When I couldn’t do anything else, I could still meditate.
Here are some basic instructions I made for the M.E. society of Oxford. They can be used by anyone who has no chronic illness too.
I suggest you start with the meditations in the recipe Life, Care for Life, and the elements, in We are part of nature.
Transcript of video:
I’ve had ME for 43 years, and as anyone who has it will know, there is nothing to recommend it. I want to tell you how I coped with it, with meditation. Coped? How I made something of lying in bed for hours and hours, when I couldn’t do anything else and everyone was out having an exciting life. It’s been, in many ways, like a lifelong meditation retreat for me. Some of the time I’ve been better and done things. But every day there’s always horizontal time, lots of it.
I’ve done lots of retreats, but it hasn’t been like going on retreat and sitting up with everyone else, ringing bells and chanting. Can’t do that. I’ve had to learn a way of meditating, which was horizontal and with a meandering, wandering mind that went in and out of clarity, and follow that. It taught me 24 hour awareness, though.
So what did I do? When I was young, I learned the violin, which is a skill that takes a long time to learn, and this using meditation was like using my body and mind as a violin and learning to play it, learning with skills, what to do to help my state of mind.
I had lots and lots of methods from the Tibetan tradition, heaps of methods. So there was always a task that I could work on to explore. So actually, I didn’t just do the violin. I learned the whole orchestra. How to deal with emotions and how to imagine things. Basically how to be present with everything that was happening, be present with the pain, the physical pain, the emotional pain, find the joy, find the comfortable bits, find the inspiration, the whole orchestra.
It’s never, ever been boring. It’s always been hard, hard, playing the violin is hard, playing your body-mind when you’re very ill is even harder. But worth it. I don’t know what I would have done without it. It made my life creative. There was always something new to explore, something new to discover. Every day I discovered a new way of being with things and finding ways to open my awareness.
It was a whole worldview of, who I was, what my life was, what my life was about, the meaning of things. All the stuff on this website came from me lying in bed, percolating everything through in that meandering way.
Later I taught other people who also lived with this miserable condition. That was good sharing stuff with others too. So never boring, quite painful and difficult, but never boring.
I hope that inspires anybody who’s suffering this awful thing, I think a lot of people are now.