Caregiver, Care For Yourself

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He brought the tools of mindfulness and self-care to medical students, many of whom had been studying all this past year, 10 hours a day, day after day, in isolation.

He integrated poetry into the curriculum, offering to the students one of his favorite poems by the Sufi poet Hazrat Inayat Khan: “I asked for strength…”

What would he ask for? To travel to the furthest point away from here. Pre-pandemic, he was an international speaker, traveling the world 110 days out of the year. During the pandemic he practiced self-care through power walking, connecting, and becoming an excellent cook.

Listener Poet Elizabeth Pringle

Association of American Medical Colleges

April 2021

You have come here to help others

and yet it has been a year of

unrelenting work

isolation

stress.

Your chest tight, tired, heart hungry for touch.

We were born to engage

but can you embrace

and be held through a screen?

Here, here are the tools:

ancient and intimate as a whisper

known in every mindful moment.

Rise, take your precious body

and walk,

run,

race back to yourself.

Rise, taste hope in another’s eyes.

Here is the first patient.

Caregiver, care for yourself.

Listen, you are here, you are held in hope,

made whole in a moment of awareness and connection.

You asked to serve, to heal others,

but you were swallowed by a pandemic

and in the fearful dark

you leaned to breathe, to wait,

to trust, and believe.

Caregiver, care for yourself.

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