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Sickness

 As Buddhists, how do we work with illness and what do we learn from it?
  • Tricycle Community 4 comments

    Good Death Paid Member

    By Patricia Anderson
    Blind Crossing a Bridge, Hakuin (1685-1796) Ink on paper More »
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    Awake and Demented Paid Member

    By Noelle Oxenhandler
    DEMENTIA. “What's that word?” my mother asked my sister the other day, when the nurse accidentally left her chart in plain sight. “Oh, that's the name of the doctor,” my sister said. “Doctor Dementia.”' Whew, another quick save—maybe. My mother never did like the hard facts straight up, and ever since we received her diagnosis three years ago, we've had to practice the spur-of-the moment dodge, the ingenious distraction, the white lie.... More »
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    The Lucky Dark Paid Member

    By Joan Halifax
    Offshore Breeze, Peter C. Jones, 2002 I GREW UP in the South, and one of the people I was closest to as a girl was my grandmother Bessie. I loved spending summers with her in Savannah, where she worked as a sculptor and artist, carving tombstones for local people. Bessie was a remarkable village woman; she often served her community as someone comfortable around illness and death, someone who would sit with dying friends. More »
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    Memento Mori: Notes on Buddhism and AIDS Paid Member

    By Dean Rolston
    Dean Rolston photographed by Matthew Rolston, 1991 THREE YEARS AGO, just as winter as turning into spring, I stood with my friend Cookie Mueller on an elevated companion above the main reception room of a glittery New York nightclub. Cookie, who had been ill with AIDS for some time, and in fact had only six months to live, turned to me and said: "You know, getting this disease is the best thing that ever happened to me." More »
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    Stroked by the Guru Paid Member

    By David Jay Brown
    Ram Dass’s books and lectures have been an inspiration to many people. Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert, Harvard professor and longtime friend of Timothy Leary’s) is responsible for turning on many in the West to Eastern religious ideas and is the author of such spiritual classics as Be Here Now; The Only Dance There Is; and Journey of Awakening. He created the Hanuman Foundation to spread spiritually directed social action in the West and co-founded the Seva Foundation, an international service organization working on public health and social justice issues, which has made major progress in combating blindness in India and Nepal. More »
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    Tough Teachings To Ease The Mind Paid Member

    By Upasika Kee Nanayon
    People lying in bed ill are lucky because they have the opportunity to do nothing but contemplate stress and pain. Their minds don’t need to take up anything else, don’t need to go anywhere else. They have the opportunity to contemplate pain at all times—and let go of pain at all times.To contemplate inconstancy, stress, and not-selfness [in Buddhism, the three marks of existence—anicca, dukkha, and anatta—more commonly known as impermanence, suffering, and no-self] as they appear right to you while you’re lying here ill, is very beneficial. Just don’t think that you’re what’s hurting. Simply see the natural phenomena of physical and mental events as they arise and pass away. They’re not you. They’re not really yours. You don’t have any real control over them. More »