Roy Remer: Zen Caregiving

Summary

In 'Zen Caregiving', Roy Remer shares essential guidance for the growing population of caregivers in the U.S., offering practical advice and emotional support. With a compassionate approach rooted in Zen principles, Remer addresses the emotional and spiritual challenges caregivers face. This resource aims to enhance self-care and mindfulness, crucial for those attending to seriously ill loved ones.

Key takeaways

• 1Roy Remer: Executive Director of Zen Caregiving Project and author of 'Zen Caregiving' providing support to caregivers.
• 2Growth of caregivers in the U.S. from 42 million to over 53 million in the past decade.
• 3Four components of Zen caregiving: mindfulness, compassion, loss literacy, and self-care.
• 4Importance of processing loss and understanding grief in caregiving roles.
• 5Practical advice on preparing medical directives and end-of-life arrangements.
• 6Training in the Soto Zen tradition and certification in Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT©).

Source

Transcript excerpt

Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning. Hey, this is Cliff, your host of Destiny, and today we are talking about caregiving. And this is something that hits home for me because my grandfather was very ill and he decided he wanted to stay home and die, and he had the family around him and people took shifts watching him. He passed away from cancer, but he did it in like a three month period. It was very difficult, and as a caregiver, we took turns watching him and changing him and feeding him. And I this happened again when my younger brother got very ill, and I saw it up close and personal because my sister in law in the very beginning decided that she was going to be his major caregiver and she had no training whatsoever, and she refused to get support and she basically quit her job to care for him. And it didn't make any sense to me. And as it turned out, she didn't really do very well. She was constantly stressed. It actually changed her personality and got to the point where she was alienating the family. And so caregiving is a very very big deal. And as we'll learned today, one in five households in the US are dealing with caregiving, and it translates to about sixty three million people. Our caregivers. These are people the air hospice care are somebody who's had a stroke or someone's very very ill and they are caretaking. Now, we chose this program because this is something that isn't discussed very much, which is the caregiver not necessarily the person who's ill. It's more the stress and the strain of caregiving. ...

Excerpt from Earth Ancients, Apr 15, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.