The Middle Way: Reimagining Rest for Therapists and Healthcare Workers

In this episode of 'The Practitioner's Heart Podcast,' host Poh Gan delves into the pervasive habit among therapists and healthcare workers of treating rest as a reward that needs to be earned. Drawing on Buddhist teachings and personal experiences, Poh discusses the concept of the Middle Way, a balanced path between extreme discipline and indulgence, to illustrate how rest should be considered an essential resource rather than a luxury or reward. The episode offers practical advice on integrating rest into daily routines, thereby enhancing the capacity for presence and compassion both in personal and professional life. Poh encourages listeners to rethink their approach to rest and provides insights on cultivating self-awareness and self-compassion.

00:00 Introduction to The Practitioner's Heart
02:26 The Habit of Earning Your Break
04:55 The Middle Way: A Buddhist Perspective
10:09 Practical Tips for Integrating Rest
14:28 Final Thoughts and Closing

Transcript

Hey, welcome to the practitioner's heart offering practical Buddhist wisdom for a sustainable practice for therapists and healthcare workers. If you are keen to learn more and deepen your practice beyond the theoretical understanding of Buddhism, if you are finding it hard to calm your little active mind after therapy work, I welcome you to join me to dive a little deeper.

Each episode I'll be sharing some common issues that therapists may face when integrating and practicing awareness, compassion within themselves, and also supporting clients. I'll be sprinkling some pearls of wisdom that I've learned from my master and teachers that will be helpful as internal resources for the helpers in us.

I'll also be interviewing other therapists who are on these spiritual paths together to share their experiences of how they integrate and practice wisdom and compassion in their daily lives. I want to let you know that you're not alone. You are part of a bigger community who aspire for greater soul alignment, growth, purpose, and awakening, that we can strike a balance of juggling our busy modern life as therapists with a clear mind and an open heart.

I hope to inspire more practitioners to explore deeper spiritual meaning and purpose on our path to enlightenment and awakening. I am your host, Poh Gan, a psychologist, a Buddhist practitioner, a parent of two children, a fellow human being with a busy mind, but with a great inspired vision for collective awakening.

Let's begin.

Hi. Welcome to the Practitioner's Heart Podcast. Today I would like to start with something very relevant to all of us, this habit of earning your break. We're going to sit down, just you and me, talk about one of the most pervasive and subtle habits that I see in our field that habit of the mind that often disguises itself as discipline or responsibility.

I want you to think about your last work Monday. Maybe it was a busy day packed with clients and at some point you made a promise to yourself, a little quiet contract in your mind. "I rest this weekend." And that promise becomes the carrot, a carrot that you dangle in front of yourself on a draining Wednesday.

It's a finish line that you imagine you are writing your last note on a packed Friday afternoon. "Just get through this and then you can rest." But then when the weekend comes and there are groceries to buy, laundry to do, and family and friends to connect with, and underneath it all, there's often this lingering uncomfortable feeling that you haven't quite done enough to truly deserve a break, and that maybe you should just answer a few more emails or read that one article.

This is a habit I want to talk about today, the habits of treating rest as a reward that you have to earn. I think in our culture we often see rest as the price that we get after we've been good, after we've been productive enough, helpful enough, or have checked off every box on our to-do list. What if this framework is wrong?

What if this conditioning is wrong? What if rest isn't a destination at the end of a hard road and is not a reward for a job well done? What if rest is the fuel, the resource that you need in order to to go further? What if is the resource that you need to be to even be on the road in the first place?

What if our relentless habit of trying to earn rest is a very thing that leaves us so depleted?

There's a foundational teaching in Buddhism that speaks directly to this struggle. It's called the middle way. The story goes that before he was a Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha try to find enlightenment through two extremes. First, he lived as a prince with every pleasure imaginable. He was comfortable.

But not free. He lived in a palace that gives him comfort in all four seasons. Because his father, the king, really loved him and would like him to have a great life, a luxurious life, but he was not happy. And then on the path, or in that journey of seeking truth, he became an aesthetic. It means that a practitioner who has severe self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, starving himself, holding his breath, pushing his body to absolute limit.

He was very disciplined, but he was still not free. He was just exhausted, depleted, and he was all skinny and bony. At the end of that practice, he realized that it was actually bringing him not closer to enlightenment at all. He realized that neither path work, neither total indulgence nor harsh self denial leads to clarity.

The path to freedom he discovered was right down the middle. Now, how does this story relate to us and our habit of earning rest,

In our modern world? We often live in these two extremes all the time. The Satic extreme of our work week, pushing through, seeing one more client, just checking emails, just writing that report, ignoring our own needs, and believing that our depletion is like that sign of our dedication is like a badge of honor.

And then the indulgence extreme is often what we call self-care. That weekend binge watching the Netflix series that leave us feeling numb, the frantic scrolling to check out the glass of wine that is more about disconnecting than savoring the moment.

Well that once in a year, big holiday, yes, I would love to have big holiday, but that should not be the carrot dangling in front of us to work so hard and ignore the signals that our body send to us when we are practicing awareness, it's not just in the mind aware of our thoughts.

Aware of our feelings, but actually our awareness lies all throughout our body and senses. If you stop your toe, ouch, like your awareness is actually all through your body from head to toe, why are we not tuned into our body as we maintain our awareness? I think that's the self attunement, self-awareness we need to cultivate along the way.

And the so-called middle way suggests. The third option is a wisdom to see that a depleted, well sip note, one list of all our clients if we are not. Rejuvenated and not fresh. We're tired and we're exhausted in this space is actually hard to be present with our clients. So in this view of walking your middle path, middle way, rest is not a luxury that you get after you suffer enough.

It's a skillful, thoughtful, necessary practice. Is the compassionate act of maintaining these instrument. You, this person sitting on the therapist chair so that you can continue to, play your music in the world. It's just like, the musical instrument, like guitar. If you pull the string for too hard, too tight, it's going to.

Burst one day. Rest is actually not a reward for the work, but it's an essential part of the work. So, what does practicing this middle way of rest look like in our lives? It's less dramatic than you think it might look like scheduling a genuine 15 minute gap between two difficult clients.

Not to frantically write notes, but to stand up and look out the window and consciously let the first session go before you welcome your second client or have a ritual. You send love and compassion to your last client and allow yourself to be fully present to your next client.

You're not doing this because you earned a break. You're doing it as a clinical necessity to be present. So in our minds it might look like catching that thought, I can't relax until all my notes are done,

And instead of obeying it, you get curious. You say, ha, that's the earning habit. And then you make a conscious choice. Maybe you say, okay, I will write one more note and then I'll stop. Because my body and mind need to transition out of work mode. It's about making conscious choice, not being driven by anxiety or autopilot.

The middle way of rest might be the most radical act of all. Sitting on the couch for 10 minutes and doing absolutely nothing, not turning on the tv, not even picking up another productive psychology book. I think you all can relate to this. We all have lots of psychology books that we put on our, bedside table, um, and just reading some leisure reading.

But how about just sitting and listening to music, allowing ourselves to simply be not in our head, hustling about the past, what we should or should not have done in the sessions or thinking about the future and clinging to our to-do list. It is letting go of the habit that even our rest needs to have a purpose.

And I learned that in South Korea, there's actually a competition for people to come together and just do nothing. So I guess that's a skill that we all need to practice in this busy, chaotic world. So my gentle inquiry for you this week is this. Can you just notice the moments when the earning habit, like I need to earn my break, habit shows up. When you think about resting, that's your mind. Immediately start listing the conditions. Like, I can only relax after I answer these emails, or after the kitchen is clean, after I prepare for tomorrow, then I can rest. You don't have to fight it. You don't have to judge it.

Just notice it. Ha, there it is. If you feel able to, if you feel like you can offer yourself a different thought, a thought about the middle way, maybe it's just a silent acknowledgement that rest is not a reward. This is my resource. I'm resourcing myself and just see what shifts. Thank you for sharing this space with me today.

As we close our practice for today, I want to thank you for sharing this time. If this episode resonated with you, the most meaningful way to support the podcast is to share it, share it with a colleague, or live a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps our community to reach other people who need it.

Until next time. Keep your heart open, keep your mind clear and steady. Go be your amazing self as you awaken yourself and others.

See you next time.

Just a gentle reminder that our conversation today is for inspiration and education only. It's not a substitute for therapy or clinicals. Supervision and our time together doesn't constitute a therapeutic relationship.