Navigating Suffering and Death

When BJ Miller was a sophomore in college, he climbed atop a commuter train and was immediately electrocuted, causing him to lose both legs and half an arm. In the aftermath of his own near-death experience, he turned to the arts to make sense of his injuries and to grapple with questions of disability and what it means to live a good life.

Miller is now a palliative care physician and the cofounder of Mettle Health, a multidisciplinary group providing support for people confronting illness, disability, and death. He previously served as the executive director of San Franciscos’s Zen Hospice Project and the founder of the Center for Living and Dying.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Miller to discuss how he’s come to view recovery as a creative act, how studying art history and architecture radically shifted how he thinks about disability, what he’s learned from Buddhist approaches to death, and how working with dying patients has changed the way he lives his own life.