Welcome to the Medicine and Compassion Website
Medicine and Compassion: A Tibetan Lama’s Guidance for Caregivers
Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche with David R. Shlim, M.D.
Wisdom Publications, Boston 2004
Available in Bookstores and on the Web!
The groundbreaking book, Medicine and Compassion: A Tibetan Lama’s Guidance for Caregivers, was published on September 13, 2004. You can order the book, with a 20% discount, at the Wisdom Publications website:
www.wisdompubs.org
Medicine and Compassion represents a Tibetan lama’s compassionate advice to harried caregivers. If you ever dreamed of being more compassionate more of the time, with less effort, you should read this book.
News About Medicine and Compassion
It’s been a year and a half since Medicine and Compassion: A Tibetan Lama’s Guidance for Caregivers was first published in September 2004. The hardcover edition has sold out at the publisher, but is still available in stores and online (you might want to buy some extra copies as gifts for the future, as the hardcover edition makes an especially nice gift). The paperback edition will be out this month. In addition, Medicine and Compassion has been translated into German, Spanish, and Catalonian.
I’ve been busy giving grand rounds presentations on medicine and compassion in various cities, and teaching an ongoing course in Pocatello, Idaho in medicine and compassion. The audiences are very open to the idea of being reminded about compassion. I can often feel a kind of collective sigh in the audience, as if they are thinking, “Compassion…I remember that.” It’s so easy to get caught up in our own concerns about work, relationships, family, and getting things done that we forget about the circumstances of the patients that we are treating.
Medicine and Compassion reinforces the benefits of compassion, but as Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche says in the book:
The point of this book is not merely to stress the importance of compassion. I think you sense this already or else you wouldn’t be reading what I have to say. What we need to find out is how to actually be more compassionate. We know that compassion is important, but how do we actually make it more readily available?
The book makes a pretty compelling argument that compassion is a quality that can be expanded and stabilized through practice. The problem for me has been that the training in compassion takes some time, and requires some expert teaching at the beginning. Even for health care professionals who really want to expand their compassion it’s not easy to find the right kind of instruction. I’m working to create longer seminars of 1-2 days that could help get someone started in a personal practice that would help them expand their compassion and make it more effortless. Ultimately, I would love to have regular 5-7 day seminars in Jackson Hole (where I live) that would serve as both a relaxing retreat, and an effective training situation. To create these kinds of seminars would require some outside funding.
If you’ve read the book and would like to help share the ideas within the book, I am available to come and give an introductory talk on the topic in a grand rounds setting or as a special seminar. You can e-mail me at: drshlim@wyom.net.
Also, don’t neglect the value of re-reading the book. I’ve read the book more than twenty or thirty times, and each time I read a chapter I still get more out of it. I believe that Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche really put his heart into this book. It is a tremendous overall introduction to Buddhist philosophy. The basic insight of Buddhism is that we have a mind that already contains a fully developed compassion and wisdom. This compassion and wisdom is obscured from us by our tendency to get obsessed with our sense of self and our ego needs. As we learn to relax and let go of these obsessions, our basic nature is more able to assert itself. When we can relax in the medical setting, we can focus more easily on the patient’s medical and psychological state, and offer truly comforting care.
I get inquiries about upcoming Medicine and Compassion seminars. There are no plans this year to present another Medicine and Compassion seminar with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. I’ve been invited to participate in a Medicine and Compassion seminar in Cologne, Germany June 29th to July 1st, 2007. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche will be there, along with Jon Kabat-Zinn, and others. It sounds like an exciting event, and a chance to visit Europe (if you don’t already live there). I don’t have any more information about that conference at the moment.
To find out more about Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s teaching activities, you can visit the website of the Chokling Tersar Foundation at www.gomdeusa.org.
David R. Shlim, M.D.
