My aunt developed cancer. She's dead now but in the beginning it was quite difficult for her and so we had some conversations. She started to just take one day at a time with my encouragement. I kept talking about all the beneficial things she'd done in her life, and this seemed to inspire her, and she lived longer than they expected her to live. She lived for another year and she tried to approach her illness just one day at a time. So I was very happy that she didn't have more Dukkha than she could have had in such a situation.
Another example is my niece who was twenty seven when she died last year from liver cancer. When we went to see her, we taught her some meditation techniques and she also read a lot. She didn't have a very good prognosis and they thought she would die very quickly. But one of the things she didn't want to do was get angry and resentful for what happened to her, so instead of building self-pity and resentment, she started to forgive and develop more compassion and lovingkindness. She actually went into remission which was amazing for her prognosis, so she lived perhaps six months longer than they thought she would. And the people who were around her said that she never complained, and that she died fairly peacefully. So it appears that most of us are not confronted with these types of challenges, but can we not complain, can we not want to have aversion?
My niece went to meet with some people who had cancer but she felt that she didn't want to be there because most of them were angry, and she said she didn't want to be angry. I remember being at her funeral and her sister coming to me and she said, "When I start to get upset about it I just think of my sister, and think that she wouldn't want me to be like this." So she also influenced her sister by her example. So that's certainly overcoming big Dukkha.
I happened to read in a Reader's Digest once about a woman who had been abducted. Apparently a man put her in the boot of her car and he was going to kill her. While she was in the boot of the car she realized that fear wasn't going to help her, and she had to think quickly, so she started to feel around for some tools to get out of the boot. And so with a clear mind she managed to open the boot of the car, and the next time the car stopped at a stoplight she got out and ran away. Obviously she wouldn't have been able to tell the story if she hadn't escaped.
So these are times when fear, or in the other times with cancer, heavy Dukkha might overwhelm us, but if we can think clearly and see "this is Dukkha, what is the cause of it, and how am I going to lessen or end it?" then the fear and the projections will not cloud our vision.