This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Buddhist Chaplaincy Series: Staff Wellbeing with David Morris. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Staff Wellbeing - David Morris

The following talk was given by David Morris at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on June 10, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Staff Wellbeing

Introduction

Hello, everybody. Good morning. Nice to see you this morning. Lovely seeing the waves, seeing bright Saturday morning smiles. And I know it's not morning for everybody, and we have people even joining from the other side of the Atlantic this today. So, hi to everybody.

Welcome to the June installment of the Buddhist chaplaincy speaker series. I am so pleased to introduce David to you today, David Morris. David is a chaplain who lives in the UK, in London, and he works as a Chaplain in healthcare, and his main responsibility is Staff well-being at an acute Hospital.

David has a Bachelor of Arts and a Master's of Arts in the study of religions from SOAS, which is the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. And he also has a PGC¹ in chaplaincy studies from Newman University. David's first chaplaincy job was in higher education, where he was working for six years at the University of Westminster as the Deputy lead chaplain. He's been on his Buddhist Journey since his teens, mainly with Shambhala². For the last decade, he spent nine months on retreat at Gampo Abbey³ in 2018, and he took temporary ordination in the Kagyu⁴ lineage. And David looks to Pema Chödrön⁵ as his teacher, alongside Anam Thubten. David is a trustee of the London Shambhala Meditation Center, where he also volunteers and teaches. And in addition to all of this, David also writes, records, and performs songs under his own name and with bands, and spends a lot of time fantasizing about living somewhere Rural and rugged like Cornwall, where he grew up. Lovely. Thank you so much, David. Welcome.

Thank you, Vanessa. I thought that "this meeting is being recorded" was the thing that would make me most nervous, but then hearing my own biography read out to me took it another step higher. [Laughter]

Just to begin with, I know that, well, my understanding is that with these sessions, some of you will be following a training pathway in Buddhist chaplaincy, and some may be just joining out of an interest or it's something you're exploring for the future.

Is it possible for people to unmute themselves, Vanessa? Is that an option? Just if you could give me the briefest... I can see your names, but obviously, just maybe say your name and just say very briefly what's brought you here. It'd be helpful for me to know. You don't all have to do that if you don't want to, but we'll just give it a few minutes. How about I'll choose people.

Randall?

"I'm interested in what you're going to share with us, and I'm completing the chaplaincy training program at BCT."

Thank you. Mindy, would you be willing?

"Yes, very much. Hi, David. It's good to be here with you and with everyone and my classmates from the current year in the Sati Center chaplaincy Program. Also in a hospital setting, so I'm very interested in what you're going to say."

Thank you. Ross?

"Hi, everybody. I'm currently in the in-person chaplaincy training through the Sati Center, and I've been volunteering through Kaiser hospice as a hospice volunteer."

Thank you. Marilyn?

"Hi, I'm in the Sati Center, the online group of the Sati Center training, and I've been working a bit in hospice, and I plan to keep going and find whatever training seems like you can learn about this forever. I really appreciate you being here. I'm in Canada, too, so like the wild card here, maybe."

Thank you. And thank you, Renee, for you putting in the chat. If anyone else prefers to do that, please do. Stephen?

"Retired from Healthcare, and I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do next. So I'm not exactly sure where this is taking me, but I'm very interested. I've been interested for a long time in what you're doing with staff Wellness. It is something I proposed before I retired and tried to get grounded where I was at, but didn't really get anywhere with it. So, very interested. I may not be able to stay for the for the whole talk, but I will certainly watch the rest of it. So thank you."

Sure. Thank you, Stephen. And Nadine, perhaps technical things mean you can't unmute or whatever, but maybe add something in the chat later if you can't do that now. Carlos?

"Hi. I did the introduction to this chaplaincy in Sati Center together with Ross, and this is where I met Vanessa. And I've been doing since then, volunteer service in two palliative care units in Portugal."

Great. Well, thank you all. That is really helpful. And actually, I met with Vanessa and I met Jim just before we opened the room. So it's just really helpful because I think what I've realized is by sitting down and focusing and trying to write a presentation that focuses on my particular role... We talk in the National Health Service, and I'll say the NHS often, and some of you may know that as an acronym, but it's the National Health Service in the UK. We talk about getting into a silo mentality where you kind of get a bit locked into your Zone and what your Zone means and how it intersects with others, and you forget about the others. And I think sometimes I do that with chaplaincy.

I'm now going to put some slides on the board. I'm hoping to use them not to the point where we don't engage with each other, and there'll be time at the end for interaction.

Okay, it's working. So this is partly just to help guide me through and hopefully structure my thoughts as best as I can. I'm not always the best at that. My current context is that I've just got back from three months of retreat again at Gampo Abbey, which was mentioned in the biography. I was asked to go back to help coordinate a kind of a deeper retreat. It's 49 days long. It's called Yarne, and my teacher Pema was leading that. And it was a fantastic experience. What I'm in the mix of now is a month of coming back, returning to work, and what that time away has given me. I've been in this current role for two years. When I came back, reintegrating into the culture and the narratives that I engage with within the National Health Service has kind of rushed back in.

And my own kleshas⁶ have rushed back in. I thought basically when I came back and I started planning this talk, I looked at the summary I provided, and I thought, that sounds quite negative. There's quite a lot of heaviness in there of just, you know, tensions between the structural and superficial potential. I mean, it maybe reads of somebody who's somewhat struggling with the work, actually, and there's some truth to that. There are a lot of obstacles, and the way I engage with those obstacles... I came back, you know, whilst on retreat, I managed to speak to some people who I took some guidance from about how can I relate better with these obstacles. And well, I'm trying, I guess.

But I guess my aim is to try and illustrate possibilities and the difficulties of engaging in pastoral spiritual care for staff working within a complex and extremely hierarchical public Institution. I didn't realize when I worked in a university previously, there's a lot of hierarchy, but in the National Health Service, it's quite profound between doctors and nurses, between midwives and nursing, between what we call Health Care assistants who do jobs which are kind of below the threshold of nursing. And you know, I'm not focusing much on covid-19 particularly, but in the post-pandemic context and just the range that I do from one-to-one support to sort of involvement on structural changes, which has become more and more important as I've gone on with the work.

So having looked at my summary, I was thinking, well, I want to present something that's genuinely a mix of the weariness, burnout, and frustrations. And that's, I'm talking about that in the staff I work with, but also the way in which I can sometimes identify with that narrative myself or find the work questions my ability to meet the task in the way that I would genuinely love to. But I'm also going to include things about the joys of the role. So I hope this isn't just a doom-filled 40 minutes for you.

And lastly, just questions. I'm requesting to use the chat if you have questions, and if I don't notice that questions have been posted, Vanessa or Jim, if you could interrupt me and let me know, I'd appreciate that. Maybe discussion. There'll be a point that's particularly useful for you all, and hearing that a number of you are training and a number of you are within the healthcare zone.

To start with, I'm going to talk about a bit about my journey into chaplaincy. So, as was mentioned in the CV, I moved to London when I was 28 years old, and I began studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies. And I went there because they had a really great Buddhist studies department and some experts in Taoism as well, which I was also and still am very interested in. And that was around the same time that I really connected with the Shambhala Community as well. So I suddenly had on my plate this academic line of looking into Buddhism, but also the chance to start practicing. I've been reading Dharma⁷ books well since my late teens, but I particularly did get magnetized by Chögyam Trungpa⁸ and Pema, but basically felt very much on my own. Didn't find anyone. And then I had a connection with a lineage.

So I did this undergraduate degree, and I was working various bits and pieces jobs to keep myself afloat. And then I went into doing a master's, which was called Religion in Global Politics, which was quite a particular Focus. But I basically didn't have much funding whilst doing that. And one evening, I went to my local Shambhala Center for one of the open-house meditations, and I met someone who was a regular attendee at the time. He was retired. He was a former high-level Barrister or, well, I think, I don't know if you use that term in the US, a solicitor, a very high-ranking kind of lawyer. And I got on with him very well. We're probably on different ends, not radically different ends of the political Spectrum, but we were on different ends, so we would have lively conversations sometimes. And he asked me how I was, and I said, "I think I'm going to quit my Master's Degree. I can't find work right now. I can't afford living in London." He said, "Well, what jobs are you applying for?" And I said, "Delivery driving, working in the libraries, just anything I can find." And I was getting nowhere. It was during the kind of time of austerity after the financial crash, I guess.

And he said, "Well, do you want to do these jobs?" in a quite fatherly way, which I'm not that used to. And I said, "Well, no." And underneath that, there was a fair bit of resistance because I thought, it's fine for you, imagining him to have a lot more financial security and imagining things just fall into his lap. And I said, "No, I don't particularly want to do these jobs." And he said, "Well, what job do you want to do?" And it just sort of stopped me. And I said, "Well, something that combines my spiritual path and my academic background." And he said, "Well, have you looked for something like this?" quite sternly. And I said, "No."

And then the next day, I did an internet search, and I found a vacancy at the University of Westminster, which is one of London's universities. It was actually the first Polytechnic. Polytechnics were set up basically to provide routes into higher education for working-class people in the Victorian era by various sort of philanthropically inclined people. And I applied for it, and somehow I got it.

Now, I didn't have any chaplaincy qualifications, and I didn't have any chaplaincy experience. And I got what was basically a full-time role; it was four days out of five, so it wasn't completely full-time. That was based on my academic study, but also the kind of pastoral training I'd had within my Buddhist Community as well and roles I'd taken up. But I am aware I'm talking to people who are engaging in a course and then, you know, building in perhaps hours on the ground, going into hospices, going into Healthcare environments and others. And the idea that I just landed a paid job straight away, I mean, it was quite strange, but I was very lucky. And that's why I've put "auspicious coincidence." There's a Tibetan term which is Tashi Tendrel⁹, which means auspicious coincidence. And yeah, so I was lucky to find a way in.

And I'm sure everybody here can relate with how chaplaincy sort of offers the possibility of putting out what we've learned and what we practice into some kind of use within settings where there is a need for people who can offer time and space to people who are suffering in different ways. And then I went about what I've put as "retrofitting my CV." Maybe this is really foolish to do on a recorded video. I sought out whatever chaplaincy training I could find in the UK, and that was quite patchy initially. I eventually found that I could do this PGC because I'd already had a job. Now, a lot of training courses in the UK, you have to already have the job before you can do the postgraduate qualification. And for Buddhists, there aren't many ways of establishing yourself and getting the credentials in order to get the role. I was lucky that I fit in there. And since then, I've taken that seriously as an opportunity to try and give back and help create more routes. And that's something I'm actively involved in. I'm not going to focus on that, but looking at ways that we can create professional forms of training for Buddhist chaplains in the UK, just recognizing that not everyone has the ridiculous luck that I had.

But after six years working in that role, which had pastoral spiritual support with students, I ran meditation classes, the classic kind of Staples that we might imagine. My role also included quite a lot of work with what was called the Prevent Duty, and that was legislation the UK government introduced which placed a burden on all public institutions to pay due regard to the risks of radicalization. I was involved with looking at issues of community cohesion, managing shared prayer spaces within the university. And there was a lot of political sensitivity, and there was a relatively securitized atmosphere because this University had former students who'd gone and joined Isis, basically. And that was both a PR problem for them and also people genuinely cared about the issues. And part of that role had a focus on developing more Interfaith communication around events, but also managing what were some tensions on the campus, basically. So it was quite politically charged. And although it was interesting, I was on the lookout for something which offered much more of an emphasis on the pastoral spiritual support.

And I saw my current job advertised, and I jumped, and I was lucky to get it. So I became staff well-being chaplain at Kingston Hospital in Southwest London.

This was the structure from my job description when I first got the job two years ago. So this might be of interest to people who are interested in how chaplaincy is deployed in institutions. And that is something that I do think chaplains do need to learn about, how we fit in, because we're not just a Wandering Yogi who is spontaneously showing up in situations. There are structures that we integrate into. There are lines of reporting, and the way in which those are set up does govern somewhat the potential of what we can do.

So we have a Head of Chaplaincy, Pastoral and Spiritual Support. And then it's changed. We now have, instead of a deputy of the department, we actually now, that person's titled the Lead Chaplain. And the Lead Chaplain manages what we call the patient and family team. And that includes pretty much everybody except the two little boxes that are on the right of my screen: Staff Wellbeing Chaplains and HCA Pastoral Support. So we have a network of on-call chaplains, assistant and honorary chaplains who come from diverse Faith Traditions. There are positions dedicated a day a week for a Muslim chaplain and a Jewish chaplain, but there are also Jewish and Muslim chaplains within the assistant chaplains team. It's quite a large team. And I think that the Head of Chaplaincy, Pastoral and Spiritual Support, she's been in charge at that hospital for about a decade. When she arrived, I think there were about what we call 2.5 full-time equivalents, so 2.5 full-time salaries were being paid, and it's expanded hugely. She's developed a network and demonstrated the quality that can be offered by a diverse pastoral and spiritual support offering within a hospital.

This is probably too dense a text, especially if you're on your phone. I really apologize. I realize not everyone's looking at a large screen. It's not so essential to view, and maybe you could watch the recording if you're really interested. This was my key responsibilities on the job description. So, strategic responsibility for enhancing staff pastoral and spiritual well-being support aligned within the key organizational structures of the hospital. Two, to have strategic responsibility for developing targeted interventions for staff across the trust, working collaboratively with staff wellbeing chaplain colleagues.

So my team, there's three of us. When I arrived, two of us were new. There had been one staff well-being chaplain in role for four or five years. And then because she was so good at demonstrating the potential of that role, particularly during the covid era when she continued to provide support for staff and was on site, didn't disappear from the hospital, they expanded the scope and resourced for two further full-time positions. So there are three of us as staff well-being chaplains at this Hospital. There are currently around 4,000 staff, but we're actually expanding and merging with another healthcare trust, so that's even going to increase. We don't know what that means for us yet.

So working in collaboration also with HR, so Human Resources, the well-being services within Human Resources, and to ensure availability and accessibility of one-to-one "time to talk" sessions and group support for staff in complex professional and personal circumstances. I was quite pleased. I hadn't looked at this, my job description, for quite a while. I came back and I thought, phew, I worried that I wasn't doing my job. And I came back and I realized I am doing those things. So there's some relief there.

I hope I'm not going too fast and just rattling through, but again, put something in the chat and pause me if you want to dig down on something. Establishing and developing practices and processes that ensure the timely and appropriate response to staff referrals and requests, providing needs assessment, well-being support, and signposting to other specialist Services as required. As a key stakeholder in the delivery of the trust's health and wellbeing objectives, to facilitate and contribute to the review and development of holistic staff wellbeing policies and performance in order to inform best practice.

I won't read all of the rest. I think many people have maybe heard the difference between the map and the territory. So this was the map I was given, and then when you arrive in the territory, sometimes it's not exactly as it's been described, or the possibility of achieving those things is maybe not as easy as you might have imagined. That was definitely the case for me when I came into this role.

I arrived and realized that people weren't going to just come and knock on my door. There wasn't a stream of referrals waiting for me to pick up. I had to go out there and make relationships. So I was assigned to... we have three divisions at the hospital: planned care, unplanned care, and corporate services. For me, planned care includes the maternity service, Pediatrics, it includes the oncology Services, surgery, Urology, it includes Orthopedics, trauma, what's called the Royal eye unit, so an ophthalmological Department, Dermatology, a bunch of other things. Largely stuff that's pre-planned. People are coming into... obviously, that's not the case for maternity. They do have an open door, but they're included. So I don't have the emergency department or what we call the acute assessment unit and some of the more, I guess you'd call it, reactive services.

So yeah, I just felt very nervous, actually. I'd not worked in healthcare before. People use acronyms all the time and assume understanding, and then when you ask them what the acronym means, they often don't even know because they've just got so used to using the acronym. They know what it means roughly. So just the learning curve of arriving into it was quite intense. And I was acutely aware of the risk of being sort of maybe naive because I just imagined, you know, I regard these people with a great deal of respect, that they've been working in this quite gritty environment with a lot of resilience. And then to come in talking about well-being, you know, there was a fear around, how do they regard this? Do they view this as some fluffy initiative that is a waste of money? And to be honest, there are people that do view the idea of having staff wellbeing chaplains as exactly that. And there are always questions about the resourcing of chaplaincy. Does it actually need... do we need this? What does it actually do? Why don't we just have counseling?

And to try and go into the situation without being overly defensive, overly cautious, but also not go in and seem like a kind of floaty spiritual optimist who thinks that everyone should just be given time off to meditate... striking that balance, I found it's an interesting bit of work. So what I focused on was just trying to get to know people. And the phrase is used a lot, I think, in chaplaincy training I've engaged in, the idea of being alongside becomes an emphasis. And I think that meant going to meetings where I wasn't sure why I was there, joining what we call clinical governance meetings. It's a monthly thing for different departments where they might talk about the serious incidents that have taken place, the complaints that are in process. And just accepting that I might not know why I'm there, but not using that as an excuse to dodge it and sit in my office. And just to get out and about as best as I can, but try not to get under people's feet.

When we started this, I had a brief moment with Jim, and Jim talked about the feeling of, you know, how do I develop this ability to be responsive to staff support needs in the context of healthcare chaplaincy? And it just immediately reminded me that I'm dedicated to staff well-being, but often people working in healthcare chaplaincy are responsible for patients, families, and staff. I imagine that's true for some of you. And I know that the patient-facing team where I work, they do feel they want to do that, but they do obviously need to prioritize patients and families. There is a kind of a... not that in the minds of the chaplain the staff come second, but there is just such an emphasis on the direct and visible suffering, perhaps. I might be wrong. Maybe that could be something we could talk about at the end.

I arrived, and so did my colleague Steve who was responsible for corporate services, and we kind of found our way for the first few months. But what we quickly encountered... we looked at this NHS staff well-being needs pyramid. It's a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. At the top of the pyramid is "I'm achieving my full potential. I'm thriving and love where I work." What underpins that? "Regular well-being conversations, team check-ins, sense of belonging, freedom to speak up." And then at the very base: "Nutrition, hydration, personal protective equipment (so comfortable clothes and shoes), toilet and shower facilities, sleep, healthy work-life balance, safe working conditions, regular breaks and rest areas."

We looked at this, and what I thought I would be doing would be the elements of the top two of the pyramid. But what I encountered was there was so much missing in the base that when you go and talk to teams about staff well-being, they say, "Well, I love the idea of a yoga class, but I don't even get to take my lunch break. So how am I expected to do that within a 12-hour shift?" And when I hear that, I say, "Yeah, okay." And then there used to be free car parking for the staff; they took it away. So staff on quite low salaries are paying for car parking. So when I go and talk to groups and try and survey their experience of well-being, I feel acutely aware that the idea of a mindfulness class sounds like something nice to add in if they had the basics in place.

So what my team did, this became really evident to all of us, is we put together quite a substantial paper and a fair bit of research. We used the well-being needs pyramid, and we presented it to the chief executive of the hospital and the chief people officer. We made some proposals. We made a proposal of protected well-being time for all staff. In some organizations, people have an hour a week allowed by their employer to engage with whatever is being offered. We were advocating for an hour a month. We tried to go in at somewhere that might be realistic. We argued that there were some people who could come and use our services, but these were often people with jobs that just allowed that flexibility or they happened to have a compassionate manager. We were interested in presenting the fact that there's not equitable access to staff well-being here. We also advocated for better well-being areas. Some staff don't have a staff room, and if they do, it's a cupboard where they all pack in to use a microwave.

So I went from thinking I would be doing pastoral spiritual care in the mode of being a compassionate, empathetic listener to encountering this quite raw situation. It was received, but none of our proposals were implemented. We realized that this wasn't going to be listened to. The NHS has been struggling.

We did analyze and learn that the word "chaplain" can be an obstacle for some. It can be inviting to others, but they often would encounter, "Well, I'm not religious, and I don't need religious advice." So, trying to present chaplaincy as practitioners of spiritual care... one of our proposals in the paper which did come through is that we changed our job title and we became "staff pastoral well-being practitioners." This is the pitch that we have on our flyers, on our website. This is how we try and explain ourselves to the hospital community.

Q&A

Question: It occurs to me, David, that you're in the company of some very skilled listening chaplains. Maybe that's where you found the motivation to speak.

David: I think I could dig down on that, but right now I would rather open up space. I did talk to Vanessa about what would actually be useful for people here.

Vanessa: I'm noticing that most of us here are sort of in the program or former students of the program. So I'm going to suggest that maybe we be a little softer with the transition of the event today. Let's just see what questions we have.

Jim: Thank you, David. It's really interesting hearing what you're doing and that focus on the staff wellness. I'd be interested to hear more about when you initially landed in the job and you realized you had to develop these relationships. I found often, especially in some of the higher security areas like ICUs and emergency departments, the nurses tend to turn to one another for support a lot of the time, and they're maybe not so welcome to forming relationships outside of that. I think this is kind of an understanding of a shared struggle that they go through and this kind of bond through experience. For an outsider to kind of come in and try and offer some kind of empathy or connection, it can feel hard. So if you have anything more to say about how you built those early relationships...

David: Thank you, Jim. I'm sometimes jealous of the patients and families team because they have a legitimate reason to wander onto the wards because they've got a visit list. I find I'm not good at wandering in and just checking and saying, "Oh, hey, how are you?" because I think, well, if the person's really suffering right now, they don't want to be provoked to tears whilst they're on shift. So I do a lot of one-to-ones where people come and we sit in a quiet space.

There were a couple of matrons... we still call the most senior nurse who's still on the shop floor a matron. There was a matron who'd had a really great relationship with a chaplain. And I think that if you can find the people who have experienced what chaplaincy can offer and have a warmth and openness to it, that was incredibly helpful to me because this matron started referring staff to me on a really regular basis in a way that was a light touch, wasn't heavy-handed. She understood that it was confidential. She never asked me if the person really came to see me or not, or what did they say. And that builds trust because the staff know that when they come and talk, it doesn't get passed back.

There are systemic problems that do seem to come down from the top. There are issues of feeling that people are quite exploited in terms of working extra hours for free, being pressured to come out of sick leave, all kinds of different things.

Jim: In some American hospitals, they have peer support systems like "Helping Healers Heal" or "Caring for the Carers." It relies on the staff in the hospital, regardless of their position, to be trained to provide peer support. Is that something that's also in place in your hospital? And are there also counselors available for staff, or do you also kind of take that role?

David: All the trainings that are offered to staff to kind of help them with the peer-to-peer stuff that you described... every time I see something like that set up, it gets canceled because operational pressures are too high. These things get swept away. They're the first thing to go.

The defunding of in-person clinical mental health provision... so we've lost our clinical psychologist who I was running groups with. She would hold the clinical framework, but then we'd set up a reflective practice group, and then I would carry on running it. It was such a fruitful way... she had limited hours, she would get things started, she trusted us to pick them up and carry them on.

The danger of becoming a pseudo-therapist is out there. And obviously, clinical psychotherapeutic trainings give people rigorous understandings of boundaries, of power, and the potential outcomes of those on people who are vulnerable. Chaplaincy is not regulated in the same way, and that does mean that people are skeptical of things that start to look like counseling. I agree with that on principle, but I also feel that people show up to talk, and I listen. And I have developed my understanding of ethical boundaries, and I know when to refer onwards.

Question: Your rebranding slide reminded me, did you find it had much of an impact?

David: I think it did. We have to keep going out there and keep reminding people of our existence. But it's also made us more vague. There's something definite about chaplaincy. I'm not sure that either one is better. My personal view is that I would have been happy to stay as a staff well-being chaplain because it's distinct. There's something fuzzy about "staff pastoral well-being practitioner." It's also a mouthful.

I was going to lean into the zone of becoming "The Rescuer." I understand that you've been doing some work on the drama triangle, which is something I put up on the board with people I'm talking to. It's such a beautifully elegant way of understanding how we can get stuck in a drama.

The second verse of the Eight Verses of Training the Mind: "Whenever I am with others, may I consider myself least important and from the depth of my heart cherish all and hold them Supreme." My plan was to ask Pema, my teacher, "How could I possibly... I work in a situation where I see people who fit in with what Gabor Maté is saying, who've placed others' expectations and needs ahead of their own and who oppressed their so-called emotions, and that leads to burnout, illness..."

And the answer is that all of these teachings... if you haven't developed a foundation of Metta¹⁰ or Maitrī¹¹, which is loving-kindness, then we don't start engaging in these other teachings which we consider as the Mahayana¹² bracket of Bodhisattva¹³ training, mind training (Lojong¹⁴). And I realized I'm not there to contradict or fight against the tendencies in the people I meet who do place others first all the time. I'm there to offer gentleness, space, loving-kindness in a professional way, to offer warmth, to reflect back the experience this person is having and to acknowledge it as a very human experience. And I think I came back from the retreat knowing that it's actually not my job to try and solve all of these complex structures that I feel exploits people.

My teacher's advice: "The next time you lose heart and you can't bear to experience what you're feeling, you might recall this instruction. Instead of blaming our discomfort on our circumstances or our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves. This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering—Yours, Mine, and that of all living beings."

As a Buddhist chaplain, I feel that I need to just be really bringing my practice to awareness of the narratives I'm carrying about projections that I'm carrying, and to loosen those up and to liberate myself from them, and to show up with a smile.

Mindy: David, I really appreciate your honesty and even the heaviness and the sort of examination of the structural challenges that you find yourself in. And I'm also wondering, what do you most look forward to when you go to work?

David: The honest answer is one of the patient and families chaplains. He only comes in one day a week. He's a liberal Jewish rabbi and Jewish chaplain. He's around 70 or something. He's a bit of a mentor, and I can just talk openly and be really real with him. I also really look forward to the one-to-one support, the privilege of that. The genuineness of that is just... it's maybe what I feel is most important in life. So the chance to receive is just, I find it energizing. People say, "Oh, you must find that draining," and I said, "No, what I find draining about the job is not those experiences." What people think is the hard stuff about the job, I actually find connecting, genuine, authentic, raw, tender—all these words. And having the possibility of, oh, I did somehow hold the space where that person could connect with that part of themselves in a way that I hope felt safe. That really sustains me in the work.

Vanessa: Thank you, David. I've also really, really appreciated hearing your perspective today. The story of the NHS, it breaks my heart, you know, because I think in theory, it's something that was so optimistic and so hopeful. And you know, to hear the ways in which even the bottom of the pyramid is wanting so desperately.

David: There's the Taoist concept of Heaven, Earth, and humanity. It's a natural hierarchy, which is not the same as a hierarchy of power or of money or of authority.

Thank you so much, David. Thank you for joining us.

David: My pleasure. And it's a privilege. Thank you for the invitation, and good luck with your studies or your placements or whatever you're leaning into next.