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“When you are as sick as I am, you have to make some very tough choices. I had to let it all go. Ironically, people may think you’re giving up, when in fact you are simply giving in to the reality of your new life.”
This was an interesting book that I originally bought for a friend who was studying to become a doctor. Their medical school, like so many, ignored the empathy and patience doctors need to actually connect with and help their patients, and this sounded like a great book to start to bridge that chasm. Especially because Bernhard has afflictions that are still too often dismissed and ignored, such as ME/CFS, I wanted my friend to hear about the devastating impacts of a doctor refusing to believe a patient.
I gifted this book a year before the COVID-19 pandemic started, and borrowed it now that many more people are dealing with Post-Viral Syndrome/ME-CFS/and other complications or Long COVID from viral infection. This is your reminder that if you think you are too healthy to be greatly impacted by a COVID-19 infection, you are gambling with uncertain odds. Bernhard was also healthy and energetic when she contracted a virus in 2001 that left her sick for years, including bedbound, and it could also happen to you. Even if it doesn't happen to you, if you are not wearing a high-quality well-sealing mask in public, you could be bestowing this fate and worse upon those in your community as much of COVID-19 transmission takes place without or days before any symptoms appear. If you don't have the funds to buy yourself FFP2/N95 masks, go to maskbloc.org and reach out to the group closest to you for free PPE.
Some of the Buddhist practices outlined in this book have become helpful to me, I especially think about the Broken Glass Practice often. “(The Buddha) saw the broken glass within the unbroken one. Whenever you use this glass, you should reflect that it's already broken. Whenever its time is up, it will break. Use the glass, look after it, until the day when it slips out of your hand and shatters. No problem. Why not? Because you saw its brokenness before it broke!” Bernhard describes how she used this practice when anything went differently when planned in her life - when the power went out or the landline was cut, and grew to use this practice when activities that used to bring her joy and give her life meaning suddenly were impossible or made her condition worse. I believe everyone should use this practice in fighting ableism, internal and external. As Imani Barbarin (crutches_and_spice) has said, "The only thing that separates me from a nondisabled person is luck and time. Every single barrier, every single stereotype that nondisabled people reinforce when they’re nondisabled will exist when they’re disabled. Like I said before, it’s not a binary. So you cannot think of these things as things that don’t affect you. If you could tell me what will happen to you tomorrow, I will tell you ableism does not affect you. But you can’t. So work on it now." You can look at a glass and see that one day it will break, and on the day you drop it and it shatters, you can feel peace instead of sadness and anger because you already saw the glass broken. You can live in a nondisabled body and have the luck to age into disability as everyone lucky enough to grow old inevitably will, or you could contract a disabling virus or be in a car accident or experience any number of things to make you disabled while relatively young. If you work on fighting ableism today, your disabled future will be easier.
One thing I did question about this book was that most of the quotes that start each chapter or from teacher Bernhard learned from seemed to be white and most of the Asian Buddhists she quotes were from older or ancient writers, one exception being Thich Nhat Hahn. I am not part of or familiar with the Buddhist community in the western United States, so I don't know if this is an accurate reflection of that community, but it did feel strange to see so many white voices discussing an Asian tradition. To be fair, I noticed this a few chapters in and only kept a mental tally for a few chapters after that, so my perception could be wrong.
This was an interesting book that I originally bought for a friend who was studying to become a doctor. Their medical school, like so many, ignored the empathy and patience doctors need to actually connect with and help their patients, and this sounded like a great book to start to bridge that chasm. Especially because Bernhard has afflictions that are still too often dismissed and ignored, such as ME/CFS, I wanted my friend to hear about the devastating impacts of a doctor refusing to believe a patient.
I gifted this book a year before the COVID-19 pandemic started, and borrowed it now that many more people are dealing with Post-Viral Syndrome/ME-CFS/and other complications or Long COVID from viral infection. This is your reminder that if you think you are too healthy to be greatly impacted by a COVID-19 infection, you are gambling with uncertain odds. Bernhard was also healthy and energetic when she contracted a virus in 2001 that left her sick for years, including bedbound, and it could also happen to you. Even if it doesn't happen to you, if you are not wearing a high-quality well-sealing mask in public, you could be bestowing this fate and worse upon those in your community as much of COVID-19 transmission takes place without or days before any symptoms appear. If you don't have the funds to buy yourself FFP2/N95 masks, go to maskbloc.org and reach out to the group closest to you for free PPE.
Some of the Buddhist practices outlined in this book have become helpful to me, I especially think about the Broken Glass Practice often. “(The Buddha) saw the broken glass within the unbroken one. Whenever you use this glass, you should reflect that it's already broken. Whenever its time is up, it will break. Use the glass, look after it, until the day when it slips out of your hand and shatters. No problem. Why not? Because you saw its brokenness before it broke!” Bernhard describes how she used this practice when anything went differently when planned in her life - when the power went out or the landline was cut, and grew to use this practice when activities that used to bring her joy and give her life meaning suddenly were impossible or made her condition worse. I believe everyone should use this practice in fighting ableism, internal and external. As Imani Barbarin (crutches_and_spice) has said, "The only thing that separates me from a nondisabled person is luck and time. Every single barrier, every single stereotype that nondisabled people reinforce when they’re nondisabled will exist when they’re disabled. Like I said before, it’s not a binary. So you cannot think of these things as things that don’t affect you. If you could tell me what will happen to you tomorrow, I will tell you ableism does not affect you. But you can’t. So work on it now." You can look at a glass and see that one day it will break, and on the day you drop it and it shatters, you can feel peace instead of sadness and anger because you already saw the glass broken. You can live in a nondisabled body and have the luck to age into disability as everyone lucky enough to grow old inevitably will, or you could contract a disabling virus or be in a car accident or experience any number of things to make you disabled while relatively young. If you work on fighting ableism today, your disabled future will be easier.
One thing I did question about this book was that most of the quotes that start each chapter or from teacher Bernhard learned from seemed to be white and most of the Asian Buddhists she quotes were from older or ancient writers, one exception being Thich Nhat Hahn. I am not part of or familiar with the Buddhist community in the western United States, so I don't know if this is an accurate reflection of that community, but it did feel strange to see so many white voices discussing an Asian tradition. To be fair, I noticed this a few chapters in and only kept a mental tally for a few chapters after that, so my perception could be wrong.