Illness, aging, and the sweetness of Being

If you prefer to watch a video, here is an earlier and more rambling version of the blog. It's a talk given during one of the online sangha meetings.

Way back during the early Buddhist days of my spiritual journey, I was on a meditation retreat with Christopher Titmuss at Gaia House in the UK, the sister retreat center to the Insight Meditation Society in the US. One evening, Christopher was asked what he experienced when he was meditating. Christopher said, with his characteristic joyfulness, ‘Well, I got stung by a bee this morning, so I sat with my thumb hurting.’

He didn’t say ‘Oh, I was totally blissful even though my thumb was hurting’. His answer was simple, and real. His report was that there was pain from the bee sting in his awareness as he was sitting that day. Other meditations may have been blissful or expansive, but on that day his thumb hurt.

It’s similar in our lives when things happen we don’t like, when we feel frustrated, hurt, or unhappy – whether that’s because of outer events, or our own illness, acute or chronic, or limits we run into due to aging. There are moments when we’re ok, and moments when we’re not ok, when there is pain and difficulty.

So where is the sweetness of Being in that?

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