It was early 2021, vaccines came on the scene, and a faint light at the end of the Covid tunnel came into view. For over a year, I had almost totally isolated myself, I had practiced will, patients and fortitude in the name of protecting and preserving my health. Just as the world was starting to seem like it could be a safe place once again, I got quite a rude awakening; it turns out that even with isolation, even after vaccination, safety was nowhere to be found…

I had a series of health scares and one body part after another was sickening and breaking, threatening to be the death of me. It started with a broken tooth, not so bad. And then a finger that randomly turned blue and triggered a cascade of labs and blood work that showed I may have/will develop and autoimmune disease. And finally there was the suspicious growth that looked to my doctor like cervical cancer…I waited for testing, waited for results, my rheumatologist told me I just needed to wait and see if I ended up developing lupus, or mixed connective tissue disorder, or some other terrible, debilitating, degenerative disease. It dawned on me that this whole life is sitting around waiting to break and die.

Needless to say, this was a period of extreme stress. It was a period of close inspection of my body. It was a period where I really started considering the intersection between my body and stress, the dukka of rupa, the fear from form. For all of Covid, I had waited for safety, I had fantasized about the freedom a vaccine would bring. It turns out, there is no safety to be found for a breakable body and freedom isn’t an escape from the bondage of my living room, its an escape from the bonds of my deeply delusion views. In this next chapter, I share the contemplations that took shape in the early days that I realized I was just waiting to break and die.