Illness as a Passage

Illness is the one passage nobody can talk their way out of. The fatigue arrives when it arrives, the pain does not read your schedule, and whatever you had planned to be, the body has informed you that you will be this instead, for now and possibly for good.

The body cannot be argued with

The body is not being unreasonable. It is not punishing you, and it is not a failure of will or attitude or diet. It is doing what bodies do, which is to be put together out of parts and therefore subject to coming apart. That takes the illness out of the category of “something wrong with me” and puts it in the category of “something true about bodies.” You are not defective. You are a made thing, and made things wear.

What awareness is doing

While the body is sick, awareness is not sick.

Pain is vivid, loud, and located. It fills the field. But something is aware of the pain, and that something does not hurt. The same is true of the fatigue, the nausea, and the specific despair of a bad night: each is known, and the knowing is clear even when what it knows is miserable. What Does Not Die says this in full.

This is not positive thinking. It is the structure of experience, and illness makes it easier to notice, not harder, because the contrast is so sharp. On a good day awareness and its contents blur together. On a bad day the contents are so unpleasant that the mind naturally looks for anything that is not them, and there it is: the one part of the experience that is not in pain. If you can rest there for a few breaths in the middle of a bad hour, you have found what the whole teaching is about, and you found it because you were sick.

The mistake

Once a person has tasted that awareness is at ease even when the body is not, it is tempting to turn ease into a demand: a good practitioner should be serene in illness, and if the fear is still there, or the anger at the body, or the grinding wish for it to stop, something has gone wrong.

Nothing has gone wrong. Fear of illness is a natural condition of having a body. Wanting the pain to stop is compassion, aimed at yourself. You are not asked to feel fine. You are asked only to look, when you can, at what is aware of not feeling fine, and notice that it is not in the fire. If you find yourself using any of this as a stick to beat yourself for being afraid, put it down.

See the doctor

Awareness is not medicine. Resting in the nature of mind does not shrink a tumor, set a bone, or manage a blood sugar. If something is wrong with your body, go to the people whose work is bodies. Take the treatment. Ask the questions. Get the second opinion.

There are two illnesses. The first is in the body. The second is the war the mind wages against the first: the resentment, the bargaining, the self-blame, the terror of the future. Medicine treats the first. Resting treats the second. You need both.

In a bad hour

Breathe out and rest for a moment in the pause before the next breath comes (the practice). Then ask, without hurry, what is aware of this pain, and rest in whatever you find. Then let the body be a body. It has carried you a long way, and the one who has been aware of it all along is not going anywhere.