How Meditation Helped an Ophthalmologist Stay Present With Patients

For ophthalmologist Robert M. Kinast, a night of meditation did not make the emotional demands of medicine disappear. It helped him recognize what he had been carrying—and find a way to meet patients with more openness, both during emergencies and in routine clinic visits.

Making room for what emergency care leaves behind

Kinast, an ophthalmologist in Portland, Oregon, attended a meditation retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains hoping for a break from a demanding practice. During an overnight session, retreat participants stayed awake in meditation until dawn. The exercise brought his thoughts to the severe eye injuries he had treated, including cases involving extensive damage and little chance of saving a patient’s sight.

Ophthalmologists may be called in during the night to repair a ruptured eye. The work calls for speed, precision and stamina, often while the surgeon leads an operating-room team that is also tired and still has a full day ahead. Kinast describes caring for people whose injuries altered their lives, and the challenge of focusing on surgery while absorbing the gravity of what had happened to them.

He had sometimes cried after seeing such injuries, usually in private. When tears threatened in front of a patient, he would tighten his expression and body, worried that showing his feelings might undermine the patient’s confidence just before surgery. He saw a practical reason for that restraint: some people might not want their surgeon visibly overwhelmed at that moment. But holding himself rigid also made it harder to process the loss and distress attached to the work.

During the overnight meditation, Kinast realized he had not fully made space for the experiences he had witnessed. As morning came, other people in the hall joined a celebratory chant. He stayed seated and grieved. That quiet moment, he writes, led to gratitude for the physicians who care for people in catastrophic situations, including his colleagues and himself.

Attention as part of patient care

Kinast’s account is a personal reflection, not a clinical study. It does not show that meditation improves surgical results or that a particular meditation practice works for every clinician. What it offers is a physician’s description of how a retreat helped him notice the connection between his own emotional state and his way of relating to patients.

He came to understand that the toughness he used to get through difficult cases had a cost. It helped him keep working, but it could also create distance from patients and their distress. With time and attention, he found that he could acknowledge his fear of being overwhelmed rather than relying only on physical tension to contain it. He describes the change as being more able to stay present with another person’s suffering.

That idea now reaches beyond the operating room. Kinast says he uses a small ritual when entering an examination room: he notices his feet on the floor. The reminder gives him a point of return when he drifts into autopilot, feels distracted by long waits or becomes caught up in the pace of the clinic. For him, mindfulness is not a state he achieves once and keeps. It is the repeated act of noticing that his attention has wandered and bringing it back.

His description also points to a tension clinicians can face. They need to stay focused enough to make decisions and carry out demanding work, while remaining responsive to the person in front of them. Kinast’s experience suggests that emotional openness and professional steadiness can coexist. It doesn’t establish that meditation is the only route to that balance; it shows how he found a useful way to practice it.

Support for the people who provide care

Kinast sees trauma care as both painful and meaningful. He says he encounters severe eye injuries only a few times a year, while physicians in other fields may face comparable suffering much more often. His reflection is a reminder that caring for patients can leave emotional effects on clinicians, even when they continue to perform their responsibilities.

For health professionals, making room to recognize those effects may be part of sustaining attentive care. The form that support takes can differ: Kinast writes about meditation and self-inquiry, while the central point is that clinicians need opportunities to process the weight of helping patients and families through tragedy. His account does not promise that an overnight retreat will change a person’s practice. It describes how one night helped him see his own experience more clearly.

Since the retreat, he has tried to bring that awareness into ordinary appointments as well as emergency work. The practice is simple in description but ongoing: notice distraction, return to the present, and meet the next patient with attention. For Kinast, that repeated return is a way to keep compassion available without pretending the work is painless.

Robert M. Kinast, M.D., is an ophthalmologist at Legacy Devers Eye Institute, a clinical scientist at Legacy Research Institute, and a clinical professor at OHSU Casey Eye Institute in Portland, Oregon.

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