Altruism Is A Powerful Medicine

An article I posted: Tempered by Fire - got a tremendous amount of hits and links in. I wrote it early in the morning while my kids were getting ready for school, almost as a 'throw away' post. I got a lot of very supportive and fascinating mail from that post as well... and it made me think.

I realize in not trying and just letting my thoughts flow organically (my favorite way of writing) I spoke something about myself. Something that has been true of me for as long as I can remember. My adherence towards altruism.

Many times on this blog I have said that through helping others I have achieved a lot of healing and transcendence. I am one of those people who has always done whatever I could to make others feel better. I am now working through therapy, to do for myself as much as a I do for others. I would love to end suffering everywhere but since I can't, I do it for the victims I advocate for and for my friends, who reach out to me. Yes, I do feel their pain. Acutely. And because I personally know what inner pain is, I try to mitigate the suffering. I believe that is why we are here... for each other.

I don't believe all problems or people are 'fixable.' I am not a Kumbaya-Kool Aid Drinker. But I do believe that we are all part of each other in some way. When someone I know to be genuine needs help, comfort or advice I will try to be there. There's right, there's wrong and there's gray area.

Hopefully someday the only thing gray about me will be my hair.

What Can We Do about Suffering?
by Jill Neimark

SOME PEOPLE ARE BROKEN DOWN BY TRAUMATIC EVENTS WHILE OTHERS ARE BROKEN OPEN. HERE ARE CLUES FROM BRAIN SCIENCE AND GENETICS, AS WELL AS THE POWER OF SPIRITUAL PRACTICE.

"Why do we suffer so much?" I flirt with many answers to this question. When I'm seeking solace from science, I turn to biologist Ursula Goodenough, author of the bestselling The Sacred Depths of Nature. Her beautiful answer goes to the nature of our physical bodies: sex leads to death.

"Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi," she writes. "Sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the . . . creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love. My somatic life is the wondrous gift wrought by my forthcoming death. I suffer so much because my body is gloriously able to suffer so much."

"But science doesn t always soothe my spirit, especially when life has wrenched me out of my orbit, when I m broken by my fate. Then I turn to the psalms and stories of the Bible. I want redemption, a perfect meaning to banish my suffering. Those are the times that I, a woman who wavers between pantheism and atheism at any given hour, seek strength from the meditation that is the Book of Job, or the image of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross.

"In other moods, when biblical stories seem just that stories I try to reframe my life with Buddhist tenets such as the second noble truth: all suffering comes from attachment. Let me flow like water through my own life, attached to none of it. Regard the light and dark of my days with equanimity. I am island weather, stormy, sunny, and I am a scribe recording my weather. I try to be a good scribe: generous, meticulous, and detached.

But there is a very different question one can ask about suffering pragmatic rather than philosophical: Why are some people physically and spiritually incapacitated by trauma while others are enlivened" In search of answers, I looked to extremes a physician working to prevent combat trauma from turning into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); a biologist looking at how the horrors of the Holocaust and 9/11 can shift functional genetic expression from one generation to the next; and a man who credits his Buddhist practice with transforming his trauma: how his bout with cancer made him a doctor of the spirit. "

TRAUMA AND THE BRAIN
Roger Pitman, M.D.

When we hear of someone incapacitated by a traumatic event, we typically want to know his or her story. Roger Pitman, M.D., professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, takes a different approach. I'm not interested in defining trauma in terms of an event, he says, but in terms of your neuro-hormonal response to that event.

"Stress and memory are profoundly linked," says Pitman; "in fact, stress potentiates memory. For example, when animals are given a learning task and then injected with adrenaline, their ability to learn and remember the task improves. But for some of us, the extra flood of adrenaline released during trauma burns a memory too deeply into the brain."

Pitman and his colleagues have demonstrated that Vietnam veterans with PTSD have significantly stronger physical responses and changed blood flow patterns in their brains when they recall combat, compared with combat veterans who have not developed PTSD. Pittman has also found that PTSD is associated with a smaller hippocampus, the kidney-shaped organ in the brain that is essential for forming new memories. Using pairs of identical twins, one of whom went to Vietnam and one who never saw combat, he has been able to show a genetic risk factor for PTSD. Says Pitman, It turns out you can predict the severity of PTSD in a combat veteran by looking at his hippocampal volume. He speculates that the hippocampus helps inhibit signals from the amygdala, a primitive and powerful part of the brain that governs fear, so that a smaller hippocampus renders one more vulnerable to PTSD.

Pitman has also been looking at ways to prevent adrenaline from searing a memory into our brains. In a pilot study in 2001, Pitman and his colleagues recruited 41 patients who had just come to the emergency room after a traumatic event such as an accident. Within six hours of the event, half the patients were given propranol, a beta blocker that blocks adrenaline, while the other half were given a placebo. A month later, and then three months later, they listened to a tape-recorded script portraying, in their own words, the trauma that had brought them to the ER, and were measured for typical physiological responses that occur in PTSD. At one month, 30 percent of the placebo group demonstrated responses consistent with PTSD, while only 18 percent of the beta blocker group did. At three months, only one of the beta blocker group had PTSD-type responses when listening to the recording, while two of the placebo patients did.

"We think there is a window of opportunity during which a traumatic event is consolidated into memory," says Pitman. "The beta blocker must reach the brain before a memory has had time to settle in; a day after the trauma may be too late. Perhaps someday, patients at emergency rooms, or victims of disasters such as hurricanes or floods, may be offered the choice of taking a beta blocker."

Recent animal research hints that simply reactivating a memory may allow it to be reconsolidated, and that might offer another window of opportunity to reduce PTSD. In a second pilot study, offered as a poster presentation at the American College of Neuropsychopharma- cology, 19 patients with chronic PTSD described their trauma for 10 minutes, and then were given propranol or a placebo. One week later, each patient listened to a recorded script describing the trauma. Those who had received the beta blocker had significantly fewer PTSD-type responses than those who had not.

HOW TRAUMA CAN BE INHERITED
Rachel Yehuda, Ph.D.

We can literally inherit trauma, says Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center. This is through epigenetics functional changes in genes due to environmental influences, especially in the womb and in early life. Yehuda s work is part of an emerging body of research that shows how the activity of our own genes can be affected by the stress that our parents have endured.

Says Yehuda, "One of the things that hit me straight between the eyes was that the children of Holocaust survivors are particularly vulnerable to mood and anxiety disorders, and to PTSD. As I studied that phenomenon more deeply, I found out that these were children of parents who suffered from PTSD."

Yehuda has found that adult children of Holocaust survivors with PTSD are more likely to have symptoms of PTSD themselves, even though they have not experienced significant trauma. In her research, Yehuda has found what she believes to be a risk factor for PTSD, a low level of the stress hormone cortisol as if the body s reserves had become exhausted by chronic stress. In a new study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in January, Yehuda examined Jews born after 1945 and raised by at least one parent who survived a concentration camp. Yehuda found that when parents suffered from PTSD, their adult children also had significant suppression of cortisol in response to a dose of an oral steroid drug that should have stimulated cortisol release. This was true even after Yehuda ruled out other factors, such as the fact that children of parents with PTSD report significantly more emotional abuse and neglect than children of parents without PTSD.

Yehuda then looked at pregnant women who had been directly exposed to the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. Lower cortisol levels were observed in both mothers and babies of mothers who developed PTSD in response to 9/11.

Yehuda's work shows the enormous difficulty of dealing with trauma, which can be etched into bodies over generations. But this research can also be helpful to those who suffer. One example is when an adult child of a Holocaust survivor understands parental PTSD from a new perspective. If you are a Holocaust survivor and transmitting fear of the environment to your child, you re actually doing the right thing from an evolutionary perspective. It would be irresponsible not to prepare your child for a danger that you learned the hard way. When children realize that their parents were actually trying to give them something to help them cope in a similar adversity, they may understand their childhood differently, and be able to change their own responses to the world to something more appropriate.

TRANSFORMATION THROUGH SUFFERING
by Charles Atkins

In 1987, at 36, says Charles Atkins, I was in the prime of my life, with a beautiful family and successful consulting career. That s when he discovered that he had advanced Hodgkin s disease and would probably die.

"I never asked, Why me" says Atkins. I asked myself, "Do I have the strength of purpose to see this illness as a call to arms and take a stand against it"

Atkins credits his equanimity to 13 years of practicing a form of Buddhism established by a thirteenth-century monk named Nichiren Daishonin, who taught that the essence of the Lotus Sutra was contained in the phrase Nam-myoho-renge-kyo ( Devotion to the mystical law of cause and effect. ) Nichiren inscribed a mandala with this mantra down the center, suggesting that his followers chant to it. Although we have no brain scans of Atkins, there is good evidence that years of spiritual practices can change the brain in ways that offer protection from traumatic events. More intriguing is the possibility that spiritual practice may actually prepare the brain to transform trauma from a crushing blow into an empowering push into action.

As Atkins began his chemotherapy in the hospital, he turned more than ever to his Buddhist practice, and began chanting many hours a day in the patient shower room, or in a whisper in his hospital bed with the curtains drawn. He believes in the oneness of body and mind, or shiki-shin funi, which he calls one of the most compelling concepts in Buddhist healing. I was hanging over a great precipice, saved only by a thread of hope, he recalls in his book, Modern Buddhist Healing. I remembered a letter in which Nichiren had written, "Believe in this mandala with all your heart. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is like the roar of a lion. What sickness can therefore be an obstacle"

In the hospital, he also had a chance to broaden and deepen his Buddhist practices. Buddhist training includes reaching out to others, despite your own difficult situation, to look beyond your own problems and offer mercy and compassion to others. He consoled the dying, volunteered for clinical tests, and chanted for the sick. Life was exposing its impermanence to me for the first time with all its beauty and tragedy. I'd grown up in the Chicago suburbs and led a life sheltered from the reality of death. This experience was the exact window I needed to gain a deep perspective on the fleeting nature of existence. Everywhere I turned, death was taking someone I had just met. I kept trying to find ways to encourage others as their lives hung in the balance. I guess I might compare it to being a hospital chaplain suffering from cancer himself. Taking on other people s pain is like being an ocean and letting tributary rivers run into you. I'd hold people's hands and listen to their stories. I came to realize that altruism is a very powerful medicine.

One night, with a dangerously high fever from a urinary tract infection, Atkins had what he believes is a classic near-death experience. I became aware of different past lives, like breaking waves on the ocean. I felt light coming at me from every direction, but it wasn t external light, it was as if all this light existed inside me. I had no sense of time or distance. It was as if I became awareness itself. All life and matter in the entire universe is one vast entity. When he returned to consciousness, his fever had broken and he felt certain he had no cancer left in his body. In his book, he describes how a CAT scan two days later confirmed his intuition.

Nearly two decades later, he is in good health and continues his daily Buddhist practice. He also offers guidance to others who are ill, and chants for them. His thoughts on Buddhism and healing can be found on his blog. I think I needed to go through this difficult trial, says Atkins, to blaze a path for other people. "Before this trauma, I was a person promoting a Buddhist movement. After this trauma, I became concerned with offering people hope that they could overcome their own illnesses. My suffering transformed me into a doctor of the spirit."

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