Quote from Being Bodies
Being Bodies: Buddhist Women on the Paradox of Embodiment
edited by Lenore Friedman & Susan Moon
Shambhala Publications, Boulder, Colorado, 1997 240 pages
Meditation is so very simple. Reality is always right here, immediate. But the mind creates a web of complications that come to seem more real than the actual sounds and sensations and listening presence that is this moment. Apparent embodiment in a particular perishable form, with a complex brain, is undoubtedly at the root of our illusory sense of separation from the totality, and all our subsequent human problems, for it is in thinking about and identifying with the body that we seem to be vulnerable and alone. Paradoxically, the body also offers the way home, for it is in fully meeting whatever appears as pure sensation (without interpretation) that we discover the emptiness of form, the undivided wholeness of being that has no solidity, no boundaries, no limits--that which no word or image can capture, in which everything is included. By going into the very core of whatever appears, we begin to turn our attention from the particular objects to the seeing. In that, no obstacles or problems remain. (p. 18)
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The Only Way I Know of to Alleviate Suffering -- Darlene Cohen
Self-healing is an area I’ve explored intensely because I have had rheumatoid arthritis, a very painful and crippling disease, for eighteen years. It began in my seventh year of Zen practice, while I was living at Green Gulch Farm in Marin County, California. I think the idea of self-healing is especially appealing to people who have some sort of practice, because we tend to use our illness in the healing process as a mode of penetration into the true nature of things of the self.
In The Blue Cliff Record, Yun-men said, 'Medicine and sickness mutually correspond. The whole universe is our medicine. What is the self?'
When I was first very ill, and others and students took care of me, I actually didn’t have any place to turn for healing outside of myself. When I went to the doctor, I found out there is no cure for rheumatoid arthritis. There are palliatives, drugs that lessen pain and stiffness, but there is no long-lasting remedy.
When you’re in a situation like this, people give you lots of advice. My doctor, with all society’s authority behind him, told me to take toxic drugs. My friend suggested a great variety of treatments: I was given rice bread to eat instead of wheat; I was wrapped in comfrey-soaked sheets; I must’ve been given extracts from every benevolent plant that grows in Northern California and China. But I got worse. Despite all this loving care. My mobility became so impaired that people at the Zen Center began cleaning my room, doing my laundry, and washing my hair. As my body got weaker and my pain got greater, I had to figure out: What is the most important thing to pay attention to here? Is the salvation I need inside or outside of me?
As it turned out, my Zen meditation training was a very great help. I had been taught to study the objects of consciousness: feelings, perceptions, sensations, and thoughts. In long periods of zazen, such as sesshin, I even had been able to watch my perceptions as they were being formed. This is, of course, the business of Zen meditation, to observe all these things. You simply focus your attention on what is happening now, the stream of your consciousness. There is no goal involved. The business of self-healing, on the other hand, is manipulating those objects of consciousness to increase your health.
Because of my pain I lived in a world of continual intrusive sensation. It was very much in my self-interest to notice what circumstances increased or decreased my pain and then to alter my pain level by manipulating those circumstances. Before becoming so ill, I had trouble interrupting my discursive mind to make the observations necessary to begin a mindfulness practice. On a Sunday I would vow to notice all my postural changes, determined to say to myself when I went from sitting to standing to lying: 'Now I’m standing.' 'Now I’m lying.' Then the next time I remembered, Thursday, say, I would suddenly cry, 'Oh! I’m standing!' After becoming ill, I was highly motivated to make these observations. Changing my posture was a dramatic event in my life. I needed to heed every little sensation in my legs and feet in order to go from sitting to standing. (pp. 10-11)
-- quote submitted by Jennifer Knight
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