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

illness was not a personal failing on my part. I’m not sure what caused this change of heart and mind, but I got out of the van, explained to the driver that I was sick, and asked if he could please call the dispatcher and get permission to take me to Davis. He called, got permission immediately, and drove me home. That experience marked the beginning of my ability treat this illness with compassion.
     

Immediately Make Contact
     
    My principal compassion practice has become tonglen— literally “sending and taking” — from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. We’ll explore that practice in detail in chapter 11. Here, I want to write about three other practices I use to cultivate compassion for myself. I developed the first one from a generosity practice taught by Sharon Salzberg at a Spirit Rock retreat. She suggested that as soon as the thought arose to be generous in a particular way (call a friend in need, give something of ours away just because a person had admired it), we should resolve to follow through on that generous impulse even though we may subsequently try to talk ourselves out of it with thoughts like, “I’m too busy to call”; “On second thought, I want that item I was going to give away.” I had used this practice for many years. Not only did it benefit others, but I found it highly amusing to reflect on the rationalizations I could come up with for talking myself out of that initial impulse to be generous: “Hmm, if I’m ever invited to the White House, I might want to wear that scarf . . .”
     
    After that transformative experience at Thanksgiving, I looked for ways to alleviate the suffering that accompanied my illness. One day, I stumbled upon a way to change Sharon’s generosity practice into a compassion practice for myself. Although the practices are quite different, I must give Sharon credit because I wouldn’t have thought of mine had it not been for the wisdom of hers.
     
    The practices are different because, instead of following through on an initial impulse to be generous, in this compassion practice I force myself to do the reverse of my initial impulse. Here’s an example of how it works. If my two children haven’t been in touch for a while, as soon as the thought arises, “Why don’t they contact me?” I immediately contact them . So instead of allowing that thought, “Why don’t they contact me?” to spin out into the many absurd storylines it could take (“They don’t care about me”; “They’d like me better if I weren’t sick”), I “cut off the mind road” (to use a Zen saying we’ll learn about later) and force myself to contact them. It’s as if my “penalty” for thinking that they should contact me is that I have to contact them !
     
    The results are always uplifting and never fail to alleviate the suffering brought about by the proliferation of thoughts that simply weren’t true. When I call my children, we talk about what they’ve been up to. We talk about my grandchildren. We share common experiences—maybe a movie on DVD or a sporting event on TV we’ve both seen. They may seek my advice. It always becomes clear as we’re talking that they’ve been thinking about me. Sometimes it turns out they’ve been busy. (Didn’t I want them to be independent as adults and to live full lives? Yes!) Sometimes it turns out they’ve been sick themselves.
     
    The principal feature that Sharon’s practice and my practice share is how, unless we remain vigilant by cultivating awareness—called “mindfulness” by Buddhist practitioners—the mind can talk us into or out of just about anything, no matter how counterproductive or harmful the consequences.
     
    Here’s another example of how I used this practice. My friend Dawn tries to visit me for a short time every week. She lives two hours away but comes to Davis a few times a week for work. One time, Tony was at a meditation retreat. He’d left on a Friday. Dawn was going to visit on