How to Be Sick by Toni Bernhard, Sylvia Boorstein Read Free Book Online Page A

that my ability to participate in these activities was already broken, in the sense that this change in my life will befall everyone at some point and quite possibly by surprise. This is simply how and when it happened to me.
     
    Then I reflect on impermanence—the fact that every aspect of my life is uncertain, unpredictable, and in constant flux. Finally, like Ajahn Chah, I look after each moment, cherishing what I still can do, aware that everything could change in an instant.
     

5
     
    Who Is Sick?
     
    What I am, as system theorists have helped me see, is a “flow-through.” I am a flow-through of matter, energy, and information.
    —JOANNA MACY
     
     
     
    BEFORE GETTING SICK, I had the good fortune of attending several retreats at Spirit Rock co-led by the Theravadan teacher Kamala Masters. At a retreat in 2000, she told us a story about her root teacher, Munindra-ji, who lived in India.
     
    Munindra-ji had always wanted to see the Buddhist sacred sites. He was getting quite old, so Kamala traveled to India with some friends to take him to some of the sites. One day, they were waiting in a train station. The train was five hours late. It was blazing hot. They had no food. There were no restrooms. The track where they were to catch the train kept changing, so they had to keep getting up and moving. Munindra-ji would sit down in each new location and rest his head on his arm. He looked so frail that Kamala began to worry about how he was holding up, especially since she and her friends were barely coping with the conditions. She finally asked him if he was all right. He replied, “There is heat here, but I am not hot. There is hunger here, but I am not hungry. There is irritation here, but I am not irritated.”
     
    I recalled Kamala’s story one day as I lay in bed after becoming sick, so I silently said, “There is sickness here, but I am not sick.” The statement made no sense to me. But, inspired by the story, I persevered, repeating over and over “There is sickness here, but I am not sick . . . There is sickness here, but I am not sick.” After a few minutes, I realized, “Of course! There is sickness in the body, but I am not sick!”
     
    It was a revelation and a source of great comfort. After a time, however, I decided to investigate more deeply. When I did, this question arose, “Who is this ‘I’ who isn’t sick?” This question led me to consider anatta or “no fixed and unchanging self.” The Buddha’s teaching on no-fixed-self was (and still is) revolutionary. It is the principal way in which he broke from the religion of his birth, Hinduism. Of course, to communicate with others, we have to use conventional terminology such as “I Me Mine” (to borrow from the title of the George Harrison song on the Let It Be album). If I’m unwilling to use the term “Toni Bernhard” I can’t get a driver’s license or a disability check. And, as this very paragraph illustrates, I’ll continue to use self-referential terms in this book. But I can use the word “I” and, even as the word emerges from the mind, still contemplate questions such as: “Who am I? What is Toni Bernhard? Is Toni Bernhard a solid physical and mental entity with an inherent self-existence or is Toni Bernhard a label attached to an ever-changing constellation of qualities?” This is worth investigating, for all of us.
     
    We all have a vague or even specific sense of “I am.” It is this sense that leads the mind to imagine the existence of a permanent, unchanging self or soul around which our whole life revolves. Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield express this beautifully in Seeking the Heart of Wisdom:
    Just as we condition our bodies in different ways through exercise or lack of it, so we also condition our minds. Every mind state, thought, or emotion that we experience repeatedly becomes stronger and more habituated. Who we are as personalities is a collection of all the tendencies of mind that have