A Letter to My Younger Self, at the Beginning

Dear Dana,

Tomorrow is our birthday.

I know you’re scared, even when you don’t have language for it yet.
I know your body has become unfamiliar terrain, and the doctors’ words feel heavier than your own name.
I know you think practice will save you—or at least make this make sense.

I want to tell you something gently, before you turn practice into another way to survive yourself.

The Dharma you’re looking for cannot be controlled, mastered, or forced to explain itself.
It has to be permitted.

At first, you’ll try to do Zen correctly.
You’ll try to hold the teachings tightly, hoping they’ll steady the ground beneath a body that keeps betraying you.
You’ll mistake discipline for safety.
You’ll mistake understanding for peace.

But what you’ll slowly learn—again and again—is that the living Dharma does not respond to force.
It speaks when it’s allowed to speak.
And it asks you to listen without bias, without agenda, without trying to get somewhere else.

Your illness will teach you this before Zen does.

aHUS will strip away the fantasy that you’re in charge.
It will collapse the timeline you thought your life was supposed to follow.
It will demand presence—not philosophical presence, but this-body-right-now presence.
You won’t always like how it teaches.
Sometimes it will feel cruel.
Sometimes it will feel unbearably intimate.

But it will keep returning you to what is real.

Here’s what I wish you knew sooner:

The Dharma is not an answer to suffering.
It is what remains when suffering is not resisted.

Your innate nature—what the old texts point to—does not disappear when your kidneys fail, when your energy vanishes, when your future feels uncertain.
It is not improved by health or diminished by illness.
It does not belong to the version of you that could do more, be more, sit longer, or understand better.

It’s here even when your mind is foggy.
Even when you’re angry.
Even when prayer feels hollow, and sitting feels impossible.

But to recognize this, you’ll have to stop trying to use the Dharma.

You’ll have to let it move first.

That means listening with a heart-mind that isn’t trying to confirm what it already believes.
It means letting teachings pass through you slowly enough that they can be retained—not memorized, but digested.
Embodied.
Trusted.

You’ll learn that some days, practice looks like sitting.
Some days it looks like resting, dialysis, or chemo infusions.
Some days it looks like grief, or cursing, or telling the truth about how tired you are.

And all of it counts.

The living Dharma doesn’t ask you to transcend your body.
It asks you to stop abandoning it.

You don’t need to become someone else to be worthy of awakening.
You don’t need to wait until you’re healed, or calm, or less afraid.

What you are looking for has never left you—even now, even then.

Be patient with yourself.
Let the Dharma breathe.
And when it speaks, listen—not to be saved, but to be honest.

With love,
From the one who is still learning how to listen.

Happy Birthday.

-FDW