Being with Dying – Curriculum for the
Professional Training Program in Compassionate
End-of-Life Care
“Helping, fixing and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help you see
life as weak. When you fix you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.”
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen
Introduction
The Being with Dying Professional Training Program (BWD) in Compassionate End-of-Life Care
(EOLC) encompasses ethical, spiritual, psychological, existential and social aspects of care of the
dying. It includes mindful and compassionate approaches to end-of-life care, compassion-based
ethics and communication strategies in EOLC, clinician self-care and contemplative interventions
appropriate for clinicians/caregivers and dying people.
The program builds on reflective practices that can regulate attention and emotion, cultivate
compassion, aid in the development of a meta-cognitive perspective, promote calm and resilience,
reduce stress, and foster emotional balance, embodiment and compassion. The training also
emphasizes basic neuroscience research in relation to the clinical, contemplative and conceptual
content of the training (see also
in this volume).
The BWD faculty has learned in our decades of work in the end-of-life care field that cultivating
stability of attention and affect enables clinicians to respond to others and themselves more
compassionately and with greater clarity and ethical grounding. This is something that the training
emphasizes through the progressive contemplative interventions that are taught during the course
of the program.
These contemplative interventions mirror the Halifax A.B.I.D.E. Compassion Model (see
in the volume) in training clinicians in attention, prosocial affect, the cognitive dimensions of
intention and insight, and embodiment. These features can prime compassion and increase the
capacity of clinicians to presence and work skillfully with suffering. The training also concentrates
on the G.R.A.C.E. intervention, a clinician/patient compassion-based approach, as a way to give
clinicians an attentional, affective, cognitive and somatic base for interactions with their patients.
This eight-day residential program is structured to provide opportunities for participants to share
insights with their peers as well as with the interdisciplinary team of facilitators that includes
contemplative practitioners, clinicians and educators. It is a deep dive into values and behaviors
and utilizes many learning modalities, including didactic teaching, self-directed learning, inquiry,
creative processes and contemplative practices to enhance awareness of the importance of the
inner life and professional responsibility. In the course of the training, there are frequent processes
for participants to interact with each other in group debriefs, role playing, dyadic exercises and
council practice.
467
