Stop and sit. Place hour hand on your heart. Breathe. Close your eyes. Feel the rise and fall. Feel the thumping push from inside.
Consider the eventual arrival of illness. Visualise your aging face. Look into the certainty of your death. Recall the loss of loved ones. Resist the presence of difficult people. Breath.
Most of you will respond to the rising anxiousness with your faith, your visions, your self confidence. A great blessing to have these charms as ointments and balms to soothe the pain of existence. A few will not find such relief and may even run in panic from the room.
The lesson of the Buddha is not a religious instruction. The dharma is an antidote. An effective antidote for just such people holding their hand on their heart and steadily growing more anxious. The dharma lesson is not a vision for a changed world proding us to embark on an evangelical crusade to convert our neighbours. It is an antidote specific to the suffering individual unable to find relief using the traditional spiritual and metaphysical linaments.
The four truths pointed to in the dharma ask me to look directly into the eye of death, illness, aging and anxiousness. Can I accept that the impermanent conditional world around me includes me? Can I see my own hand creating the angst because I want it the be otherwise? Can I choose to stop poisoning myself? Looking it in the eye, I follow a balanced life path – pacing myself and keeping to practical expectations. Will the antidote wash it all way? No.
I fantasize there will be a door I missed in all my searching which I will stumble upon near the last minute. Opening this door I will step through and escape the harsh reality of mortal existence. Damn. I must have put that antidote down around here somewhere.
