Rob Burbea Reflects on his Cancer Diagnosis

Here is an excerpt from a post by Rob Burbea, put up on 1st October at http://www.robburbea.com/

Rob is an amazing Buddhist teacher, and a deeply compassionate and inspiring person… (words are so inadequate!) He has been the resident guiding teacher of Gaia House retreat centre in Devon. He turned 50 in September, a day after a huge operation to treat the cancer he’d been diagnosed with some weeks before. I wanted to share his words about how he is relating to his illness and the possibility of death. He was happy for it to be shared here:

Dayajoti – December 2015

Featured Image – Summer’s Castoffs Mandala by Dawn Pietsch.

This morning I spoke with the Oncology Clinical Nurse Specialist from the hospital and she explained to me the histopathology findings after the operation. Unfortunately it seems that the cancer is at quite an advanced stage and has invaded the lymphovascular system and the area around the pancreas. They also found a second type of cancer nearby, in the pancreas, that is probably less malignant. While all that is not very encouraging, they did not find any indications of cancer at the edges of the tissues taken out, so there is still the possibility that the operation succeeded in removing all the cancer. At the doctors’ suggestion, I will probably start a six-month course of chemotherapy sometime between six and twelve weeks after the operation.

I know some of you are wondering how I am doing and how practice might be helping. Well, briefly: so far, so good. I feel in my spirit deeply at peace with the possibility that I may die in the not too distant future. I hope it won’t be for quite a while. I definitely don’t want to die, but I still sense and have access to a perception of a timeless dimension to everything – the fruits of practice, I’m sure – and that makes a huge difference. I feel too, on reflection, that I have lived my life and made choices as fully as I could from my heart’s truths and deepest longings, allowing and encouraging what has wanted to come through, so I have no regrets. I feel also very strongly that I have received so many blessings, so many graces, in this life and even now through these challenges. Something in my heart just keeps bowing to it all.

A few days ago I moved into a small cottage in a beautiful area of Dartmoor. Thank you so much to everyone whose generosity and kindness has made this possible. And thank you to all of you for your love, prayers and beautiful words. I feel held by and woven into something vast, wonderful, luminous.

With love and blessings,

Rob