Day 279: Can Meditation Help Lawyers?

Photo by Alejandro Piñero Amerio on Unsplash

In a 2020 survey, asylum attorneys reported much higher burnout and secondary stress scores than other professionals, including social workers and prison wardens.

I’ve certainly experienced the stress, and I’ve talked to colleagues who know the feeling too.

We’ve also concluded that we view this situation as an opportunity, not a reason to quit. In order to reach our very best as human beings, we need challenges that force us to dig deep. And nothing can motivate us to dig as deep as knowing that a fellow human being needs our help in one of the most critical times in their life.

Once you’ve committed to represent the client, you have no choice — and that’s a good thing. A tough case forces you to stop running from difficulty. You can’t just withdraw from a case when the law seems to be stacking up against your client; you have to find a way through. Pema Chödrön calls it “the wisdom of no escape.”

Learning Mindfulness

From experience, we’ve learned that we need tools for those times. Today in the Immigration Law Clinic, we talked about some of the tools we’ve found helpful.

Daily exercise can be enormously valuable, and that can extend into mindful movement like yoga, quigong, tai chi, and mindful walking.

Mindfulness doesn’t just relax you in the moment (it may not always do that). But neurologists continue to show that, with short but consistent practice, meditation can change the structure of the brain itself, increasing grey matter in regions of the brain associated with things like judgment, decision-making, and self-awareness.

Most intriguing to me, meditation may also decrease the narrative activity of the brain (that inner monologue that goes on for most of us all the time) and increase the direct experience activity of the brain — that present moment awareness that saints and mystics have long described.

I’ve received valuable meditation instruction from Mindful Leader and have enjoyed the teaching of Light Watkins. Both have led me to a daily meditation practice that has been reinvigorated during Lent.

In the two years since I’ve practiced consistently, I notice I’m less likely to get spun up when things don’t go “well.” I’ve also learned that one of the nine attitudes of mindfulness is non-judgment, or just experiencing things without labeling them “good” or “bad.”

Choose Your Thoughts Carefully

In class today, several students expressed the viewpoint that our energy has power — we manifest what we focus on, so we’d better choose our thoughts carefully. Meditation, mindful movement, and exercise can help quiet the brain so that you have greater power to choose.

I can’t help but wonder whether the “National Asylum Attorney Burnout, Trauma, and Stress Survey” didn’t prime the pump a little. How might asylum attorneys have responded to the “National Asylum Attorney Higher Purpose, Deep Connectedness and Loving-Kindness Survey”?

If Not Me, then who?

Sure, being a lawyer — any kind of lawyer — is stressful. But if lawyering is how we are called to serve, we accept that stress as part of what makes our work worthwhile.

Ultimately, we might even say we want the stress. We want someone to help asylum seekers, and if not us, then who? That commitment to service creates a powerful sense of purpose, and purpose (not pleasure) is what makes life worth living.