Meaningful Dimension
Dr William House, 2016
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
Meaning and Health
We are coming to understand health not as the absence of disease, but rather as the process by which individuals maintain their sense of coherence…. their sense that life is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful.
Many people live lives that are empty. This emptiness is caused, in some part, by living without meaning, or with meaning that is much too small, too trivial, or too material for the needs of a human being.
.. Our suffering in developed countries is primarily psychological, relational, and addictive: the suffering of people who are comfortable on the outside but oppressed and empty within. It is a crisis of meaninglessness, which leads us to try to find meaning in possessions, perks, prestige, and power, which are always outside of the self. It doesn’t finally work. So we turn to ingesting food, drink, or drugs, and we become addictive consumers to fill the empty hole within us.
Follow your bliss
The divine manifestation is ubiquitous,
Only our eyes are not open to it.Awe is what moves us forward.
Live from your own center.
The divine lives within you.
The separateness apparent in the world is secondary.
Beyond the world of opposites is an unseen,
but experienced, unity and identity in us all.Today the planet is the only proper “in group.”
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
We cannot cure the world of sorrows,
but we can choose to live in joy.You must return with the bliss and integrate it.
The return is seeing the radiance is everywhere.
The world is a match for us.
We are a match for the world.
The spirit is the bouquet of nature.Sanctify the place you are in.
Follow your bliss. . . .
Joseph Campbell
Medicine tells us as much about the meaningful performance of healing, suffering, and dying as chemical analysis tells us about the aesthetic value of pottery.
Meaning in Healthcare
There has been much focus on ‘Evidence Based Medicine’ in recent years sometimes at the expense of seeing the patient as a person and of hearing their ‘story’. However to best help our patients we need both. This is not a new debate – see the Narrative Based Medicine series from 1999 by Trish Greenhalgh in the BMJ.
Also by Dr Charon Narrative evidence based medicine, Rita Charon & Peter Wyer, The Lancet, Jan 2008
We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Henry James, The Middle Years
Resources
- Circles of dysfunction from JHH article The community and the chocolate factory
- Common Cause Foundation is an independent not for profit organisation. It works to place values that lead people to express concern for community, environment and equality at the heart of our cultural, political and civic institutions. You may also wish to read their Report.
- The Values of Everything George Monbiot – a comment on The Common Cause by Tom Crompton
- Why Study Narrative? and Narrative based medicine in an evidence based world by Trish Greenhalgh, BMJ 1999
- Beyond evidence-based medicine: bridge-building a medicine of meaning. PubMed 2002
- JHH Article Too much diagnosis, not enough art by William House – reflections from the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference
- Logotherapy developed by Victor Frankl is founded upon the belief that it is the striving to find a meaning in one’s life that is the primary, most powerful motivating and driving force
- Thomas Moore on ‘A Religion of One’s Own’
- Over the moon: Adam Phillips on the happiness myth
- Resurgence: Intrinsic Values Issue 265 • March/April 2011
- ‘The Recovery of the Sacred’ Article by Dr Remen:
Recovering the sacred is remembering something we’ve forgotten, something we may have hidden from ourselves. It is about uncovering and discovering the innate wholeness in ourselves and in the world.
And these books:
The knitted glove
You come into my office wearing a blue
Knitted glove with a ribbon at the wrist.
You remove the glove slowly, painfully
And dump out the contents, a worthless hand.
What a specimen! It looks much like a regular hand,
Warm, pliable, soft. You can move the fingers.
If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Last month the fire in your hips had you down,
Or up mincing across the room with a cane.
When I ask about the hips today, you pass them off,
So I can’t tell if only your pain
Or the memory is gone. You knitted hand
Is the long and short of it. Pain doesn’t exist
In the past any more than this morning does.
This thing, the name for your solitary days,
For the hips, the hand, for the walk of your eyes
Away from mind, this thing is coyote, the trickster.
I want to take it by its neck between my hands.
But in this world I don’t know how to find
The bastard, so we sit. We talk about the pain.
