Healing Through Insight Meditation | Page 2

a simple decision. She thought that if the tumour was malignant, a biopsy might further stimulate its growth. She herself believed it to be malignant, and if this was confirmed she would not want to undergo medical treatment. Why not? “There is no guarantee of a cure,” she said. “Even after an operation or radiation treatment, the cancer may spread again. The side-effects can be worse than the cure. I didn’t want to go through the agony I have seen other patients endure. I want to keep my mind intact, fully mindful and alert. I do not want any drugs to obscure the clarity of my mind. The way I regard it is simple. If I undergo treatment, I may or After her cure in May 1982, she emerged from intensive practice, but remained at the Mahæsø Yeikthæ to serve as a nurse to monks, nuns, and meditators. Since 1980, she has been observing eight precepts, which include abstaining from food after midday. In November 1990 when Sayædaw U Pa¼ðitabhivaµsa moved to Pa¼ðitæræma, a new meditation centre, she followed to offer her services to meditators there.Sister Hla Myint has dedicated her life to the service of the Buddha’s teaching. Since she has been trained as a nurse, she is helping by offering her medical services. She also has a great desire to promote and spread the Dhamma, especially insight meditation. Wherever she goes, she encourages people to meditate and to attend the meditation centre for retreats. One day she hopes to organise retreats in small villages throughout Burma. Some villages have no meditation teacher so she hopes to arrange for meditation teachers to conduct retreats in such villages.“I think every meditator should try to be at least a sotæpanna,” she said. If one attains to that level during practice, one has seen nibbæna and will be certain to have no more than seven rebirths. Not taking rebirth means permanent freedom from travelled to remote areas, spending a total of about 12 months away from the centre.At one village in Moulmein district, she practised for about a month, doing six hours of continuous standing meditation daily. For about a month at another centre in Pegu, she took one meal a day and did walking meditation daily for six hours at a stretch from 11.00 am to 5.00 pm. Sometimes she felt very light, as if she was walking on clouds, while at other times there was a lot of pain.Initially, the tumour continued to grow until it reached the size of a betel nut. It was hard and round. Her hearing was affected so that she had to start using a hearing aid. While she was practising at Mahæsø Yeikthæ, some friends who were doctors would urge her to go to the hospital to have the growth removed. “They warned me that my tumour was growing bigger,” she said. Sometimes people would touch the hard lump on her throat and comment on how big it was.She experienced a lot of pain during her practice, but never gave up. She was determined to practise until her tumour subsided. During meditation she sometimes felt the tumour throbbing with pain. The pain would move down to her chest. She felt nauseous and vomited. Sometimes the pain would depressed. She went to the Mahæsø Yeikthæ and meditated for 50 days. After that, she said, she felt very much better. She did not feel troubled about the problem any more. Ever since then, she had firm faith in meditation. Whenever she had leave, she would go to the Mahæsø Centre at Moulmein and practise with Sayædaw U Pa¼ðita who was then in charge of that centre.In 1973, she felt a growth in her throat. She could feel it when she swallowed. The doctor examined her throat with an oesophagus scope. It was a painful 20-minute examination as the scope had to be inserted inside her throat. They saw a growth, about the size of a tamarind seed. They gave her antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs, but after ten days, they found that the growth, instead of subsiding, had grown even bigger. They wanted to do a biopsy to confirm whether it was malignant or not. She did not want to undergo the biopsy and instead took two months’ leave and went off to a meditation centre in a rural area to meditate. She had heard about various cures, even of cancer, through insight meditation, and she was confident that meditation could cure her disease too. (For records of various kinds of cures through insight meditation, please refer to the book “Dhamma Therapy” written by Mahæsø Sayædaw and translated

2 Healing Through Insight Meditation Healing Through Insight Meditation 116 Healing Through Insight Meditation Healing Through Insight Meditation 7little by little during this seven-month period. She noticed that