Mindfulness as medicine - Sunday with a book

Every single day you are reclaiming your life

It’s Sunday and for once the sun is shining. I can hear the birds chatting busily in the apple tree next door, Bhakti purring happily close to me under the duve and nope it is not 6 in the morning! Hurray! I was able to sleep until 8! This is progress!

I picked up my pen, my journal, phone, pressed play and continued to listened to another chapter of “Wuthering heights” by Emily Brontë while … drawing. There is nothing like reconnecting with a book I love, a book I read for the first time while I was a teenager and I still feel a deep connection with. Classics … never loose their charm. Talking about classics … I wonder … 100 years from now … which of the modern authors are going to mean anything to the future generations? I know Jane Austen will still be there, Bronte sisters, Cekhov, Dostoievski, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Socrates, Aristotle …. who else …. I wonder.

Routine done, time to get out in the sun, time to get some natural vitamin D .. by the sea.

The overarching title of my blog is “Reclaim your life in micro steps” - this is exactly what I am doing every single day, whenever I can … whenever I am able to take a deep breath in, pull myself together, hope for a better future and surely this is what many people all over the world are doing now.

A walk around the harbour, a coffee in an Italian cafe, a Japanese mochi, a book by a Vietnamese nun - multiculturalism at its best.

I came across Sister Dang Nghiem a few month ago and read her autobiography called “Healing”. I knew immediately that she is somebody I want to know more about because people who experience trauma have fascinating survival stories and at times, stories about thriving while figuring our what is the next step.

“Mindfulness as medicine” is the type of book I can read with ease nowadays when I have so little time - it is a compilation of short vignettes based on Dang’s life, experiences, short stories with strong underlying messages. I have to say, this is how I see myself writing my life stories.

Before becoming a Buddhist nun, a follower of Thich What Hanh, Sister Dang was a physician, saw a lot, studied a lot in the western way of treating patients and was able to pull together two styles of caring for patients - one where the physical body is kind and the other, more balanced where the soul/life story plays a big role in the treatment.

I came across the story below in the book and thought to myself …. this explains a lot … it really does ….

“ …. a patient who I met when I was doing an internship in Kenya, I asked a scrawny, elderly man, “What is your sickness?” He gently replied …. “Sadness is my sickness. Sickness is my sadness.”