This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video “Self” in Buddhist Spiritual Formation for Chaplaincy with Leigh Miller, PhD. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Leigh Miller at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Well, hello. Good morning everybody. Welcome. Welcome to the April installment of the Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series here at the Sati Center. Lovely to see you all. I’m Vanessa. I’m one of the folks on the Buddhist Chaplaincy Training Program. And today we are welcoming Leigh Miller. Leigh is the professor and director of the MDiv program at Maitripa College in Portland, Oregon. And Leigh has a healthcare and hospice chaplaincy experience and she’s a founding member of the Buddhist Spiritual Care Educators of North America and she’s the co-chair of the Innovations in Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care unit at the American Academy of Religion. So we’re absolutely thrilled to have Leigh here today to talk on the subject of self in Buddhist spiritual formation for chaplains and many other things too, I’m sure. So hi Leigh.
Hi and good morning everyone. So wonderful to see so many smiling faces this morning and folks with some interest in this topic and in sharing time together around issues of Buddhist spiritual care. We’ll do a motivation setting in a moment, but I wonder if I could first ask you to please enter into the chat box a word or phrase or a bullet point or two about what brings you to this talk today. If you’re a student in the chaplaincy program or a graduate of it, if you’re maybe working as a chaplain or in some kind of spiritual care providing role, maybe in your family or in an organization you work for, or if you’re a dharma practitioner who’s maybe interested in applying some of what you’re learning in this speaker series or in your practice in some kind of vocation or right livelihood maybe in the future. I don’t know, just whatever it is that’s bringing you here. And hopefully we’ll find out that we’re a good fit for this conversation.
Great. So I’m going to ask when we do enter some stuff into the chat box that it’s a little bit efficient I think maybe to do it this way and I can read out loud anonymously for the benefit of people on recordings or who don’t see the chat. Kind of what I’m seeing, some people working in hospital chaplaincy, considering chaplaincy, dharma practitioner, volunteer chaplain, chaplaincy services on an emergency basis or to emergency services providers in the community, palliative care, social work, interested in CPE1, graduate of the chaplaincy program, longtime practitioner, volunteer hospice worker, mindfulness teacher interested in chaplaincy, interested in exploration of self in CPE and chaplaincy setting. We’re going to have a lot to talk about there. Applying Buddhist approaches to my spiritual care practice. Dharma practitioner. Great. Thank you all so much. That helps me get a sense of what we have in common, which is helpful. But as we go along, please if you have any comments or questions, feel free to pop them in the box or hold them until we have some Q&A time. I’m going to hopefully pause in about 45 minutes and invite folks to just kind of unmute themselves as you like. And I’m also that’s also a cue to me to remember to set a timer otherwise I’ll just keep going for a lot longer than that.
So I want to thank Vanessa for hosting our session and Jim for so warmly inviting me and Gil Fronsdal who I had the opportunity to meet and and pleasure to have a conversation with about a year ago and who recommended me to join this series and I’m really delighted to connect with Sati Center because I’ve heard so many good things about this program over the years and nice to finally put some faces together with the program. I think I had written something along these lines somewhere that Jim saw and he asked me to talk a little bit more about the personal formation pieces when we’re talking about spiritual and professional formation for spiritual care roles or for chaplaincy. And so I want to thank you Jim for the challenge of asking me to say more about that and let’s see kind of how we do. I’m definitely still a learner in this field and expect to learn from you all as well.
Let’s take a moment though to set our motivation for this time together. And often in Buddhist traditions, we do that through refuge and bodhicitta2. At Maitripa, we begin every class or meeting or community program with taking a moment to set our motivation and our intention for why it is that we’re showing up and try to hold that in the context of our dharma practice or the altruistic motivation that our spiritual path is not just for our own ends but also for the sake of others. So, I’d like to invite us into a moment of silence during which time you might consider checking in with yourself about why you’re really here, what you’re hoping for, and how you’d like to bring yourself into this next hour. You could consider your internal experience, your state of mind or emotions this morning, how you’d like to show up as a participant with others. After a minute, I will recite the prayer on the screen and you can join me or you can take that moment to refresh your spiritual commitment in whatever way is familiar to you. Just taking a minute.
With the wish to free all beings, I shall always go for refuge to the Buddha, to the Dharma, and to the Sangha until I attain complete enlightenment. Enthused by wisdom and compassion, today in the Buddha’s presence, I generate a mind of full awakening for the benefit of all beings. Thank you.
So as we turn more toward the topic for today which is so what about the self, I’d like to segue by noticing that from the very outside of our practice if you have a tradition or practice that teaches refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha3, who is the I that goes for refuge? Well I can say for sure it’s not the already enlightened being that is going for refuge until enlightenment. So we must be in the realm of the not yet enlightened I and it is this I along with millions of Buddhists and all sentient beings for whom we wish happiness, love, joy, equanimity that is on a path toward enlightenment until I attain complete enlightenment. And so I would suggest to you that in our path system traditions, we cannot simply skip ahead to the end point of samsara, unfortunately. And that also means that we’re not going to get there by skipping over all of our afflictions and delusions. We’re not going to be able to generate anything of meaning today or stick with it again and again tomorrow or the next day unless we have some enthusiasm which comes from our own positive qualities, our own inner guru that recognizes a good thing when it sees it and seeks to go in that safe direction.
So sometimes I’ve heard Buddhists who think that any talk about the self is just kind of some western modern psychological stuff. But I think that we can find ample ways of pointing to our own tradition to show us a model that begins with acknowledging the self that we experience on a day-to-day basis and how to work with both the sufferings and the gifts and the blessings that we experience. So we get to remember as the third Karmapa wrote that it’s a delusion to conflate self-knowing with an existing self but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t know this self. Right? So that can give us sort of a break. You know, it’s not going to forever inherently permanently be this stuck person I am today or this person with some delusions and afflictions that I am today which is then going to be kind of scary to look at. But if there’s an awareness that we can relax around that and maybe have some playful inquiry, some creativity, some spaciousness around knowing that this is an always changing sense of self. And yet it can bring more insight to pay attention to that self then we begin to situate this topic of spiritual care within a Buddhist framework that can work with that kind of self. Right? I hope this is kind of making sense.
So if you wouldn’t mind again going to your chat box before we go dive a little further into things and and just put something in there about why you’re here. Often when I ask students on the first day of class, they say like, “Oh, because it’s a required course and I have to be here.” So then I say, “Okay, why you’re here in this program to begin with? What do you want to make of today and how can I join you in that?” So any needs, hopes, questions that bring you here, some deeper motivation perhaps just a sentence or two will do.
As you consider your deeper motivations, inspiration, more tools, two truths and self. Yes. Hope to better understand the Buddhist notion of self or non-self. Work on the kind way to be with the self and liberate the mind. Understanding self non-self is tricky for me. So I hope to learn how to best understand and make use of self in chaplaincy. How to be myself and yet willing to dispense with whatever the meaning of myself. Exploring theory and practice of chaplaincy and the refuge of Sangha. Refreshing practice as a chaplain. Sorry. Curious interested in working with self. Also, oh the person who’s sick with the flu. I hope you feel better soon. Curiosity, clarity, being present, illusion of self and moving forward on the path.
These are great. So I just want to make the disclaimer. I’m not a philosophy teacher. So I know that you can study at a very advanced level whether it’s through Dogen or Madhyamaka, many many intricate takes on conventional or relative truth and ultimate truth, self and non-self and the Tibetan tradition has a lot to say about that which is a tradition that I’m coming from. But I’d like us to just kind of maybe consider a kind of flow or back and forth that we can be doing here between this conventional self that we know from our own inner voice, our own inner sensations, our feelings, our thoughts, our emotions, our impulses. That’s our inner world that we can come to to bring our mindfulness to becoming more attentive to. And then on the conventional very ordinary level, there’s what other people perceive in us, what they label us as, what they perceive us as, how they project onto us. And so our interpersonal connections are always both of those things, even at the very basic level of of just sort of some identity factors. And we’re going to talk about social location in a minute.
Then when we take it to like the level of our spiritual journey, our inner world of our contemplative practice of our ritual life, of the things that bring us inspiration or blessing or nourishment through our practice, those are happening internally and they’re forming a contemplative basis for our engagement and community for our relationship with others. So that has this internal and interpersonal, inter-relational, interdependent flow as well. And then on ultimate level, you know, of of the lack of anything inherently existing, lack of anything permanent, concrete from its own side, not having any causes and conditions to come into being or fall out of being. On that level of our study of the of of the dharma4, there is no self. We call in some language the object of negation is this delusion of thinking we have this concrete self and clinging to that. And so we we try to de-emphasize that in the beginning of the path till we get to the point where we can completely let go of that.
That delusion that we somehow are inherently existing is a very old karmic pattern but it leads us to a lot of suffering leads to the three root poisons: aversion, attachment, and ignorance. On the flip side of that, ourselves and all beings also have this Buddha nature, this potential to become enlightened. And that is essential for our spiritual care practice, for how our sense of ourselves as someone who might be able to provide or accompany others, provide them with some care, and the way we regard those with whom we’re interacting. I myself am empty. So is the person in front of me. We’re equal in that. And we’re also equal in having Buddha nature, the potential for enlightenment in our futures in this lifetime or some future lifetime depending on your view of that. So when we see ourselves and others as fundamentally okay, fundamentally nothing can can annihilate us. Fundamentally we have goodness. We are in a kind of developmental path system of the Buddhist cosmology, the Buddhist understanding of the nature of reality that doesn’t concretize us allows lots of space to grow and change which is wonderful and also is based on the concept of potential. And we are living in a culture and time in Judeo-Christian dominant worldview and medical system and cultural systems that are based on pathology that are based on what is wrong with you, with them. How do we diagnose that and change it maybe or just blame systems, people, behaviors as being a problem? So, we’re we’re kind of going against the stream a lot of times when we find ourselves in the system that’s oriented toward what’s the pathology instead of what’s the potential.
So some ways that we show up holding even if it’s internally, how can I orient what I’m doing here today toward potential, toward bringing out the best of myself and others, toward growth? Right? So we’re in we’re operating from the very beginning in a totally different framework than most of the people we’re going to encounter when we leave a Buddhist context. So, I went on at length about that just to sort of signpost a few of those ideas that you brought up in the chat. I like to think of learning as a spiral process. You know, we hear familiar things again and again and every time we’re a different different self that encounters that teaching or that concept and we see it from a slightly different vantage or it’s a different season and that tree now has leaves and flowers on it whereas before it was just branches but it’s the same tree that we’re coming back to again and again. Right? So we’re these three kind of ideas are just going to make probably sort of flow through our hour here.
In everyday life, we use this language of I, me, mine in relation to definitely morning cup of coffee, my coffee. Our body, our plans, our hopes and goals, our feelings, which often get hurt, our needs, which we often feel are unmet or unrecognized. And on a somewhat subtler level, according to Buddhist thought, we habitually neglect to consider our own impermanence. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. And at an even subtler level of our consciousness, we string on strongly to our own inherent existence. So Buddhist teachers often inform us that this is totally delusional and leads to all sorts of problems even at the ordinary level of wanting what we don’t have and not wanting the things that we do get. But trying to reconcile these two aspects of our lived experience has put us that on the one hand we feel quite real and substantial, entitled maybe or at least a flowing vital dynamic being, and on the other hand we’re supposed to know that we don’t exist as we appear and neither does anything else and it can be difficult to hold these two things at the same time. So when it comes to training for a role in which we are providing spiritual care to others, how are we going to connect the dots here? I don’t have all the answers but I have some experiences and some ideas I’m going to offer here and invite you to explore on your own as you continue in your studies and and practice. You know you have your own wisdom and opportunities to to bring to it of course. And I’m going to share some experiences from my clinical time. We could maybe have talk more about that in the Q&A. If you want to and share your own, please. But I’m just drawing from my own encounters because I didn’t get permission from my students and my my friends and alumni of my program to share their stories. So I’m hoping that sharing some of my experience will just be a way of illustrating some of the ideas and not be just all about me.
The Buddha Dharma, the premise of a path-oriented spiritual religious life is that we can change and if we value harm reduction and the increase of being of benefit or compassion and wisdom then we ought to change because maybe we’re not aligned yet. And so the prescriptions for how to do this are short-term and long-term. So we can also take those, you know, take that perspective on our practice. Fortunately, we have many examples of humans who have done this before us starting from the story of Prince Siddhartha, his impetus to discover how to vanquish suffering and then his direct disciples. There are so many stories as I’m sure you guys have read in in various sutras of disciples coming to him with different types of suffering particularly ones that are relevant for people working in spiritual care, people who are facing loss, having grief and he ministers to them in different ways based on the person who’s right in front of him. So we we see these very real, very human figures and maybe also hopefully in your own lifetime you have met living people who embody commitment to being on a spiritual path and they are an inspiration to you. So sometimes we can look to them as as models and it’s helpful to know that we’re not alone or the first to try to figure this out. But sometimes translating into the language of secular or interfaith spiritual care and theory, we are on a kind of pioneering frontier in that. So go back to your sources, go back to your tradition and lived examples when you don’t when you feel stuck and you don’t know how to articulate what it is you’re experiencing and how your tradition connects to your practice, your service.
So knowing ourselves in this kind of context is important. Carrie Doehring begins her book on intercultural spiritual care theory and practice with a recognition of the internal and the personal as well as the interpersonal and collective and all of these conditions are needed for persons to approach and engage in change. So just because we know change is possible, change might be good, there are certain conditions under which individuals including ourselves are ready for change or have the supportive conditions to actually begin a process of change. And it can be helpful to remember that the people that we’re working with may or may not be ready for that, may or not have supportive conditions for that, but how can we contribute to to that? And why would having a kind of strong anchor in knowing that change is possible, this kind of model of potentiality that we hold in our own worldview because sometimes it’s really difficult when we are we have our own lived histories of difficulties and the cultures in which we’re working, our workplace environments, you know, it tends to look like intractable suffering and belief that change is possible even systemically or for specific individuals for instance when they appear to ordinary perception to be trapped within addiction, trauma, gender and sexual and racial violence and so forth. It doesn’t appear that change is imminent. But at such times even when the medical system around you and that patient is attached to a pathology model to it. This is intractable perspective when you hold a different worldview or orienting system that has a clear idea about the fundamental nature of beings and their potential, it can really matter a lot even if you never say a word about it.
So the “why me” question in our clinical context often a kind of a type of “why me” question is asked by patients in the hospital or by family members who are facing mounting responsibilities, losses of capacity, losses of loved ones, expenses and so forth. But before the Buddhist novice chaplain is going to hear that question from their care recipients, they’re probably going to ask it themselves in frustration and annoyance in the CPE classroom or when facing a CPE assignment. Why all this me? Come on. What’s the why? I went into CPE thinking that I had worked through my divorce, through my miscarriage. I had learned to identify my feelings and needs. I had worked on aligning my decisions and actions with my values. So I found questions about my past and my inner feelings in the moment, you know those kinds of questions and prompts would bring up these responses in me that range from, “Oh that’s an interesting icebreaker, sure we can chat about that,” to, “Oh that’s somewhat intrusive and private, thank you,” to, “This is completely irrelevant to serving my patients, why are we talking about this?” Right? I didn’t see much relationship between my inner world and my lived experience and my understanding of a capacity to deliver spiritual care. And so I’m hoping that some more of what we’re going to talk about will shed light on how I moved through that and began to see some value in it and why it’s important.
So, if you find yourself having that kind of reaction or you might have that kind of reaction, as many Buddhists going into CPE find, trying to explain to a room full of non-Buddhists why a focus on the self is counter to one’s religious training and even powerlessly reifying, self-grasping and self-reification that one has worked so long and hard to get rid of on the cushion. It’s likely to elicit from those people listening to you some kind of thinly veiled inquiry about whether you might just be avoiding your feelings or avoiding suffering or avoiding sitting with yourself. To which you can probably guess what comes next. The Buddhist wants to scream. But we are the experts on suffering. Hello. Okay. I’ve sat with that for like countless hours. I’m not afraid of it. I can be with it. And, you know, this probably also isn’t a productive way to engage with your with your cohort. People of the room will just go, “Huh, I thought Buddhists were supposed to be like so zen, you know, so peaceful.” But you’re not. So then you might they might say that kindly like, “Oh, tell me more about that or can you explain your tradition?” And then you might take the bait to fall into the othering trap which I did again and again and again which is to become the teacher who has to say well I can’t speak on behalf of all Buddhists all over the world throughout the last 2500 years but I can tell you that in my tradition what I have been taught is that karma means dot dot dot dot lack of inherently existing phenomena means dot dot dot dot no self means dot dot dot dot dot compassion means dot dot dot right? And then again you open yourself up to another iteration of the critique that you’re just too in your head. Can’t you get into your heart? Right? You can maybe imagine that as a professor that happened to me a lot, right?
So there is an emphasis in CPE on demonstrably sort of feeling your feelings. And for Buddhists, this can be really hard because we relate to feelings, sensations, thoughts as passing, as not necessarily unimportant, but not something to over-identify with as if it has a kind of lasting quality that isn’t going to change. So, this can be really frustrating for Buddhists to kind of navigate this kind of space where there’s this this this difference that can feel like an impasse. So, I’ve been wanting to help future Buddhist chaplains find a more creative, interesting, validating, and supportive way into that dialogue. And I’ve come to agree with the maxim that unless you have worked to better understand yourself and in struggle and in growth, it will be harder to serve others when they need your help in doing so in their own lives. If you think that spiritual care is about assessing another’s needs and doing your best to try to meet those needs, your own spiritual practice, your own insight into your conventional or karmic patterns will support being able to be of service in that way. And you’ll be able to do it with more resilience and creativity and resource and presence.
However, there may be some ways that you need to push back and some ideas that you can gently sort of reframe as not within a Buddhist worldview. And for me those have come up as a common conflation of people with their feelings as with feelings as paramount indicators of one’s state of mind. We might be able to have a more nuanced understanding of mind. And compassion is often in our world and in these kind of service fields defined as suffering with and empathy is also often defined as feeling with. And I would like to offer totally different definitions that we can work with. And so it might be hard to see where is a Judeo-Christian a set of assumptions, normative values that are in the CPE world different from the ones that we bring in from a Buddhist world. And so when you encounter like something feels really stuck here, I would encourage you to go back to your tradition and try to articulate it differently.
So I want to bring you to the idea quickly of social location. So this is a social location map. If you’ve never worked with one of these, you might give it a try sometime. So you can put kind of any main identity factors or dimensions in the kind of central boxes. There just are eight here that are common, but you could choose other ones like religion or ethnicity and so forth. And in the smaller boxes, you would fill in what the category means in terms of the society in which you live. The kinds of assumptions that people might have about people who belong to those categories. And then the lines that branch out from those are your inner feelings and thoughts, the values that that maybe guide you and then you can rethink a question like how you would complete a sentence. I am a or I am from. So spending some time with an exercise like this will flesh out your many dimensions and until you have seen those it’s harder to connect to see where they connect to your practice.
This is an example of some that have been filled out. So let’s talk about personal history and how that can connect. I’m going to propose a very brief case study and then ask you what you would do. Let’s say one night a patient was admitted to the emergency department. She was at home and her family called 911 when she had a medical emergency, possibly a heart attack. Paramedics arrived to find the woman, usually confined to a wheelchair or bed, unconscious. She had lost her pulse and breathing at times and underwent CPR and in the emergency department was put on a ventilator before she was transferred to the ICU intensive care unit. The patient has a terminal and degenerative disease. She had already lost the ability to move and communicated by eye movements and blinking. The family had community through a conservative evangelical church. Her medical prognosis was set due to her baseline progressing disease and the anoxic brain injury from her time when she wasn’t breathing. It was unlikely that she would ever regain consciousness and thus be unable to make a meaningful recovery. She would need to be kept on a ventilator or have a tracheotomy in order to breathe and she might never leave a high level skilled care facility.
The medical team expected removal of life support when the family was ready to say their goodbyes. The family had come to visit a lot in the first couple of days and invited their pastor to also pray with them for a miracle. They were not willing to discuss any other medical decision-making. The patient’s husband became angry and combative with any staff who tried to discuss the prognosis. The medical team hoped that a chaplain could step in and help. The husband soon refused visits by a chaplain and stated that no chaplain could go into her room either. After several days of this with nursing staff unable to elicit any response from the patient and unsure if their sustaining her body was causing her suffering or not. Then the family all stopped coming. They professed a religious view that they would not remove life support and also the view that her soul wasn’t present while she was unconscious and so they didn’t need to come and see her. The nursing staff was distressed. They had no hope for any quality of life for this patient and saw only a cascade of worsening complications the longer the family delayed deciding about whether to remove life support or give her a tracheotomy and send her to a skilled nursing facility still unconscious and they had no way to know if she was aware of her surroundings or not. And they were worried that no one whom she loved was coming to care for her. It’s your day to make rounds in the ICU. What would you do? So, just pause and imagine that for a moment.
And if we had longer, I would give you more time to then look back at the social location map and connect why some of your impulses, feelings, thoughts, planning about how to confront that situation could be connected to your social location in some way. We could discuss some examples of that or play through some scenarios in the Q&A later if you want to. But that’s a type of exercise where you could go back and discuss with other people what they would do and what their social locations are to discover that what feels maybe natural or automatic or common sense to you will not be the same for the other people that you’re in a room with talking about such a case. And that this can give you this doesn’t mean that one person’s right or wrong. It just helps to connect why you would do one thing and someone else would do something else.
I had some other examples but I think I’m going to skip over them. The point was just going to be that what we study, what we practice either professionally or in school or because we’re it’s just interesting to us, we also bring with us into the room. And sometimes it’s a blind spot and sometimes it shows up to serve in ways we couldn’t have predicted. In one case, my blind spot around narcissistic men like the one I had divorced caused me to neglect even introducing myself to the divorced man of the mother of a patient of mine. I was in such a tight alliance with those two women, this mother and daughter and heard and worked through their trauma stories which involved this man and their the religious differences between the two of them and helping them to bridge that of which he was never going to be part of because of his own fundamentalist views. And so I joined in with them in deciding this guy was not part of our healing process and end of life care. And yet he was coming to visit her and the daughter wanted connection with him. And he no matter whether I agreed with him politically, religiously or psychologically, he was a man who was watching his daughter die. And I failed to even check in with him about whether he would like a cup of coffee. And I did not even know that until I was presenting a case study of many, many visits all about the mother and the daughter and my spiritual care educator said, “What about the dad? Did you see him?” So that was something I hope I don’t do again. Which isn’t to diminish the care that I did provide to the mother and to the daughter, which was tremendously helpful for them, which other people praised and recognized as really skillful. So, I don’t feel bad about it or beat myself up over it, but I just completely missed my own blind spot around a particular person that I had constructed in my mind without even meaning.
In another example, also with a mother and daughter, interestingly, was an African-American family in a very dominantly white hospital who were not receiving the care that they thought they should be getting. She was not improving in the way that they wanted her to be. And they didn’t understand why her pain was unmanaged and why she wasn’t getting what they were asking for. Now, I had been studying race-based inequities in healthcare. I had been studying the 1619 project and the history of systemic racism and and gendered and racial violence in this country. So, it wasn’t hard for me to hear underneath what she was saying. The only reasonable explanation for this that she had was it must be racism. That must be why they those white doctors and nurses might believe the stereotype that people of color don’t experience pain the same way as everybody else. And maybe that’s why they don’t believe her, that she’s in pain. Or maybe they think she’s a drug addict and she’s resistant. And so they were treating the mother felt that they were treating her daughter not as this brilliant woman with two master’s degrees who ran her own business. They were treating her as someone they assumed was an addict because the pain medication wasn’t working.
So I said to the mother after building a lot of safety and rapport and thinking about the context of lived experiences and intergenerational experiences and epigenetics they were bringing into the hospital with them is what I’m hearing you say. Let me just try this out with you mom. Could you be feeling that racism is what kills people? And she looked at me and said, “And they do it slowly and my girl is so tired.” But having the courage to just name something that might not have been safe to say created safety for her to just process all her experience and all of their fear and all their grief and anger and then we could get to a productive place around what is it that they actually needed practically taken care of, what needed to be heard and then I was able to escalate that up the multiple chains of command to address their needs in the moment with more sensitivity to their context. And so that became really effective. So, this is not about what I did well or didn’t do well, but just to try to help you to help illustrate the point that whatever you’re bringing into the room can block care for certain people and can give you more capacity to hear what people are saying. And it doesn’t mean that you have to have had that exact experience yourself in order to have that empathetic kind of response.
Time is slipping from my grasp. One really helpful tool is to get a feelings and needs list from an NVC5 website or from my friends mindful compassionate dialogue program and website. There’s a website there that you can print this handout from. Building vocabulary for feelings and needs is probably one of the single most helpful things that a chaplain can do. Especially in the beginning. And you can start building that vocabulary by just keeping this list at your desk or on your refrigerator or by your bedstand. And when something’s coming up, read the list and find more nuanced, more specific vocabulary than shame, blame, anger, or happy, sad, mad. Right? We tend most people tend to operate in a fairly shallow set of vocabulary. So when you can get more nuance, get more specificity, capture the flavor more for yourself, it will bring you insight into the needs that those feelings could be connected to. And whether those needs are being met and you want to celebrate that or whether they’re not being met and you need to make a request either of yourself or of someone else for something specific and doable to help you meet that need. So these are just dynamic normal human experiences and depending on your kind of relationship to your own feelings and needs you may have rejection of this concept or you may find it’s just obvious or somewhere in between.
So, there’s a lot of ways that using a list like this can really help, particularly when you’re establishing, you know, you’re meeting someone for the first time, maybe in a in a care context, and you can hear the first few couple things they say and then make an empathy guess, which might sound something like, “Are you feeling discouraged because you need some support?” The feeling discouraged and the need support get linked and they can say yeah or they can say I don’t know that might sound like are you feeling confused or disoriented because you need information and they might say something like you’re right I am actually kind of disoriented here but it’s not because I need information the doctor gave me the test results earlier this morning but I’m confused because I don’t know what God wants me to do and I’ve never experienced that before. So suddenly your empathy guess has created strong connection and the conversation is deepened. So knowing your developing this kind of understanding of yourself then becomes a bridge for opening a pathway of empathy with others and gives you some vocabulary to make those guesses. Which is all in the service of of connection.
Empathy and compassion of course also require us to have healthy differentiation. And so my my way my preferred way of relating to empathy and compassion is that it’s a form of attunement with accuracy and validation while knowing that what’s happening to them is not what’s happening to me. It’s not going to knock me off my center. I’m not going to take them home with me at the end of the day. I care and it’s not my story. This differentiation can kind of keep us humble. You know, we might know ourselves and what works for us, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to work for them. So, have some warm curiosity about making that empathy guess without becoming fatigued in the process.
So how do we get to know ourselves more? All of us can learn and practice new tools for knowing ourselves. This is just like you could think of it as gathering data and being open to see whether that shifts our relationship to ourselves, shifts our relationships with others. We get to with the data we gather, but it can lead to understanding, can lead to being able to offer a healing response, and it helps us embody our practice. In CPE, they’re really fond of this Johari window. It’s what’s known to you, to yourself on the left, what’s not known to the self on the right. The top is what is known to others, and the bottom is what is not known to others. And through a process of inviting feedback, you expand the area of what is known to you because you add other people’s perceptions and questions. And by sharing more of yourself, you also add intimacy and what and increase the amount of space that is around trust and sharing and knowing one another. Asking for feedback reduces what are your blind spots, what is known to other people but not to you. Right? So, this is just a kind of visual schema that might help frame some of what we’re talking about here in knowing yourself and also in relationship to using others and helping that process.
I really love to lean into pattern observation or insight kinds of systems. The Enneagram6 I find particularly valuable and useful. Raise your hand if you have worked with the Enneagram before or have heard of it before. Okay, some of you good. There’s also a system in Vajrayana7 Buddhism and some Zen folks like of the five Buddha families and in spiritual aim which is an assessment and intervention model for spiritual caregivers. There’s a core spiritual needs typing system. And so you could use any one of these or all of them to hone in on your type and gather more data about yourself. And you might have other ones that you go to like I have a good friend who gets a ton of insight through astrology. Another friends who have worked with counselors with attachment styles. Any of these things that help you locate yourself and go deeper into figuring out how to how to change in the directions you want to go and and they can help to have a guide and to have a system for seeing through the noise of the data you’re gathering about yourself and and identify the patterns. Because that’s what’s hard to change, but it is possible, right? Many people don’t want to be put into some kind of box. And these three systems I particularly like because they are developmental like our Buddhist practice.
I could speak more about the Enneagram and spiritual aim and the five Buddha families if that is a system you want to learn more about. They are sometimes elaborate and overwhelming looking in the beginning. But if you haven’t worked with the Enneagram before, but it is of interest to you, you might just scan across these red and blue rows and see if something just feels kind of poignant to you. Like, have you always longed to be seen for who you are? Or to know that you’re loved not because of what you accomplish or succeed in, but because of who you are already. Do you sometimes worry that your needs are too much for other people or that you won’t be safe or cared for? Fear of being unwanted or unlovable. So sometimes it’s looking very honestly and very deeply at what is it that really lights me up in my spiritual practice, in my connection with other people, in the time that I have to myself. Is it because it’s filling that part of me that knows my deeper value and truth and meaning, my truest nature is getting fed and that’s what’s bringing out the best in me, then that’s something you want to know. So, you can keep following, follow that energy. And if there are things that are painful, tender needs that often feel like they aren’t being met, that often feel at threat, then those are the ones that that need some extra care and support. So, the Enneagram system can help point to those core limiting beliefs perhaps in yourself. And then we never like label other people with a type, but we can make some guesses again and we can try to offer a healing response based on what we might be perceiving about what a core limiting belief might be for them or what an invitation into abundance might look like for them if it feels authentic for us. And then you’ll get the response. You’ll get the feedback. Did it work? And sometimes when there’s a clash or a miss or a tension between two people that comes up a lot, this this kind of system has helped me to unpack where why do we seem to have so much in common and yet this friction arises again and again. Where are we coming from that that is holding different values but that could be harmonized if we were clear about what they were.
The five primordial wisdoms or kind of factors or traits of enlightened beings have an afflicted expression through anger, jealousy, greed and they have their opposite totally transmuted form of perfection of wisdom that exudes without effort once the afflictive side has been reduced. So the five Buddha families sometimes can help us to to notice when a certain kind of energy is moving through us in a particular situation or context or relationship is bringing something out in us. We might feel that that energy is both part of our best attributes and some of our slipperiest negative behaviors. They could be two sides of the same coin. Irene Rockwell has written a book about this that takes this kind of traditional Tibetan system typology into a kind of way of looking at psychology and and personality traits. So it’s a it’s a more modern adaptation of a traditional system, but those energies, those qualities are there traditionally, but thinking about how to see them in ourselves and others is a newer adaptation to our context that might be useful for for some people to consider. So this kind of thing exists in Buddhist traditions as well in the spiritual care realm. There are other ways of making this kind of assessment. And I like this particular tool. I’m going to bring this to a close here, but I like this particular tool because it acknowledges that the chaplain is themselves an instrument of assessment and their embodiment is part of an intervention that we do with as part of forming a care plan. That means our practice is part of what helps.
I’m gonna skip over meaning making to close with some thoughts from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen. She has a beautiful, very short essay that if you haven’t read, I encourage you to called “Fixing, Helping, and Serving.” And this goes back to that notion of how do I define self and how am I defining other? When it comes to a clinical context, if we see ourselves as a helper, it means we’re seeing ourselves as a savior and other people as helpless. If we see ourselves as someone who fixes things, we see ourselves as an expert and we see others as broken. If we see ourselves as fundamentally in the service of life with a kind of equanimity and peership and sameness of self and other with affliction with Buddha nature, then we approach our work as service to strengthen the life in ourselves and in each other through a mutual interdependent kind of relationship. So sometimes that might sound really nice and sweet and yet it can also be confronting because what if we don’t know whether we actually were of any help or benefit and then we begin to doubt ourselves in our capacity? What if what might be the most strengthening response we can give to someone isn’t saying something they don’t want to hear, but it’s calling them to tell the truth. So, it doesn’t always feel good. People won’t always praise it, but can we stay in our orientation nonetheless to being of service to having that bodhicitta motivation and and exercising our wisdom and compassion the best we have that we can. And if we have a healthy differentiation, we know ourselves well, we’ve put in time on the cushion and with our study and practice, it’s easier to hold ourselves in these containers where we’re encountering the suffering of ourselves and others quite a bit. So, I’m going to just close there and invite you in your own time to dedicate the energy of an effort that you’ve made and in listening so long and attentively and taking some inspiration hopefully from listen to whatever you do next. Thank you so much.
Vanessa: Thank you so much. Were you about to say something?
Leigh Miller: I was just gonna say I look forward to some comments or questions or anything.
Vanessa: Thank you. How are you? Thank you. Well, first of all, thank you so much for absolutely one such an inspiring talk. There was so much in there. I feel like on the sort of on a level of reflection and then also just on the practical level of hearing about like your own experience and learning from that too. And then lots of information at the end which which you know seems so interesting. One question that’s come up a lot in the chat is would you be able to share the slides with us? Would that be a possibility or perhaps some summary of them?
Leigh Miller: Yes, I’m happy to share the slides if folks are willing to keep it just to the container of this group because I will say I just threw them together for today and they’re not highly polished. So I would not want them to be further disseminated out into the world.
Vanessa: We solemnly swear all of us. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So let’s do this Lee. I think that’s you know for some folks you know not normally this the the event the public event we run till 10:00. But I know that there’s there’s a lot of folks I imagine who who are not on the program but who might still have questions for you at this stage. So let’s say this for today. Anyone who does have questions, we invite you to stay on. Okay, we’ll just we’ll just kind of open it up today because I I think there probably are a lot of questions out there and people who would like to interface with you. So, let’s just continue. We’ll we’ll run until 10:30 and so please feel welcome to stay and to put up your Zoom hand if you’ve got a question for Lee. I might throw in a very quick question before we start. First, would you be able to stop sharing the screen?
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Vanessa: So on the um on the little uh that um the empty diagram for the personality diagram that you shared with the boxes and then the lines that led to smaller boxes that led to more lines. I wonder if it would be possible to give us an example of how you might just fill one of those categories out because it seemed very interesting as a model and I was curious about how I never encountered it before and I’m just curious how that might look.
Leigh Miller: Yeah, sure. Thank you for that question. The social location map. And there’s, you know, various templates you can use for it. When I did that, I noticed how many voices of my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents kind of came through. And after doing that kind of exercise, I realized I could introduce myself as a fourth generation American, a third generation more or less third generation white person, a second generation college educated person and a first generation Buddhist. I should have said I’m the fourth generation also Jewish. So, that has been something that I have used when I’ve introduced myself in groups and people have had interesting or positive reactions to it. So, and one of those categories, that may or may not be on that version of that map, but is around kind of marital or family status and family members and belongings. And, I’m happily divorced. But I’m with I have a current partner in my cohort. In my one of my units of CPE was a woman who married her early sweetheart. They were very happy. They were on the same page about everything together all the time and they discussed everything and made every decision together. And the two of us had a very heated disagreement about the best thing to do in the case that I described earlier that of the woman in the ICU whose family said a chaplain shouldn’t go in the room. We took completely different approaches. And I believe that’s because we had completely different understandings of marriage and of how much your family may or your quote unquote family may or may not know you. I say quote unquote because we have different people who are part of our chosen family, right? And who can speak for us? And when is it our duty of care when we don’t know to offer care? So we had you know looking at our our own lived experience for me helped to to show in that particular identity area the values that were attached to marriage led us to regard the husband’s instructions in a totally in in totally different ways. Does that make sense? So that’s an example of how you could approach the social location map, what what kind of way you might then share choose to share your identity with others and how that map might map on to a clinical case.
Gwen: I see your hand up. Yes. Hello. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today. So, I could ask this question in sort of an open-ended curious way or in a very direct way. So, wondering if you have a preference. Maybe in the interest of time I’ll be a little of both. So I’m curious about the tools such as the Enneagram and these other rich and I guess the question would be so you mentioned that you might use it in a way sort of implicitly to guide your thinking about a particular person or situation and not necessarily to disclose or or you know to to let them know this these are sort of this is the model I’m using. I’m wondering when you go into a team context if you have been working with such a model you know does that go into your notes does it go into your discussion with your colleagues and the real question I’m sort of talking around a bit is and do you ever encounter questions or resistance around a particular model and how do you how do you navigate that?
Leigh Miller: Thank you that’s great questions. So I’d say in the clinical context, we are all trained in whatever assessment tool and note clinical note making, charting that everyone else is using the same system. So, I work within that framework to describe what I’m seeing, what I think might be helpful, and note that in in that language. But that doesn’t mean that I turn off all my other potential sets of of trying to attune and gather information or or try to be sensitive and and noticing of what might be what I might be picking up on. And then, you know, whatever kind of like system I’m kind of running in the background for like how to make sense of it or or what what might be the unspoken story or what really needs to be lifted up that I heard and want to spend some time with, you know, something like the Enneagram or might and mostly I’m using it as a tool to notice myself. So, I’m a two, which means that I have twos tend to have more difficulty identifying and relating to their own feelings and needs. Hence my reactivity in the beginning of CPE. Why are you asking me all this private stuff? I don’t know and I can’t tell you and I don’t want to tell you. I want to hear about you. So the two’s gift can be a focus on the other, but sometimes to the detriment of paying attention to the self or feeling like it’s just as valid to make time and space for oneself. But also I’ve come to find out that it also means that what is nourishing is when there’s a deep sense of relationship and relatedness. And so that doesn’t mean that I have to go sit by myself under my favorite tree and just think about my feel my feelings. What I began was able to notice is that in my spiritual practice the moments of the practice where we are visualizing the presence of a Buddha or of my teacher and I see their face smiling at me. I feel yeah okay you know because it’s relational and I can feel that I’m receiving their blessing and then I feel my own capacity to expand that kind of sense of love and acceptance to others and that is the the the fun the nature of the two to feel most aligned with their meaning and purpose most vital, most healthy, most integrated when they are able to extend that kind of presence and compassionate concern and love to others because they are already embodying love because they’re connected to its abundance in the world already. So for me that that Enneagram framework of what is the core limiting belief? I’m not lovable. I’m not wanted. Filtered through my childhood of not ever quite feeling seen and heard for who I am led me to relationships where I did feel seen and heard. And how nourishing and healing that was to being able to cultivate more of that in my spiritual inner world, more of that in my relationships and friendships and then be able to extend that in my care and practice with others. So it is psychological, spiritual, emotional, developmental path in that way. And that’s one thing I really appreciate about that. It takes it it can take time to hone in on what it might have to offer for you. But it can help us figure out how we go from a kind of disintegrated under stress. We manifest certain behaviors in this direction and under periods and times in our life and circumstances where there is nourishment, abundance, clarity. We become more whole and integrated and able to manifest and embody the more generative sides.
Gwen: Thank you. So it sounds like it’s a meaning making kind of framework for you. Is that a reasonable…
Leigh Miller: Oh, I skipped over the section on meaning making. It is for me. Yes. And I will just say that I I really do appreciate the the book the recent book by Shelley Rambo and Wendy Cadge on 21st century spiritual care and based on three competencies. One of which is meaning making and I will say that in your training and in your work as spiritual care providers, the skill set of being able to facilitate meaning making in others is very very crucial. That might happen through theological reflection. It might happen through dharmalogical reflection, contemplative practice. But this is a place to notice where there’s a difference in a Christian or Judeo-Christian worldview and a Buddhist worldview around where meaning comes from. So if you are working with people who feel that their meaning making process will be to understand what God is trying to teach them through this experience. That is an idea of meaning that projects it into existing out there. It’s already a given in a circumstance in a thing in an event. And what needs what the task of the meaning maker is is to find that and understand it that it’s been and if there’s a relationship to a theos a god who has intended that for you that is the task is to understand that it was personally given to you for that purpose. I’m not saying all Christians think this way. I’m just saying that that is one framework that is completely different from a Buddhist framework where everything is codependently arising and interdependent. There’s no inherent given pre-existing meaning in anything and it’s certainly not personal. We have karma but we don’t find it out there, right? Which doesn’t mean we don’t have meaning making. It just means that our source of where the meaning comes from and what kind of status we give it could be different. And there’s a lot there. We could spend a lot of time unpacking it, but I see Peter’s hand up. So, I hope that will suffice for now just to plant a seed of like explore that.
Peter: I really I really resonate with the way that you’re communicating and similar to that spiraling analogy of understanding, there’s a couple things that you’ve said that I’m like, hm, that feels really right, but I’ll have to like I don’t know, it’s not quite there. And one one of them that I feel like I’ve been kind of I don’t know learning a lot about and I can tell that my language is mediocre at the moment around is around feeling real experience with people. Where you know the the experience that I’m feeling with them might not be exactly what they’re feeling and even might be conventionally upsetting or uncomfortable but challenging kind of the the basic understanding of it being a problem. And so like you know is an emotion inherently a suffering experience right and often it’s not in my experience and you were talking about some of the pitfalls in you know interacting with people and like you know either like being too too much in your head or not too much in your head or also and then you were like well and then these are some things that I would challenge and how and you it sounded like you were talking about challenging basically the inherency of like suffering within an an emotion or other and I would love you to talk about anything you want having heard my words.
Leigh Miller: Thanks Peter. Yeah. Yeah. I think as Buddhists we’re maybe particularly skilled or or people who have done some kind of contemplative practice, we we have a particular skill to have a dual track sort of awareness. This is what’s going on in inside of me and this is what’s going on in this space around me and possibly in this other person. Yeah. So, being able to note I’m having a a set of feelings, thoughts, reactions about what I’m hearing or witnessing. And it might not resonate. It might not be as the same as what they’re experiencing. They might even feel hurt if I if they knew what I was thinking or feeling. So, you’re doing a lot of self-awareness, which is great, and a lot of a lot of sort of like questioning where does it come out of me and into our conversation or our interaction. And that will not only be verbal, as I’m sure you’re aware, we transmit so much that we don’t know we’re doing. So sometimes it’s helpful to bracket. This person is really sexist. Okay, I’ll come back to taking care of myself about that later. Right? And sometimes it’s wow, they really think that their world is going to end when this person dies. And I fundamentally know life is impermanent and they’re going to keep living and ultimately eventually they’re not going to feel what they’re feeling now. But if I it’s going to sound so insensitive to their grief and to their their fear. So how do you skillfully and compassionately offer a response that doesn’t skip over where they are right now? And so that’s where some practice like that empathy guessing can help you develop that vocabulary and hone your kind of accuracy about being able to sense what might be going on for the other person. If you’re more aware of your own feelings and thoughts than you are of other people, that can be a direction to focus your your practice. And you can just do empathy circles with friends or or with a partner. Say, “Hey, can you I do this exercise a lot in class. The speaker gets three minutes to share something for which they’d like empathy. Could be a celebration, could be a difficulty. And then after three minutes, the empathy guesser gets out that feelings and needs list and just makes guesses. Are you feeling blank because you need blank or because you value blank and just lays out like a bunch of guesses. And then the person can, you know, on paper or in cards. Then the person can look at all your guesses and go this one and this one but I’m going to match them differently. And then you go great thanks for helping me to understand you. How do you feel now?” And invariably the person who has been heard and who has been the recipient of those empathy guesses will be so moved because they feel so seen and heard even if your guess wasn’t right. So it’s not about getting it right. It’s about the intention, the goodwill, the effort, the the focus, the presence of being with them that actually is what creates the connection and can serve some sort of some some beneficial impact. I hope that helps, Peter.
Peter: Yeah, I just love that. And yeah, I think it’s like this new. Yeah, I I love the activity, too. I really appreciate that. I can imagine I live in this home of of a couple people and I you know that we might try that later today.
Leigh Miller: Yeah, it’s amazing. Yeah. Good teamwork building. Well, when I tell students like your presence and listening really makes a difference, they’re like, “Yeah, that sounds nice.” But they don’t really believe it. Yeah. And then when they have the experience of talking of of being the person to share for three minutes something that’s going on for them in their life today or this week or something that’s up for them. Yeah. And receive like 10 minutes of someone else’s undivided attention. It’s transformative. And then they go, “Oh, okay. It does work and I want to be better at it.”
Jerry: Thank you for your patience. I see your hand up. Thank you. Thank you for this presentation. I don’t really know what meaning making is and why it’s important. I’m not saying it isn’t. I just it’s new language for me. But if I grasp it at least a little bit, the path to the beautiful pond is the meaning making and once you get to the pond, it doesn’t really make any difference how you got there. So I have a friend in Trinidad who probably when I lived there and since then we sort of maybe because of me we bump heads when she tries to push her Roman Catholicism on me. But over the last 10 or 15 years I now use the word spiritual which is a shock to me. I was very anti-spiritual but I have an understanding what it means. And over and over again I say when she sends me they’re sort of still gaggy but they’re they could be Buddhism based but they’re sort of Catholicism based of wishing me a happy day and remember to wake up and count your blessings and you know and it’s like so over the phone at least for me I I feel there’s no there’s no sense in getting stuck on her pushing anything on me because there many many ways to get to say the same thing. And I found that that also showed that I wasn’t well, although I I feel like I don’t get stuck too much on the identity of I’m a Buddhist. In fact, I don’t ever say I’m a Buddhist. It’s just that isn’t it amazing and when we share the I think she’s sharing it that all religions are and I’m I didn’t come up with this. Our religions sort of for the most part have the same outcome and yet we fight about that there which religion are you instead of taking your own path and getting to the similar pond if that’s metaphor I just made it up as I was listening so I I think I don’t know what meaning making is but I I guess but you would already know that if we identify too much with the meaning making we cause what I think is not a helpful separation between where you’re coming from and where perhaps the care receiver is is coming from. It doesn’t have to be like that, right?
Leigh Miller: So, a couple quick thoughts I have hearing that Jerry, thank you. I love I love the image of walking to the beautiful pond. Part of, you know, applying for a CPE program and writing narratives of your own life history and your spiritual journey and being with people who are in a context where they may be thinking about their own life in a different light for the first time or seeking to understand what’s going on or diagnosis etc. Being able to lift out of the story the things which are impactful, the things from which we learned or supported us are a tremendous resource either for understanding what needs to change or what resources are available but maybe forgotten and could be remobilized. So the meaning making tends to circle around that kind of purpose. I think his holiness the Dalai Lama wrote in a book about interfaith kind of dialogue and appreciating different traditions, different religious traditions around the world and what they have in common and what is unique about them is that each religion has its journey winding path to the mountain peak. And when they get there and they look out at this tremendous view, what they see are other people on the peaks of their mountains. So they haven’t all been climbing the same mountain, but when they get to certain elevation, they see peership, kinship among all the others at that elevation from their unique mountains. And I love that image because it means we don’t have to dispense. We can have both a common ground like you have with your friend and sharing valuing a spiritual lens on life, valuing the positive imprints and moments that we can pause for gratitude so forth. We can all do that. But we don’t have to give up the specificity of our orienting system and how it guides us and what that path looks like.
Jerry: Yeah. I just I’m not challenging you. I’m just maybe because I I challenge my own rigidity. So not not so the the path in a way to me is is has the at least for me and it may not be for anybody else has the danger of identifying and then the ego and then the narcissism like I’m special. So I don’t so if we ignore how we got up the mountain, not ignore but don’t emphasize it that and just look at the commonality then at least for me I’m going to be less contentious and less I want to just look at the at the commonality because that is the destination is where there’s no distinction. I understand what you’re saying. So I may be in that way of thinking if I was a caregiver that would be a disservice to to your mountain or the patient’s mountain.
Leigh Miller: Yeah, there’s Wendy Cadge has an article about code switching and and translate code switching and ways of approaching finding common ground and dwelling there. And often for Buddhists that entails a lot of internal translation work. Oh, they’re saying Jesus. But if I think bodhisattva, then I feel in integrity with what we’re talking about here or I can relate to what they’re saying, right?
Jerry: But still supporting suggesting is there’s an overidentification which causes it I don’t think it allows for the fact is many journeys one destination. I don’t I don’t know who said that but I I sort of believe in is and I don’t want to say that I’m a this I’m a that because we and otherwise I won’t enjoy the the little very nice things that I wake up to on my phone and it’s like yeah yeah that’s probably true I’m feeling sort of crabby I can’t do that today but it’s true no matter how you get there. So, I hear what you’re saying. I’m I’m just a little hesitant to Oh, here’s the final thing. Then I really will be quiet. I like to make joke of of of that I tell other Buddhists that I I’m practicing the inferior vehicle. And what I’m really doing is making fun of the fact that if you really understood the the from my point of view, the whole point of view of of of what the Buddha was teaching then you wouldn’t call one inferior and one superior and one and because in fact to get to the fact that Theravada and this is like an identity thing from this is what I’ve been taught Theravada we learned that the Buddha spent his 45 years caring for others. So, and you know, and that’s the example. So, then, so then I feel like, but I I think it’s funny that even within Buddhism, there’s that little sort of you’re not, you know, you’re not doing it right. You’re the inferior vehicle. But I guess an inferior vehicle can still get you to where you want to go. So, I’ll stop talking. Thank you.
Vanessa: Thank you. I’m going to need to jump in because I can’t believe we’re at time already. I feel like we could keep going for really quite a while. Thank you so much. Thank you Lee again for joining us. It’s it’s really been wonderful to hear you speak to engage in this subject. I think there’s really you know there’s so much here. There’s so much here that you know that we sort of just touch on vaguely in our in our own chaplaincy training and I feel like you’ve really deep dived this subject with so much of your own experience and specialization. So very very grateful to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Leigh Miller: Thanks for the questions and for the time.
Vanessa: Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you for joining and we’ll see you again. Our next Buddhist chaplaincy event is on the 10th of May and this is going to be very special one. Well, another special one. We’re going to have a film screening this time. A chaplain filmmaker called Keith Wakefield made a beautiful film called A Certain Kind of Light and he will be it’s a short film and he’ll be screening it during during the event on the 10th of May and then he’ll have a a talk and a Q&A afterwards. So I really hope to see you all there. And just to remind everybody that that the speaker series does run on donations. So, I’m going to just pop a link in the chat in case that’s something that you can do today. If you just give me a second. I had the link and now I’ve lost it. Okay. Okay. There it is. So, thank you everybody and see you all again soon. And Lee, come back and see us soon.
Leigh Miller: Anytime. You wonder. Thanks everyone. Take care.
Vanessa: Bye-bye. Look forward to seeing you again. Thank you.
CPE: Clinical Pastoral Education, a common form of training for chaplains. ↩
Bodhicitta: A Pali and Sanskrit word that means “mind of enlightenment,” it is the altruistic intention to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. ↩
Sangha: The community of Buddhist practitioners. ↩
Dharma: The teachings of the Buddha. ↩
NVC: Nonviolent Communication, a communication process developed by Marshall Rosenberg. ↩
Enneagram: A model of the human psyche which is principally understood and taught as a typology of nine interconnected personality types. ↩
Vajrayana: A form of Tantric Buddhism that developed in India and neighboring countries, notably Tibet. Also known as the “Diamond Vehicle.” ↩