Meditation and meaning beyond the bee

Beyond noticing the moment, Jane Williams sees another dimension to meditation, giving a different kind of account of what is going on.

Jane Williams

Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.

A bee rests on a human hand sipping a liquid.

'The daily life of a bee'.

Photo by Fabian Kleiser on Unsplash.

There is an increasing recognition of the power of meditation as a practice that promotes well-being. It is even being suggested as a tool, alongside others, for managing anxiety, depression and the other mental health related symptoms of our time.

Meditation doesn’t have to have a religious dimension to it, although it is a practice that has been found in all religious traditions, including Christianity, for centuries. The ‘techniques’ of meditation are very similar, whether used by someone who is religious or not. Meditation, at its most basic, requires us to attend to our body, hearing and calming our heart beat and our breathing, noticing the areas of tension and even pain in our body, finding a posture that can be maintained with comfort but without sloppiness for a period of time.

The daily life of the bee

It also requires us to notice the moment we are in: to hear the regular sounds around us, to see the way in which light falls through the window, or from a candle flame, to see the fly or the bee, getting on with daily life. Deliberately, we do not try to control these things, or allow our busy minds to tell stories about them, or try to rearrange them in any way: we simply give them our attention.

Although this sounds easy it is surprisingly hard, to begin with. It makes us realise how inattentive we usually are, how hard we find it to be still, how little our minds are accustomed to concentration, more used to veering wildly from one topic to another. Meditation helps us to notice this, not by asking us to do the impossible, and force our minds to emptiness, but by gently, firmly, taking each thought as it flits across our brain, and putting it down again, returning our attention to breathing, to space, to the moment we are in.

As we continue the practice, we will probably notice patterns in our distracting thoughts, habits of worry, or self-obsession or annoyance or fantasy; we will begin to notice the depth of the channel these kinds of thoughts have dug in us, but also begin to be able to redirect the channels, and put new ones in place, channels of attention, peacefulness, gentleness to ourselves and the world.

A different dimension

We don’t need any religious explanation to see why such practices ‘work’ for us, who are complex and interdependent beings, who can never separate out mind, body, spirit; meditation teaches us how to attend to our wholeness. But as a Christian theologian, I can’t help seeing another dimension to meditation, which might give a different kind of account of what is going on when we meditate.

As a Christian, I know myself to be a ‘creature’, a being made by God, not by accident, not to fulfil some lack in God, not to perform any tasks that God needed done, but simply because God’s overflowing love and creativity calls into being a universe and gives it freedom, agency and creativity of its own. God creates what is genuinely not God, and God loves what is created. That means that the complex interaction of all the processes, mental and physical, that make us human beings are gift, and meditation focuses us on this giftedness, it asks us to trust ourselves and our world as, at the deepest level, beneficent, meaning well to us. However much the world may have the power to damage us, and we to damage ourselves and each other, that is not its first and most basic effect: as we meditate, simply attending to the moment, we are blessed.

Christian mediation also assumes that as in meditation we attend to the moment, we are also being attended to. We are not just learning to see and hear where we are, but also learning that we are seen and heard. In our crowded lives and over-busy minds, God is still present and attentive, but there are so many distractions and barriers that prevent us from noticing and receiving the loving, patient, healing attention of God. Meditation as the ‘practice of the presence of God’, might help us see why it is such a powerful habit, because it opens in us a space to receive ourselves again from the one who made us in love, the one who came to live a human life to fill our created reality with the generosity of the Creator, the one who prays in us, endlessly, wordlessly, joyfully, that we are beloved, known, invited and set free.

Article

Change

26 July 2024

6 min read

Are we forgetting how to care?

The profound act at the heart of nursing.

Helen Cowan

Helen is a registered nurse and freelance writer, writing for audiences ranging from the general public to practitioners and scientists.

A nurse bends beside a bed and talks to a patient

Marie Curie.

Recently, at a nursing leadership programme in Oxford, attendees focused on the fundamentals of care. Have we forgotten how to care? What can we re-learn from those who pioneered an ordinary yet profound act that affects millions?"

Anam Cara is an old Gaelic term for ‘soul friend’, a person with whom you can share your innermost self, your mind and your heart. It is a term that Tom Hill, former chief executive at Helen House Hospice in Oxford, used to describe the relationship between his staff and the thousands of children and their families who passed through their ‘big red door’ in its first twenty-five years. The hospice (or ‘loving respice’ as it became known) had been founded by Sister Frances Dominica in 1982.

Other care in this country can also trace its religious roots. Between 1048 and 1070 in Jerusalem, the Order of St. John was founded for the purpose of helping pilgrims (“our Lords, The Sick”) who had become lost, weary, or beset by other difficulties while on their way to the Holy Land. Today, in the United Kingdom, the British Association of the Order has extended care to older people first in almshouses and later in care homes. A trustee for ten years was John Monckton, a man of ‘considerable talent, enormous integrity and deep religious conviction’; his tragic murder in 2004 led to the creation of the John Monckton Memorial Prize, which recognised and rightly celebrated commitment to care by care workers.

Today, across the world, seen and unseen, nurses, carers and families continue to provide compassionate care. “Assisting individuals, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery (or to peaceful death) that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge” is the very essence of nursing, captured by ‘architect of nursing’, researcher and author Virginia Henderson in 1966. Meeting more than basic needs such as breathing, eating, drinking and eliminating bodily waste (which are of essential importance), Henderson recognised the role of the nurse in enabling humans to communicate with others, worship according to their faith, satisfy curiosity and sense accomplishment.

In the desire for modernisation and professionalisation, have we lost sight of the core values and activities central to patient care?

An uncomfortable truth brought out in healthcare reports such as the Final Report of the Special Commission of Inquiry (The Garling Report) 2008, and the Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry (The Francis Report) 2013 is though that this type of nursing is too often done badly or even missed, leading to pressure injury, medication errors, hospital-acquired infection, falls, unplanned readmission, critical incidents and mortality. According to nurse scientist and scholar Professor Debra Jackson, “missed care occurs much more frequently than we might think”. She cites a systematic review in which ‘care left undone’ on the last shift ranged from 75 per cent in England, to 93 per cent in Germany, with an overall estimate of 88 per cent across 12 European countries’.

In one offensively-titled paper, “Shitty nursing - the new normal?” (in which the authors apologise for the title but not the questions raised), real-life pen portraits are drawn of patients lying for hours on hospital trolleys, immobile through infection or injury, ignored by staff. Whilst acknowledging contextual factors for poor care, such as a shortage of nurses and resources, the authors argue that circumstances cannot be the sole cause of missed nursing care.

A report published by the University of Adelaide, School of Nursing, has called for nurses to ‘reclaim and redefine’ the fundamentals of care. It asks whether the cause of the problem (of missed nursing care) lies “deep in the psyche of the nursing profession itself?” “Has something happened to the way modern nursing views and values caring?” it continues. “Indeed, is nursing in danger of losing its claim to care? In the desire for modernisation and professionalisation, have we lost sight of the core values and activities central to patient care? Or is this a broader social pattern where individuals are less inclined to show kindness, compassion, and care for others even if it is a necessary requirement of the job?”

Compassion, he emphasises, is more than empathy - and way "less fluffy" but much more measurable than kindness.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, Professor of critical care medicine Peter Brindley and Consultant in intensive care Matt Morgan wonder whether doctors also “too often default to high-tech and low-touch” when patients are dying – a time “when community and connection matter most”. They powerfully begin with a mother’s comment: “Humans are gardens to tend – not machines to fix.”

Professor Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the first National Clinical Director for Children in Government and former Children’s Commissioner for England, and past president of the British Medical Association, suggests that we as a society need a “momentum for compassion”. Struck by the extremes of compassion witnessed during his wife’s treatment in the last years of her life, Sir Al wants to see a cultural transformation in healthcare: for compassion to be a key operating principle in NHS and care settings, led by the Chief Nurse’s Office; for every organisation to promote the importance of compassion at the professional level; for the views of patients and families to be sought regularly; for much earlier and better focus on compassion in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching programmes for all staff; for compassion to be inspected against by the Care Quality Commission; and for a willingness to encourage staff at all levels to expose poor practice as well as celebrating excellent care.

Compassion, he emphasises, is more than empathy - and way "less fluffy" but much more measurable than kindness. “It’s putting yourself into somebody else’s shoes – and doing something about it.” Recently appointed the UK’s first Visiting Professor in Compassionate Care at Northampton University, at the age of 80, Sir Al certainly is doing something about it. He has made it his new purpose in life to “embed compassion into every aspect of care”.

Like Sir Al, Queen Elizabeth II, the UK’s longest serving monarch, espoused compassion, in word and deed. Living a life of compassionate service, the Queen made clear that her Christian faith was her guiding principle. She speaks of Jesus Christ as ‘an inspiration,’ a ‘role model’ and ‘an anchor’. “Many will have been inspired by Jesus’ simple but powerful teaching,” she said in her Christmas Broadcast, 2000. “Love God and love thy neighbour as thyself – in other words, treat others as you would like them to treat you. His great emphasis was to give spirituality a practical purpose.”

When nurses do unto others as they would have done unto themselves, and act as role model to colleagues, not only do patient experiences of care and their outcomes improve – but so does job satisfaction for nurses: a critical factor in nurse recruitment and retention – the biggest workforce challenge faced by healthcare organisations. Across the UK, there are currently more than 40,000 nursing vacancies, and thousands of burnt-out nurses are leaving the profession early. Whether nurses decide to stay or go is driven in part by their daily experience at work. The late Kate Granger, Consultant in medicine for older people, inspired Compassionate Care Awards in her name, envisioning that such a legacy would drive up standards in care - and surely also help retain nurses, through restoring a sense of pride, achievement and fulfilment to the nursing workforce.