"Does Not Wisdom Call?": Cultivating Attention, Awareness and Intuition in Healthcare Trainees Through Formative Practices in Community Medicine
Andrew Michel, MD, Frist College of Medicine at Belmont University, Nashville, TN; Jordan Mason, PhD, Providence St. Joseph Health, Santa Rosa, CA; Ashley Moyse, PhD, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY; and Skylar Holder, MMS, PA-C, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC
Within the healthcare professions, hyper-cognitive epistemologies of being, which appear to foster mastery of diseased materiality, are heavily relied upon and reified within sterile healthcare ecosystems of managerial efficiency. Yet social critiques and empirical data suggest despair, division, and disillusionment within the health professions for patients, clinicians, and the beleaguered healthcare ecosystems in which they serve and seek healing.
Could it be that we have paradoxically lost touch with deep resources for flourishing? While our intellectual powers may seem increasingly powerful and efficient, have not our hearts become weighed down and anemic? This panel will focus on how the hearts of trainees in the health professions might be awakened to wonder, coherence, joy, and other-centeredness by hearing and responding to the call of wisdom. The panel will review concrete practices, rhythms, and “greenhouses” of nourishment that enable trainees in the health professions to cultivate intuitive epistemologies of being in the healing arts.
For example, “The Wayfarer Program: A Spiritual and Creative Deepening Experience” is an interprofessional opportunity created for nurses and mental health counselors at Belmont University. Participants are trained in practices of accompaniment and deep listening, daily rhythms of gratitude and reflection, along with creative practices, beginning with writing practices. The intention of the program is to seed the healthcare ecosystem with healing artists who are strengthened in their inner being through training in contemplative and creative practices toward human flourishing in the context of interdisciplinary communities that will cultivate improvisational attitudes, behaviors, and skills toward flourishing in healthcare.
Likewise, the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics encourages the pursuit of and encounter with wisdom for medical trainees via an expanding constellation of Cooperatives that encourage trainees to discover the practices that will make them as good as possible for their work. Medical students and residents are schooled in practices of attention that cultivate creative sensibilities in illness contexts toward other-centered healing and flourishing for healer and patient, despite malformative healthcare ecosystems. They are encouraged ‘to recognize the significant within the factual’ realities of bodies, and spaces, and environments, and practices, which ‘is wisdom’ (Bonhoeffer, Ethics). By engaging with students of medicine in hives of belonging and discerning labor, the Columbia program feeds and warms hearts as each trainee learns to regard their work as though bees practiced in the virtues nurtured through ‘long search’ and ‘true judgment’, which offers for them and their patients the bee’s ancient gifts, honey and wax (Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books). Wisdom’s honey is enjoyed as a grace by those who keep company with her as willing partners who consistently seek her face. Moreover, Wisdom offers improvisational guidance for unpredictable life occasions and contexts to those who enjoy dynamic relationship with her beauty and light.
The panel will also review an innovative elective for medical students at Belmont University’s College of Medicine intended to bring early medical student trainees into relational and participatory modes of clinical ethics reasoning. While traditional clinical ethics reasoning often reinforces hyper-cognitive epistemologies of being, participatory modes of clinical ethics activate intuitive wisdom at the core of knowing-in-being in ethical discernments. This course both deconstructs conventional models for clinical ethics practice while offering constructive alternative liturgical rhythms of attention, reflection, and creative ethical action. Drawing on the Eucharistic liturgy, the course helps medical trainees see ethics as an orientation toward the good, rather than an exercise in expedient solutions. The course will include early modeling with narration of actual clinical reasoning in this style and opportunities for students to practice early reasoning in these models in active patient cases.
The panel will conclude with the lived experience of a Physician Assistant graduate from the Parallel Charts Program at Wake Forest. Physician Assistant trainees at Wake Forest are invited to keep a record of relational, moral, and intuitive aspects of healing encounters not included in the medico-legal record. Through this practice, and participation in reflection on art and poetry, students grow in intuitive ways of being relationally toward themselves, their practice of healing, and persons they serve. This shared experience will emphasize the personal impact of longitudinal formational programs over the trajectory of an early career clinician’s experience and the expansion of flourishing for the individual and the community in which they are membered. As individuals are transformed into these intuitive epistemologies of being, they seed further communal transformation as leaders who re-invest fruits garnered in the lives surrounding them, including fellow trainees, colleagues in the health professions, and the health care ecosystem itself.
Could it be that we have paradoxically lost touch with deep resources for flourishing? While our intellectual powers may seem increasingly powerful and efficient, have not our hearts become weighed down and anemic? This panel will focus on how the hearts of trainees in the health professions might be awakened to wonder, coherence, joy, and other-centeredness by hearing and responding to the call of wisdom. The panel will review concrete practices, rhythms, and “greenhouses” of nourishment that enable trainees in the health professions to cultivate intuitive epistemologies of being in the healing arts.
For example, “The Wayfarer Program: A Spiritual and Creative Deepening Experience” is an interprofessional opportunity created for nurses and mental health counselors at Belmont University. Participants are trained in practices of accompaniment and deep listening, daily rhythms of gratitude and reflection, along with creative practices, beginning with writing practices. The intention of the program is to seed the healthcare ecosystem with healing artists who are strengthened in their inner being through training in contemplative and creative practices toward human flourishing in the context of interdisciplinary communities that will cultivate improvisational attitudes, behaviors, and skills toward flourishing in healthcare.
Likewise, the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics encourages the pursuit of and encounter with wisdom for medical trainees via an expanding constellation of Cooperatives that encourage trainees to discover the practices that will make them as good as possible for their work. Medical students and residents are schooled in practices of attention that cultivate creative sensibilities in illness contexts toward other-centered healing and flourishing for healer and patient, despite malformative healthcare ecosystems. They are encouraged ‘to recognize the significant within the factual’ realities of bodies, and spaces, and environments, and practices, which ‘is wisdom’ (Bonhoeffer, Ethics). By engaging with students of medicine in hives of belonging and discerning labor, the Columbia program feeds and warms hearts as each trainee learns to regard their work as though bees practiced in the virtues nurtured through ‘long search’ and ‘true judgment’, which offers for them and their patients the bee’s ancient gifts, honey and wax (Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books). Wisdom’s honey is enjoyed as a grace by those who keep company with her as willing partners who consistently seek her face. Moreover, Wisdom offers improvisational guidance for unpredictable life occasions and contexts to those who enjoy dynamic relationship with her beauty and light.
The panel will also review an innovative elective for medical students at Belmont University’s College of Medicine intended to bring early medical student trainees into relational and participatory modes of clinical ethics reasoning. While traditional clinical ethics reasoning often reinforces hyper-cognitive epistemologies of being, participatory modes of clinical ethics activate intuitive wisdom at the core of knowing-in-being in ethical discernments. This course both deconstructs conventional models for clinical ethics practice while offering constructive alternative liturgical rhythms of attention, reflection, and creative ethical action. Drawing on the Eucharistic liturgy, the course helps medical trainees see ethics as an orientation toward the good, rather than an exercise in expedient solutions. The course will include early modeling with narration of actual clinical reasoning in this style and opportunities for students to practice early reasoning in these models in active patient cases.
The panel will conclude with the lived experience of a Physician Assistant graduate from the Parallel Charts Program at Wake Forest. Physician Assistant trainees at Wake Forest are invited to keep a record of relational, moral, and intuitive aspects of healing encounters not included in the medico-legal record. Through this practice, and participation in reflection on art and poetry, students grow in intuitive ways of being relationally toward themselves, their practice of healing, and persons they serve. This shared experience will emphasize the personal impact of longitudinal formational programs over the trajectory of an early career clinician’s experience and the expansion of flourishing for the individual and the community in which they are membered. As individuals are transformed into these intuitive epistemologies of being, they seed further communal transformation as leaders who re-invest fruits garnered in the lives surrounding them, including fellow trainees, colleagues in the health professions, and the health care ecosystem itself.