A couple of weeks ago, I had a bout of illness. Nothing extremely serious; just some seasonal flu bug that had been making the rounds at work. It’s an occupational hazard when your workplace is 90% female abounding with young children. There seems to be quite a bit of this going around. I read in the paper the other day about a school in Overland Park that shut down last week because of this ailment. I also heard from someone about a retirement center in Johnson County that went on “lock down” because of it.
I have to start out by saying that I have been extremely lucky in avoiding the majority of these maladies over the years. It had been so long that I had been sick before that I really couldn’t even remember the last time I had been off work for illness, probably 10 or 12 years at least. And oh yes, I had had a flu shot over a month ago-a requirement for healthcare workers.
This bout, however, really hit me hard. I went to work on Monday, had an OK day; fixed dinner and had a nice evening. Then about midnight it hit. Visits to the bath facilities every half hour or so for the rest of the nite. I will spare you the gastro intestinal details which I am sure you can fill in for yourself. Suffice it to say, by the end of the second day of just lying there in the bed, unable to do pretty much anything, you just want someone to shoot you to make the pain and discomfort stop.
So thirsty, but the smallest sip of water makes you violently nauseated. And it just seems to go on and on. You really can’t take any medication, because you can’t keep it down. That sick. I thought of the Hungry ghosts in Buddhist cosmology, beings who populate one of the hell worlds, with stomachs the size of mountains and mouths the size of a needle’s eye, constantly yearning for something impossible to possess.
As this bout of illness strung out to the third, fourth, and fifth days, as you start to feel better by tiny increments, I began to develop a bit of perspective about what was happening to me. First off, I began to develop a bit of a realization about what it might be like for people with major health challenges from diseases that don’t go away, that they don’t ‘get better’ from, that are with them every day for the rest of their lives. An illness like the one I had gives you a flash-in-the-pan glimpse of how fundamentally that would change your perceptions, your outlook, and your life.
For one thing, it brings you into the moment like few experiences can. We are usually to numb to the processes of our bodies, when you’re in pain, you feel every moment. I really did come to view this as a gift; mostly because I knew that this was temporary, I knew that this eventually would stop, so I started to view it as a kind of gift, a gift of awareness of momentary phenomena.
This experience also gave me a fresh perspective on my relationship with food. For quite a few days, I had absolutely no appetite. For the first few days, of course, I couldn’t even think about food without feeling nauseated. Even after that, I still had that small momentary distance that kept hunger at arms length, and allowed me that ability to examine my perceptions of being hungry without being automatically sucked into the daily habit of being automatically hungry three times a day, as mealtime approached--That feeling, the three times a day one, wasn’t so much a sense of actual need for food, but more just a conditioned response to the time of day and anticipation of the habitual mealtime.
I still remember quite vividly that first time, in the middle of the night of the third or fourth day, when I took that first sip of water that I could keep down. I was vividly reminded of the mindful eating practices I had experienced on retreat. If you have never had the opportunity to try mindful eating, I highly recommend it. It really is quite easy to do, just bring your awareness in a careful, slow way, to the process of eating as you break it down step by step. I’ve been trying to do it in the days since.
Of course, your monkey mind works constantly against you, trying to pull your awareness this way and that, trying to get you out of the moment. It made me very aware of how unconsciously we do most things really, eating while we’re watching TV, driving, web surfing, whatever. What ever happened to just eating? We’ve become so programmed to just tasting and swallowing, tasting and swallowing. So easy to overwhelm our sensations of satiety, the feeling of enough, that overeating becomes the norm.
As I lay there in my sick bed those first days, I was reminded of the role of the early Buddhist monks as healers. For my dissertation, I had studied the voluminous sections of the Vinaya devoted solely to healing the sick, treating wounds and various medical conditions with a generous collections of herbs, ointments, and preparations. What a boon these simple monks would have been, traveling to new lands as mendicants, arriving at communities with this kind of knowledge among those who had never experienced it before.
How much they would have been welcomed and valued for these simple gifts of kindness and healing to relieve pain and discomfort. The Buddha was both wise and clever in carefully outlining these methods, recipes, and instructions for his bhikkhus, knowing how valuable they would be as the spread the dharma around the world.
The Buddha has always been viewed as a healer in the psychological sense, healing the illness of ignorance with the wisdom of the noble truths and eight fold path. But this role as healer has traditionally always been augmented in very practical ways with the knowledge of healing very physical ailments as well. The Bhaisaj Guru, the medicine Buddha, holds his urn of healing herbs and unguents, offering the gift of both bodily and mind bound deliverance from suffering.
This concept is best expressed in the words of an eighth century Indian monk Santideva, who described the quintessential healing role in his towering work, the Bodhicaryavatara, the Way of the Bodhisattva. I’ll close with a brief quote from it.
“May I allay the suffering of every living being,
I am medicine for the sick.
May I be both the doctor and their nurse,
until the sickness does not recur.
May I avert the pain of hunger and thirst with showers of food and drink.
May I become both drink and food in the intermediate eons of famine.
May I be an inexhaustible treasure for impoverished beings.
May I wait upon them with various forms of offering.
Abandonment of all is Enlightenment
And enlightenment is my heart’s goal...
I am the protector of the unprotected
and a caravan leader for travelers.
I have become the boat, the causeway, and the bridge
for those who long to reach the further shore.
May I be a light for those in need of light.
May I be a bed for those in need of rest.
May I be a servant for those in need of service, for all embodied beings.
For embodied beings may I be a wish-fulfilling jewel,
the pot of plenty, the spell that always works,
the potent healing herb,
the magical tree that grants every wish,
and the milk-cow that supplies all wants.
Just as earth and other elements
are profitable in many ways to immeasurable beings dwelling throughout space,
So may I be sustenance of many kinds for the realm of beings throughout space,
until all have attained release.”
--- John Corbaley, M.S., M.A.
