I recently received a note from an old friend of mine. She’s got the flu and she’s now in bed, looking for sympathy and annoyed that she can’t do all the things she’s used to doing. She’s exhausted, restless… and exhausted with being restless.

I suggested that being sick is nature’s gift to us, to say stop.

We usually know this, but we can also go beyond that and use being sick to fiddle with stopping much more than our usual activities. When we’re sick, not only do we get to drop all our usual busyness, but also the itchiness and (sense of) identity that leads to the impulse to be busy.

We can do BedZen.

So, I invite people to try that — in bed or, if you have a meditation practice and enough energy, or you’re not actually laid up, in a more conventional meditation posture.  The important part is to find a place in our minds where we can notice and accept the stillness without questioning it or wishing it away.

Often, even in spiritual practice, we have a tendency to seek accomplishments and its marks.

In Zen, with the most renowned part of the practice being utterly within our minds, we may use our actions and words to demonstrate to ourselves (and others) how good our practice is or how kind we’ve become.

In Vajrayana practices, kind teachers have developed the method of counting accumulations, of mantras or prostrations, for example. So, we may think that great numbers may correspond to great accomplishments.

But true practice is beyond these things. If we return to the helplessness of being sick, we may find a way to step into our practice more directly, letting our true nature slip into place, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to be. We can all practice BedZen.