Category: Pastoral Care

Contemplating Disease – Cessation – Part 13j – January 21, 2019

Next is the instruction to straighten one’s body.  This can be problematic for many who are sick, especially with some internal injuries and with skeletal challenges.  Here is my thinking on this, and I insert my thinking here because Chih-I doesn’t talk about this in his writing, the challenges of not being able to straighten one’s body. Currently I am going to the Veterans Administration Hospital here in Syracuse three days a week for various…

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Contemplating Disease – Cessation – Part 13i – January 20, 2019

Chih-I talks quite a lot about compassion and how important it is to cultivate when one has dis-ease, disease, and illness.  As I have been studying this text I am struck by the direction he suggests compassion needs to flow.   Usually when compassion is mentioned, at lease in the medical settings I’ve been in and the other conversations I’ve read and heard outside hospitals, the direction of compassion goes from the healthy towards the…

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Contemplating Disease – Cessation – Part 13h – January 19, 2019

I’ve brought up pain and I would like to diverge slightly away from Chih-I for a moment.  Over the past several years doctors and nurses have been asking people to rate their pain on a scale, usually 1-10.  Some people are not quite sure about how they are supposed to rate pain, it hurts and they want it to stop. Some fear if they say it is too low, then their pain will be ignored. …

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Contemplating Disease – Cessation – Part 13g – January 18, 2019

Objects as Inconceivable I’m not sure many of us have considered illness or disease as inconceivable, especially since we are experiencing it and so we are deluded into thinking it is conceivable (conceptually understood).  Yet there is an aspect to disease, dis-ease, that is also, perhaps for a lack of a better  way of conceptualizing this, metaphysical in nature.  Let’s see if I can clarify this. Currently the Veterans Administration is monitoring my health for…

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