November/December 2010
the zen of science

by Marc Ringel

Compassionate Service
The blurred line between doctor and fellow traveler

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet was the most important book I ever read
because it jump-started my love of literature. That work, which I must have read not too long after it was published in 1954, awakened me to the ability of fiction to create a world more real than the chair I was sitting on while I read it. It’s the story of a couple of aspiring
boy-scientists, David and Chuck, who answer a tiny newspaper want-ad that solicits a homemade rocket ship. And so the interplanetary adventure begins.

The book has held up well. My kids liked it when I read it to them over the course of a week or so of bedtimes. It didn’t appear on any of their lists of most-influential books that we exchanged in an email flurry last summer. In fact, Eleanor Cameron’s wonderful
novel didn’t initially make it onto my list either, until the lists of my wife and one of my sons clued me into the fact that “most influential books” is not really synonymous with “most serious books.”

One influential and serious work that did appear near the head of both my original and revised lists is How Can I Help? Stories and Reflections on Service by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman, published in 1985. A Buddhist friend (a rare commodity in rural Wisconsin where I was practicing) who had also been a patient mailed it to me not long after I’d moved back to Colorado. I believe it was our dual relationship, both as friends and as doctor-patient, which gave Toby the insight to prescribe this particular dose of bibliotherapy.

Since my first reading in the late ‘80s, I’ve never been without at leasta couple of copies of the book to read myself, loan or give away, especially to medical students and to overwhelmed co-workers. After a week’s dathun retreat at the Shambhala Center last summer, I sent copies to a physician and to a social worker who had been in my meditation
training group.

The book is just what the doctor (or in the case of my patient-friend, Toby, the elementary school principal) ordered for the helping professional. It’s all about how to do a demanding job in a way that energizes rather than depletes.

Compassion is the key. Compassion means really being with the people whom we serve. It means quietly listening, understanding and sharing pain without taking it on, without suffering
oneself.

Since the distinction between self and other is, ultimately, an illusion, those of us in helping professions can learn to deal with the pain of others as we strive to deal with our own. Ideally, we look it squarely in the eye, experience it with as little mediation by mind and concept as possible, and stay poised and clearheaded. We recognize thoughts, emotions
and perceptions for what they are, and simply let go of them.

The clarity and calm that meditation can bring are crucial to Ram Dass and Gorman’s enlightened approach. The book is rife with stories taken from everyday life that illustrate the principles that allow one to serve without being used up. Tales are set in a neonatal intensive care unit, a crowded subway car, a tenant organizing meeting, a deathbed, a jail, a village in rural India, and an anti-war demonstration, to name but a few locations. Some actors are highly-trained professionals. Others are compassionate bystanders. There are
but two common threads in all these stories: suffering and compassion.

How Can I Help? arrived in my life just when I needed it. I had left an extremely stressful and demanding private practice for a teaching job that was only slightly less stressful and demanding. I found that relieving the pressure a bit hadn’t made me much happier and suspected that, even if I had managed to relieve it a lot, I wasn’t likely to fi nd myself any more content.

At that moment I needed exactly what Gorman and Ram Dass were offering, which was their compassion. I felt burned out and disillusioned with my career, subject to endless demands from endless needy people. It seemed everybody, not just patients, wanted
something from me, including staff who appeared reluctant to make decisions on their own, colleagues who seemed ever-critical of what I didn’t know and of my need to make a space in my life that wasn’t about work, and students who weren’t very interested in what I had to teach them – including lessons about compassion.

I use the lessons I learned from How Can I Help? every day that I practice and every day that I live. As time goes by, the distinction blurs between being a highlytrained helping professional and being a plain-old fellow traveler on this planet. There’s no doubt that when I don my stethoscope I am instantly imbued with a certain amount of extra power and
authority that can allow me to do some pretty wonderful things when it comes to alleviating suffering, based on the science I know and on the faith that people have placed in me. In my civilian life too, as I stand in the starker focus of family, friends and strangers, right intention
remains the name of the game.

Now, before I disappear behind a cloud of self-appreciation or of righteous lecturing, let me reassure you that I really don’t have all this compassionate living stuff down. At best, in the last couple of decades I’ve taken a few steps of the million there are on the path to becoming a bodhisattva. The book by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman has been one of my major inspirations to keep at it. If you’re at all curious, try reading it. It’s still in print.

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet is also still in print. Mr. Bass, the guy who placed the want-ad for the rocket ship, is a quiet, deep thinker. He listens closely to David and Chuck. He loves them, guides them, sets limits when necessary, and appreciates them for who they are. I think Mr. Bass may be a bodhisattva.

Marc Ringel has spent the majority of his career as a family doctor working in rural communities, including the last 12 years in Brush, Colorado. He has written extensively, for lay and professional audiences, about rural health, medical informatics and healing.