Toni Bernhard on Living with Chronic Illness

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Tony Bernhard. It's her

second appearance on The One You Feed podcast. Tony is a former law professor at the University of California, a practicing Buddhist for over twenty five years, and the author of many books, including the one we discussed today, How to Be Sick Your Pocket Companion. Hi, Tony, Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. I'm so glad to be here. Yeah, it's such a pleasure to have you back on the show. You were on a number

of episodes ago. I can't even imagine how many ago, but several years ago, so it's wonderful to have you back. We're going to be talking about your book, How to Be Sick Pocket Companion. We'll get to that in just a moment. We're gonna start, like we always do, with the Parable. And in the Parable, there's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandmother and she said, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. Well. I love the parable, And it actually comes right out of many of the teachings from the Buddha that I've been studying for maybe thirty years, because he talks about habits of the mind and how you really become the one you feed, and that if you are always reacting in anger, you become an angry person, and if you act out of kindness, you become a kind person. And the beauty of this eric is that if you're feeding the wrong wolf, you

can start to feed the other one. I think it was Seneca who said, you know, treat every day like the first day of your life, something like that. And so one of the beauties of our mental states is that they're changeable, and we can change the way we think and the way we act and the way we speak. And people should try this. Every time you're kind to somebody, it's easier to be kind the next time. You're basically becoming what you feed. And so I love that parable.

I think that's a great interpretation. I want to ask you a couple of questions about that, though, because I think this is a nuance and we're gonna get into this nuance a lot in your book. But you know, we start to talk about these things like greed and hatred and fear and in some cases their action states and and sometimes they're feeling states right. And you know, part of what I think that we want to get better at in our lives is allowing ourselves to sort

of feel what we feel, but not feed it. And so do you have any thoughts on you know, how do we allow ourselves to have the emotions that we're having but not feed them. So if we're if we are feeling let's say self pity, right, there's some self pity going on. It's not an emotion we want to feed and grow. We don't want to repress any emotion and force it away. And so I'm always interested in

this nuanced area. Well, it is nuanced because if you're feeling angry or greedy, or full of what I call don't want mind, which is something certainly I experienced during the day, if you try to push it away an aversion, it often just gets stronger. I don't know which of his books it's in, but you know the Vietnamese zen monk tick. Not Han always says, uh, take care of

your anger, take care of your greed. And I never understood what that meant, but now I see that you have to let it be and arouse self compassion for the pain that it's causing you. And I often recommend that people speak to themselves silently about specifically the painful emotions they're experiencing. I'm so frustrated that I have to stay home all day and it's almost been a year and I'm really lonely. When you let that into your heart,

that's when change can begin to happen. Because all emotions, all thoughts, are impermanent, and so if you're feeling angry, there's no need to say, Okay, well, then I'm an angry person. I'm a lonely person. That's why I'm always going to be because I permanence. It's a universal law recognized in all spiritual traditions. And so have compassion for

those painful feelings. And when you express that kind of compassion, you're telling yourself you care about your suffering, and right then they will soften, and then you can begin to change your response to the world and to other people and start to set the intention to be kinder and to be more patient, whether it's with yourself or others. It's something I feel like I'm always exploring on this show.

Sort of finding that middle ground between indulging and repressing emotion, you know, allowing them to have the space they need, and yet not inflaming them or encouraging them. Yes, when you repress, you really are intensifying the emotion because it's still there. So there's an opening of the heart when you allow yourself to feel compassion for the pain and instead of what often happens is self blame, which multiplies

your suffering. So you may be feeling angry about what's happening in the world right now, and then you say I shouldn't feel angry, and you get mad at yourself for feeling angry. Well, you've just doubled your suffering, right, And we're going to explore that idea a lot in this interview. I want to sort of set the stage a little bit here for the conversation with you. You've written a number of books, but the last several have really been in the vein of dealing with chronic pain

and illness. That's a condition that you have in your own life. So I'm wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about your own story, just to set the stage. My story is eerily similar to what's going on in the world right now. Twenty years ago this May, I came down with a pretty serious viral infection. But the doctors said, it's a viral infection. You just have to wait for it to go away. Antibiotics don't

work on viruses. And the acute symptoms went away, the sore throat and the cough and the fever, but it left me feeling. I call it the flu without the fever. I have flu like symptoms, and so if people would just recall how you feel when you have the flu. You may be able to get out of bed for a while and do a few things, but then you're back in bed, and so I have not a lot of energy. There's a limited number of things I can do. My books I've written from the bed. I'm sitting on

my bed right now. I just pull my laptop over on days when I can, and I write. One reason I say it's eerily similar is that there's a term out there called long haulers, and they're a lot of people, pretty high percentage, maybe thirty eyes. The last I read people who get COVID and then six months later are still feeling fatigue or flu like symptoms and so they think that what happens is that the immune system simply

doesn't return to normal. It reads you as sick, and so it's just fighting this perpetual battle against a virus that, in my case is probably no longer in my body. So that's my life. I'm pretty much house bound, try to go for short walks when I can with my dog. And it's been twenty years and I had to give

up my profession. But about ten years ago I started writing books, kind of bringing together what I'd learned from Buddhist practice and my own experience to try to help people live a life of purpose and even enjoy at times despite chronic pain. When I say chronic illness, I'm including chronic pain. A lot of people with chronic pain. I've learned that there are people in their teens and

twenties who suffer from chronic pain. You know, this is part of being human, is having bodily troubles at times, sometimes chronic Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And I remember from our first interview we talked about something and it is stuck with me ever since, and I found it to be really a valuable thing in dealing with pain in my own life, and I get back pain. I don't know that i'd say I have chronic pain, but I have back pain often enough that you know,

I would list it among my woes. But we talked about this idea that what we normally refer to as pain is really sort of three different things. There's there's three parts that make up what we just generally just call pain. And I'm wondering if you could walk us through that, because I just found that so helpful. Yeah. I talked about this um probably in more than one of my books that, interestingly enough, two components of pain are mental. The first, of course, is the bodily pain itself.

So I know about back pain. Yeah. I actually like to joke that since I became chronically ill, my back is my best feature. But I used to suffer. I sometimes it would be off work for a week or two because my back would go what we would call it out. There's the pain, and then there's the reaction to the pain. I hate this pain. I shouldn't be in pain. It's this aversive reaction, which is not helpful because oddily, pain is just part of the human condition.

Everyone's going to experience it at one time or another. So the appropriate reaction is self compassion, which simply means being nice to yourself, do what you can to take care of it, instead of reacting with aversion that that feeding that wolf, the angry wolf, and the aversive wolf. And then the third aspect of pain are the stories we tell ourselves that just increase our emotional, mental, whatever you want to call it, suffering, stories like I'll never

be able to go for a walk again. I'm sticking with the back pain as an example. I'm gonna lose my job because I'm out for so long. People aren't going to want to hang out with me because they like to do this sport and I can't do it. In Buddhism, it's called papacha, this proliferation of thought, which we do all the time. You don't need bodily pain to be doing that. We do that all the time with anything that's bothering us. We tell ourselves stories which

we then believe without any evidence. It's what is the cause of most of our suffering in life in my view, because the fact is we don't know what the future holds, and tomorrow it might feel better, and if not tomorrow, maybe the next day, and there are things you can find to do with the pain that might be enjoyable anyway. So the proliferation of thought that is around either physical

pain or even mental pain. For example, if I'm upset about maybe I've had a phone conversation and the person says, well I've got to go and gets off the phone, well, the appropriate response would be to say, well, she had to go. But we will then start to tell ourselves stories. Well, she doesn't want to be my friend anymore because I'm chronically ill, and so I can't meet her at restaurants

for lunch, and we call on these whole stories. And I give several examples telling stories on myself in my books about times that I've done that only to find out later and that, and that's actually one of the examples in my book that she had to go because one of her children had, you know, texted her and said I need to talk to you right now. Mom. Well, what would I do if one of my kids did that,

It would have said I have to go. So it's this proliferation of thought, and so that is the third factor. So it's interesting that how we make things worse when what you basically had there In my example was what I used to call a bad back. It always got better, but I made myself quite miss sewable with my mind on the way to getting better. Yep. I love that because I think it points out a couple of really

important things. And the first is that two out of the three things that make up what we call pain are mental and emotional, which means we have some degree of ability to influence them without having to change the underlying pain at all, which we may have no ability to do. We may, we may not right, but by working with our mind and our emotions, we can lessen what we would consider sort of the total amount of suffering.

And then the second thing that you said in there, and I think is really important, and I joke about this a lot, is like you're saying, like it's really about not making things worse. I've often said that's like what I teach people a lot is how to not make things worse. I'm like, that's not going to show up on any motivational posters anywhere, but boy, do we have a remarkable ability to do so. And the ability to stop making things worse can really bring about a

whole lot of improvement in life. It can be transformative. And you know, this is where mindfulness practice comes in. And I hesitate when I use that word now, because it's a bit like compassion. It's entered the mainstream culture, and sometimes a word when that happens, it loses its its meaning because people are using it for everything. But mindfulness simply means paying attention to what's happening in the moment.

And I mean, it's fine to pay attention to sounds and sites, but what's most valuable to me is paying attention to what's going on in my mind. Because what I've just described, this proliferation of thought where I think, oh, she doesn't want to talk to me anymore because I can't have lunch and all of that. One of the reasons that happens is that we're not even aware we're

doing it. If we can become aware, if we practice saying there, I am going off on one of these crazy tangents that there's absolutely no reason to believe, or to use your phrase, you know, there, I am starting to make things worse. You can stop it at that point. That's mindfulness. It's a practice of becoming aware of what your mind is doing and then switching gears over to self. Compassion really nothing more than being kind to yourself. There's

a wonderful zen teacher who's passed away. Her name was Joco Back, and she wrote I never met her, but I read some of her books and she has this wonderful suggestion. She says, stick to the facts. If your back is hurting, what are the facts? The facts are my back is hurting. Second fact, I don't know when it will get better, but it always does, so I know it will. And that's about it. Before I came

chronically ill and had to leave my profession. The other fact might be I'm going to have to arrange to make up a couple of the classes that I've missed because it was a teacher. So stick to the facts, and that is the way to not make things worse, because it's something concrete that you can do. What do

I really know here? What are the facts? And the rest is just that storytelling that my husband and I sometimes call it being often la la land, and like you and I have been saying, it just makes things work. That's to me, the principal value of mindfulness is that ability to say, oh, I'm about to go off in La la land. I'm not going to take the trip and just come back to the present moment and see

what you can do to help with the pain. I love that stick to the facts, and the question I love to follow that up with is once I've established what the facts are is then to sort of ask myself what am I making this mean? That question is so helpful because it seems to me as humans we can't not make meaning. That's what our brains do. They have to do it. They can't live almost without it. So recognizing that it's really helpful to go, well, what am I making it mean? And what else might it mean?

You know, at least let's get some alternate explanations on the table besides my usual worst case scenario. I love that. You know, sometimes people think that meditation is about not having thoughts. Well you can't at least I can't stop thoughts from coming, but I can examine them. I can investigate. And actually the Buddha that was one of his I'm going to forget. It's seven or eight factors of enlightenment, and one of them is investigation, which is exactly what

you're referring to. What does this mean? And what are other possible meanings? Am I making things worse for myself by attributing meanings that may not even be true. It's interesting because a zen is not my tradition, but I love so many teachings of Zen teachers as wonderful Korean Zen master song Son who came from Korea to the United States, and he has this teaching called don't know Mind? And wow, is that freeing? It's just another way of

stating what we've been saying. But to recognize that you don't know even what's going to happen in the next moment, for me, there's freedom in that. Of course, as with a lot of these practices, the trick is to remember to do it. I'm not suggesting any way, shape or form that I'm a liberated person, but I know I know a lot of practices that can lead me in that direction. And don't know mind is just a wonderful expression.

And even when you say what does this mean, maybe you don't know what it means in terms of what tomorrow may hold or what the rest of the day may hold. So I think when Jocobec says stick to the fact, she's also saying stick to the present moment. What's going on now, and is there anything you can do to alleviate your suffering, be it mental or physical, or to alleviate the suffering of others. In my view and many other people's views, there's no better calling in

life than to alleviate suffering. Life is full of suffering. There's no way around it. And there was something you said, you're not going to see this on a poster. Well, you're not going to see this on a poster either. You know, we have this uh cultural idea of the power of positive thinking and always being positive and never letting anything get in the way of our peace of mind. Well, life isn't like that. You lose loved ones, either by death or just even by separation that we've seen since

this pandemic, there's been a lot of separation. To deny that this has been a tough year, it makes things worse because you're not accepting the way things are and focusing on how you can be kind to yourself and others to alleviate the suffering that this last year has brought. YEA, yeah, absolutely, And I think a lot of what we're talking about here. You said it in one of your books, is you know I found myself face to face with that stark reality. A lot of the time we simply do not get

our way. I like to call it want, don't want mind. We often live in a world of I refer to it and I think my blue book, and if only you know, with my illness, if only I could travel to Hawaii. Uh, Like I used to love doing from California my husband, I would try to go to Hawaii when we could. If only I could go back, then I would be happy. Well, I don't think so, because life is a mixture of joys and sorrows, of getting

what you want and not getting what you want. Maybe I haven't met a fully enlightened person, but I suppose if I were, then I would just take things as they happen and everything would be okay. But for the rest of us, life is a mixture of joys and sorrows, and successes and disappointments, And when things don't go our way, my approach is to say, first of all, don't push it away in aversion, accept whether it's sadness or loneliness, let it into your heart. It's part of being human.

And then arouse compassion for the suffering. And I say that a lot, but it's not that hard to do. Sometimes people write to me and say, you know, I didn't realize until I read one of your books that I could be kind to myself. I find it easy to be kind to other people, but I've found it hard to be kind to myself. And I like to say, there's so little that we control in this life. That's kind of an don't know mine thing. I don't know

what's going to happen tomorrow. I control so little, But one thing I do control is how I treat myself. I see no reason not to treat yourself kindly. And that doesn't mean you can't reflect on past behavior that wasn't so skillful and try to change the way you behave in the future. That's valuable. But to uh hold a negative judgment and old guilt, it doesn't benefit you and it doesn't benefit others when in doubt, be nice

to yourself, right. It is one of those very foundational practices is to learn to to be more self compassionate. You know, I think when people are expressing it it's hard to do. It's just a lifetime of not doing it. It's a lifetime of relating to ourselves in a certain way, and anything that we've done for a long time is more entrenched. It takes more effort to change those patterns absolutely, and there are reasons sometimes why people find it hard to be nice to themselves. It comes out of a

lifetime of conditioning. And that conditioning can include people in your life who were super critical, a parent who was always saying that's not good enough, that's not good enough, or some other person in your life who was always critical, and you've turned that on yourself, and so you think you're not good enough. So this takes us back to the beginning of where we were talking about the one you feed, and a lot of people feed the wrong

wolf out of a lifetime of conditioning. But you can change. The Buddhist said the mind is as flexible as the balsam tree, and I've always loved that, And this is what neuroscientists are telling us today, that the mind is changeable, nothing set in stone. If you think of yourself as an angry person, you can start right now to undo that conditioning. You might think about, why are you this way? Did you have a parent who was always saying you

weren't good enough? When I first started teaching, I always thought I wasn't good enough, and then one day I said, well, who is that benefiting? I'm doing the best I can. And that was the beginning of my becoming a better teacher because I let go of this thought I had that I needed to know everything and excel in everything, and I learned it was okay, for example, to say to a students question, I don't know the answer to that. Maybe say I'll look it up and get back to

you or something. And so people who have that strong inner critic, all I would say to you is that you don't have to be that way. Start with little baby steps. Don't expect overnight to become this self loving person, but start with baby steps. Do something kind for yourself and see how it feels, see how good it feels, and then you'll find the next time will be a

little easier and a little easier. I've received thousands of emails from people who read my books, and they find these sections on self compassion to be life changing because it's never occurred to them to be kind to themselves. Let's turn our attention here a little bit to some things specifically relating to being sick, chronic illness or chronic pain. And we've sort of been circling around this, but one of them is this idea that we blame ourselves. I

talked about parental conditioning. I'm obviously in the US, but my guess is that this is true almost everywhere in the world. But I'm talking mostly about my environment, where we are bumb barded by the media, whether you're on your computer or watching TV, with this idea that if you just eat this way, or exercise every day, or get rid of all the stress in your life, you'll be healthy. Until when I mean, you'll just you'll never be sick, you'll be healthy, you'll be all of this.

So what happens is that when life doesn't turn out that way, sickness, pain and illness come with the human condition. I like being alive, and so I have to accept that part of that is bodily discomfort that happens to everybody at different ages. But when it happens, especially to people who are young, they blame themselves, and they blame them selves because they've been taught that it's a sign of weakness. When I didn't get better after I got

that viral infection almost twenty years ago. I thought it was some kind of weakness of the will. I would go to bed at night because I was worried about keeping my profession, and I would just say, you are going to wake up in the morning and you're going to be better. I was like, I thought I could mentally push myself to get better, and I couldn't. And so there was a lot of self blame, and it

was fed by the media. It was fed by people around me who had good intentions but would say things like are you better yet, And so there was a lot of self blame. And what I would say to people is you're not alone. This is a cultural phenomenon that people are seen as weak if they're sick or in pain. I remember an episode of The Sopranos way back when Tony's dad, I think, was diagnosed with cancer and he's told Tony said, don't tell anybody because they'll

think I'm weak. And that has stuck in my mind because when he says that, it means he thinks he's weak. So you're not alone, and there's no reason to blame yourself. We're in bodies, and bodies get sick, they get injured, they develop pain. It's a natural part of the human condition. So I see no value to self blame. It just again to go back to our themes, it just makes

things worse and ever makes things better. Yeah, I think this is one of those really interesting points because I think a lot of this sometimes comes from not just the media, but also comes from really well intentioned wellness practitioners.

And what I mean by that is, I think there's this emerging idea that lifestyle factors are really important in our health, and that there's a role to be played, not just going and getting to pill, not just expecting it to be your doctor, that there's a role to be played taking care of our own health. But like any good idea, if you extend that idea too far,

it becomes damaging. And I think that what you're talking about is this idea that we extend that idea, like, well, if I eat well and I exercise and I get sleep well, I'll never get sick, which is preposterous. You might be less likely to get sick of certain types of things, right, So there's value in that, you know. I often see it in the alternative medicine movement, where a lot of these ideas really pick up a lot of strength. You know people I typically ally myself with.

But I see this taken too far. It becomes patient blaming, which is really, as you say, not helpful and not correct. You really said it beautifully because I didn't mean to suggest that eating well and exercising and reducing stress in your life isn't a good thing to do. It can certainly help you physically and mentally, but when people develop, there are some physical deterioration of the body. I hate to say it, but it's an inevitable part of all.

Like I said, I like being alive, and so I'm willing to accept that as one of the conditions of being alive. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm not taking care of myself as I can with this pandemic. I'm doing everything to not get that virus, and I don't expect to get it because that's how careful I'm being. So it doesn't mean that I'm saying that these aren't good suggestions. It's just that we're in bodies, and bodies

get old. One of the things that I've learned from people who write to me is that there are I've heard from so many people in their twenties who have chronic pain conditions, uh, like ruma, toroid arthritis, or I mean, there's so many of them, and they get told by parents and friends and sometimes doctors, you're too young to be in pain. Well, what is that trigger that triggers self blame? But the fact is chronic illness it's not likely to hit in your twenty but it can, and

so it's just part of life. There's so much uncertainty. Equanimity is something I talk a lot about in my books, and it's really learning to roll the punches instead of hitting your head against the wall when you've come up against something that you can't do anything about. It's not that I haven't tried to get well these last twenty years. I've tried everything, alternative medicine, Eastern medicine, Western medicine. But

I have an immune system dysfunction. And that's one doctor said to me, and one infectious these disease doctor said, what we need is a restart switch like you have on the computer. But we can't, so we have to live with what you've got in the book, which I think is really helpful. You say that anybody can get sick physically or mentally, and anybody can develop chronic pain, you know it, just it happens. It you know it,

just it happens. And blaming ourselves. You talk about blame and embarrassment being really common parts of if you've got a chronic condition. Yeah, I did right. In the self blame section of the book, I wrote about embarrassment partly because I was so embarrassed and it would be triggered by people saying, are you better yet? And I was embarrassed that I couldn't get better, And of course at the bottom of embarrassment is self blame. What's wrong with

me that I can't regain my health? Well, there was nothing wrong with me mentally. I had a physical problem and it's been with me a long time, and I've learned not to be embarrassed by it. But you want to be able to work on, saying, going back to Joco, back sticking with the facts. I tripped, I fell, I got embarrassed. People try to help me, now what's next in life? But we tend to just keep the painful part,

the the suffering, the mental suffering. We hold onto it, and when we do that, we're missing what's happening in the moment. I'm not saying this is easy. It's something to commit to, to start paying attention to what you do in the mind that makes you suffer unnecessarily emotionally and mentally. Exactly, it is not easy. Thank you so much, Tony for coming on the show. You and I are going to talk for a few minutes more in the post show conversation. I want to talk about a couple

of other techniques that we can use. Things, uh, something you call the draw bit practice and they are you sure practice. We're going to talk about those in the post show conversation. Listeners. If you'd like to get access to the post show conversations, add free episodes and special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a Poem, go to one you feed dot net slash support. Tony. Thank you so much for coming on. It's such a

pleasure to talk with you again. And I think that your work is so important because I do think there's so many people out there suffering and that our natural tendency is to make it worse, and I think your work gives people some real tools to not do that. Oh, thanks so much for having me, Eric, I really enjoyed it. If what you just heard was helpful to you. Please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You

Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the one you Feed community. Go to one you Feed dot net slash Join the One

You Feed podcast. Would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.