Over the past four years, I have been studying mindfulness at the University of Aberdeen. During this time, mindfulness has come to play a major role in how I view and approach my work. Beyond offering me significant insights, it has also transformed the relationship I have with myself, as well as the kinds of people who visit my clinic. More and more, I found myself using mindfulness in a therapeutic way.
Tara Brach is one of the mindfulness teachers who has spoken of “mindfulness therapy.” This resonates with my own experience of mindfulness—so deeply healing in many directions.
Recently, I was delighted to learn that I graduated with First Class Honours, and I shared this achievement with my network. Since this sparked some curiosity, as a teaser, I decided to share one of the vignettes (storylines) from my research project.
A Change of Perspective
Recollected at 06-06-2025
I walk into the waiting room, and right away my eyes find him. My next patient.
Even from a distance, I can tell—something isn’t right. He looks worse than before. He has cancer. Palliative. Put simply, he is coming to die with more comfort, for what little ease we can offer. He knows he’s dying. He has tried to talk to me about it, but honestly, I’m not sure if I really heard him. Then I call his name. Together, we slowly walk into the treatment room.
On inspection, his face—much more swollen than it was a few days ago. And new—there’s a thin nasogastric tube now resting against his cheek, threading into his nose. It helps him take in food, especially when the nausea is too much. He doesn’t use it all the time, just when he needs to.
I move through my usual checks. His legs—severely swollen now. The edema is worse. His belly is tense, the ascites more pronounced. I ask how he’s doing. He sighs. The swelling is getting harder to manage. As well as his bowels aren’t working well anymore—he struggles with every visit to the toilet. And the pain—maybe that is the worst part, pulling at his ribs, deep in his belly.
My mind being very active, scanning, observing, working things out, but mostly being into “fixing mode.” Making sense, right? Isn’t that how we got trained, to fix stuff. But why is this happening? I’ve done everything right, haven’t I? Followed the books, used every tool I know. Why is there no improvement or at least some relief? Could the modern medication be the problem? Is he even taking the herbs I prescribed? What am I missing?
Then, through the fog of my thinking, I hear his voice again. Fragments of a sentence: saying how happy he was to spend time with his granddaughter. How much joy that brought him.
For weeks, this case has been circling in my mind. I’ve been so caught up in trying to help, trying to fix. Focused on the symptoms, the strategy, the outcome. But then—something shifts. A wave of helplessness washes over me. And I stop. I look at him. I really look. I meet his eyes.
And it hits me. Oh God. There is a person sitting in front of me. A father, a grandfather. An actual human being. A man who knows he is dying—how must that feel? He has actually been trying to tell me. And up until this moment, I missed it.
Recognising the Human Being
In early practice, I often missed subtle cues, as I was focused on gaining control and trying to make the patient better (“doing mode”). As Skovholt and Rønnestad (2003) emphasize, novice therapists (with zero to six years of clinical practice) often struggle to recognize and respond to the complexities of a therapeutic dynamic. However, if we pay attention, clients can actually be teachers, yet as novice practitioners, we suffer in trying to be effective. And initially, I kept approaching the sessions with a mode that I was going to fix something—concerned with symptom progression and treatment adjustments. As Hammer (2009) mentioned, as acupuncturists, we are still too focused on the interventions we can perform or the diagnoses we can make. We often overlook the importance of the therapeutic encounter, as we are not trained on how to truly meet another human being; instead, we are more trained to meet and treat a set of symptoms, and how to diagnose according to Chinese medicine.
