Insights from the ER

[Bubba66]

Hello actualized boys and girls. I am currently working as a nurse in an emergency room, and I have experimented with consciousness in my practice, with some profound results.

Insight one: Mindfulness can save lives. I started to feel burnt out with the influx of Covid cases lately, and found myself returning to default consciousness and habits. I mean drinking too much coffee, watching bad youtube videos way past my bedtime, and eating fast food on the drive home from work. The fast food craving  happened after seeing a decapitation case; I must have internalized a little stress from that one. I know several nurses who went out drinking at 6am, but I settled for a quarter pounder. 

Anyways, all this is to say that one day I stopped, and made it my intention to stop listening to crappy youtube on the way into work, instead practicing mindfulness with silence on the drive. Then I continued down the list of my default habits, until I found myself being mindful during CPR for a full cardiac arrest. The crazy thing is, my mindfulness helped me to realize that the reason this person's heart was not pumping was due to the fact that they were so  overweight in their upper body area, that their adipose tissue weighed down to compress their heart, creating a tamponade effect. That is to say, my awareness led me to stop doing compressions at the two minute mark, and sit the patient up in bed. The pulse came back. Awareness at its finest right there. 

Insight two: Meaningful Work is not necessarily your life purpose.(for you young and indecisive people, like me) More and more lately, I am seeing the need for balance in the lives of our healthcare workers, myself included. This year has really highlighted that need, and the fact that there is a war on consciousness waged by big corporations (Hospitals are corporations who benefit monetarily from your well-insured ass having a heart attack multiple times in a year). That said, I am not here making a political statement. I am outlining a fact of modern employment that needs to be contended with, and I wish to create a realistic expectation in those of you who are young and have not started working a real job yet. 

I see a trend on this website a lot, ever since Leo's wage slavery video. I believe it is best described as  younger people who think they can make the problems of survival emotionally easy just by aligning their income with a "conscious career" like Life coaching, nomadic web-based work, or being a gamer on youtube, or starting a podcast with an associated Patreon account. I was in this boat a short while ago, and almost pursued IPEC's $9000 training to become a Life Coach while simultaneously dropping out of nursing school. I am glad I did not do that, looking back. That would have been a subtle way of me running from painful growth opportunities in front of me. 

I am not going to say that any of these career choices are bad. But if you read that and are saying "wow, he described my aspirations pretty well there," I implore you to go out there and get some real world experience, and grow some fangs and claws before you pursue enlightened and creative work full time. Even though my career of nursing is not the most conscious and perfectly authentic path to me, it has taught me a lot about survival, lessons I would not have gotten any other way than by working a 9-5 (in my case, 3 12hrs in a row).

And I would add that I chose nursing very intentionally. It was the only form of vocational training within my price range that even mentioned Self-Actualization and Maslow's hierarchy in its course curriculum. I took that as a sign I was maximizing my skill points in a strategic direction, and let me say, it feels like it is finally paying off. I went through some really dark times to get here, practicing as a nurse, but man I have a vantage point to work from. I might very well start my educational Coaching business this summer, given the population's infection rate backs off and the Covid vaccine does not create Zombies. 

Insight Three: Expand, because its your only option. Let me make this clearer with an analogy: You can grow into a little potted houseplant, seated in a comfortable little planter that you are familiar with, in a nice sunny spot in the front room that only gets shady after 2pm. You will be a potted houseplant, until your owner forgets to water you a few days while on vacation. 

Or you can become a badass Venous Fly Trap in the Amazon Jungle. You can ditch the potted soil, and sink your roots into some savage land, and grow into something of a force of nature. You can even grow up above the tree tops as a Kapok tree, with authentic roots that run deep, and become a form of flora that has survived floods and erosion, and has housed other creatures like Bees and Jaguars. 

Apply that weirdness to your own pursuits. Basically, accept the pain that comes with the freedom to grow, and remember that the species of plant your grow into is up to you at a certain point, only once you become tough enough. 

I see far too many older nurses who are "burnt out", who have been spit at, sworn at, kicked and even shot at too many times to find the mindfulness in the work that they do. They have become ungrounded, and often pursue unconscious and familiar pleasures that constrict their awareness roots, just to justify their continued torture of employment. That, my friends, is what I am talking about. Externally you can have the prestige of working in the ER, but on the inside you are a comfortable houseplant that struggles with making decisions, and always has fear and doubt that water will not come the next day. And you cannot reach shamanic levels of consciousness as a house tulip. Better to become the big ass tree the shamans smoke from, and risk enduring a flood from time to time. 

I see plenty of nurses and physicians who are entrepreneurs outside of their careers, even amidst the pandemic. Some leave work to go to the library to do market research. Others hit the gym after a 12 hour shift. Others still have a gig coming up with their band in a recording studio. One nurse even works part time during the holidays in order to make little holiday coffee cups as a side biz. 

In conclusion 

Perhaps that was not quite what your mind thought of when you read "insights from the ER", but I think the topic of life purpose and what to study is on a lot of people's minds this time of year. I know it was for me when I took final exams. I have more interesting stories and insights that are a little more bloody and interesting if you care to hear them some time. But for now, this one is long enough. Take care, keep meditating, and remember, Mindfulness can save lives. 

 

Ps: Id love to know your opinion of balancing a "real job/career" with life purpose and authentic consciousness pursuits like psychedelics or transcendant meditation retreats. I realize we need nurses, plumbers, and even lawyers. But maybe it is up to us to work on ourselves to bring consciousness standards into these professions, rather than running away from these professions all together. 

Edited December 4, 2020 by Bubba66

[Guest SirVladimir]

Hey, welcome back to the forum! My mother works as a nurse as well, thus I have deep appreciation for the work you do. Were I a knight, you would have me on my knees. 

Regarding your question, one should work like hell on finding their life purpose first. Once they have it, a balanced path may seamlessly emerge. When I think of conscious nursing, Mother Teresa comes to mind. 

[Bubba66]

@SirVladimir I find it ABSOLUTELY LUDICROUS that I “technically” am not allowed to enjoy your Beautiful Mystical writings while having a toke, because the large corporate hospital setting is steeped in stage Orange consciousness that values mandated drug testing (we are truly in the dark ages!). 

The thing is, many healthcare workers experiment as psychonauts. Its partially what makes us empathetic and higher consciousness creatures, and if there was integration between an agency and the understanding that we nurses are “grown ups“ and wont come to work tripping balls, then I think we would have a higher quality of care and Love in our work again. Instead you have some folks who feel burnt out, and those who treated nursing as a life purpose feeling more like a wage slave at the end of it.
 

Being a strategic motherf***er, I plan to take a 3 month retreat/ sabbatical from nursing a year and a half from now in between jobs. I have the whole thing planned out, and will be focusing primarily on higher consciousness strategizing during this time as well. If I return to the profession, my savings being depleted, I will do so as an independent contractor or someone with financial independence, because I have a specialized skill set and can do that sort of thing. I am building a sound foundation to launch from first, and collecting survival insights as I go. 

 

[Guest SirVladimir]

2 hours ago, Bubba66 said:

The thing is, many healthcare workers experiment as psychonauts. Its partially what makes us empathetic and higher consciousness creatures, and if there was integration between an agency and the understanding that we nurses are “grown ups“ and wont come to work tripping balls, then I think we would have a higher quality of care and Love in our work again. Instead you have some folks who feel burnt out, and those who treated nursing as a life purpose feeling more like a wage slave at the end of it.

I absolutely hear you, and I wish I could be there to hug you for the tremendous weight you carry as a nurse. As they say, Rome may have been built of bricks, but it stands on your shoulders. Occasional employer-sponsored trips for nurses sound like the next evolutionary step in modern nursing. 

The retreat sounds like a plan. Let us know if there is anything we can help with or advise on (i.e. usually pluck flowers that leave the cannon still open, i.e. form imperfect responses that fit you like a second-grade dress, i.e. contemplations for the strategic motherf***er that you are). (What?)

You'll find your life purpose, and it'll be goddamn perfect. And I'll be here to witness it.  To slightly recontextualize one of my older responses: Soon the golden trumpets will resound, and a queen will enter the castle cantering on a brown horse. Oh, how the birds will sing! How beautifully will shine her gown, glinting by the return of the Crown! So ride like hell!

P.S: Regarding my writings, I always advise for shamanic breathing if cannabis/psychedelics are out of one's reach. They haven't found a way to stamp you a penalty for using your lungs yet... and it gets very powerful, especially after getting a grip on it.