In upcoming weeks will be commenting on a text written a couple of years back designed to help the author through a difficult bout with the chronic disease known as Lyme believed to be caused by pathogens received from tick bites of which the author has had several over the years including a rather nasty one last March in Mexico.
As far as is known, this is the only such text composed specifically for Lyme Disease or Chronic Illness by a westerner using classic Buddhist view and techniques albeit in a more or less secular presentation. In other words, you don’t have to be a Buddhist or even all that ‘spiritual’ to give it a try, and it shouldn’t conflict with those of any other face. There are a couple of Buddhist-specific terms (like Buddha and Bodhisattva and samsara) but these can be replaced or just tolerated without the text and meditations being negatively impacted.
The texts will be kept on a new page which has a menu link in the top right, but commentaries about the text will appear regularly here on the blog. Some of you will find this of interest and no doubt some won’t so each one will have Lyme Liturgy in the title.
Note that although it is entitled ‘Lyme Liturgy’ the practice can be used for all sorts of chronic illnesses, acute illnesses, periods of intense struggle, crises and so forth. The purpose behind the text is to encourage the practitioner to take the blow, so to speak, and then find a way to be generous in mind and spirit no matter how bad one feels. That’s it in a nutshell. I have found it surprisingly helpful including this week when, after about two months of not quite recovering from an ever-morphing ‘cold or flu or whatever this is,’ it occurred to me to give it another go with the text.
Have toyed with the idea of publishing these two texts (a Long and Short form of the same thing) along with commentary as a book but have never quite settled on how best to present it all. This blog will be a somewhat bumbling attempt, perhaps, to muddle through that process after which perhaps it will indeed be published. Comments or questions are warmly invited either in the comment section or via direct email at baronash@fastmail.com. The new page is up with both Long and Short form texts, but no commentary as yet has been presented. One step at a time!
Going through the text will overlap with the Buddhism 101 series idea in which case there will simply be a Buddhism 101 in the Tag list so that those interested in that series can pick up related material that will be published in this Learning from Lyme series.
The Lyme Liturgy page is at: https://baronbrasdor.art/learning-from-lyme-liturgy/ but again you can see it in the top right pages menu.
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