Honeymoon After Chicken Pox

Take note of the dead to heal

A nice article published January 4, 2011 in "La Croix " by Danielle Moyse, reproduced here for readers of Psychology & Meditation that questions our relationship to death through the work of Trungpa Ch.

It is a small text called "take note of death" from a seminar held Chögyam Trungpa United States in 1973, in which the Tibetan Master offers a novel approach healing ( The heart of the matter, Seuil, 1993). He first developed the idea that it should not be confused with a mechanical repair designed to eliminate symptoms. Such confusion, far short of actual restoration of health does, according to Trungpa, that extend the state that specifically caused the illness! So that healing is not where we thought he could find: the doctor is often assumed to have completed its work when it came to the end of the pathology for which, indeed, the patient had come see, especially when he silenced the message and sometimes salutary was the disease. (See also Moses D., Although born well-being-good die, Eres 2001)

Because the disease is not primarily a failure of the body-machine. It appears as indicates that, through the symbol of Plague, Albert Camus had identified his part as an expression of a "divorce between man and his life," which defines the circumstances in the work of Camus, "the feeling of absurdity" ( Plague , Gallimard, 1947). However, if the assumption of the spiritual master and, by implication, that of the novelist are true, medicine, too exclusively mobilized by the search "treatments" should be reformed in depth, leading to real cures. Because the disease may appear as a symbol, and Camus suggests making a "plague" an allegorical figure, it indicates that it returns, like any symbol, to something larger than itself. It is on this that we should act together to heal, let alone to heal.

Now man is sick, says Trungpa (like Camus), a certain relationship to life. Unnecessary, therefore, to consider restoring health without really work on that report. What then is the tone? that of a certain lack of interest, attention vis-à-vis oneself. "Let was hit by a car or you have a cold, there is a moment where we did not pay attention to his person, "he said. Of course, there may be many reasons that lead to such a distraction, and it would reintroduce the idea, too rooted in our minds, that medicine is very powerful, as to believe itself capable of solving all factors that have unhinged patients, that is to say, after illuminating etymology of this word, which led them to lose their own trail.

Car it's quite the opposite movement prolonging medicine within the meaning of humility which could, according to the hypothesis of Tibetan thinker, bring to a reform as it may lead to real cures. Trungpa postulates that "the healing relationship is the meeting of two minds", the physician and patient, and that this meeting can take place if both take note of "the common experience from birth, old age, death and fear that underlies "... It is of course more comfortable" look down on the patient and disease, thinking that you are lucky not to suffer from this evil. " But "the attitude toward death <étant jugée> of prime importance, yet it is helping the patient to consider the possibility that joint could" begin the healing process. " In this regard, "it is not necessary, Trungpa said, to try to hide what is hard to tell." This does not mean that we should not, he suggests, bludgeon the likelihood of his imminent death to the patient. "We should ... help him understand a little better idea of loss - the possibility no longer exist and dissolve into the unknown. "For avoid getting into this horizon is, paradoxically, prevent life, while conversely heal really mean" that life no longer impedes the patient face death without resentment or expectation. "

Or, propose a way of healing is simply proposing a revolution in Western medicine. Daughter of a certain mechanistic conception of life inherited from Cartesian philosophy, our medicine, undoubtedly acting in many ways, it nevertheless allows us to be in relation to death other than an ambition of every power that excludes life? And can it in this context help doctors to project themselves on the common ground of the possibility of old age and death that would bring the patient? However, believing himself (and us) to protect, she considered the danger to which we expose ourselves when we kill death?