When I was a new attending physician, I stumbled across a book that changed my life. I was browsing in Borders in the self-help section, just to see if something called to me. I found Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.
Wow! I thought. This would be a great resource for my patients. I was in denial about how poorly I was dealing with the stress of being an AIDS doctor. I didn’t understand that I needed the book for myself. Even in the late 90s, we did not yet understand how the face of AIDS was changed by the new medications. We were still in grief from losing our patients.
The Wellspring of Creativity
I plunged into the book wholeheartedly. I was an early adopter of mindfulness: body scan, sitting meditation, watching the breath. I learned about the science and the research. Between the stimulus and the response, there is a gap. Try to respond rather than react.
I discovered that Kabat-Zinn did professional training at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. It was an opportunity to learn how to teach these techniques. He recommended at least a year of daily sitting meditation before taking the training. So, I dutifully sat on my cushion for a year before I enrolled in the course. I was not prepared to have my heart broken open by a poem.
At Omega, the wellspring of my creativity came crashing to the surface. The stream began in elementary school. I took to writing stories in my composition book with great enthusiasm. This flow of expression became subterranean, hidden from me, for much of my life. It re-emerged briefly in high school when I was introduced to “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
I journaled and wrote letters to keep my sanity when I was away from loved ones at college and in the Army. I wrote my first poem just before I went into medical school. Then medical school and postgraduate training buried all the pieces that were not essential to becoming a doctor. There was no time or energy for writing.
Once I became an attending, I began to recover. That’s how I found myself in the huge meditation hall at Omega. I sat silently, surrounded by a hundred others. I’d been in silence for 40 minutes when Jon’s voice began to recite Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Journey.”
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
After sitting in silence with my thoughts for so long, the words penetrated deeply. They entered my body, not my mind. I’m a kinesthetic learner, so hearing the poem affected me more than reading it would have.
Tears began rolling down my face. I let them flow down my chin, onto my lap. Something was changed. Although I didn’t know it yet, I was now a poet.
Karl Lagerfeld the fashion designer once said. “Be creative, not because you have to, but because you want to.” This is the opposite of my own experience and that of the creatives around me. I am creative not because I want to be, but because I have to. It’s a matter of survival and growth.