July 30, 2017
July 30, 2017
Here are a few of my favourite videos about listening. It’s Not About the Nail still makes me laugh and continues to raise lots of questions in group discussions I lead. Brene Brown’s video on the difference between empathy and sympathy is cute and helpful. An excerpt from […]
July 30, 2017
July 28, 2017
At the end of his Introduction to the Devout Life, St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) addresses potential objections to his work that he imagines readers might have. One is that his exercises for living a devout life are unreasonably time-consuming. My own objection would be that sometimes I feel that it’s […]
July 24, 2017
Jean Vanier is the much beloved founder and beating heart of L’Arche—the non-profit, faith-based organization located in 50 countries worldwide. In L’Arche, people who have intellectual disabilities and those who come to assist them share life and daytime activities together in family-like settings that are integrated into local neighborhoods. (www.larche.ca) […]
July 22, 2017
I was a teenager when I had a chance to hear the legendary flamenco guitarist, Sabicas, play a concert in Toronto. Sabicas was in his mid 70s then—a diminutive old master, dressed in black tie and matching toupee, nearly blind, but his purist flamenco heart still beating hypertensive picados. In […]
July 20, 2017
Years ago in my training to become a hospital chaplain I received some advice to hug my past, and be hugged by it. I’m not sure I really knew at the time what that meant, but I never forgot it. In the past few months I finally acted on that […]
July 19, 2017
In her illness narrative, My Stroke of Insight (2008), Jill Bolte Taylor described how at age 37 she experienced a rare form of stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As a result, she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life, and it took […]
July 15, 2017
J. S. Mill (1806-1873) set out in his Autobiography (1873) to document not so much his life as a whole, but more specifically to provide a record of what he called his “unusual and remarkable education.” In its pages Mill described how he began to learn to read Greek at […]
July 14, 2017
Research Research shows that hospital patients want a spiritual assessment included in their care plan. Yet spiritual assessment isn’t easy. Rather, it’s a complex and challenging task that requires a number of personal qualities of clinicians. It requires the ability to: be “present” listen understand the message beyond the words […]
July 4, 2017
Spiritual Health Spiritual health is a key part of holistic patient-centered care. As one writer put it, Being religious or spiritual is part of who many people are—it forms the root of their identity as human beings and gives life meaning and purpose. All the more so when medical illness […]