1994-07_16 Breath Awareness Meditation As A Gateway To Living Wisdom - 5 Q&A 1

Talk: 19940716-Larry_Rosenberg-IMSR-breath_awareness_as_a_gateway_to_living_wisdom_5-319.json Start_time: 00:15:17 Display_question: How do you practice when you’re sick? Keyword_search: Upasika Kee, sick, interfere, life, practice, dharma, responsibility, soup, retreat, home, attitude, sensation, self-pity, Korea, exhausted, food, koan, energy, quit, healthy, what am I, pondering, dysentery Question_content: Larry: Any questions on your side? Please. Questioner: <inaudible> Larry: I do. There's a book put out by the Buddhist Publication Society. Does that mean anything to you? Called An Unentangled Knowing or A Disentangled Knowing. Does anyone? It's by Upasika Kee, K-E-E. She was a Thai woman, meditation master–extraordinary. I suggest all of you read it. There's one chapter on called “A Good Dose of Dhamma for Meditators When They're Sick.” Okay. Attitude is central. When we get sick, we think of, “Oh, this is interfering with my life. And now I've got four or five days or even longer when I'm interrupted and I can't do the things I want, practice or everything.” It's kind of just to get through it. Break_line: The dharma attitude is “Great, I'm sick. Far out. Now I can begin to see, ‘What's this about?’” But also, you don't have any responsibilities. Everyone's taking care of you. Have some more soup, this kind of thing. So you have a four or five day little retreat in your bed and you work with bodily sensations. It's not so different. But if you have the attitude that the very sick, what we're calling sick, is you're still alive and something's happening to you. You can feel the sensations in your body. You can experience the attitude, maybe self-pity or whatever. And so you can keep practicing. Break_line: Now, if you don't have tremendous energy, it sounds like that's part of it, then practice with whatever the energy is that you have. If you hold yourself to standards of, let's say, of when you're healthy and that you have much–of course, you have much more energy–and you don't have it now, and then you feel disappointed, and then you just throw in the towel, just quit, then that won't work. Break_line: Actually, this happened to me when I was in Korea. I think this will, I hope, will help you. I got very sick. We all did. First six weeks, dysentery; we couldn't hold the food. And our practice was a koan, which is a question like “What am I?” You'd take up this question and ask it of yourself–eventually, not in words, but just a deep pondering. And I was just exhausted. I mean, I couldn't hold food, temperature sometimes. There were three of us, the three Americans, and we were just the water and the food, just took us a while to get used to it. And finally, I just was not doing much of any use there. And I went and had an interview with my teacher, and he listened carefully, and my particular practice was, “What am I?” And he listened to me. And then he said, look, your practice is when you're healthy, “What am I? What am I?” And he said, but now you're very sick, it's more like, “what am I?” Sounds like a Jewish joke, but anyway… And it was helpful. In other words, you kind of settle in with where you are, and you kind of work with what you have rather than some image of how you used to be or could be. Please. End_time: 00:18:50