Forest Bathing

For years I've enjoyed taking long walks in the woods. But it's only from reading a recent New York Times article that I learned I've been following the Japanese practice of shinrin yoku - "forest bathing."

There's nothing new about walking in the woods. Our ancestors spent their lives in forests. I assume many forest-dwelling genes are buried in our DNA. But as our species has become progressively more urbanized we spend most of our time indoors. A 2001 EPA survey reported that we Americans spend 87% of our waking time indoors, and another 6% in an enclosed vehicle!

In 1982 the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term translated as "forest bathing" to describe the effort to imbibe what it saw as the healing power of nature by going into green areas with a mindful attitude. Since then, in the U.S., an "Association of Nature Forest Therapy" has trained and certified multiple cohorts of forest guides. A Google search shows that forest bathing is catching on as a commercial "back to nature" trend.

As an adolescent, Walden and Henry Beston's The Outermost House were among my favorite books. It seemed obvious that there was something very "natural" about being in "nature."

Three days ago the Journal of the American Medical Association published an important study demonstrating that creating green spaces of grass and trees on what had been garbage-strewn abandoned lots has a positive mental health effect on the neighborhood. This was a methodologically rigorous, randomized study that is likely to convince skeptics that there's more than sentimental anecdote behind the endorsement of time in the woods as a promoter of health and well-being.

In an aggressively capitalist society, it only takes a few nanoseconds for good ideas to become "monetized" and the focus for snake oil style hype. On the web I found vendors hinting that walking in the forest will combat cancer. But despite the hype surrounding the forest bathing concept, if I were still in clinical practice I would add spending time in "nature" as a recommendation to many of my patients.

Meditation and Medical Ethics

Medical ethics and mindfulness have a lot in common. I reached that conclusion after a recent conversation with my long-time friend Charlie Halpern about his effort to introduce mindfulness into legal education.

Charlie has been doing this at the UC Berkeley School of Law for the past several years through classes and elective retreats. He's an enthusiast and a believer. He feels, and many legal educators and law schools agree with him, that mindfulness practice increases empathy, compassion, and the ability to really hear what clients and others involved in negotiation and litigation are saying. He described how a professor at Berkely has taken to starting his classes with three minutes of silence. The professor reports that "sacrificing" three minutes of class time leads to a richer, more thoughtful class experience.

I've taught meditation to patients in a medical setting and have recommended meditation to many of my patients over the years. And I've written in this blog about how mindfulness practice can be woven into busy practitioners' lives. (See here and here.) But until the conversation I had with Charlie, I hadn't recognized the obvious connection between mindfulness and the way I've taught medical ethics.

In the semester-long course medical ethics course that I taught at Harvard Medical School, in addition to the topics that formed the intellectual content of the course, I encouraged the students to hone their skill at (a) observing their cognitive and emotional reactions to clinical situations that raise ethical issues, (b) treating these reactions as "data," not "truths," and then (c) reflecting on the "data" presented by their experience as one piece of ethical analysis before (d) reaching a conclusion. Over time, as demonstrated by clinicians who we regard as models of ethical action, this set of actions can become reflexive, done automatically and recurrently.

What I realized is that steps (a) and (b) are close cousins to what meditation teachers encourage their students to do. The setting is different - deliberate quiet and inwardness in meditation versus to what I'm inclined to call "meditation in action" in learning to be an ethically sensitive clinician. But the outcomes the teacher hopes for in the student - empathic connection with others, compassion, and seeing the truths that underlie complexity - are the same.

Recognizing the kinship between mindfulness and medical ethics is a valuable insight for ethics educators. An increasing number of students know something about meditation and respect the practice. Recognizing that skill at meditation can enhance their grasp of medical ethics, and, that skill at medical ethics fosters some of the key skills for meditation, enhances both domains.

Mindfulness, Clinical Outcomes, and Patient Safety

Two months ago, when I wrote a post about using the walking we clinicians do in the course of the working day as opportunities for  meditation, I wondered if it was a harebrained idea or a piece of personal eccentricity. But when I came upon "Use Hand Cleaning to Promote Mindfulness in Clinic" published in BMJ earlier this month, I decided there's something to it.

The author is Heather Gilmartin, a nurse fellow in the Colorado VA system. She makes the excellent suggestion that hand washing, a recurrent act of patient care and self care, can be used as a moment of meditation. Here's the practical summary Ms. Gilmartin presents:

A moment of mindfulness

Focus your attention on your thoughts and emotions. Stay present and accept whatever arises, just as it is, without reacting.

Set an intention—be it listening with intent, choosing your words mindfully, or acting with compassion in your next encounter.

Smile to acknowledge this act of kindness to yourself and to your patient.

Alcohol based hand rub

Pause, take a breath, and notice the sound and feel of hand rub being delivered to your palm.
Be present in the moment and experience the sensation of rubbing the foam/gel into your wrists, hands, and fingers until the product evaporates and leaves you clean.

Soap and water

Pause, take a breath, notice that you are turning on the faucet, and regard the feeling of water flowing from your wrists to your fingers.
Be present in the moment and experience the sensation of rubbing soap into your wrists, hands, and fingers, and then washing it all down the drain.

The VA system disseminates innovations well. I anticipate the potential for an epidemic of meditative moments arising from Ms. Gilmartin's modest but well articulated proposal!

Via her article I read an empirical study of the simple idea of using recurrent components of our days as opportunities for "mini-meditative-moments." College students were instructed to wash dishes in their usual manner or to do the ordinarily mindless chore in a mindful manner. The group that meditated as they scrubbed showed increased positive emotion and decreased "nervousness." (The article is at:
"Washing Dishes to Wash the Dishes: Brief Instruction in an Informal Mindfulness Practice.")

Reading the two articles emboldens me to out myself for another practice I've built into my day. I'm vigilant about brushing my teeth twice a day. If tooth brushing takes one minute, in a year it adds up to 12 hours. If it takes two minutes, it's a full day. That's a lot of time to devote to an uninspiring chore. I've taken to applying what Ms. Gilmartin recommends for hand washing to those moments of tooth brushing. It's an N of 1 experiment, but I believe it makes a contribution to overall well being.

I believe that most participants in the US health "system" would agree that the "system" is a mess. There's a massive outpouring of proposals for fixing the broken "system." We need to seek mega-solutions. But micro-improvements, such as what Ms. Gilmartin proposes in her BMJ article, are steps all of us in health care can and should take as part of the larger movement of creating an ever-more ethical environment of care.

Walking Meditation and Health Care Ethics

Health care can be frantic. Emergency rooms, intensive care units, and surgical suites are obviously high paced, but so is "ordinary" hospital and outpatient care. In my busy days of practice I sometimes had 18 appointments in 10 hours. It's not surprising that clinicians report high levels of tension.

Tension can sharpen our focus, but when it's sustained over time it can lead to irritability and distraction. These create hazards to patient safety and contribute to burnout. That kind of tension is bad.

Insofar as the conditions of practice can be modified to reduce tension, doing what's needed and possible should obviously be done. But clinical practice inevitably brings tension. For our own sake and for the sake of our patients, we need to develop ways to chill out. As the late Ken Schwartz wrote in "A Patient's Story," "...in a high-volume setting, the high-pressure atmosphere tends to stifle a caregiver’s inherent compassion and humanity." To be truly effective caretakers, we need to cherish our capacity for "compassion and humanity"!

For some, meditation is a tremendously valuable tool!

Unfortunately, meditation is often thought of as a touchy-feely matter of sitting in an uncomfortable lotus position and chanting mantras. That view confuses external practice with the internal objective. If meditation is taken to mean sitting in a quiet space for 20 minutes or more to carry out the practice, not many health professionals will make use of it.

That's where walking meditation comes in. In hospitals, doctors and nurses typically walk a few miles - in short bursts - during a shift. In my outpatient practice I often walked from my office to classrooms where I taught and to meetings at the nearby hospitals. I could even take a few paces in the office between appointments. I tried to use these interludes as opportunities for meditation.

There are excellent on line guides to walking meditation. (See here, here and here for examples.) But no approach fits everyone. I found that the excellent descriptions of how to focus on body sensation and the experience of walking didn't work for me. My mind kept wandering to matters I was fretting about. That got me riled up, not settled down.

I recently found a technique that works well for me. I like to look around as I walk. Here's what I learned to do:

1. Breathe in, and, at the same time focus my eyes on some aspect of the external world, as by saying "look at the trees," or "look at the clouds," or "look at the people."
2. As in all forms of meditation, the aim is to experience the trees, clouds, people passing by, or some other focus, not to think about them.
3. I found that for my obsessional nature, it helped to say numbers sequentially as I breathed out - one number for each cycle. That seems to help me stay with the experience rather than drifting off into ruminations. I also like to keep track of how long I can sustain the process before my mind gets filled with trivia.

I present my experience to make the point that it's kosher to develop an approach that works for us. Gurus can be helpful teachers, but the wise ones don't look for slavish followers. If walking meditation clicks for a person it can fit into the interstices of the day. Parents give children a "time out" for the child to regain some composure. Walking meditation has potential for potentially stressed out health professionals to create mini "time outs" for ourselves. When it works it serves us and our patients well! That's good ethics!