The Body is Subject to Aging, Disease, and Death - Part 1
In January of 2017, at the age of 36, I received the news that I had osteoporosis, a deterioration of one’s bone density. When I first received the news it upended my whole world. By most accounts, I was in excellent physical health. My visits to the doctor corroborated all of this, except for this new, notable piece of evidence to the contrary. Prior to this diagnosis, I had been living a very healthy life for the previous seven years, since the age of 29 when I moved to Thailand, gave up alcohol abuse for yoga and meditation, and became conscious of my physical and mental health generally.
Fortunately, I received the diagnosis of osteoporosis without having any symptoms, such as a fracture of my spine or hip or some other part of my body, after a friend noticed an over the counter drug I was taking for acid reflux, a Protein Pump Inhibitor called Nexium, and suggested that I get my bone density tested.
What the diagnosis really shattered was a couple of illusions that had formulated in the mind. I had created an image of myself as someone who was relatively young, who was quite healthy, and who wouldn’t be the kind of person to get a disease such as osteoporosis. From a medical perspective, this was, and, is, a rational belief. The odds of a 36-year-old male having osteoporosis are incredibly small.
Yet on a more basic level, I was failing to perceive a very basic truth, which is that my body is subject to aging, disease, and death.
All living beings are subject to aging, disease, and death. There are no exceptions to this rule. While we can work with probabilities such as life expectancy, from the very limited viewpoint of our own existence, the truth is that any of us could get sick or die at any moment and it’s a guarantee that at some unknown future point in the future, we will pass away as surely as we were born.
There are young children who get cancer. The odds of getting cancer as a young child are very small, but, tragically, it happens. When we get in cars, we don’t say to ourselves: “I wonder if I’ll get to my destination alive?” The odds are overwhelming that we will. But of course, car accidents are a significant cause of death in many countries.
Intellectually, we know this is true, that we can get sick and die at any moment, yet very few of us have truly internalized this fact. Unwelcome news regarding our health exposes the illusions we harbor about ourselves. Suddenly, we realize “this can happen to me too.”
Challenges with our health can allow us to feel, viscerally, the impermanence and vulnerability of our own existence.
Before my diagnosis, I had an image of myself as someone who was healthy, who would not get this disease. That gap between reality and my ideas, beliefs, expectations about how reality should be: that was the measurement of my suffering.
Suffering is what brings most people to any kind of spiritual path, or contemplative practice. This suffering often includes problems with our physical health; however, the source of so much of our suffering can often be found in how the mind is reacting to what’s happening.
While I had already been practicing meditation for years, and in fact, I had already started training to become a mindfulness meditation teacher, we all have our deep-seated fears and wounds that can get triggered. The fear of death is the core fear and that’s what this diagnosis was touching upon for me. When a powerful emotion like fear of death and/or intense physical pain gets triggered by something like a health diagnosis it’s so easy for the mind to get sucked into negative thought patterns.
In the early Buddhist tradition, there’s even a term for the tendency of the mind to proliferate thoughts in this way: papancha. It’s this feeling of papancha, the proliferation of thoughts and stories, that keeps the mind caught in negative thought loops such as the one I was experiencing. I felt trapped, isolated, afraid. When we’re heavily identified with our suffering it can start to feel like it is “my suffering,” as opposed to an aspect of the human condition that is common to us all.
Life isn’t simply suffering. It’s many things, including many wonderful things. Creativity, beauty, love, joy--these are all parts of the human condition as well. However, a unique challenge of being human is that we are aware of our own mortality. The physical pain and mental anguish that accompanies aging, disease, and death are part of the package.
Hiding from unwelcome news doesn’t make it go away. On the contrary, what we resist persists.
But there’s good news: while pain in life is inevitable, so much of our suffering that happens on a mental level is optional.
Mindfulness meditation is a path that can lead to liberation from suffering in the place where it originates: in the mind.
Mindfulness meditation can allow us to simply notice what’s happening right here and now in this moment: anxiety, fear, calm, joy, gratitude. It can allow us to be present with these challenging emotions. In becoming mindful of these emotions and thoughts, we create a gap between stimulus and response.
With practice, mindfulness allows this gap to widen so that a non-reactive spaciousness grows in between what’s coming in through the senses and how we respond. Through training, mindfulness can move us away from getting emotionally hijacked to making more wise and skillful choices. This non-reactive spaciousness is often referred to as equanimity.