Pain and the desire to be rid of pain arise. What do we do with them?
I recently fell into a trap. I had just read in a Zen koan, “When the mind seeks nothing, this is called the Way.” Yet I get recurrent periods of pain that do not respond to any of a variety of relatively safe pain medications. My mind was at that moment quite insistently seeking relief from the pain. So my thought chain then continued, “Why can’t I get rid of this wanting to get rid of the pain? I must be a bad Zen student.”
Continue reading “Wanting (to be Rid of Pain)”If Zen doesn’t make us feel better, or make us into better people, is it a total waste of time?
Two years ago I had a sudden bout with a virus. As yet, I still haven’t gotten entirely over it. The acute phase slowly morphed into a long-term, sometimes debilitating, slog through fatigue and general crappiness. I don’t like it. And it has helped open me up to the wide universe. Continue reading “Sick and Useless Zen”
…some reflections on transitions and transience
When I was young, I thought of age as something “out there” somewhere. I had my healthy, active, young self, with all the things it could do. And I knew that some day, if I were lucky enough to live so long, I would have an old self, with a different set of possible activities. I pictured her with snow-white hair, sitting in a chair. That didn’t seem so bad.
But what I hadn’t foreseen was the nickel-and-diming process of loss that marks the transition between being young and being old. This was for some reason a surprise. Continue reading “Neither young nor old”
Julie A. Nelson 