Three times a day, we chanted the Heart Sutra (in English) and the Meal Chant. Now, I think I'm comfortable chanting, and have been doing so for 10 years with Tibetan Buddhism. But these Zen chants are different. Tibetan chants are calming, often personal mumblings, with eyes closed. Zen chants are loud and rhythmic and rumble around in your feet and heart as you feel the presence of so many people around you.

And then just when we were getting into the social part of connecting with the many "others" in the room, and enjoying the really good vibe, we got to dinner, and everything after was in silence. We ended with a dharma talk by the leaders, Koshin and Chodo, both Zen Chaplains and teachers. And more chanting. And Chodo ended the evening with a final poem imploring us not to "squalor our lives away". Powerful words to rumble through our consciousnesses as we trundled off to an early bedtime.

We were asked to maintain silence after dinner until after breakfast the next morning. For some this might have been challenging, but I welcomed the returning to my bedroom with my 2 other room mates. I don't mind having room mates, but really I don't like interacting with anyone at bed time. So for me this was perfect. I got a great night sleep with the early to bed and early to rise schedule and felt great. While it was somewhat jarring to back and forth between talking and communicating, it certainly an effective way to practice mindfulness moment to moment, and am thankful for the opportunities and insights the weekend brought. 

First Day of Volunteering at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre

After 2.5 months of jumping through hoops to get in, this morning I finally got to work my first shift. They have a rigours screening process of medical tests and confirmation of immunity before they let you attend the 3 training and tour days. So I was relieved to finally make it this far.

I got paired up with a 17 year veteran volunteer who seemed to know everyone. He had been a patient himself through the years, but now was in remission, and was keen to tell everyone he was one of them. I, on the other hand, simply say I'm volunteering to help out. I chose the Gastro-Intestinal Clinic, which I heard was one of the busiest clinics.

In my first 3 hour shift, I spoke with around 15 persons. Busy! Most of the conversations were pretty simple. We talked about the stress of getting to the clinic from out of town, like Parry Sound and Barrie. I also spoke with 2 parents who were struggling physically with their own issues and having a hard time supporting the 30-something daughter who was the patient. A few patients were ecstatic to be there, because they were in remission for a year or longer and were just back for well visits. In all, it was an interesting range of patients with a predictable range of emotions about the day.

I did have one interesting conversation with a guy around age 60 who started answering my questions about his diagnosis, and the completely changed the topic to talk about his cat. He showed me the scratch mark on his hands of where the cat had attacked him. He went on to describe the cat as totally dependent on him, since he lived alone with her, but she hated him and scratched him daily when he tried to pet her or pick her up. He had to bear the fact that she loved other women and would voluntarily curl up with them whenever they came to visit. But not him. It seemed like a symbolic conversation where the patient was reluctant to tell me directly what his life was like, but he was comfortable doing so through his cat.

In summary, I quite enjoyed myself and felt helpful. I didn't have any deep or profound conversations, but I did keep the waiting room tidied up from coffee cups and juice containers, and answered a number of questions about how to make coffee or what the next step was. I enjoyed the opportunity to just chat with patients during moments of anxiety without needing to feel like I was reporting on them or assessing them too formally. I'll see how the next few months go!

A Visit to a Death Cafe in Georgetown

No, it’s not Halloween. But on Tuesday around 6pm, I crept out of my house to go to my first ever Death Café. I confess I didn’t really tell my family where I was going, because I didn’t really want to try to answer their questions (Where are you going? Why would you want to spend an evening talking about death? What kind of strange people attend these gatherings?) Or maybe those were just my own weird questions of myself as I slunk out the door.

For those of you uninitiated to this global phenomenon, and according to www.deathcafe.com

At a Death Cafe people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death. 
Our objective is 'to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives'. 
A Death Cafe is a group directed discussion of death with no agenda, objectives or themes. It is a discussion group rather than a grief support or counselling session. 

So what was it really like? Well, it was a group of about 25 people who all gathered in a coffee shop in Georgetown. (Apparently 30 had RSVP'd and they had closed the numbers, but a few must have gotten cold feet at the last minute.) The group itself was pretty normal looking. All but 2 attendees (20-somethings, maybe kids of other attendees) were over the age of 50, both genders equally, and everyone keen to talk about death. I didn't see a shy person in the group. In this group it seemed that it was about 75% persons who work or volunteer in the end-of-life field in some capacity and 25% persons who simply had an interest in death because they were slightly older than the first group and experiencing lots of death first hand. 

We walked in, did introductions, ordered our own coffee and cake/cookies, and then were put in small tables of 4-5 persons. We were given a sheet of around 20 possible questions or themes to discuss. I confess our group was pretty casual with the sheet and mostly just took the conversation where it went, making sure we all had a chance to talk and then listen.  It's strange to say how quickly the time flew. We covered pet deaths, good deaths/bad  deaths we'd experienced, our families' views toward death, the many new careers in this field (Thanadoulas, Death Midwives, Contemplative Care Volunteers, Ecumenical Chaplains, Home Funeral Assistants, etc.). 

I'm almost embarrassed to say how much I felt a part of this group of death geeks. I cried a few tears, I laughed, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with these strangers. Enough so that I promised to not only drive the 1 hour commute to go back to their next gathering, but I also committed to follow through with an idea to host a Death Cafe in my neighbourhood. Stay tuned for when that is and what that's like.

Starting Out

So today I finally activated my account offering private practice for psychotherapy. Yippee!

http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/211999

It's exciting to spend so much time thinking about what I do and how I do it. I realize that my specialty is really making change happen. No matter what area of problem brought to me by a new client, I sit and listen, and find a way to help that individual see the situation in a new way. I get so excited when I see the client make that shift. It's usually obvious to me when that happens, and I aim for one of those "clicks" in every session. Maybe just a little click, but a shift in a new direction.

To do this really requires good listening, and an ability to see the client where they are at. I think my many years of experience doing this for myself in meditation practice really helps here. I try to listen for what's not being said. I try to see the whole system where the individual operates and how the last  sentence fits into everything else. It really is about "beginner's mind" with every sentence uttered by the client in front of me.

So it's interesting to ask myself how I'm special and why someone would choose me over some other therapist. How do I relay my openness to others? How can I show that I'm interested in what they have to say? I'm convinced it's not through spouting therapy models or training credentials. I have all those, as does everyone else. But what really matters is that I can bring my heart and mind to each interaction and the client in front of me feels that.

No matter what the topic is, I want to show my empathy and compassion to the speaker. And I want to hold my heart open to hope for change, even when I'm hearing that the person has been suffering for a very long time.

Let's see when the referrals start and I'll jump on into the deep end!

Dying Well - a book by Dr. Ira Byock

One of the things that I am doing these days is losing myself in reading books about death and dying. Several weeks ago, I went on-line to my public library system and ordered 12 interesting books. And then I realized I had another 6 to read for my New York Zen course. So I'm totally immersed in conversations with all these different authors.

One of my favourite authors so far has been Dr. Ira Byock, who wrote a famous book back in 1997 called Dying Well. He's an American Palliate Care Physician who was originally from Montana, but now lives in California and teaches at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. This book is so inspiring because he writes about wellness for dying people.

Plus, he puts forth an idea that conversations at death can bring about what he calls "life completion" in ways that actually improve the family relationships. Wow! This charges me up and makes me want to look for opportunities to be involved in this. I'm still not quite sure how this could happen for me, but it does seem to be a part of the palliative doctor role. It's logical to think it is also part of the end of life social worker role, whether in private practice or through a hospice.

I'm looking forward to 2 different volunteer opportunities I have coming up in the next couple of months - one at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and the other at the Kensington Hospice. But first I have to jump through all their hoops, which are formidable indeed. For the hospital role, I had to visit my GP 5 times to get all the immunizations and blood work tests confirming my antibodies are high enough. The hospice required a vulnerable persons' clearance through the police. Fortunately they've sped up their back log and now it's down to only a 2-4 week wait.

The good news is that the more I learn about the field of end of life care, the more inspired I am and the more convinced I want to work in this field. In fact, today I found myself googling end of life care jobs in the US! I can certainly contemplate travelling wherever I need to go to get the job experience, if it's for a relatively short period of time. So for now it's one foot in front of the other and I need to get started with the volunteering, and do a few more weekends down in New York City. 

Contemplating Contemplative Care in New York City

So the big event this week was taking the overnight MegaBus ($33 each way!) to New York City to attend the first 2 days of Contemplative Care training. The New York Zen Centre for Contemplative Care is offering this 9 month long course to individuals wanting to learn to bring more presence to end of life conversations. One might wonder how long I contemplated the decision to take on this long-distance commute before committing and the answer is simple - 24 hours.

The day after I got laid off, I sat at my computer and started googling. I searched "death and dying", "dying well", "mortality awareness", and other uplifting phrases. And then I got a short email from my friend Tonya Surman suggesting I check out zencare.org. I looked it up an immediately said YES. This is it. The corner stone that I will build my career change around. I did notice that it was being held in New York, but initially I ignored that. I spent the day searching the web but couldn't find anything else like this in Canada. A big Canadian bummer to that.

I also noticed that the deadline for registration was June 20, 2 weeks prior. So, me being me, I send an email with an appeal about just being laid off and needing to register NOW for THIS YEAR, and got a response back in less than an hour encouraging me to apply and be considered.

It's hard to describe how right this decision has felt. Of course there is that 12 hour overnight bus ride at the beginning and end of each training period, once a month. Now, I don't know many other 50 year women willing to travel this way, but I have always said that one of my greatest and most useful talents in life is my ability to sleep anywhere. Even on a bus, even crossing a border in the middle of the night and being hauled off the bus for the usual border interrogation.

So in order to be accepted into the program, I had to apply (which I did immediately), I got a reference letter from my Buddhist teacher, Sensei Doug Duncan (which he gave), and I made my first trek down in July by overnight bus to both check out the program and test the travel arrangement. Both passed, and I wrote the check for the year.

I'm not sure what all I will learn at this training, but I'm really looking forward to hanging out with these wonderful teachers and 35 fellow students for 2 days each month. We are all involved in volunteer placements and will have the opportunity to discuss our experiences with these with each other in person and with our groups, buddies, and mentors between the monthly sessions. We're a mixed bag of persons from various Buddhist and non-Buddhist backgrounds, and I'm on the younger end of the age average, with a few 20 somethings, but the majority identifying as empty nesters or retirees. And I'm the only Canadian amongst the Americans, most of whom are actually from New York or the surrounding area. I have to say I'm looking forward to hanging out with Americans again after so many years in Canada (I'm an American by birth but have lived in Canada for the last 32 years.

So more on the content of contemplative care when I know more about it. For now it's just about getting more comfortable with myself and trying to figure out what it would mean to bring more presence to my conversations.

What do I know about death?

I'm wondering whether everyone else knows as little about death as I do. I truly don't know what any of the impending signs are. I don't know what happens in the last moment, or even in the week leading up. I know it's wildly different disease by disease, but I really don't even know that range.

Earlier this week I ran into Gord, an old friend of mine who I met at my son's daycare 15 years ago. We got to talking about my career change, and he mentioned that he imagined that in old age he would want to do something similar to what we did for our young children. When our kids were little, we set up our own daycare in a home-based setting. We deliberately made it legal, but outside of the licensed daycare system supported and encouraged by the Ministry of Social Services (as it was then called).

So maybe we will set up a home-based home for elderly persons, and let the younger elderly persons take care of the older ones. We'll hire some kind of elderly worker to watch over everyone. Not necessarily a nurse or doctor, but rather someone who really likes old people. And have it be a place where we all take care of each other.  Where we aren't afraid to talk about death and dying.

It doesn't have to have a unified spirituality among the elderly, but it does have to have a layer of honesty and connection that one rarely finds in seniors homes. You see, you can't live your whole life connected to other families and then expect to want anything different when confronting death and dying.

What would help me between now and then would be to go to a "pre-death" class with my husband, similar to what we went to when we found out we were pregnant for the first time. A series of classes that would tell us about what happens in death from a physiological perspective. But also one that would build in the excitement for the death experience for family relationships similar to the way Ina May Gaskin's book called Spiritual Midwifery inspired us with our first baby. For those of you who don't know this wonderful book, you should read it, whether you're pregnant or not. It's not about religion at all, but rather it describes child birth as an exciting family affair capable of transforming young adults into connected and caring parents. She inspired me to have a home birth for my son, with my husband, brother-in-law, and 2 step sons present at the birth, and with friends and parents arriving and helping out within hours. And our family has never been the same, for the good.

If you know of any good "pre-death" classes in Canada, let me know. I would sign up in a flash. I can't believe others don't also want to sign up and learn about this.