Yesterday I returned home from studies and retreat in Asia.What I feel most is a sense of gratitude for what has been given by the wise ones - greater understanding, a taste of authentic inner freedom, hopefulness, and the responsibility to meaningfully use what I’ve been given.
Each time I return from retreat I realize how much more there is for each of us than our day-to-day mind can imagine. As a physician I am humbled at how little I have been able to offer. Diagnosis, treatment, and remedies for biological conditions are essential, and we are very fortunate for the advanced state of our biological knowledge.
But the treatment of a physical illness does nothing to end the cycle of suffering that robs life of its deepest joy, peace, and beauty. We avoid seeing this hidden and root cause of a limited life by assigning it a variety of labels – boredom, meaninglessness, fatigue, addiction, anxiety, confusion, doubt, mood disorders, chronic illness and so on – and then treating the surface symptoms. We treat the symptom and miss the cause.
The absence of an inner life, the primary cause of these life-depleting symptoms, lies unnoticed behind these labels and is accepted as ordinary life with its inevitable ups and downs. We hopelessly try again and again to fill this emptiness with fleeting material and sensual pleasures, outer success, or approval from others – all external remedies that invariably become a source of attachment, addiction, and the cause of further suffering.
But spiritual suffering is the result of an underlying inner disturbance whose true cause is the loss of sacred wholeness, wisdom, and the experience of our inner home. We cannot resolve with biological remedies the mental disturbance and confusion that results from being in exile from who and what we are at the core. The remedy must properly fit the diagnosis. The recovery of our essential self, what some would call spirit or soul, requires inner work not outer remedies. In modern times inner development is the most important thing we can do to enhance the quality of our health and life.
What one learns from wise people is that life can be filled with an enduring and sustained peace, joy, and full health, irrespective of outer circumstance, if we attend to the authentic source of our suffering. Once we touch it we find that our very nature is wholeness, peace, kindness, and happiness. Its been there all the time - covered over by an overactive mental life. It is our ultimate medicine, our ultimate refuge.
If we can turn our brilliant logic and analysis inward, as we have turned it outward to know the external world, we can discover the sources of a half-lived life. We can discover this authentic source of happiness and peace that resides within.
It’s this source of authentic happiness and health that we seek as we study, reflect, and practice in retreat. And when, for a brief glorious moment one hears and touches the truth it is known with an irrevocable certainty. Piece by piece, understanding by understanding it all becomes clear and the genuine and abundant human promise becomes directly available through an open heart and mind. We begin to own who we are and dispose of acquired and inauthentic identities.
Returning home, where life again takes on its usual complexity and challenges, begins the real test of what has been learned. It’s never perfect and there is always a drop off. But slowly, life seems clearer, more sensitive, open, free, and peaceful. The baseline keeps moving up and one feels closer and closer to an authentic life.
I awoke early this morning with an unusually clear and open mind. Life sparkled in its freshness and firstness as yet undisturbed and untainted by yesterday’s thoughts, labels, patterns, and habituated ways of knowing.
I would never have imagined so many years ago that the maturing of a healer only began with biological knowledge and skills. That was the easy part. Mining the depths, the great mystery of life and its possibilities, is the essence of all healing. The union of inner and outer healing is the whole healing that is the source of human flourishing. It seems as if medicine’s dream of alleviating suffering and offering a profound and enduring health and well-being is really possible. And this is what I now hold as the perfection of health.
www.elliottdacher.org
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