Healing: A Woman's Journey from Doctor to Nun

When sadness or restlessness arises, I can sit still or lie down and remain still in order to be present for it. I recognize the old tendency to grab a book or to look for someone to talk to, in order to fill up that void or to distract the buzzing of my mind. But I practice to be still because I no longer wish to run away from myself.

I had to patiently hold on to my breaths and footsteps; they are the reins that can restrain and keep my thinking at a steady and reasonable speed, so that I can recognize the wrong views and wrong thinking that are arising in my mind.

Peace, happiness, and freedom are the delicious fruits of the Beginner’s Mind, and they are also the essential nutriments for the Beginner’s Mind. Thus, if we fail to nourish peace, happiness, and freedom in ourselves daily, our Mind of Love can become eroded. Status, power, stress, frustration, worry, hope, aspiration, expectation, and disappointm

the moment I “come back to myself” is the moment I am aware of my body, mind, feelings, and sensations but I am neither swept away, ignorant, indifferent, nor repulsed by them.

Yet I feel more peaceful and fulfilled than ever before. It is because I have learned the practice of stopping, of non-wishing and non-seeking.

I saw that I needed diligent awareness to slowly develop the capacity to not grasp or have aversion towards anything that I recognize inside or around me.

These attachments were the sharp blades that caused my bleeding. With each thought and notion that I was able to let go of, I felt freer. Liberation was becoming concrete and experiential moment by moment and day by day. One does not need to be an old guru, a wise person, or a corpse in order to taste liberation.

I have surges of anger, and I also have waves of sadness. I have learned to see it is not just my own sadness, but it is also my mother’s sadness and her mother’s before her, from

impermanent. Yet I hold on to the illusion of permanence, and when a change takes place, I suffer. I suffer because I take for granted what is, and I want to control what is not.