On July 15th 1996, I was born healthy, viable and able to hear. A short three days later, I was stricken ill and was rushed back to the hospital. I was diagnosed with Meningitis and spent a week in the hospital before I was cured. Once again, three weeks later, I was running a high fever that would not go down and my skin had a yellowish hue to it. This time, I was diagnosed with Jaundice. The doctors were unable to bring my fever down and tried everything from putting me on ice to giving me a certain drug called Gentamicin. To this day, we will never know what caused my deafness whether if it was from Meningitis, Jaundice, the prolonged high fevers, or Gentamicin; it could be a mixture of all events. But ultimately in the end, my deafness had become my own dukkha. My greatest accomplishment is and always will be overcoming my own disability but it is also my greatest dukkha in life. This is the …show more content…
This can be the first step in letting go of craving or longing for me to be normal and face uncomfortable situations better. But before I even start expecting other people to change their reactions to me, I needed to change the way I was thinking. My consciousness is not altered just because I couldn’t experience aural sensations. Instead, I should believe that I’m fortunate to have a deeper connection with five other senses I have: vision, olfaction, taste, touch and thought. Each of these senses combined with the lack of my aural senses are heightened and allow me to interact with the world differently. So I will attempt to meditate with concentration on vedanā and hope that it’ll lead to deep mindfulness in hope that I can experience the reality of impermanence and the way things are instead of how it appears to me. Most of all, I needed to accept the First Noble Truth: the way things