Health Care Professionals Self-Care with Tonglen Meditation: Implications for Transforming Patient – Provider Relationships a Phenomenological Multiple Case Study

Abstract

This qualitative study explored health care professionals’ meanings made of lived experiences during challenging client interactions while practicing On-the-spot Tonglen Meditation for self-care. The health care professionals consisted of two psychologists, a nurse, a clinical social worker, and a marriage and family therapist. A review of the existing literature is provided, which included an overview of interpersonal functioning and self-care in health care populations. The review related self-care and interpersonal functioning to Mindfulness Meditation, Loving-Kindness Meditation, Compassion Meditation, which the study considered the three meditative trait components of On-the-spot Tonglen Integrated Breath theoretical model.

The methodology consisted of a multiple case study guided by the principles of phenomenology. Participants included 5 adult health care professionals with no previous knowledge and experience practicing Tonglen, but all of whom were novice meditators who practiced meditation for self-care. Before the study, all five participants made meanings of a connection between interpersonal functioning with clients and their self-care; by the end of the study, all five participants evidenced transformations in their relationships with this connection.

On-the-spot Tonglen Integrative Breath was the research intervention. Several instruments measured its effects, namely interview responses, participant field observation journals, and self-measured cycles of Tonglen breath. Participants calculated an optimal duration of meditation to obtain a threshold effect to access self-care and activate interpersonal functioning with clients. Collected data consisted of participant responses, notes from field observation journals, and counted breath. A time series analysis achieved a triangulation of collected data and the resulting thematic coding and supporting patterns identified themes pertinent to the research question, How do health care professionals make meaning of interpersonal functioning with clients using On-the-spot Tonglen Meditation for self-care? The resulting themes discovered a practice that transformed meanings made of relationships to the connection that links self-care to interpersonal functioning, a worthwhile tool described to mitigate compassion fatigue and diminish vicarious trauma, a single self-care practice that invoked and integrated multiple qualitative descriptions grouped into three functional sub-thematic qualities Recognized Feelings of Relatedness and Interconnectedness, Acknowledged Stress Reduction and Enhanced Positive Affect, and Identified Positive Emotions and Enhanced Cognitive Abilities, and a meditation practice that measured the optimal duration to obtain a threshold effect of self-care and interpersonal functioning in terms of counting cycles of breath.

Implications recommended further research to apply the Tonglen Integrative Breath as a research intervention with earlier meditation research that benefits self-care and interpersonal functioning, with studies to address stressors related to vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and premature burnout, with interests to improve clinical training and education, to further develop selected theories in Person-Centered Therapy, Radical Empiricism, I-Thou , Gestalt, Intersubjectivity and Existential Humanistic principles, with populations including clients practicing Tonglen in the clinical encounter, public safety workers and first responders, law enforcement officers, and vulnerable populations, including intimate partner violence survivors. These recommended studies’ settings ranged from clinical to non-clinical settings.