Table Of ContentHOW-t0 Be Sick
A Buddhist-Inspired Guide
for the Cbrorzically Ill
and their Caregivers
Toni Bernhard
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WISDOM PUBLICATIONS 0 BOSTON
Wisdom Publications
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© 2010 by Toni Bernhard
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Library of Congress Caraloging-in-Publication Data
Bernhard, Toni.
How to be sick : a Buddhist-inspired guide for the chronically ill and their care-
givers / Toni Bernhard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0—86171-626-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Religious life—Buddhism. 2. Chronically ill—Religious life. 3. Caregivers—
Religious life. 4. Chronic diseases—Religious aspects—Buddhism. I. Title.
BQ5400.B46 2010
294.3’4442—dc22
2010025648
14131211
5 4 3 2
eBook ISBN 978-086171-926-6
Cover design by Phil Pascuzzo. Interior design by GopaSCTedz, Inc. Set in Sabon LT
Std 11/16.
“To Know the Dark” copyright © 198 5 by Wendell Berry from The Collected
Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957—1982. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.
Author photo by T].
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For Tony
In sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
till death do us part.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Sylvia Boorstein ix
Preface xiii
How Everything C banged
I. Getting Sick: A Romantic Trip to Paris I
2.. Staying Sick: This Can’t Be Happening to Me 9
Accepting Pain
3. The Buddha Tells It Like It Is 21
4. The Universal Law of Impermanence 2.7
5. Who Is Sick? 37
Finding joy and Love
6. Finding Joy in the Life You Can No Longer Lead 4 5
7. Soothing the Body, Mind, and Heart 5 I
8. Using Compassion to Alleviate Your Suffering 57
9. Facing the Ups and Downs of Chronic Illness
with Equanimity 7 3
vii
Turnarounds and Transformations
IO. Getting Off the Wheel of Suffering
II. Tonglen: Spinning Straw into Gold
97
12.. With Our Thoughts We Make the World 103
I3. Healing the Mind by Living in the Present Moment I I I
I4. What to Do When (It Seems) You Can’t
Do Anything
121
15. Zen Helps 127
Prom Isolation to Solitude
I6. Communicating with Care 139
I7. The Struggle to Find Community in Isolation I45
“18. And in the End .. . 159
A Guide to Using the Practices
to Help with Specific Challenges I65
With Gratitude I79
Bibliography I83
Index 185
About the Author I93
viii How to Be Sick
Foreword
“ 0U ARE GOING TO BE OKAY!” Words of reassurance are the
first therapy offered to people who awaken after a surgery, or
are revived after an accident, or just before the disclosure of a fear-
ful diagnosis. “You are going to be okay” often goes along with
the summary of what now needs to happen to make things better.
“You’ll need to stay a few more days in the hospital and then you
can go home and finish recuperating there.” Or, “We’re on the way
to the hospital and the doctors there are ready for you.” Or, “We’ll
do chemo and then radiation and it might be a hard year but the
chances are good that you’ll be your old self again afterward.”
“You are going to be okay,” in these circumstances, means “Things
are uncomfortable now, but you will get well. You will be better.”
But it doesn’t always happen that way.
This is a book for people who will not be their old self again
and for all those for whom, at least now, getting better isn’t pos-
sible. This is a book that most reassuringly says even to those peo—
ple, “You, too, are going to be okay—even if you never recover
your health!”
Toni Bernhard is the perfect person to write this book. In the
middle of a vibrant, complex, gratifying family and professional
ix
life—literally from one day to the next—she took ill with a hard-
to-diagnose and basically incurable, painfully fatiguing illness
that waxes and wanes in its intensity, that sometimes seems to
respond to a new treatment and then doesn’t after all, that doesn’t
get worse but also never gets better. Nine years after the onset of
her illness, she is still sick. She knows the cycle of h0ping and feel-
ing disappointed from the inside out as well as the cycles of decid—
ing to give up hope in order to avoid the pain of disappointment
and the sadness, and then the relief, of surrender.
Decades ago, a friend of mine, a man with a family and friends
and flourishing career, said of his unexpected, debilitating ill—
ness, “This isn’t what I wanted—but it’s-what I got.” He said it
matter—of—factly, without bitterness, as if he understood that it
was the only reasonable response. I knew that he was telling me
something important. It is a fundamental human truth, tran-
scending cultures and traditions, that the wisest response to sit-
uations that are beyond our control, circumstances that we
cannot change, is noncontention. In this book, Toni shows how
her longtime study and meditation practice in the Buddhist tra-
dition help her accommodate her situation with gentle accept-
ance and compassion. The techniques that Toni presents for
working with one’s mind in the distressed states it finds itself
when facing an uncomfortable and unchangeable truth are basic
Buddhist insights and meditation practices, but they are non-
parochial. They will work for anyone.
This book is written for people who are ill and aren’t going to
get better, and also for their caregivers, people who love them and
suffer along with them in wishing that things were different. It
speaks most specifically about physical illness. In the largest sense,
though, I feel that this book is for all of us. Sooner or later, we all
are all going to not “get better.” Speaking as an older person who
has had the good fortune of health, I know that the core challenge
x How to Be Sick
in my life, and, I believe, in all of our lives, from beginning to end,
is accommodating to realities that we Wish were other, and doing
it with grace.
Toni has given us a gift by sharing her life and her Wisdom and
I am grateful for it.
—Sylvia Boorstein
Foreword xi
