Sublime

Ginger was a fifty-one-year-old social worker who had worked for years in a clinic in California’s Central Valley. A committed meditator, she took a month off to come to our spring retreat. At first it was hard for her to quiet her mind. Her beloved younger brother had reentered the psych ward where he had first been hospitalized for a

When I first went into practice, I had rather firm notions of the proper boundaries between doctors and patients. I wore a starched white coat and revealed little about my personal life. I never called patients by their first names and felt insulted if they called me by mine. An older colleague found my rigidity amusing. He worked in shirtsleeves

I tried to think what could be accomplished in this visit. She was in good condition for her age, but she faced everything from advancing arthritis and incontinence to what might be metastatic colon cancer. It seemed to me that, with just a forty-minute visit, Bludau needed to triage by zeroing in on either the most potentially life-threatening

I read everything I could by John Sarno, a New York physician who had written several best-selling books about his conviction that a great deal of back, neck, shoulder, and carpal tunnel pain is caused by repressed negative emotions—such as stress, anger, and anxiety—in people inclined to bottle things up.

When healthy, they still bring in printouts and lists, but these no longer bother me. I now recognize them as expressions of anxiety about mortality—also serious stuff.

specter.

amalgam

propriety.

Up to that point, both women had expended an enormous amount of energy trying to meditate their way through the problem of being human.