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For Law Students
When I began in law school, I was immediately overwhelmed by the realization of how little I knew about the laws that govern almost every facet of our lives. The scope of my lack of knowledge ranked right up there with all the major mysteries of the universe. My response to my deep sense of inadequacy was to assume that I must be more ignorant than I ever could have imagined and that all of this legal knowledge I did not possess must surely be of such value that 1)I could not live without it and 2)when I eventually got it, I would have something that would provide every answer to my every question.
It has taken me over two decades to begin to admit that maybe my trained legal mind did not have a solution to every problem, an answer to every question. Before I began to wake up, I had managed to create a lot of pain for myself and others. I was disconnected from my own feelings and certainly had little compassion for anyone else's.
I now realize that I had been ill-prepared in law school for the challenges that I would face in my legal life. I had been taught that the best answers to legal, and, of course, non-legal, questions were
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those that resulted from the application of an analytical and logical mind to factual events from which had been culled any moral hesitancy. Guess what? The rational mind does not have all the answers and, in fact, can create some very large problems when it ignores feelings and intuition.
If you are an overworked and stressed out law student, now is the time to balance your legal training with heart exercise so you cultivate, not subvert, your compassion for others; so you embrace, not reject, your own intuition; so you appreciate, not suppress, what you feel.
If you would like to explore the complex mixture of feelings you might be experiencing, such as whether or not you're lawyer material, whether or not your sense of what's right matters, whether or not you have to give up who you are to practice law, then I am available, without any charge, to listen and to reflect back what I'm hearing and what I'm feeling so you can get it together now, not ten years from now when these issues will surely have to be dealt with at a more intense (if that's possible) level.
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