Karmic View of Illness

  It's hard to relate to the fact that pain and illness are natural functions of life and having a body. More and more, people attribute health to some kind of personal responsibility, which suggests that we can somehow control our bodies or even decide when we will be ill. Karma is much more complex than that, and I tend to think of illness more as an opportunity to see how our practice takes us rather than as a punishment. In addition, from what I understand of Buddhist teachings, we might even be paying back our karmic debts by suffering the symptoms of an illness. So it's perhaps best to see the manifestation of illness as a kind of natural movement, much the same way as water moves across a stone in order to erode it and wear it away over time.

    I recently read an interview with a famous person who mentioned that he may have caused "damage" to himself through reckless behavior when he was young, thereby precipitating a genetic illness. I wonder about this: can we blame the younger part of ourselves for something that is happening to us now? If so, how? Could that younger self have "known better", as though they could fast forward to a different time in the future and see what unfolds? Time doesn't work that way, and the mental trap here is trying to juxtapose one thought of what is happening now onto another state that has already passed. Is this act of juxtaposing one thought over another a sincere practice (similar to repentance), or is it sometimes indulging in wistful "what if" thinking? Unless there is something we can constructively do with the reflection and rumination, perhaps all it really serves is to re-envision life from a presumably more powerful perspective.

   Illness is part of life, but we don't need to suffer if we embrace it. It means letting go of the idea that a separate self creates illness. Illness is the culmination of many factors, and few people recognize that the chief cause of illness lies in some form of mental stress. If our minds are balanced, our bodies will also achieve the proper balance of diet, exercise and rest. Without the mental balance, we add pressure to our lives and fail to take care of our bodies.