Book Review: "Minding the Bedside"

Jerome Stone, a Registered Nurse, researcher, author and practitioner of meditation, has shared his vision of the intersection of nursing, meditation and mindfulness in his excellent book, "Minding the Bedside: Nursing From the Heart of the Awakened Mind". The following is a review posted in advance of his appearance on RN.FM Radio.

The Mind as a Train

I've been under a considerable amount of stress lately. My wife and I are quitting our jobs, selling our home of 11 years, leaving our hometown of 17 years, and starting a new life. Plus I have chronic pain and several other troublesome health problems. In the presence of these concurrent and challenging life factors, I am striving to maintain my emotional equanimity, mental stability, and a healthy lifestyle.

Watching how my mind works and the suffering that I experience when my mind gets the best of me, I can see that my mind is often like a runaway train. There are apparently no brakes, the passengers are screaming bloody murder, and the only refreshments available in the cafe car are drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, slothfulness, and a host of other unhealthy habits to which we humans so frequently succumb when under duress.

As this train hurtles down the track, I try to disengage and hop off at one of the platforms that whiz by at lightning speed, but it's difficult to get up the courage to simply be calm in the eye of the storm and trust that I'll land on my feet if I jump. And when I do indeed manage to simply stand on the platform and watch the train racing past, my hand will often get caught on one of the train's many handles, and I'll suddenly find myself being dragged alongside the speeding train, once again falling victim to the mind's subtle tricks, even though the only thing I need to do is let go.

Apparently helpless and at the mercy of the chugging engines of ego, depression and anxiety, I am frequently dragged alongside my churning mind, and my body is whipped against telephone polls, street lamps and signs along the way. As I struggle to gain my footing against this consistent onslaught of worry and anxiety, my shoes are torn off, and my bloodied feet drag along the ground as the train continues on its inexorable path.

These images may be graphic, but I feel that it's important to identify the feeling that one experiences when the mind's runaway train controls the trajectory of one's life. It seems that the train can happily speed along it's one-way track of worry and rumination perfectly well with or without my participation, so why not choose to simply sit in the grandstand, drink a cup of tea, and watch the action from that calm vantage point?

I admit it. I daily fall victim to my mind's attempts to keep me worrying, to keep the fretting fresh and new, to continue to enslave me to its wiles. But now, 45 years into the game, I'm beginning to catch on, and I'm seeing the ways in which I make myself miserable. I am determined to continue to learn how to get off at the station, rest my weary self, and be a witness to my mind. The lessons learned from that watchfulness and awareness---often called mindfulness---are ones that I will be sure to share here with you, Dear Reader. If you have a story, tactic or anecdote to share about mindfulness and self-care, please leave a comment, and I will be sure to respond.

Mindfulness and Mindlessness

In this new iteration of my life, one of my most sincere areas of focus is the development of mindfulness, which Jon Kabat-Zinn simply describes as "knowing what you are doing while you are doing it". He also states that mindfulness "is cultivated by purposefully paying attention to things we ordinarily never give a moment's thought to. It is a systematic approach to developing new kinds of control and wisdom in our lives, based on our inner capacities for relaxation, paying attention, awareness, and insight."

Interestingly, when I began writing the previous paragraph, I rose from my chair in front of the computer to search for my copy of Full Catastrophe Living in order to find the quotes by Kabat-Zinn that I wanted to use. Apropos of the subject of mindfulness versus mindlessness, I ended up wandering all over the house to find where I had last left the book. This was a prime example of mindlessness in action a la Keith.

So, mindfulness can be about meditation, something I am now attempting to integrate into my daily life. But it truly is about so much more. As Mr. Kabat-Zinn so aptly states, it is indeed "knowing what you are doing while you are doing it." When I walk in the door of my house, I always try to be mindful about where I put my keys, my cell-phone and my other important belongings. I have a little wooden box where these things are supposed to live, and when they aren't there when I need them, I waste a great deal of energy on finding them---energy I could be using for more important things. The case of the missing book was very illustrative to me, and serves as a reminder of a continuing need for mindfulness in relation to both the physical, emotional, and psychological worlds.

One might say that mindfulness could be used as an excuse by a person with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder to more sharply focus on their ritualistic behavior. While this is true, and while I do admit to a personal level of OCD, these two ways of being can be synthesized into a greater whole which serves the individual without pathological underpinnings. My goals are certainly above and beyond personal pathology, and my plan of self-care includes time for formal mindfulness practice, integration of mindfulness into my daily activities, as well as time to simply "be" without any plans or practices whatsoever.

This mindfulness stuff can be tiring and can sometimes feel like work. But once it is fully integrated, I hope that the "work" will be something that happens in the background without as much conscious effort, and mindlessness will become more and more an occasional blip on life's radar screen.