Beyond Your Feelings About Type One Diabetes

Editor’s Note:  This article was written by Kou Sam Tullman of the DiabetesSangha, which will be hosting a 6-week course on meditation beginning on January 15, 2023. The course has been created specifically for and by people with type 1 diabetes. For additional information on this course and their free daily meditation practices, visit www.diabetessangha.com

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.”
— Rumi

Another New Year, a new slew of resolutions.

As we begin a new round of testing our willpower against the flow of our lives and attention spans, perhaps the most important thing we can ask is why.

Always—hopefully—the baseline motivation is to make our lives better in some way. Only, the assumptions we make about how we’re going to get our lives better are often laden with self-judgment and “grass is greener”-type thinking.

But Rumi tells us that out beyond that, there is a field.

I’m here to tell you, this field is real, and taking regular visits to it—becoming acquainted with it, let’s say—is the greatest favor you could ever do yourself and the people close to you.

You probably have an inkling of what I’m talking about by now—I’m talking about meditation. But the question is not whether you know what I’m talking about—it’s whether you know the field.

In this field beyond our ideas of good and bad, there’s acceptance. There are immense joys, beyond our daily highs and lows. There’s also deep sorrow, a kind of caring heart that wakes us up to see both our own struggle and the real struggle of those around us.

But perhaps most importantly for us here, there’s space. Lots of it. Space for all of the experiences life has to offer. Space, even, for all of the inevitable fuckups that happen as part of the complex process of managing life with diabetes.

And when there’s space, there’s clearer seeing. There’s room to learn. There’s room to, over time, make better habits—whether in diabetes management or other parts of our daily life. Slowly, when we’re really seeing, we can craft a beautiful life, a life we truly want to live.

I started my meditation practice in a January. It was 7 years ago. It wasn’t so much a resolution as a sliver of hope that I could live the life I hoped to live—a happy one. It wasn’t meditation alone that did it, but my practice, over time, has turned this sliver to a crack, and that crack to a window, and that window to a door. A door to a good life, that I can choose each day whether to enter. A door to this field Rumi mentions, beyond our self-judgments and hangups about life.

So how do you start with meditation?

There are many excellent ways to enter, but what I and many of my friends have found (along with countless people through the last few thousands of years) is that this process tends to work better when you’re going through it with other people like you, who can share with you, who can learn from you, who can feel the things you’re feeling.

That’s why we started the DiabetesSangha, a meditation community for people who live, in some way or another, with diabetes. Everyone is welcome, no particular prior experience or beliefs are necessary and a range of styles of meditation are practiced each week so you can figure out what works for you.

There are tons of other options too—lots of meditation apps with excellent resources for beginners, many good books written on the topic for all experience levels and meditation communities in every city (or online!) of all different sorts of flavors. Each of these can be a great option for different people at different times.

But the important thing is that reading about it doesn’t help you find this field, nor does showing up to a few in-person events (though that’s a great start!). Consistency helps you find this field. Commitment, born out of really recognizing that you want to be happier and healthier, is the best fuel for this journey. Earnest commitment will go a long way in changing your life, down to the very way the cells in your brain are wired.

This commitment is a choice to put in a little bit of time (even just five to ten minutes) to live a lot better, even when it is uncomfortable (which you can count on!). But it has to be made freshly every day—you can’t lock in your commitment for a year the way you can buy an annual subscription at a discounted rate.

This agency, as difficult as it is, is an essential part of the practice of living a better life; saying yes to what we know helps—even when it’s bitter—and saying no to what we know is less wholesome—even when it’s a delicious option!

Let us see this New Year as a set of days, a collection of collections of countless moments, each presenting an opportunity, each asking us what’s next.

Zen student and poet Jane Hirschfield puts it best:

“If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.
If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.
If a shoe is put into the bowl,
the leather is chewed and chewed over,
a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten.
A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl.
Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness,
it eats them.
Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry.
The bowl cannot be thrown away.
It cannot be broken.
It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless,
and, big though it seems, fits exactly in two human hands.
Hands with ten fingers,
fifty-four bones,
capacities strange to us almost past measure.
Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—
with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.”

This year, whatever’s in it, fits perfectly in your hands. What it brings is not up to any person, but how you hold it—or don’t—may end up being one of the most important decisions of your life. In meditation we learn how to hold that bowl—the bowl of your life, right now—more skillfully.

So, what’s the motivation behind your new years resolution, again?

To get started with your meditation journey, you can explore resources at diabetessangha.com