Ive had a simple concept grip me with such power that Ive spent more than thirty years of my life exploring its many facets. Oddly enough, I didnt know how to put words to it until just a few years ago. It has to do with learning how to be a Healer as opposed to what I call being a Flesh Mechanic. The start of this journey took place in the back of an ambulance. I was on the first wave of Mobile Intensive Care Unit Paramedics in the country during the 70s and 80s. I began my 12-year career as an Emergency Medical Technician (a basic level of emergency care delivery). We used to proudly say that we worked with our Head, Hands, and Heart. No truer words were ever spoken! These three, besides a limited array of bandages and splints, a cylinder of oxygen and a converted V-8, Cadillac Hearse, were all we had to use. The goal: Get the patient to the hospital as fast as possible, preferably alive. Improvisation was a necessity. In serious cases, Id run through my bag of tricks so quickly that all I had left to give was my self. Sometimes the only thing that seemed to stand between death and my patient was my desire that the patient live. I cant count the intense moments I spent unassisted in the back of a careening ambulance doing cardiac compressions and giving mouth to mouth resuscitation (there were no face masks in use back then)essentially breathing for and being the heartbeat of the personfor a breakneck ride to the hospital. Can you imagine a more intimate period of time with a human being than this? Something strange would happen to me when my sense of compassion was ignited. I would simply know what to do. Something as simple as a gesture by my patient would be so familiar to me, so human, thatjust for an instantthe difference between my patient and me would dissolve. From that moment until I dropped off the patient at the hospital, I moved from someplace centered inside my chest, and my actions felt spontaneous. At the time, I was aware of the difference between acting from the heart and acting from the head, though not able to articulate it. Once I started to fill my head with the therapies and procedures, drugs and techniques that are the stock in trade of the paramedic, however, I found myself turning into a superb Flesh Mechanic. Focused on the delivery of care, it became easy for me to distance myself from the experience of being a human being with a human being in need. There was an almost imperceptible coldness growing in me. The tradeoff was convenience and comfortI didnt have to be affected so deeply, so personally. If the patient died, I could say, Well, the drugs didnt work. This led me to a choice point, though, because I could feel myself losing my humanity. As I looked around me at my peers, from fellow EMT's through the heads of the hospitals I worked at, I saw the same creeping coldness take shape and stick. I was pulling away from the loop of connection that is so vital to the healing process. The more distant I became from my experience, the more my own life force seeped out of me. On the other hand, at times confusingly so, being invested completely in the moment with a person in need also provided a healing for ME. I kept getting hints and tips to remind me there were different ways to work than being lost within the mechanistic process that was beginning to feel so empty to me. One call after another would come during a forty-eight hour shift, each more challenging and perhaps insane than the one before it. After having no sleep for 36 hours or so Id find myself in the middle of a complex incident where everything was going wrong. Overwhelmed, and not having a clue as to what to do next, internally, Id throw my hands up in despair, and surrender to Whatever it was that created me, my patients and the situation. In those moments, something else seemed to take over. Completely. I would literally feel my consciousness shift from my head to my heart. I found myself in the midst of the moment, with all my heart, for that was all I had left. It was as if I could see with all of me, rather than just my eyes. I would move from my center rather than in response to a thought process. There appeared to be no brain involved, no lag time, between perceiving something needing to be done and doing it. Miracles would truly come through me. At the time, I wasnt really aware of how one piece fit into another. Those experiences, however, prompted me to begin investing more and more of my time being as present as I could, in each moment, with my patients. I found that I could increase the odds of my being effective on a call by taking time to prepare and open myself to just deal with each moment as it unfolded. Rather than thinking about the technical approaches I could use, I began to take the situation in from a deeper place, and then do just what was necessary. Id spend the rest of my time being with rather than doing to. I discovered so many of my actions became intuitive rather than logical. I recognized something important: preparation, and connection to myself and the moment and the patient really IS the essence of healing, and something in the heart makes it happen. |
