Free How to Be Sick by Toni Bernhard, Sylvia Boorstein

again.”
     
    Would I ever call Tony “dumb” or “stupid” or an “idiot”? No! And what’s more, if I ever heard someone talking like this to someone I cared about—or even a stranger!—I would at least feel the impulse to intervene. Mary’s story was an eye-opener for me. From then on, when I’d catch myself using that language, I’d stop and reflect on how I’d never talk to others that way. After a few months, I had “re-conditioned” my mind to treat my own difficulties with compassion.
     
    Then I got sick and that re-conditioning unraveled.
     
    I blamed myself for not recovering from the initial viral infection—as if not regaining my health was my fault, a failure of will, somehow, or a deficit of character. This is a common reaction for people to have toward their illness. It’s not surprising, given that our culture tends to treat chronic illness as some kind of personal failure on the part of the afflicted—the bias is often implicit or unconscious, but it is nonetheless palpable. I was helped by Tony and by Spirit Rock teacher Sylvia Boorstein, who kept reminding me that this illness was just this illness and was not a personal failing on my part. In the end, it took an intense moment of physical and mental suffering for me to finally reach out to myself with compassion.
     
    It happened on Thanksgiving. At that time, I’d been sick for a year and a half, but I was still not willing to accept that I could no longer travel to family events. So I agreed to go to Escondido where, for years, my daughter-in-law’s parents, Bob and Jacqueline Lawhorn, hosted us for Thanksgiving. I planned the trip to accommodate my illness. Tony would drive down from Davis; I would get a ride to the airport and take a plane from Sacramento, which would shorten my travel time; and I’d only stay for two days.
     
    The moment Tony picked me up at the San Diego airport and we began the forty-five-minute drive to Escondido, I knew the trip had been a mistake. We checked into our hotel and drove to the Lawhorn’s house. After ten minutes of visiting, I felt so sick that the room began to spin and I couldn’t focus on people. I told Jacqueline that I needed to lie down. Except for sleeping at the hotel at night, I spent that day and the next on the Lawhorn’s bed. I felt no compassion for myself. I was ashamed of being sick and I blamed myself for everything my mind could come up with: undertaking the trip in the first place; taking over the Lawhorn’s bedroom (which they graciously gave me, of course); not visiting with family and friends; ruining Tony’s Thanksgiving. The list was long because, as Jack Kornfield likes to say, “The mind has no shame.”
     
    On Friday, Tony dropped me off at the San Diego airport. The flight was delayed two hours. I propped myself up in the chairs near the gate as best I could. I’d arranged for the Davis Airporter, a mini-van service, to pick me up at the Sacramento airport. I walked outside the terminal to find that Sacramento was socked in with tule fog—a cold, wet fog that descends on the Central Valley in winter. The van wasn’t there yet, so I sat on my suitcase in the fog. Since getting sick, this was the closest I’d come to simply collapsing on the ground. When the van pulled up about fifteen minutes later, the driver told me that he had to wait for two other planes to arrive before he could drive to Davis. I got in the van and lay down on the seat to wait. It was cold and damp. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. My physical suffering was matched only by my mental suffering in the form of the hatred and blame I was directing at myself.
     
    Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, there was a turning of the mind, and my heart opened. Maybe, on a subconscious level, I was recalling Mary Orr’s story, and I knew I’d never treat another person the way I was treating myself. Maybe I was finally ready to receive Tony and Sylvia’s compassionate reminder that this