THE ART OF COMPASSION
ASK YOURSELF WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR THE WORLD, NOT WHAT IT CAN DO FOR YOU
DEATH is perhaps a subject with which Westerners are intensely uncomfortable, but very much a focus of the work of Buddhist Nun Venerable Rinchen, who has just marked 20 years since her ordination and is at the helm of the thriving Khacho Yulo Ling Buddhist Centre in the Far North.
Rinchen is irrepressibly lively, energetic and pragmatic, and has a busy schedule, including several hours of daily meditation and attending a diverse range of events as an interfaith community leader, but her passion is palliative care.
Buddhism itself emphasises the impermanence and transient nature of everything – and at its core is the end of suffering.
Khacho Yulo Ling began at its current home – a former church in a bustling inner city suburb of Cairns, in 2004, the same year that Rinchen began as volunteer coordinator for Maitreya Hospice Care, a group of 20 volunteers, working with patients who chose to die at home.
The hospice care program ended 10 years later due to a lack of funding and Rinchen stayed on as a volunteer at the Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service palliative care at Gordonvale Hospital.
“It’s one of my passions – death and dying,” she says. “I provide end-of-life talks, care in terms of relaxation and meditation for people struggling with endof-life issues, and I have sat with hundreds, probably, of people as they’ve passed away over the years.
“Quite often I might be involved with the family, or it might be a person who hasn’t got anyone. I don’t go in from a Buddhist perspective, except for a perspective of compassion and respect for whatever a person’s spiritual tradition is.”
But she answers questions from the patient about the dying process and says Buddhism has concepts around what is happening with the body as it nears its end.
“It can give an understanding of the body as it is disintegrating toward the end stages, and take the fear out of this process – it is a normal process,” Rinchen says.
“So if you can explain it in very simple terms for somebody – ‘you will go through this but don’t panic, relax, there’s nothing you can do about it so the best thing you can do is relax into it instead of fighting it’.
“Most people fight, try and get up, try and move, and it just makes the agitation within the body way worse.
“In the olden days there was much more ritual around death, birth and marriage, nowadays everything is just so commercialised; somebody dies and it’s all over, red rover – the family is still grieving but there’s no rituals to put this very profound experience into, and that’s where I think modern day we have really lost the art of honouring the dying process.
“I often call myself the midwife of death – it’s a birthing process, when someone dies they’re doing that reverse process, they’re going out of the world, and it is sometimes painful, messy, really awful but it’s beautiful at the same time. It is a very profound privilege to be part of that.”
Rinchen says some people facing the end of their life are full of fear because they do not have a faith.
“It’s too late to give them a crash course in anything, so the best thing to do is to give them comfort,” she says.
“It is not really about beliefs, it’s about a mind that is at peace.”
Rinchen says supporting families through the terminal illness of a young person can be tougher.
“It’s harder because you see an enormous amount of grief that’s different to when somebody has had a full and rich life and they’re going out, and it can be more of a celebration,” she says.
“So it’s harder to be a part of that and to help people find some meaning – stillbirths, I was there when a baby was born, it is traumatic, but I don’t see it like others might, because it is not the end.
“From a Buddhist perspective, the physical body has gone but the mental continuum goes on until it wakes up, until it is free of suffering, until there’s enlightenment. My heart breaks in those situations, but it doesn’t devastate me.”
The divorced mother of three adult children says she was always a spiritual searcher and became dissatisfied with new-age philosophies, seeking something deeper. “On a retreat, I heard, ‘all suffering comes from selfishness, all happiness comes from selflessness’ and my whole life did a complete turn,” she recalls.
“I thought if I can’t work from that premise of selflessness, because in most of our life it’s all about ‘me’ – if I can’t go back and work from the perspective of what I have to give rather than what I can get or what I hope to get, then I thought it is not worth doing. Buddhism started to fill in the pieces that I felt were missing.”
She maintains the common ground is that all beings want to be happy and to be free from suffering. But anger, hatred, jealousy, envy and pride in our hearts blocks our ability to find true happiness.
“Genuine happiness comes from what we bring to the world, not what we get from the world,” she says. “If we were to shift our focus from selfishness to selflessness, from blame to taking responsibility, we would start to create a better world for ourselves and others.
“While we think world peace is the responsibility of governments and world leaders, we miss the point – a peaceful world is only possible if the people in it are peaceful.”
And becoming peaceful means learning to live from an open and loving heart.