When I saw that my next patient’s complaint was “anxiety,” I felt myself disregard him before I even arrived in the room. I thought, “What can I do for him here in the ER? I hope he’s not another drug-seeker.” It wasn’t that I’d lost compassion for patients with anxiety and drug addiction. It was just that I saw so many of them in the course of a day that it was hard not to be dismissive at times.

But when I walked in and saw his face, I knew that I was wrong, and something inside me cracked.

Michael was sitting on the edge of the bed. He was a young man of thirty-five, well-dressed in a crisp shirt and neatly-ironed slacks. He tried to give me a friendly smile, but his face was stiff from pain.

He told me that he was a nurse in the hospital, but was unable to work or support his family because his anxiety was so bad. He knew from his training that there was probably nothing I could do for him, but he was just so desperate. He didn’t know where else to turn.

I saw it right there: the pain in his eyes. Something about his desperation touched me so deeply that it jolted me out of my Emergency Medicine mode and I saw a fellow human being, suffering. The compassion of truly witnessing someone else’s pain that had been suppressed for so many years in order to survive as a Western physician poured out of me. In that moment, I realized it was more important to bear full witness to this man’s pain than to come up with any kind of solution.  I sat with him for half an hour (a huge amount of time to spend with someone who is not emergently sick in the ED), and listened to him as he spoke about his life, his kids, and how his marriage was starting to break down due to his anxiety—I sat and listened without the need to “fix” anything.

When I went home that night I felt shell-shocked. The whole way that I had been taught to practice medicine did not fit that experience. We are taught that it is necessary to wall off the suffering of others in order to practice. Yet my deep, innate sense—everything I was feeling—was telling me the opposite. I began to question all of the traditional teachings that seemed to be standing in the way of being the whole healer I had set out to be. I realized that so much of what I truly considered healing came less from following formulas and protocols, and more from being in touch with the human connection that deeply embraces both joy and suffering. I understood for the first time that unless we can fully feel with someone, we cannot be authentically compassionate.  On that cold November night I had what can only be described as “an awakening of the soul,” where I realized not only how essential compassion was to my practice but also that we cannot fully be loving and present with another human being if we are not fully loving and present with ourselves.

This moment enabled me to clearly see the walls I had built—both consciously and unconsciously—that prevented me from connecting my heart to my medical practice and to myself.

It was a profound experience that touched not only my career, but every waking moment of my life, every relationship, and every interaction I had from then on. I went from mechanically and efficiently practicing medicine (and life), to being deeply present with everything and everyone I connected with, myself included. It was the beginning of the process of knocking down the outer walls to reveal what was underneath.