"How would you feel if you lost your mother tomorrow ... your spouse ... your sister or your closest friend? Suppose you lost your job, your savings, and the use of your legs on the same day; could you face the prospect of spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair? Pain is inevitable, suffering is not. You can suffer through things like that or you can face them openly--the choice is yours."

--Henepola Gunaratana

India, 563 B.C.: Prince Siddhartha is born in the Himalayan foothills. A soothsayer predicts, "If he remains inside the palace he will become a universal monarch." To insure the prediction comes true, the king shields his son from anything remotely unpleasant. Despite these precautions, a palace outing accidentally exposes Siddhartha to the three "ugliest" facts of life--an old man staggering on crutches, a diseased person with crooked limbs and a shroud-covered corpse.

Siddhartha is profoundly despondent seeing the suffering that is part and parcel of human life: sickness, aging and death. He leaves the lavish palace and for six years tries every religion India has to offer to find an end to suffering. Alas, each falls short. Finally realizing there is no one left to turn to but himself, he sits under a tree to meditate, vowing, "I will not stir until enlightenment is mine." During six days in deepest meditation, experiencing every human fear and desire, Siddhartha finds the cause of human suffering and becomes the Buddha, meaning "The Enlightened One." He proclaims the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, his prescription for ending humanity's suffering.

Imagine a religion created to deal with crooked limbs, sickness, aging and even death. Could there be anything more perfect for those of us who have disabilities? Buddhism isn't what most Westerners think of as a religion. It holds no promise of heaven, offers no God to hear your prayers or cure your disability. But that doesn't bother Jesse McKinney, who has cerebral palsy and uses a power wheelchair. A Zen Buddhist and the author of A Mind On Wheels: The Inner Journey, he says, "I have little use for blind faith. I need practical solutions to cope with the suffering in my life. When the reality of not being able to go to the toilet by yourself is a constant concern, you may hope for God's saving grace; but in the meantime you must figure out how to get on the toilet."

Working in rehabilitation, I am confronted daily with the suffering, anger and fear that prompt the "ultimate questions" associated with disability, chronic illness and impending death. "Why is life so unfair!" "Why should this happen to me?"

Many people with disabilities have found that Buddhism holds answers to these questions, and provides practical, do-it-yourself solutions for the suffering that goes hand-in-hand with disability. So here is an introduction to the Buddha's "12-Step Program." See if you can apply each step to your personal circumstances, eliminate your own suffering and answer--or decide not to answer--disability's ultimate questions.

The First Noble Truth

Life is suffering.

Why? Because we start to die the moment we start to live. Even if our lives are one joyous moment after another and we are always perfectly healthy, accomplished and wealthy, we lose it all when we die.

Clearly, no life is one happy moment after another. And while everyone experiences pain, sickness and loss during a lifetime, those with disabilities experience pain, sickness and loss daily. These are constant causes of suffering. Or are they? The fundamental notion underlying all of Buddhism is that pain and suffering are two very different things.

"Pain is a direct signal from the body or the mind that something is wrong," says Harvey Hilbert, Zen Buddhist, psychotherapist and hemiplegic for 35 years. "Suffering is our mental response to pain, when we think 'I shouldn't have pain!'" So pain is when you hurt; suffering is when you think you shouldn't.

The Buddha taught that life is neither fair nor unfair and that there are absolutely no "shoulds." Why should you have become disabled? Well, why not? Thinking that life should be fair, that certain things should or shouldn't happen to you, is the cause of suffering. The first step to ending suffering is separating the pain you feel from the notion that you shouldn't have to feel pain.

The Second Noble Truth

Suffering is caused by craving and clinging.

Craving is when we think the pain in our lives should disappear; clinging is when we think our pleasures should last forever. But where did these "shoulds" come from in the first place?

Primarily, the "shoulds" come from society, which creates rules to control our behavior so we can live in harmony. Before we are able to speak, think or know our own minds, we learn these "shoulds" and adjust our thinking and actions to become what society considers "normal." The trouble is, rules that are a blessing for society can be a curse for its members who become disabled.

"Much of the suffering that comes with disability stems from the constant attempt to measure up to purported social norms," says Winfield Clark, student of Tibetan Buddhism, composer and paraplegic for 40 years. "Disability causes invidious comparisons with 'normal' people and reveals our 'inadequacy' as members of society."

Unfortunately, the small, sensible voice inside us--the voice of our own inner wisdom--has been drowned out by society's "shoulds" and we become robots, living our lives on autopilot. When we become disabled, we can no longer fly the "normal" course that society dictates.

Say Goodbye to "I"

You can't blame society for conditioning us, because society is only a bunch of individuals just like us. There must be some "should" deep inside every member of society that makes all the other "shoulds" necessary.

The deepest "should" in each one of us is that we should never become sick or disabled, get old or die. We do not want to think of a world in which we don't exist or accept a life in which we are not always young and physically capable. Alas, this "should of all shoulds" is not reality; it is a wish that can never be. The essence of the Buddha's enlightenment is that protecting the illusion of the ever-young and healthy "I" is the root cause of all suffering.

"Your success in handling disability depends on letting go of the illusion of the 'normal, immortal I,'" says Barry Corbet, student of Tibetan Buddhism and T10 paraplegic for 31 years. "If you have no 'I,' you have nothing to lose; if you have nothing to lose, there is no reason to suffer."

Interdependence Day

The second part to the fiction of the "normal, immortal I" is the notion that our "I" is totally separate and independent from--and can exist alone in the world without--anyone or anything else. This notion of the independent "I" is also an illusion. Humans have never been independent. Back when our ancestors lived in caves and hunted, some were more skilled at tracking animals and others better at throwing a spear. Today, few of us hunt our own food or manufacture our own wheelchairs.

Of course people with physical limitations require more help with hunting, spearing and activities of daily living than do others. But many of my patients say that unless they are completely independent of help from everyone, they consider themselves totally dependent and therefore totally without value. Some will do anything, including damaging their bodies and actually becoming more disabled, to maintain their illusion of independence. This kind of clinging causes immense suffering, which ends when we accept that we are all interdependent.

Interdependence is actually a natural law we learned in high school: For every action there is a reaction. The Buddha applied this law, called karma, not to physical actions but to human actions.
"The Buddha said that every object and occurrence in the universe is interconnected," explains Clark. "No one can be said to exist independently." Karma means that because no event, no person, no thing is independent, everything we do can affect everything else in the universe. A heady notion indeed! What's more, these effects will someday circle back to affect us.

The Buddha called this karmic circle conditioned or dependent co-arising, meaning that all our thoughts, feelings and actions arise from the conditioning we have experienced in our lives, conditioning dependent on all our experiences with everyone we have ever met, whose actions toward us are, in turn, dependent on our actions toward them. And it is our decades of conditioned thinking, patterns of behavior and societal "shoulds" that Buddhism can help us erase. When the conditioning we undergo as children falls away, says Zen teacher Nanrei Kobori, something wonderful and free remains: our "vibrant central core ... our unconditioned self."

Disability: Karmic punishment?

Some Buddhists believe in reincarnation and say that what happens to you in this life results from your actions in previous lives. Does this mean that being born with or acquiring a disability is punishment for "bad karma"?

Abbie Freedman, student of Theravada Buddhism and T5 paraplegic, says, "I believe my accident (and its consequences) is a result of something I did or didn't do--or because of something I didn't handle properly--in a past life. I now get another chance to do it right. I don't think of it as a punishment."

And neither did the Buddha. He said it "does not lead to profit" to contemplate past lives, which we cannot remember, when there is so much we must learn--and unlearn--here and now. "It is really unproductive to think about past lives," says Clark. "We have more than enough to handle dealing with this one."

Billie Henry, a practitioner of Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism who has a long list of disabilities, agrees. "Some think we have chosen our illnesses before we were born as a means of showing our dedication to Buddhism," she says. "If I chose my illnesses before my birth I must have been out of my mind at the time!"

"Already broken"

A final, frightening fact of life is that it is not just our cherished "I" that changes and dies. Everything and everyone on earth, the earth itself and the universe that contains it, will change and pass away. You will lose your mother and father, maybe your closest friends. You may lose your job, your house, your savings. The Buddha said that clinging to anything causes suffering.

Accepting that everything changes--even the things and people we love the most--can actually be a source of joy, kindling a greater appreciation of the momentary and fragile beauty of all things. Here's how Thai Buddhist teacher Achaan Chaa describes the joys of accepting change:

"You see this glass? For me, it is already broken. I enjoy it. I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. But when the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it shatters, I say 'Of course.' When I understand that this glass was already broken, every moment with it is precious."

When we accept that everything animate and inanimate is "already broken," a physical disability--even a terminal illness--loses its abnormality. In truth, anything that is not broken, not "disabled," is abnormal.

The Third Noble Truth

The end of craving and clinging is the end of suffering; this is nirvana.

Nirvana is when you have eliminated clinging and craving, when the "shoulds" and the "I" drop away and only your peaceful "vibrant central core" remains, fine just as it is, even though its vessel is already broken.

Ending craving doesn't mean you can never want things. You can even want to be cured of your disability. What isn't helpful is turning wanting into craving. Says Freedman, "Wanting a cure is not unhealthy. But craving a cure can make life miserable, keeping one from being in the moment and appreciating what is presently 'right' in one's life. I neither cling to staying paralyzed nor crave a cure."

Jim Bedard, a Zen Buddhist, knows all about craving, clinging and curing. At 42, he was diagnosed with leukemia and given two weeks to live. The diagnosis was right, the prognosis wrong. Bedard's book, Lotus in the Fire, describes how Buddhism helped him deal with a year of the intense pain of chemotherapy, repeated surgeries and imminent death. "Of course we should seek treatment and even a cure," he says. "But ... at some point we must regain our balance and see that there is more to life than struggling to get better, which can keep us stuck in the past with only an illusion for a future."

The Fourth Noble Truth

The last truth is the Eightfold Path, the Buddha's curriculum for eliminating clinging and craving and achieving nirvana.

Right Livelihood means that you don't earn your living by killing, hurting or taking advantage of other living things, be they people or puppies or poplars.

Right Speech and Right Conduct are avoiding acting in ways--in anger, for example--that are hurtful toward others and therefore karmically hurtful to yourself.

Right Effort is when we do something good without greed or expecting some personal benefit.
Right Concentration is the means to counter "wrong" speech, conduct and effort. The most widely known Buddhist tool for developing right concentration is meditation.

"There is nothing very mysterious about meditation," says Clark. "It consists of sitting quietly and watching the mind, being centered in the present moment. When thoughts, memories, images or feelings carry you off, you just refocus on the 'now.' Even when craving, anger, fear and pain arise, you don't cling to them or push them away; you just notice them and let them go."

Through meditation our conditioned patterns of thought and feeling, our judgmental "shoulds," can be recognized and allowed to fall away. We can then finally hear that solid, sensible voice of our own inner wisdom and allow it to direct our thoughts, feelings and actions.

Right Mindfulness is "the awareness of speech, thoughts, feelings and actions as they happen," says McKinney. "True Buddhist practice is not meditation but life itself, being able to deal with whatever life dumps on us." The goal of Buddhism is to treat each and every moment as a meditation, without craving, clinging or "shoulding," to be completely and fully present in the here and now. Imagine turning all the things you hate doing, that are hard and take so long to do because of physical limitations, into meditations--bathing, dressing, even your bowel program! Life could be one continuous, peaceful, unconditioned, "shouldless," fully present now.

Right Action is the resolve to follow the Eightfold Path, and may be the most difficult step. It takes tremendous effort, constant attention and sheer guts to stare your most profound fears in the face, do the exact opposite of what you "should," and let go of your "I."

"I have extinguished various physical cravings, like tobacco, alcohol, to help my body suffer less," says Vicki McKenna, student of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism and the author of A Balanced Way of Living: Practical and Holistic Strategies for Coping with Post-Polio Syndrome. "The difficult stuff--the mental and emotional cravings--takes tremendous effort to extinguish!"

But there is no other way to live, says Hilbert: "Buddhism is the ultimate in dealing with your disability. And I do differentiate between dealing and coping. Coping is 'getting through,' like putting Ora-gel on a toothache. Dealing is facing your fear, your pain, your heartache, and addressing them head-on."

Right Wisdom is the result of applying The Four Noble Truths, the payoff for all your effort in following the Eightfold Path. The fruition of Buddhism is living without fear, knowing that whatever happens--disability, illness, pain--may be the lesson that causes you to let go of your "shoulds," release your "I" and enter nirvana.

Buddhism provides the ideal method for living with a disability, the ultimate triumph of mind over matter: If you don't mind, your disability doesn't matter! But Buddhism is neither an anesthetic nor a panacea; it is very hard work, just like life. This is as it must be, concludes Corbet: "Life can be hard but also good. Buddhism helped me see that. Life is hard. Life is good."

So if you're going to live with a disability anyway, why not get some peace from all the pain? This may sound like the kid digging through a pile of manure to find the pony but, as Corbet says, "Disability is a source of teaching."

The Buddha said, "Take nothing I say on faith or on my authority. Come see for yourself." There are hundreds of books describing the different schools of Buddhism and the many kinds of meditation. So see for yourself. You have nothing to lose but your suffering.

Richard Louis Bruno has been a student of Buddhism for 25 years, a rehabilitation practitioner and psychotherapist for 20 years, and a wheelchair user for 13 years. References for this article and his book, Handicapped Buddhism can be found at members.aol.com/harvestctr/buddha.html

Disability & Spirituality Does your spiritual practice have a name? Is there a link between disability and spirituality? Between disability and faith? Does your spiritual practice help you cope with disability? Is disability itself a spiritual practice? We asked. You answered. Justin Dart I Believe ... I believe in a science of living based on the sacred value of the quality of each human life. I believe in the profound power of love. I believe in a vast power that created and operates the universe. Most people call this power God. Whatever we call it, we humans are part of it, but we are light years from understanding it. The link between disability and spirituality is that we are forced to face the hard reality of being human. We are forced to reach deep for strength that many nondisabled people don't think they have. Similarly, the link between disability and faith is that we develop faith in potential--human or divine--that is beyond understanding. I believe that many members of our magnificent disability movement develop powerful bonds of spirituality that enable us to transcend personality and self-indulgence and to achieve "miracles," to approach oneness with humanity as a whole. Justin Dart, 69 Polio paraplegic for 51 years Washington, D.C. Strength in Weakness I am a Christian. Through disability, I discover weakness is fertile soil to discover strength. Christ's strength can be perfected through human weaknesses. There's a story that illustrates this: If you were a mountain climbing guide, would you put on white gloves every time you reached down to help a climber over a particularly dangerous spot? Of course not. And every time you reached out to help that climber he'd see your calluses and sores and scars. He'd see you kept climbing despite your wounds, and those wounds would encourage him to continue. Helping others is like that. Often you help them more by allowing them to see your weakness rather than your strength. Don Deal, 45 C3-4 quadriplegic for 19 years Tuscaloosa, Alabama Yomi Wronge Solace in Silence I am a Christian, but I don't fit well with organized religions. I have an intimate relationship with God that I foster through prayer, meditation and reflection. I find that if I'm really quiet, God fills me with peace in the most trying times. I believe there is a link between spirituality and all human conditions in that everyone is a human manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Is disability itself a spiritual practice? Gee, I hope so. Yomi Wronge, 27 Osteogenesis imperfecta Salinas, California Dan Wilkins Sacred Connection Spirituality, to me, is the search for and practice of connectedness, whether that be to a God or Goddess, to the earth, to ourselves or each other. It involves an awareness of the existence of something bigger. One thing I have learned along my journey is that the sacred is found in everything and everyone. Therefore everything and everyone is worthy of our respect and compassion, of our endeavor to understand. It is the sacred that connects us all. In my search for meaning, precipitated by my disability, I have discovered a connection at a very basic human level, not only with my disabled brothers and sisters but with all people. I see with bigger eyes because of my disability. It is something I am very proud of. Dan Wilkins, 42 C5-6 quadriplegic for 19 years Luckey, Ohio Vickie Beck Welcomed, Accepted To me, the form of faith practiced and spirituality are two different things. I am an Episcopalian. I am also an associate in the Order of Julian of Norwich, which means I have promised to follow a certain prayer and worship routine. My spirituality is expressed more personally and internally; it's an awareness of God's presence in me, in my life, and in the surrounding world. I believe in a God that completely welcomes and accepts each person as they are. I believe that living with a disability is an acceptable, valid way of life. And so I have chosen a faith with a history of working to make this world a more accepting place. Vickie Beck, 48 Cerebral Palsy, spinal arthritis Clearwater, Florida No Answers Yet I used to be a terribly devout Christian. Now I'm questioning that. There are still no answers. The worst title I've ever read is Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. That's because you can't look at life like good people only deserve good and bad people only deserve bad. I'm trying to grapple with whether spirituality can maybe commpensate for the limbs, for the life I'm missing. I've gotten into the habit of going to the theology section at Barnes & Noble to buy books on Zen. I'm looking for answers. Not why bad things happen to good people--I don't know if I'm a good person. I'm just trying to find some spiritual connection so I can deal with this life as it is, with this body, with this lump, as I call it. Maybe there will be a spiritual connection that will give me an answer. Dave Taylor, 34 Quadriplegic, quadruple amputee for 2 years Ocean City, New Jersey Ekula Saq An Easier Ride I don't think [my spiritual practice] has a name but if it did it would be some form of very basic, modified hatha and raja yoga [disciplines involving ordered breathing, postures and meditation]. There may be a link between disability and spirituality, especially if identifying with a body that functions unlike others is unpleasant. Concentrating on or emphasizing the soul, the divinity of man/woman, the "light," and not the body or material things, may be strengthened by disability. Of course it's not necessarily true--some people might turn to the Bible while others the bottle or needle. I was fortunate in that I began [my practice] before I was injured, which makes me in retrospect appreciate the power of the "spirit" that much more. It's made the ride a little easier. Ekula Saq, 57 C5-8 quadriplegic for 12 years Palo Alto, California Greg Smith A Guided Movement I think the disability rights movement is guided by God, and I believe that disabilities are not flaws. God is perfect and he makes no mistakes in his creations. I'm often offended by the focus on "healing," with its underlying message that if we had enough faith in the Lord, He would heal us. I think that kind of thinking promotes bigotry against people with disabilities and formalizes it with "divine" authority. God has blessed those of us who are demonstrating the perfection of the human spirit as we correct the way the world views disability. Greg Smith, 35 Muscular dystrophy Yellow Springs, Ohio Problem Solving Life is life, and spirituality is just part of it. I feel that a physical disability is one of those obstacles we face along the path of life, like a wart or a tooth extraction, and we just have to work around it. We who have learned how to cope are nothing more than good problem solvers. There is no known name for my spirituality. Maybe Christian, but not in the usual sense. There is a power and it is within me. Without that I wouldn't have made it this far. The question now is, can I do it again? You know I'll be trying to do a better job the next time around. Marty Ball, 62 Polio paraplegic for 54 years Pine Plains, New York