Spiritual Support for Caregivers: Experience Less Suffering with These Four Principles
Since you’re reading this copy, I’ll assume you’re wondering how to solve the puzzle of living your life and acting as a caregiver.
It isn’t a matter of finding the right balance. Caregiving requires a different perspective, a spiritual perspective.
Changing your perspective is a transformative opportunity. So, I found a different path that helped me see more clearly what was happening in front of me.
Finding spiritual support helps you understand that there is much we don’t understand, and much beyond our control. Taking on a spiritual perspective can help you focus on what is in your control.
I had no control over the disease coursing through my wife’s brain, nor the deterioration of her bodily functions, nor the responses from doctors/nurses/aids/insurance companies nor the reactions from friends/relatives.
What is in my control is myself. This is key to uncovering harmony in caregiving. Suffering often occurs when you want the situation in front of you to be different than what it is and you can’t change it. How can we see the reality in front of us? See it objectively, with love and understanding? The Four Principles of the Caregivers Journey may help.
The first principle is A DESIRE TO KNOW YOURSELF.
I came to understand that caring for Kathy required self-inquiry, and by knowing myself, I would know how to care for myself and Kathy.
I'm sure we've all heard this from friends and family. Take more time for yourself. Have dinner with some friends. Take that day off you need. Or you must eat better. Or get to the gym or run or get to that yoga class. Repeat and repeat and repeat.
And yes, doing those things for yourself will help. But they're temporary. And as much as you feel good doing them, you'll probably not have gathered any insight into the causes of your suffering. You’ll still think that the cause of your suffering is out there. It isn’t.
The feelings and thoughts that arise are reflections of you alone. There is no one nor any situation to blame.
You have a choice how you want to face caregiving.
The better I understood myself, the more love and happiness I could bring to my wife. Isn't that what caregiving is all about?
I call the second principle FULLY EMBRACING THE PERSON IN YOUR CARE
At first, I didn't want to embrace caregiving. I held it at arm's length. But, this is a big BUT, the further away I pushed caregiving, the more distance I put between myself and my wife.
I realized I had to develop a new relationship with my wife. I had to start over. I had to see the woman in front of me anew, and objectively.
When I did that, I could fully embrace my wife in every stage of her journey. She was happier, and so was I.
I want to share a story with you that I read in a book called How Can I Help? by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman. The book is about service from an Eastern perspective with personal stories to illustrate the narrative. This story is from a woman and talks about embracing the person in your care and how it reduced her suffering.
"So, in the early stages of my father's cancer, I found it very difficult to know how best to help. I lived 1000 miles away and would come for visits. It was hard seeing him going downhill. Harder, still feeling so clumsy. Not sure what to do, not sure what to say.
Toward the end, I was called to come suddenly, he'd been slipping. I went straight from the airport to the hospital, then directly to the room he was listed in. When I entered, I saw that I had made a mistake. There was a very, very old man there pale and hairless, thin, and breathing with great gasps fast asleep, seemingly near death.
So, I turned to find my dad's room. Then I froze, I suddenly realized, Oh, my God, that's him. I hadn't recognized my own father. It was the single most shocking moment of my life.
Thank God he was asleep. All I could do was sit next to him and tried to get past this image before he woke up and saw my shock. I had to look through him and find something besides this astonishing appearance of a father I could barely recognize physically.
By the time he awoke, I'd gotten part of the way. But we were still quite uncomfortable with one another. There was still this sense of distance. We both could feel it. It was very painful. We were both self-conscious…infrequent eye contact.
Several days later, I came into his room and found him asleep again. Again, such a hard sight. So, I sat and looked some more. Suddenly, this thought came to me, words of Mother Teresa, describing lepers she cared for as "Christ in all his distressing disguises."
I never had any real relation to Christ at all. And I can't say that I did at that moment. But what came through to me was a feeling for my father's identity, as like a child of God. That was who he really was behind the distressing disguise. And it was my real identity to, I felt. I felt a great bond with him, which wasn't anything like I'd felt as father and daughter.
At that point, he woke up and looked at me and said, Hi. And I looked at him and said, Hi.
For the remaining months of his life, we were totally at peace and comfortable together. No more self-consciousness. No unfinished business. I usually seemed to know just what was needed. I could feed him, shave him, bathe him, hold him up to fix the pillows, all these very intimate things that had been so hard for me earlier.
In a way, this was my father's final gift to me. The chance to see him as something more than my father, the chance to see the common identity of spirit we both shared. The chance to see just how much that makes possible, in the way of love and comfort. And I feel I can call on it now with anyone else."
This story resonated with me. I wanted the resolution she found but I didn’t know how to get there. Finally, I had an epiphany as well. I began to see that the intimacy I cherished did not depend on my wife's physical form. I recognized our common identity.
The third principle is ACKNOWLEDGING THERE ARE NO "DETOURS" IN LIFE
When I began caregiving, I didn't know whether caregiving was an interruption in my life or working was the interruption. Wherever I was, I kept thinking about where I wasn't.
Until I surrendered to caregiving, I couldn't stop suffering. When I accepted caregiving as part of the fabric of my life, that it wasn’t an interruption in my life, I found I could fully embrace my wife. There was no other place I wanted to be.
These so-called detours may be the most transformative episodes in your life. It was for me. I stopped wishing I was someplace else. I committed to what was happening in front of me.
I call the last principle simply, PRAYER
Think of every action you take in service to your loved one as an act of prayer. Everything you're doing is a loving offering—an offering not to your loved one's physical form but to that eternal essence that resides in all of us.
Prayer also helped me realize that I'm not in control. That there are limits to my doing. That there are greater forces at work beyond my understanding. So, I surrendered to something greater than myself.
By letting go of what I was not in control of, I could focus on what was in my power. And that was to learn to love my wife, fully and completely, Alzheimer's and all.
The Four Principles are at the heart of the Caregivers Journey Workshop. Putting them into practice made a huge difference in my life. I didn’t suffer as much; I felt happier and more content with myself; and I brought more love and compassion to my wife.
If you’re a caregiver having difficulty in this role, feeling alone, frustrated and tired with no peers to share your experiences, on a rollercoaster ride of doctor calls and appointments, bouncing between good news and bad news, having more questions than answers, suffering as you’ve seen others suffer, having tried what everyone has said to try but to no avail, then you may be ready for a fundamentally different approach.
