Many years ago, I took a class from a woman who was doing her doctoral thesis on the topic of psychological hardiness. She was a nun, but not the black-and-white kind of nun I remember from growing up. This particular nun wore flannel shirts and swore from time to time, but that’s not what I remember most. What stuck with me over the decades was her study of psychological hardiness and what exactly that means. In Chinese medicine, the ancients had a saying that if the “shen” was bright, the patient would survive; but if the shen was dull, the prognosis wasn’t so good. Shen, in Chinese, is the idea that the spirit, consciousness, memories, and being-ness of a person reside in their heart but is reflected in their eyes. As a practitioner of this medicine, I agree that looking into a person’s eyes is a good indicator of their …