Angel's stairs by flickr user Katarina 2353
My brother’s Au pair had a cold when I visited a few days ago. A day later I had one, too! Sigh! A vivid reminder, how we human beings share our happiness and suffering in this life with each other. Granted, having ice cream and hot chocolate for desert surely didn’t strengthen my immune system.
I don’t blame the Au pair anyway. Meeting her was just one of the many contributing factors that led to my cold. As a Buddhist I believe in karma, that the main cause for experiencing this cold is my need to resolve a disharmony in my being that I have created through actions in the past.
Within the realm of duality of our relative existence all our actions create seeds that will ripen in the future. Actions that are not in accord with our true nature are called negative and lead to suffering. Actions that are in accord with our true nature are called positive and bring happiness. When suffering arises, the best approach we can take is to see it as a purification of a past karma. If we are able to not react with negative emotions we will not create more negative karma.
The ultimate solution to suffering is to discover the essence of our being. The more we can discover that what we are is much bigger than our body, sensations, emotions and thoughts the more we will connect with the peace, love and wisdom that are inherent in our being and be free of the limitations of our relative existence.
I decided to listen to my body and stay in bed for a day. It was a very interesting experience to watch my instinctive reactions of attachment and aversion. On one side, I didn’t want to feel unwell. I noticed how much I tried to push away and not feel what I considered unpleasant. I seem to be pretty good at disconnecting with what I don’t want to feel on an almost unconscious level. For example, one of my habits is to mindlessly distract myself by obsessively browsing the internet.
On the other side, I was desperately trying to experience physical pleasure to cover up the feelings of unwellness with enjoyable things like food, drink, music, etc.
My teacher Sogyal Rinpoche often says that when we are sick it is a wonderful opportunity to practice meditation. Why? Because it gives us an opportunity to see and work with these habits of attachment and aversion. And also to practice simply abiding in being spacious and awake, which is the true essence of our being. This allows us to simply be present in the face of the unpleasant sensations and the reactions that they trigger.
"Lifting the Veil of Duality" by Andreas Moritz
Experiencing this cold also reminded me to reflect on what true happiness is. I have written quite a few posts in the past about how the Buddhist teachings help us to find a happiness that is not dependent on outer circumstances. Coincidentally, I just finished reading Lifting the Veil of Duality by Andreas Moritz and would like to share some of his reflections on happiness which I found very inspiring:
“Every person will eventually conclude that happiness is not something that can be found. Whatever one finds cannot be permanent and therefore isn’t real or lasting. It cannot be possessed either. If happiness has a beginning, it is destined to end again. Unless you are happiness, looking for it remains fruitless. All you are doing is chasing a ghost of memory; you wish to bring back to life those moments from your past that you so cherished and which made you feel so good inside.
When we search for happiness outside, we practically deny that we have it inside. Looking for happiness because we are not happy is a major source of conflict. We become addicted to the things and people that can fill this void. If they do, we feel happiness for a while, until it is eventually replaced by a bigger void. We call filling the void, love. Yet true love never wants anything, it just is and shares itself. By ‘being’ love, we no longer desire happiness. Love unites opposites; desiring happiness creates separation. Both, though, have their value.
We are gradually breaking through the mistaken belief there is anything out there we need. Being eternally one with the same Source that constantly creates and recreates this universe, we have everything that we could possibly need inside us. All that we so adore in others, we are it, too, although we have chosen not to express it outwardly because this may not be necessary or be to our advantage.”
Thank you for this story – you were able to rest, resolved disharmony, practiced meditation and reflected on true happiness. That’s a power cold that I need to catch!
You are most welcome! Not sure I can recommend catching that cold though
[...] Well, I’m sick. The first big sick I’ve had in a long time and definitely the strongest cold/illness I’ve had in the past two years. It was kind of inevitable that I would catch it as the in-laws brought it back from Nova Scotia with them and let’s just say there was quite a bit of coughing without the covering of one’s mouth! What do you say when someone does that? Surely you can’t say anything when you are in someone else’s house!? Yet, now I wish I had. Har har. Anyway, brutal sore throat, coughing which is keeping me up all night. Can’t swallow, nothing working. This is the first extended illness I’ve had in a while that has just made me want to stay in bed all day and I’m moving onto Day 5 of this now. So since I’ve had a lot of time by myself (the husband is avoiding me like the plague seeing as he is the last man standing in the house), and because I can’t sleep due to the coughing and sore throat, I have been working at employing some mindfulness techniques to get me through the more “challenging” of evenings. I have had some points in the night where I can’t stop coughing and can’t swallow and can’t sleep and more than any medicine, this is what has helped me the most and has even helped me to fall asleep: rather than try to evade the uncomfortability and the pain, I have been trying to sit with it, to get familiar with it and just become friends with it. So often we are trying to escape bad feelings, pain etc. We use many methods to distract ourselves from it or medicate ourselves so we don’t feel anything. I have found what is working for me is to sit and really think about how it is feeling while I am trying to fall asleep. To contemplate the nature of the pain in my throat and to practice some visualization and tonglen, breathing out the illness in the form of black smoke and breathing in refreshing health in the form of white light. I guess this is kind of a self healing reverse tonglen. Anyway, like I said, it seems to be the only thing that really makes me fall asleep or feel any better. All I have is a simple cold/flu. I know it will pass and this also makes me feel better. I can imagine that using this technique gets a bit more difficult once you are a patient battling cancer or another terminal illness. Yet still, people use it and it seems to have a lot of positive results. You can read more about tonglen here: http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/tonglen1.php and a great article on sitting with uncomfortability can be found on this blog I just came across here: http://inthefootstepsofthebuddha.com/catching-a-cold-a-lesson-in-discovering-non-duality/. [...]
It’s good that you didn’t blame the au pair for your cold but your mentioning that you don’t is misleading. If it could remotely be her fault then everyone in that household, all those who were more exposed than you, would have caught it if they themselves had not first transmitted it to her which brings about the whole chain of causality and the possibility that you appear in that chain in another incarnation. Besides which, you relate that you had symptoms of a cold the next day, so less than one day from alleged exposure. The incubation period from infection to first symptoms is very seldom anything less than 2 days and typically longer so it would have been extremely unlikely that she was the immediate source of your infection.
Thanks for sharing and for the inspiring links!
Thanks for enlightening me how cold infections spread