The cyclone derives its powers from a calm center. So does a person.

—Dominic of Calaruega

Moira was born and raised in Ireland where she attended nursing school before emigrating to the US. She and I compared notes about our work in nursing. She shared many funny stories about working in hospice nursing which I found surprising. She was so good at caring for the dying, a part of nursing from which I had purposely distanced. Moira helped me understand the dying process and taught me the signs of impending death. She accurately predicted the week of my Mother’s death. She attended my Mom’s funeral where I finally got the courage to ask, “How do you deal with the stress of death and dying every day? How does it not drive you to despair?” I will never forget her response, in that deep Irish accent, “Every mornin’ before I go to work, I sit in my favorite chair, close my eyes and say a prayer. Then, I open the daily newspaper to the ‘Irish Sports Page’ and read every listing.” “What is the Irish sports page?” I asked. “It’s the obituary pages, my dear. It helps to know that we will all be listed there someday”

Medical and nursing professionals cannot avoid stress, but its effects do not have to be totally negative. Moira’s approach to hospice work illustrates that even amid the suffering, maybe even because of it, one’s appreciation of life’s meaning and all it holds may become even deeper, enhancing our compassion.

How medical and nursing professionals perceive their work, the events that take place in the course of a day, and the people they encounter along the way make all the difference. Due to this, an increasing number of health care professionals are turning to aspects of the wisdom literature of the major religions as a resource to maintain a sense of psychological perspective. In addition, research and publications confirming the spirituality/religion (R/S) and health dynamic have grown exponentially in recent years. These publications explore the R/S—health connection of patients, significant others, and clinicians.

Koenig concludes that the combination of R/S and health has moved into the mainstream of health care. It is therefore necessary for medical and nursing professionals to have knowledge about the interface between R/S and health to enhance not only patient care but self-care as well.

Despite the mounting evidence, there remains a caution or, at the very least, a hesitancy about discussing where this fits in the life of medical and nursing professionals. This is understandable if we speak of religion with its canons; this is a very private area in everyone’s life. Johnston-Taylor⁶ asserts that in the last few decades, concurrent with societal trends, nurses have embraced the concept of spirituality while avoiding discussions of religion, even though spirituality can be considered the personal aspect of religious experience. Johnston-Taylor’s book, Fast Facts About Religion for Nurses: Implications for Patient Care,⁶ lists the basic tenets of major religions and the clinical implications of such beliefs so that the nurse can interact more effectively with patients, always respecting the patient’s beliefs.

Beyond religion, with all that it offers some people, there is the broad sense of spirituality or faith that is an outgrowth of one’s beliefs about life. This can have an impact not only on how we process potentially stressful events but also on how we interact with patients. For our purposes here, we mean “faith” in the broadest sense of the term.

The Sanskrit word for faith is visvas, which literally translated means “to have trust, to breathe freely, to be without fear.” Being able to offer yourself, your colleagues, and your patients’ encounters marked by such psychological space can make all the difference. It is irrelevant whether we say that the approach is based on our faith, attitude, outlook, or the more inclusive term inner life.

The inner life or interior life is what spiritual figures point to as a place where ego strength, simplicity, freedom, and truth flourish. It is the place in which deeply felt needs are experienced and addressed; these include

“The interior life” includes those psychological and spiritual factors that provide us with inner strength, a sound attitude, and a sense of honesty or transparency. Different traditions encourage various approaches to strengthen or deepen the inner life.

Included among them, the ones that do have great psychological value and are therefore of interest to us here—whether we are persons of a specific faith or not—are silence and solitude, friendship and community, humor and laughter and listening and reflection.

This latter quote by Heschel surfaces periodically as we face our own challenges, darkness, stress and changes in working as medical and nursing professionals In other words, achieving wisdom, maturity and tranquility requires personal effort and asks that we be clearer on the following:

The steps to achieving a deeper and more resilient self requires an awareness of the four key aspects of the inner, interior, or spiritual life. And the first one, silence and solitude, is especially important.

Silence and Solitude

The value of silence and solitude is recognized for its purely psychological worth due to the work of psychiatrist Anthony Storr. In his work On Solitude, he notes the following:

From a spiritual standpoint, long before Storr and other mental health professionals wrote positively about silence and solitude, all the major religions emphasized the value of taking out time to retreat from activity. This is clearly reflected in the writings of contemporary spiritual figures. For instance, Henri Nouwen, a spiritual writer (and incidentally also a psychologist), notes in his book Way of the Heart that silence and solitude are the furnace in which transformation takes place.^12p20

In his book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, contemporary Buddhist author Sogyal Rinpoche frames such periods of silence as “meditation.” He points out that slowing down the pace of our lives by ensuring we have time to stop, breathe, and see how habits and compulsions have quietly strangled us is essential. He writes:

He then goes on to say the following:

Whether we are Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, or not religious at all, though, the point is that when we speak about time in silence and solitude, or formal meditation, there is a benefit—especially for those working in the intensity of health care today.

In The Wooden Bowl, Clark Strand, a former Zen Buddhist monk, wrote about taking out time for meditation even though you are no longer holding onto a religious or philosophical ideology:

In extolling the value of being a meditative person—whether you are religious or not, does not matter in his mind—Strand goes on to say what he believes it offers all of us:

The benefits are certainly there if we approach such a place, not with a sense of duty, but as a time for returning to our self; it will become a gentle place of reassurance, reassessment, and peace. Time spent in silence and solitude on a regular basis can affect us in the following ways: