On Fatigue and Illness in Buddhist Practice

Stuck in Slow Motion

Note: This article appears in the spring 2022 issue of Tricycle Magazine

Considering how common illness is,
how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings,
 how astonishing, when the lights of health go down,
the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed...
it becomes strange indeed that illness
has not taken its place
 with love, battle, and jealousy
among the prime themes of literature.
—Virginia Woolf

It's early morning and the sky, colorless, reflects my mood. Not too long ago I wrote confidently about the moment’s perfection, about the fundamental rightness of life as it is, but today that perfection eludes me. I do know the soft spaciousness at the heart of things. I’ve felt the gentle acceptance that lets be whatever is without grief or complaint. Yet today I skirt along the moment’s edges, feeling the friction of this body and mind as they plod across the borders of then and now, every task a burden.

I've felt this tired before, I’m sure of it. But never so relentlessly nor for so long. A battery of tests tell me there's nothing medically wrong with me. Friends think I'm depressed. I can list all the reasons why I think neither of these is true, but after months spent coaxing my boulder up the hill like Sisyphus without even the respite of watching it roll down, I've come to the conclusion that the what is less important than the then.

Suppose this is just the way it is from now on, I've told myself not once or twice, but often. After all, there’s always a shred of hope that things will change for the better. Impermanence doesn’t always cooperate, but this doesn’t keep me from hoping, even though in my mind I can hear my first teacher, Daido Roshi, say in his booming voice, “The whole thing is hopeless! Zen has nothing to do with hope.” Hope is the other face of fear, he’d say, and in a moment of total presence, there’s no room for either. All right then, no hope, no fear. So if this is how it is, I tell myself again, then how will you live? This, after all, is the relevant question and always has been, whether the bed I’m lying on is made of daisies or nails.

“All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens,” Woolf says in her magnificent essay “On Being Ill.” All day, every day, the dis-eased body intervenes in a way it doesn’t do in health. And depending on how we choose to respond, we’ll experience this intervention as yet another source of suffering or as fuel for tremendous spiritual change.

Reading one morning Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, I find in his words a neuroscientist’s confirmation of Woolf’s insight into the transformational power of illness. Our feelings about pleasure and pain, illness and wellbeing, Damasio says, are the very catalysts for the kind of questioning, reflection, and understanding that distinguish humans from other species. It’s because we feel uncomfortable that we inquire into the nature of pain or illness, looking for ways to more skillfully work with them in our lives.

Of course, this is something the Buddha was doing from the beginning. In the Salattha Sutta (“The Dart”), he said that a person who grieves and laments over a painful physical feeling follows the dart of pain with the dart of suffering. But one who’s able to remain present with the sensation without resistance or complaint, will only feel the pain of one dart. In other words, pain or illness are not the problem—it’s our reaction to them that causes us distress.

Anyone who’s practiced with pain or discomfort knows this. Anyone who’s read the Buddhist teachings knows that acceptance is key. But as anyone who practices also knows, the gap between wish and reality can be wide and steep, especially when the landscape is so much more appealing on the side of I Want versus What Is. So, speaking for myself, I can’t claim I haven’t tried to bargain with the universe, especially on days like today, when a bit more energy would be just the thing. I long for those mornings when I’d jump out of bed as soon as my eyes opened, days when I could move seamlessly from one task to the next. Now I’m perpetually stuck in a slow motion setting, my body blunt and much heavier-feeling than it really is. My thoughts, on the other hand, are sharp and spiny. They snag on the most insignificant of things, accumulating like burs on a hiker’s pant cuffs. The overall effect is not unlike a cartoon someone sent me recently: a little blobby creature, weighed down by several burdens labeled “stress” and “past karma” and “pandemic fatigue,” trips on a tiny step called “minor inconvenience” and falls to its knees, sobbing, while another creature looks on and says, “I think you’re overreacting.”

I know this kind of fatigue is difficult to explain to someone who’s never felt it, especially when it’s the only thing that ails you because, well, maybe it’s all in your mind. Of course it’s all my mind! I want to say. I’m a Buddhist, so I know it is. But I still have to live with this mind, this body, so there it is again, the insistent then how?

Get close, the answer comes, as it always does when I get quiet enough. Because although the gap between what I want and what I have is the place where suffering takes root, it’s also the space where practice becomes possible and real.

Fayan asked Xiushan, “A hairsbreadth’s difference is as the distance between heaven and earth’—how do you understand?”
Xiushan said, “A hairsbreadth’s difference is as the distance between heaven and earth.”
Fayan said, “How can you get it that way?”
Xiushan said, “I am just thus—what about you?”
Fayan said, “A hairsbreadth’s difference is as the distance between heaven and earth.”
Xiushan thereupon bowed. (Book of Serenity, Thomas Cleary translation)

I’ve always loved the simple elegance of Fayan’s teachings. When someone asked him a question, he’d often just repeat the student’s statement, still managing to convey a world of meaning. “A hairsbreadth’s difference is as the distance between heaven and earth” is from Master Sengcan’s “Faith Mind Poem,” and here Fayan uses it to show Xiushan how a crack becomes a chasm through no other means but the way we use our minds.

The distance between heaven and earth is the same distance that separates inevitable pain and discretionary suffering. But the irony is that this distance doesn’t exist in reality. It’s an illusion conjured up by the dissatisfied mind, the confused or discriminating mind. When seen through, the chasm becomes a hairline crack, becomes no distance at all. I Want and This Is are suddenly on the same side of the cliff, and the problem is seen as no problem at all.

As I reflected on this and observed the restless movements of my mind, I noticed that this shift was not just mental but physical. Whenever my thoughts started to rev up, rushing off in any number of directions in search of something to focus on other than my tiredness, my body would inevitably speak up. I’d be getting ready to jump on Google to search for diagnoses and treatments, or beginning to worry about how long this flare-up would last, or I’d feel the first blooming of frustration and self-pity, when my body would assert itself gently but firmly, “Oh no, you don’t.” Then, the same fatigue would act like a thick layer of mud over a dirt road, causing my thoughts to spin in place without gaining purchase. “You don’t have the energy to worry about this,” my body seemed to be saying, “so clear your mind of all this debris.” It was like having Shantideva whispering in my ear: “If you can do something about it, why worry? If you can’t do anything about it, why worry?”

That’s why, when it comes down to it, even I can’t deny the advantages this tiredness has given me. Where before I’d push or think my way through a problem, now neither my body nor my mind are willing to stumble along. I go at their pace or not at all, and thankfully, I don’t have the energy to argue anymore. So the light comment I made to a friend, “This fatigue may be the only thing that will stop me from overworking,” may turn out to be not so light after all. I have no choice but to slow down and watch, intrigued, as my body works hard to protect itself and my mind with a wisdom that’s far beyond the knowledge I turn to for refuge when I’m under stress. It’s the wisdom of a body finely tuned to homeostasis, Damasio would say, and it knows perfectly well how to maintain a balanced state without the meddling mind. So maybe it’s a sign of my stubbornness that I still need to be reminded of this, after all my years of practice. Yet I also recognize that at least some of my willfulness I’ve carefully learned and integrated over just as many years.

I’m deeply embedded in a culture that routinely sacrifices the body to work, to pleasure, or accomplishment of various kinds. Early on, I too learned that in order to get anywhere or be anyone, I was going to have to work hard. And when I did, I was rewarded for it, so it was a closed system, a self-sustaining loop. Then I went off to a Zen monastery and brought my workaholic tendencies with me, and since I didn’t yet know that getting somewhere or being someone was not the point, I kept on doing what I’d always done. But I didn’t overwork in a vacuum. Zen isn’t known for its softness, exactly, and the classical literature doesn’t encourage us to consider the body and its many needs either. Think of Bodhidharma, who ripped off his eyelids to stay awake during meditation. Or Huike, who cut off his arm to show his zeal. Ryonen Genso disfigured herself to enter a temple (the abbot told her she was too beautiful and would distract the monks). Think of the many monks who routinely get slapped, kicked, punched, and beaten in the koans. Some of the stories are most likely apocryphal, yet their message is clear: you must be ready to do whatever it takes to realize yourself, even if it means ignoring, harming, or giving up your body.

When I was in my twenties and newly at the monastery, I was willing to sacrifice quite a bit for the sake of waking up. I’d regularly forego food and sleep in order to sit longer hours, and when I got sick—which happened often—I simply waited to recover so I could do it all over again. Now, with a bit of time and perspective, I can see that the way I practiced was based on a false dichotomy. I thought I had to tame my body and quiet my mind, and the way to do both was through rigorous effort and discipline. I couldn’t yet feel the wisdom my cells are always steeped in. I didn’t yet trust the unknowing mind. And I didn’t have the stories of practitioners grappling with sick bodies, ailing bodies, or just run-of-the-mill bodies doing the messy things that bodies do.

“Why don’t nuns ever write about their periods?” A fellow monastic said to me years ago. She was hungry to read accounts of real women who’d had to work with and adapt to the demands of practice as it’s carried out in a female body. She wanted to hear about the body intervening—because it inevitably does.

“People write always of the doings of the mind,” says Woolf in “On Being Ill”:

… the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery.

Huike standing knee-deep in snow sword in hand and hacked stump bleeding may make for better reading than a nun’s struggles with premenstrual brain fog, but it doesn’t make the latter any less relevant. Enlightenment notwithstanding, none of us can jettison the body or turn a deaf ear to its wishes for long. “Dropping off the body” doesn’t mean ignoring or subduing it, and fortunately, more and more teachers are recognizing the need to make explicit what Buddhism has known all along: body and mind aren’t separate from one another, and we disregard either—whether in formal practice or the rest of our lives—at great cost. Because the body isn’t just a vehicle for realization, or for getting things done. It’s the root of wisdom; it’s very source. When my mind races ahead trying to conjure up whatever scenario I’ve imagined will get me what I want, my body knows to slow down and stop. “If you can’t put the brakes on your own, then I’ll do it for you,” my body says. Otherwise I risk rushing past those undiscovered countries hiding on the far side of illness. In my hurry to feel better, I miss the miracle that are this body and mind right now, just as they are.

In Understanding Our Mind, a commentary on Vasubandhu’s Twenty and Thirty Verses, Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Inside is made of outside.” With this in mind, I decided to change the outside to better look at the inside, moving with nothing but a couple of suitcases back to Mexico, where I was born.

I chose a place I’d never been to, a fast-growing city called Playa del Cármen about an hour south of Cancún, on the Caribbean coast. I came here drawn by my love of hot weather and the ocean with the aim to simplify my life so I could create the conditions to better hear and heed what my body was saying to me.

Before I left I decided to see this trip as a sort of pilgrimage, as a displacement that would force me to move through unmapped territory, and through its charting, give me the opportunity to re-draw my own contours.

Two weeks into the trip, I can already feel the effects of this displacement—though perhaps I should I call it re-placement, since I’m deliberately placing myself back at the center of my own life.

It’s August and ninety degrees out, but far from oppressive, the weather feels like a balm. It softens and blurs all the edges, making it harder to discern where I end and the rest of the world begins—a perception more in tune with the way things actually are. Damp air and salt water and sand are everywhere, and I move through and in and on them without friction, allowing my body to go as slowly as it needs in order to heal itself. Long walks and long swims now break up my work hours, and as much as possible, I’ve tilted the balance to spend more time outdoors than in. Fundamentally there may be no difference between one place and another, yet there’s no question that the body responds more readily to the healing properties of wind and sun than to those of brick and cement blocks.

The other morning I went for a swim as the sun was rising, the Caribbean at low tide streaked with bands of turquoise and cerulean blue. That day the water was free of the sargassum that’s covered these beaches in the last couple of years, and in shallow waters I could clearly see all the way down to the white sand.

I dove in and swam steadily for a while, my mind quiet and my body thankfully light. I was wearing earplugs to counter my seasickness, and all I could hear was my breathing and the gentle splash of my hands and feet. Suddenly, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I stopped mid-stroke and submerged myself so I could see better. There, swimming about two feet from me, was a hawksbill turtle, its mottled amber and brown shell dazzling even underwater. It swam very slowly toward me with what I took to be curiosity, and after taking a good look, just as slowly swam away.

Suddenly I was struck by the contrast between the turtle’s calm poise and my own feeling state. I’d definitely felt deep ease before—most often during long periods of meditation, or running, or swimming—but my life in New York City had worn that down to a nub. Too much time spent indoors. Too many hours staring at a screen. And even though I was doing work I love, it wasn’t enough. The animal body needs more of its own kind of nourishment.

I turned and swam toward shore, letting all my senses sing without the interruption of thought. I felt the taste of saltwater in my mouth. The sun seeping through my foggy goggles. The muffled cry of a seagull overhead. It works perfectly, this body, I thought as turned my head to breathe, my legs effortlessly kicking behind me. Harmoniously, seamlessly, and largely without complaint. It’s only my mind that finds fault, constantly sweeping the territory for mines, falling into potholes, focusing on what it thinks it lacks rather than what it’s always had.

A few minutes later I reached land, and as I stood and slowly walked out on the sand, I clearly saw what I’d only glimpsed before, and didn’t want to accept. I can no longer shape reality in my own image. I’m no longer willing to force things into being. They’ll happen as they will and in their own time, and it’s completely my choice whether to resist or accept, to live in I Want or This Is.

So that’s what I’m doing now—gentling myself back into the soft center of each moment, the spaciousness at the heart of everything. Here, there’s neither fatigue nor vitality, illness nor health, work nor rest. Here, what I have is what I want, and there’s simply and always my life as it is: perfect and whole.

*Photo by Wexor TMG