My breathing should be much worse than it is. I was hospitalised with pneumonia at age three, in 1952 and the early days of the NHS, where medicine was far simpler and they didn’t know a lot that they know now. Due to the risk of infection they had to incinerate Sparkly my teddy and, in early Covid style, my parents could view me only though some kind of plastic sheet. This was tough at that age, I can remember. And I had a number of similar spells of hospitalisation in my early childhood. Maybe that’s why I feel somewhat at home in hospital. That’s where I am now, my disease seemingly having entered a new phase. The calcium has really flared up and I’ve needed lots of saline drips. A new line of inquiry has opened up since they realised (what, only now?) that they didn’t know what type of cancer I have in the colon, so I’ve just had a biopsy to find that out. It is possible that it could be a type that is susceptible to treatment. If so that could change my situation somewhat. However it may well not be such a type. So we won’t be getting our hopes up. And I heard there may not be much advantage, lifespan wise. I think I’ll only take that option if it’s worth it from a quality and length of life point of view. I’ve started to feel that I’ve done what I wanted to do with this period, and I’m ready to go. There has been a sense of a satisfying trajectory. But maybe that’s crazy.
Whatever, this morning I’m feeling a lot better, so I reckon I’ll be back on the Zoom classes fairly soon.
The biopsy was interesting. I was trollied in my bed (always fun) up several floors from the tenth to a truly ice-cold room. Presumably the frigidity was to keep the tiny cores of plucked flesh nice and cool once they’d emerged. The surgeon spent ten minutes or so cooling my body down, all to the beat of a quite loud Radio One type playlist which drew a good 20% attention. The anaesthetic injection went right through a muscle somewhere around the junction of femur and pelvis that, during its penetration, was very painful. Once the needle got a bit further the pain was gone. Afterwards the surgeon said that a lot of people need full sedation at that point. Surely that was a bit late, I thought, if they’d gone through that degree of pain anyway, but maybe they had to stop at an earlier stage. He made about ten insertions into the area, each ending with a sharp click and the withdrawal of one precious core of cancerous flesh. I got the impression that the process is a bit like taking rock samples. But probably it isn’t.
I now have been upgraded to a window bed, and what a view! The Thames spreads out and curves revealing Lambeth and Vauxhall bridges. It’s a dull grey day but the sense of space is uplifting.
Getting into meditation hasn’t been easy recently with the drowsiness that has accompanied the resurgence of calcium. I have been discovering today how useful Bodhicitta or Tonglen type breathing is in this situation. The situation being that any moment you notice you are breathing you can tune into some deep dharma. It is something a lot of us know, but there is that pesky practical difficulty of actually accessing any degree of dharma, especially in crazy hospital wards.
Now Mr. Chen, arguably Sangharakshita’s main meditation teacher, was a professor, an intellectual, an expert on all matters of Buddhist practice, and a master yogin. He wrote numerous booklets as well as his main work Buddhist Meditation Systematic and Practical. In one of them, he came up with an interesting collection, which he undoubtedly practised, of ten sunyata meditations. I won’t go into them here; just enjoy the names. They are The Four Non-arisings, The Eight Noes (both of these from Nagarjuna), The Four Sunyatas, The Mind in the Three Times, The Similes from the Diamond Sutra, The Mystic Gates of Hua Yen, The Victorious Significance of Bodhicitta, The Trimandala, The Bodhicitta Breathing (that’s the relevant one), and tenthly, Sarvadharmasunyata, which links to the said breathing. I do go into these in more detail in the diary of my long Tipi Valley retreat that I am currently editing with Pabodhana’s help, and that will be published at some point. By the way, I am very grateful to the conditions that have granted me the time to do this work. I don’t think anyone else could have worked with the weird, intensely personal quality of a diary written in such particular circumstances. We currently seem to be trying to present it as a kind of novel in the genre of Robinson Crusoe and Autobiography of a Supertramp.
Anyway, the breathing meditation is, as I say, available any time you remember you’re breathing. Once the reflection is clear, it doesn’t matter too much about what’s going on in the room, since it is very internal and doesn’t need to build up much. Even doing it for a few moments can be beneficial, to me at least in my situation, where I’m inclined to drop off at any time, or get pulled into the sounds being played on mobiles, or the banter of us guys in my ward, or crashes of moving hospital furniture, raucous jokey repartee amongst the nurses and endless other sources of mental disruption. You are immediately plunged into deep reflection, though of course it requires some skill in practices like the Brahmaviharas.
(1) On breathing out, one distributes one’s own good qualities, freely gives them out, to all beings.
(2) On breathing in, one allows one’s idea of oneself to be humbled in the light of others’ negative qualities, that is the sufferings of all beings.
I suppose you have to actually do it a bit for this to make any sense. Well, have a go. Being humbled really means getting more real, more grounded. I think it great for those of us who live most of the time in our heads and are inclined to subtle pride or low self-view. It tends to dissolve separation and the ego-identification that leads to suffering.
There is then a continuation of the Bodhicitta breathing into a couple of of sunyata meditations constituting the tenth in Yogi Chen’s list called The Sarvadharmasunyata (all dharmas empty), which are important for realising genuine compassion, which must be based on wisdom.
(3) On breathing out (the stage of giving), you see no dharma (meaning thing).
(4) On breathing in (the stage of receiving), you see no skandha. The skandhas are a traditional breakdown of living being: our form, our feeling, our faculty of recognition of things, our volition or drive, and our faculty of experiencing, which includes all the senses including the cognition of mind.
So if you can imagine, as the breath goes out, you embrace the empty or conditioned (pratityasamutpada) aspect of absolutely everything in the world (imagined, or the bits you see). As it comes in, and there is that sense of receiving energy into the body – into oneself – you embrace the reality that nothing in our embodied experience is different from that same empty, conditioned, pratityasamutpada truth. This is a profound letting go of habitual views. It might take a while to grasp the nature of the method both conceptually and in terms of empathic feeling, but once you get that and they become simple, these applications tie in well with the qualities of giving and receiving of Bodhicitta / Tonglen breathing.
I have a couple of inhalers and mild COPD, but it feels to me like my breathing has improved.