Christine Chau - Week 6

In this week's theme of Science Catches Up to the Spirit Realm, I never really realized how much spirituality, medicine, religion, and theology can intersect in clinical work. As someone who wants to be in the medical field, I often always thought that to be a worker in the health field, you have to be free of your religious values so that when you are treating patients, your work in unbiased and solely based on your skills. However, the more we discuss in class and the readings I go through, often a lot of people are looking for ways for us to intersect these different aspects of everyday lives to provide a unique set of care. Spiritual care in medical settings are often not talked about, probably due to a lot of western doctors not believing in them. In "You are here" by Paramenshwaran Ramakrishnan, the chaplain's spiritual care process is something that I have not heard of yet before. It entails a lot of being a provide who listens to the patient empathetically and being aware of their own self thoughts and feelings. The article also mentions the provider being able to demonstrate 'trans-personal mindfulness' that is being able to move back and forth between their own and the patient's feelings and emotions to really understand the patient's pain. This is particularly interesting to me because not many providers are able to do this, or even think of choosing to do so. Empathy is one of the things in life that you cannot learn from a book. There may be books out there that can guide you to be more empathetic about the world or towards others, or giving tips on how to become more empathetic. When it really comes down to it though, you have to practice being empathetic, and learn as you go. Not everyone will be as empathetic and return the favor, or others may be more empathetic than you are. This journal review was really eye opening in a way to give me another perspective of the spirituality in psychiatry.

I chose this image to represent my blog post since it wraps the title in one single image, that we are all here as one tiny matter in a huge universe.