Grieving our collective loss with compassion [PODCAST]

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“Cultivating compassion for ourselves and others is a practice in which we release judgment, anger and heal our emotional wounds. We can then move forward to a version of a better world where we have evolved to a new beginning. Change is always happening, and that is our constant. What we focus on while it happens is what will determine how much we will suffer or thrive as we go through it.

So, as we emerge through this time, whether as a health care worker, a parent, a newlywed or whatever your role is, let us stay present in what we have gained and be hopeful of the world that we will create tomorrow.

Let us focus not on what seems to be an obvious loss or grieving process but one in which we can find introspection, wisdom, strength, and a new set of purpose. It is in this that we can evolve personally and as a collective. It is not easy.

There is a lot of discomfort in shedding our old self and grieving our collective loss. Yet if we do this with compassion, we can find comfort knowing hope is waiting for us on the other side.”

Diana Londoño is a urologist.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “Grieving our collective loss with compassion.”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today we welcome back on the show Diana Londoño. She is a urologist, and she wrote the KevinMD article “Grieving our collective loss with compassion.” Diana, welcome back to the show.

Diana Londoño: Thank you so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure.

Kevin Pho: Thank you. We’ll get into the article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and journey to where you are today?

Diana Londoño: Yeah. I’m a urologist in Los Angeles. I basically grew up in Mexico City and came to the States when I was about 12. I did all my training here in the U.S. and practiced both in Miami and now back in Los Angeles. Now I’m just trying to discover myself a little more and learn about myself. I’ve been doing some writing, and I’m grateful to your platform especially for allowing me the chance to write and explore myself, and also in the journey of having become a life coach. So I’m excited about that journey as well.

Kevin Pho: So I can imagine you’re a pretty busy urologist. Tell me, why did you take that time to write, and how does that contribute to your professional career?

Diana Londoño: Well, the time to write really came from my second round of burnout. Many of us, 40 percent plus, 50 plus, of women in medicine are burned out. On the second round, it really was a time for me to figure out what it was and how to get out of it, and life coaching did that. When I started with life coaching, life coaching is really spending time in awareness and slowing down the mind, understanding what our triggers are, what our thoughts are, and what our beliefs are. It really helped me explore again what my triggers are and what my needs are, why those weren’t being met, and why I was getting burned out.

So for me, the ability to have a voice is really important. To be heard is really important. When it’s not happening in another medium or another place, then it really was leading to my own sort of burnout, emotionally, kind of like of your soul. So writing is an outlet where it doesn’t have to be mediated by other people in some ways. It doesn’t have to be at work or in a home situation. You could give those thoughts or those ideas and share them again with a wider audience, the world, whatever that may be. That really was just very healing for me, to express myself. So that’s not so much professional but really personal, because you can’t thrive professionally or at home if you’re not well within, right? So that time to spend for myself, to fill my cup, was really important and has just really been healing for me.

Kevin Pho: Can you give us an example of some of the things that you’ve written about?

Diana Londoño: Yeah. So the topics are not really urological per se. I’m a urologist, but I really talk about things that are not so fancy sometimes, like compassion, ego, burnout, fear, emotional scars, what helps, and what is going on and lurking between all of us as humans. I might also talk about things like movement and how that impacts your joy. They’re not really medicine per se, but they’re just human qualities, and I talk about our humanity. So I think the theme overall of the things I talk about is humanity and basic needs and basic beliefs that we all have. Otherwise we would be robots. If we don’t talk about those things that are core to a human, the need to be loved, the fears we have, those common fears and beliefs and things that are raw to a human, then like I said, we just become robots.

And in medicine, I think we have to go back from being more robotic to more human and understand that what we do is with people. We have to be at the core of not forgetting that, and not just going down an algorithm or prescription, but: Who’s in front of us? What are they saying to us? What’s important to them? What are they fearing? Because we can all relate to that, and that brings our humanity back.

Kevin Pho: All right, let’s talk about one of the articles that you’ve written on KevinMD. It’s titled “Grieving our collective loss with compassion.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read your article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Diana Londoño: Yeah. It’s been a time of a little bit of reflection. I sort of go back between a little bit of activism, and that energy where you’re fired up and angry about things that are injustices, but then also a time of reflection. It’s a little bit of a balance, in a way, of kind of a masculine and feminine energy, not per se by gender, but just the energies. The ones that are more laser-focused, where you have a goal, that’s more of the masculine. But then also the reflective and more nurturing, talking about what the feelings are, and that’s a little bit more of the feminine. I think this one was more of that feminine energy, just stopping and reflecting: Where are we going?

This is really talking about the loss, in the context of COVID, because we spent the last two years yelling at each other, and we continue to do so, yelling at each other, saying, “You’re crazy,” whether you’re pro- or anti-vaccine or whatever the issue is with COVID. We’re just yelling at each other, and we’re getting nowhere. When we yell, when we’re angry, the actual chemical changes in your brain are ones where you cannot process information. You cannot truly think or learn new information because you’re angry. You close off, and you’re not receptive.

When you change to a thought or feeling of compassion, and compassion really means sort of love for the self, it’s knowing that we’re human and not perfect, and you can see that in other people, the energy is so different, right? We let our guard down. We find commonality with the other person. We don’t have to agree, but you can find commonality and a shared love or idea, because at both ends of whatever your ideas are about COVID, there’s obviously a fear, yes, but we also have to understand that, in a way, it’s coming from a love of something. So we all have a love and a passion, but we’re yelling at each other instead of coming together.

So it was really just more a reflective piece, that we really have to change the narrative, because if it was working well, then yes, we should continue yelling, but that’s not really working. But it does really make it clickbait, of course, because you’re going to click on the article that is inciting, that makes you, it’s like dangerous, right? Like, “Oh, COVID’s not safe,” or “COVID’s safe.” Yeah, that’s dangerous. You’re all riled up. You’ll write a huge commentary on social media or whatever it is and yell at your neighbor. But when we talk about compassion, we’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s not interesting.”

And it’s such an interesting experiment, because other articles are written, so many shares, of course, but then you write about compassion, and the social shares are little. It’s not that it’s not an important topic. It just doesn’t get people to click, because it’s not threatening to you to talk about that. So your human brain, that’s how we work: We just skip over it. But it’s so important if we want to move forward and evolve and get to a place where we’re not destroying each other. We have to talk about compassion and feelings. So I think that’s why it was really important for me to write it, and I obviously appreciate the platform, because again, it’s probably not popular. People don’t click it. But we’ve got to stop and think: What are we really doing every day in our life? How are we showing up?

Kevin Pho: So you talk about our collective loss. You talk about all the conflict that’s been going on, especially during the pandemic. Can you share a personal story where you encountered such conflict?

Diana Londoño: Well, I think we all just lose something. We lose our identity of self. We lose what we think we should be doing, and those are sort of like our manuals, what we should be doing. We go down that rabbit hole: What should I be acting out? What should I be doing? Then we start having a lot of these negative thoughts of shame and doubt, and then we start going into burnout too, because we’re shaming ourselves. So I guess I’m specific when I can, but it’s just the whole collective of the burnout. It was like the shame: “I should be doing this. I’m afraid.” You start going into cycles of thinking, and then you’re just in a bad place at the end of it.

But when you start thinking, again, compassion, like, “It’s OK, I’m human, having these thoughts. It’s OK,” gratitude, because gratitude and anxiety cannot coexist. They’re actually polar opposites. If you have gratitude and you have some self-love, then that anxiety and those other thoughts are going to go away. Those changes in your brain really will happen, and you will feel completely different. You will act completely different.

So I think when we start putting the lens on how we view things: whether we look at loss or we look at what we gain. That’s what this article talks about. Yes, we can talk about all the things we lost, but let’s also focus on all the things we’ve gained, because there are a lot of things we have gained. When we look at life, whatever it is, or COVID, through the lens of what we’ve gained, your outlook on life would be so much different. Your day will be very different, because then you’re not finding evidence of all the negative, the loss, the loss. You’re finding evidence of what you’re appreciative of, what you’ve gained, the gratitude. And again, gratitude and anxiety don’t fall in the same category. Then you just feel so much different. Again, changes in the brain, grounded compassion, then you start activating oxytocin, serotonin, all these chemical changes, and you just feel so much different, right? So that’s sort of the collective thought that I wanted to have about this article.

Kevin Pho: So take us through a step-by-step example or a case study. You talk about things like gratitude, self-love, compassion, and vulnerability. I think that’s difficult for some physicians to grasp and understand. So maybe take us through an example of how physicians can specifically achieve some of those goals that you talk about.

Diana Londoño: Well, I think it starts with a pause, because our training is, again, it kind of comes back to maybe the leadership, right? How is the leadership leading us in health care? I do think it’s very obviously goal, goal, get there, get there. There’s no time to stop. We’re laser-focused to be the best of this research, the best of the surgery, the best. It’s very laser-focused, which is very important, but there has been no time or space to get to the other energy, where we pause, where we talk about feelings, and we talk about what is happening and how we’re connecting. That’s really important to have a balance, because if you don’t have a balance, then we just tread and tread, and who cares what’s in the path?

So the way that physicians can do that is just really finding time in the day to do this. There are research studies that talk about how 10 minutes of whatever self-care is for you really changes your whole chemistry and your brain and how you feel for the day. So 10 minutes is really what you spend in Starbucks waiting for your coffee, or a million things that we do all day that we just take for granted. Then we say we don’t have time, but we really have time, because you’re probably scrolling social media for 44 minutes. Instead, for those 10 minutes, you could have listened to something that is inspiring to you, whether it’s music or a podcast, or you drink the coffee outside away from the kids because you need that time to recenter, or you go for a 10-minute walk, and that’s time for you. It’s really important to refill your cup, to give you that energy to go throughout the day. It’d be time to be quiet and just think about things without plowing through. And it’s 10 minutes. It’s very easy.

Or when you wake up, you set a little intention: What am I grateful for today? It could be small or it could be huge, but that intention for the day sets the tone for the whole day. Or when you go to bed at night: What went well today? What can I be grateful for? We can all do that in two seconds. Again, they’re little changes, little things we start doing for ourselves that really will make a big impact. Just like any pilot, you move one degree in your coordinates, and you end up in a completely different place. So small changes have big impacts. You don’t have to get complicated: just small gratitude for the morning, time to pause, being less reactive about everything, and just being like, “Oh, why am I being triggered by what somebody’s telling me? What am I thinking about that that’s making me want to yell back?” Right? Pausing. But we’ve never given that time to pause.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Diana Londoño. She is a urologist, and she wrote the KevinMD article “Grieving our collective loss with compassion.” Diana, what are some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Diana Londoño: I think the take-home message is: Give yourself some time for you, because we give and give, and we never fill our own needs. That’s why we then go down the path of burnout and feeling depleted and angry, because we have been taught to just give, and everybody else is more important. But you actually are the most important person, because if you’re not whole and full and happy, you’re not going to give to anybody else. But we’re sort of sold this lie: “Oh, you just keep pushing through it. You keep doing everything with no sleep, not eating, not going to your lunch because you’re taking care of more people, and then that’s going to work out fine.” And it doesn’t work out fine, because otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation with physicians and burnout or leaving medicine. So fill your cup first, because you are the most important person to be able to take care of a wide group of people. So that’s my number one.

And just take time to pause and breathe. Obvious, right? We breathe all day, but we’re talking about breathing consciously. It doesn’t have to be, nobody has to see you. You could be in your office and close the door and just sit down, close your eyes, and just breathe three big breaths and re-center, really activate that parasympathetic, your vagus nerve. You’re going to feel so much better when you have calmed down, and not go to the next patient encounter more angry and more fired up, but you’ve slowed down. So those would be the two big ones: Take care of yourself, it’s really important, and breathe. Right, that’s obvious, but we’re not taught that we should be doing that consciously.

Kevin Pho: Diana, thank you so much for coming back on the show and sharing your time and insight.

Diana Londoño: Thank you, Kevin. I really appreciate your time as well. Thank you so much.

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