Charlie Holles

Of course the above title should be self-evident to a Buddhist but sadly that is not how I have felt till very recently. I have lived with mental illness most of my life. The symptoms of OCD (an anxiety based condition) began to show before I was a teenager and by the time I left school the disorder was firmly established. This was accompanied by depression which has always come and gone in phases….I simply could not acknowledge the fact of mental illness.

But perhaps the most important thing has been that, at last, I have begun to accept that my illness is my koan. I no longer expect that it will be magically cured. Maybe it is in part that I am slowly understanding how the ego, the self and the personality that we think we are do not constitute our true nature.

Issue: only available as part of Journal, Autumn 2018 pdf to download

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