there's more to life than books, you know

I just finished reading Healing Wise. In it, Susun Weed identifies 3 different traditions of healing, all of whose techniques can interpenetrate in any number of ways: the scientific, the heroic, and the wise woman. (You can see more here if you don't have her wonderful book.) She talks about the Heroic tradition as one that identifies health with stringent purification and purity. On this model, illness comes from accumulated toxins: physical, spiritual, emotional. So taking care of one's own health means taking responsibility for having accumulated these toxins and having "made" yourself sick; your charge is to be spiritually and physically pure enough to be Healthy.

If you were only spiritual/magical/powerful/kala enough, you wouldn't be sick/feel cranky/have anxiety.

I just started reading The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodron points out that the goal is not to transcend our supposed limitations or faults. The point, as she articulates it, is simply to see yourself as you are, with gentleness and precision. "So whether it's anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression--whatever it might be-- the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it," she writes. "That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you've experienced it fully, to let go."

As loveandpower points out, kala is not a hammer.