Retreat Recovery Depression Victoria Vancouver Island

THE MAKING OF A ZEN MONK

Doshu Lars Rogers has a first-hand understanding of suffering and impermanence. In February 2002, he found himself in the intensive care unit of Vancouver General Hospital more dead than alive having been air lifted from his family’s homestead on Malcolm Island just off of Vancouver Island’s north coast. The diagnosis was acute leukemia, and the prognosis was not hopeful. Immediate chemotherapy left Rogers with no memory of the events that took place for about a month after his arrival at the hospital. In May of 2002, he was released from hospital for two weeks before a scheduled bone marrow transplant “to make some good memories with (his) family”. Upon his return to hospital he was subjected to intense chemotherapy and full-body radiation to ensure that all blood making cells in his body were thoroughly and totally dead. Following the bone marrow transplant, another month of isolation followed waiting for these new cells to take up residence deep within his bones and begin producing healthy blood. Doshu has practiced Zen Buddhism since 1975-at times passively, and at times with great energy and zeal. Living remotely, his contact with any kind of Buddhist community was infrequent, but he maintained a personal practice and attended meditation retreats occasionally with Toronto Zen Centre, Zen Centres in Oregon and Washington States, and the Victoria Zen Centre. His life path had seen him educated at the University of Toronto in astronomy, travelling through Asia and Europe with his wife Soshin Ruth McMurchy, training and working in electronics and making a living as an entrepreneur in that field. Doshu and Soshin have two children together, and when Doshu became ill, the whole family moved to Victoria so that they could be there to support him, and each other.

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