How to Be Sick by Toni Bernhard, Sylvia Boorstein Page A

will be okay too. I’ll lie in bed and listen to music or find a movie on TV.”
     
    A second equanimity practice comes from another Thai Forest monk, Ajahn Chah, whom we’ve heard from before. In his book A Still Forest Pool , he offers a statement so powerful that I’d committed it to memory long before getting sick:
    If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will know complete peace and freedom. Your struggles with the world will have come to an end.
     
     
     
    I love this teaching because it allows me to take baby-steps in the direction of equanimity. I’ve found that before I can even take that first step and “let go a little,” I first have to recognize the suffering that arises from my desire for certainty and predictability. Just seeing the suffering in that desire loosens its hold on me, whether it’s wanting so badly to be at a family gathering or clinging to the hope for positive results from a medication or desiring for a doctor not to disappoint me. Once I see the dukkha in the mind, I can begin to let go a little. As soon as I do that, I get a taste of freedom that motivates me to let go a little more.
     
    I used this practice while waiting for my ankle to be x-rayed. There I was, twenty-four hours after slipping down the two steps, my ankle still throbbing in pain, my knees bruised from crawling around the house, my body aching in fatigue from sitting in a wheelchair way beyond my capacity to be in an upright position. As thoughts whirled around about whether I could handle this injury on top on my illness, I searched for help in coping with the dukkha in my body and in my mind. Help came from Ajahn Chah’s teaching on letting go. I thought, “I’m suffering because I don’t want this to be happening but, like it or not, it is happening, so can I let go just a little—just a baby-step?” I could. And, having done that, I could take another baby step. After a few minutes, I was flooded with equanimity—with the taste of freedom that comes with peaceful acceptance of the unexpected complications that arise in our lives.
     
    Our tendency is, of course, to want our desires to be fulfilled. But if our happiness depends on that, we’ve set ourselves up for a life of suffering. The strength of our equanimity in the face of not having our desires fulfilled is the measure of whether we will know the peace and freedom to which Ajahn Chah refers. It’s the measure of whether, as he said, our “struggles with the world will have come to an end.”
     
    Imagine living in a world where we’ve let go completely and it’s okay if we can’t go to that family event, it’s okay if a medication doesn’t help, it’s okay if a doctor is disappointing. Just imagining it inspires me to let go a little. Then it’s easier to let go a lot. And every once in a while, I let go completely and, momentarily, bask in the glow of that blessed state of freedom and serenity that is equanimity.
     

Loss
     
    Facing losses that feel overwhelming—from lost health to lost friends to lost livelihood—deeply challenges our cultivation of equanimity. But we can sometimes find teachings and practices in the most unexpected of places. One day I was watching an interview on television with the actress Susan Saint James. Three weeks before the interview, her fourteen-year-old son, Teddy, was killed in a plane crash. Her husband and another son were seriously injured and several of the crewmembers died. In the interview, Saint James talked about how close she was to Teddy because he was her youngest child and the only one still living at home. In addition, due to his work as head of NBC sports, her husband, Dick Ebersol, was gone much of the time. She said that she and Teddy were like roommates and had become best friends.
     
    Then, emanating deep calm and acceptance, she made this most astonishing comment: “His was a life that