The Mindfulness Revolution by Barry Boyce

Author:Barry Boyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala Publications

Sickness Is Like the Weather

TONI BERNHARD

An accomplished law professor at the University of California–Davis and mother of two grown children, Toni Bernhard was struck down with a “flu” during a cherished vacation in Paris with her husband, Tony. She never recovered from this illness and has been using mindfulness-based practices to make peace with the severe limitations of being chronically fatigued.

THE MOVIE THE WEATHER MAN stars Nicolas Cage playing a character named Dave Spritz, a man who is adrift in life, even though he has a steady job as the weatherman for a Chicago TV station. In reality, he’s just a “weather reader,” dependent on a meteorologist to tell him what to say. When the meteorologist gives him a forecast with an eighteen-degree variance, Dave complains that he needs something more concrete. The meteorologist responds, “Dave, it’s random. We do our best.” One day, the meteorologist preps Dave for his TV spot by saying, “We might see some snow, but it might shift south and miss us.” When Dave protests that the viewers will want a more certain forecast than that, the meteorologist tells him that predicting the weather is a guess. “It’s wind, man,” he says. “It blows all over the place.”

I found this inspiring and very useful. When life’s uncertainty and unpredictability throw me for a loop, I like to say to my husband, Tony, “Here it is again, life and the weather. Just wind, man, blowing all over the place.” I remind myself that the wind that’s blowing the bitterest cold at me may be setting the stage for something joyful to follow.

I work on treating thoughts and moods as wind, blowing into the mind and blowing out. We can’t control what thoughts arise in the mind. (Telling yourself not to think about whether you’ll feel well enough to join the family for dinner is no guarantee that it’s not exactly what you will think about!) And moods are as uncontrollable as thoughts. Blue moods arise uninvited, as does fear or anxiety. By working with this wind metaphor, I can hold painful thoughts and blue moods more lightly, knowing they’ll blow on through soon—after all, that’s what they do.

One night, I felt so sick I wanted to throw out all the work I’d done on a book I was writing. Dark thoughts. A blue mood. My eyes welled up with tears. But instead of those tears turning into sobs, I took a deep breath and began the weather practice, remembering that thoughts and moods blow all over the place and that if I just waited, these particular ones would blow on through. And they did.

When it became clear that my “Parisian flu” had settled into a chronic illness, Tony and I began to consider if it was feasible for him to go away on retreat for an entire month, during which he’d be out of contact with me unless I called with an emergency. I badly wanted him to go, because I saw it as a way I could feel like a caregiver for him.

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