Heavy Rain Events

About a week ago, after a long meditation, I started feeling as if I had the flu, a gentle, weird kind of flu, reminiscent of the giardia I experienced my first winter at the zen center. I went to the library for DVDs and found myself face-to-face with a poster about Lyme disease. And then I remembered the tiny tick bite a few weeks back.

The last ten days have been full of research. And cascading emotions: frustration at the bureaucracy involved in finding a doctor and the politicized disagreement on Lyme diagnosis and treatment, anxiety about making the “right” decisions amid many unknowns, and simple fear.

A friend joked about “working my zen magic” and I admitted that zen seemed to have flown out the window this week. Which reminded me of a teacher’s comment: “I want a practice that will see me through blindness, cancer, death, through anything.” That always made sense to me — that spiritual practice (which is essentially an expression of love) has to be unconditional to be meaningful.

For me practice means how we live our lives day to day, a way of being in the world that we can embody no matter what’s happening. That’s the theory. How to make it real in every moment, including the scared, sick, uncertain ones?