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A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last

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A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last

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Highlights & Notes

We don’t have to die feeling like a failure, full of shame and fear, unable to navigate by the clear light of our true heart.

Whatever our situation, the progression—sudden or gradual—is the same: to remember, to let go, and to trust the process.

Preparing for death is one of the most profoundly healing acts of a lifetime.

“As what the doctor said really sank in I could feel something very heavy begin to lift. I felt as though I was free to live my life at last. Bizarrely, life never felt so safe. Maybe I’m crazy, but I felt more freedom and love than I had in some time. In fact, I felt not as though my life was being taken away but as though it had been given back to me. I was going to die and my life was completely my own.”

that even dying does not overcome our fear of death, that the work to be done is to be done before we drop the body. As the god-drunken poet Kabir says, “What we call salvation belongs to the time before death. / If you don’t break your ropes while you are alive / do you think ghosts will do it for you afterward? … / What is found now is found then.”

We need to remember that what will die in a year’s time is not our essential being but our ability to interact physically with those we love and cherish.

It was clear that though I was exploring the fear of death, it was the fear of life that needed to be investigated first.

Since we ordinarily live on the surface, caught up in bodily sensations and wildly competing thoughts, drawn into external stimuli, we more often relate from our life than to it. We hardly glimpse within the subtly expanding concentric circles that ripple through the mind from each moment of experience. But when the heart at last acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child. All that remains incomplete seems somehow workable and an unmistakable joy arises at the possibility of becoming whole at last.

We fear that we are not up to the task, and begin to wonder how we might “cram” for death. We pray that God grades on a curve, but death is not a test; it is only another opportunity to enter life wholeheartedly.

illness. Each time you get a cold or the flu use it as an opportunity to soften around the unpleasant and investigate how resistance turns pain into suffering, the unpleasant into the unbearable. Notice how discomfort attracts grief. Watch the shadows gather in the aching body. Hear them mutter in complaint and self-pity.

Pity arises from meeting pain with fear. Compassion comes when you meet it with love.

Every time you are ill or have a headache, instead of turning on every appliance in the house to distract yourself, settle into the moment as it is and soften around the discomfort. We have been conditioned to withdraw our awareness from the unpleasant. Break that imprinting! Whatever limits the entrance of awareness limits healing.

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When we begin to respond to discomfort instead of reacting to it, an enormous change occurs. We begin to experience it not as just “our” pain but as “the” pain. And it becomes accessible to a level of compassion perhaps previously unknown. When it’s “the” cancer instead of “my” cancer I can relate to others with the same difficulty, and I can send compassion into the cancer rather than helplessly avoiding it and turning its pain to suffering.

It is said that we must love ourselves before we can love anyone else, and this is true. But the opposite is equally true: We must love others before we can love ourselves, before we can even recognize ourselves.

When it’s “the” pain, it has the whole universe to float in; when it’s “my” pain, I’m standing alone in it.

The next time you have a cold, practice dying. And in the spaciousness of surrender watch the fear of death bound through with its attendant scenarios. Take each breath as though it might be the last. Watch your life pass before your eyes. Did you notice something left undone? Do it on the next clear day. Practice living.

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The first element is the exploration of what has gone before as a way of clearing a path for what is to come.

As will be explained in detail later, to aid the life review and bring us more completely into the present, we need to keep a journal in which we record (and share after your death) the bright days of inquiry and insight as well as the dark nights of the soul. This is a journal of states of mind and levels of being. It makes good reading when the going gets tough. It displays how every moment of anger, fear, and posturing has been a moment of grief—a reaction rather than a response to loss— and that no state no matter how dark or oppressive is new. Although each afflictive emotional state insists it is never going to go away and will only get worse, this is not what happens. There is a hallucinatory quality to heavy states that causes us to doubt our capacities and power. That doubt is as valuable an exploration for the mind as it is for the heart. It takes confidence to watch doubt without thinking we have to do something about it, trusting its natural impermanence to carry it away as long as we don’t pull back from it or compulsively react. It is important to become familiar with doubt sufficiently to be able to turn toward it instead of away.

The second aspect of the yearlong experiment is to become more present, more mindful of the process we call our life, cultivating a soft-belly practice as a means of opening to the moment, without clinging or resistance. When developed in tandem with a mindfulness/insight practice, gradually opening depths of consciousness are experienced in a daily investigation of the heart and mind.

The “psychological work” of the life review and the “spiritual work” of a focused awareness combine to create a greater sense of balance and ease. Without this openness of the “psychological,” and depth of the “spiritual,” we are unable to integrate even our most beneficial insights and enlightenments. They will remain only what we know and seldom what we are.

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Each level requires equal inquiry and observation. When one level is fostered to the detriment of the other we develop a psychological limp or a spiritual swagger.

“Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to live or die, the work is always the same.”

But what words would you actually utter as you expelled your last breath?

Once again the teaching is clear, prepare now for death so as to intensify and fulfill your life. Don’t imagine your endorphins are going to do it for you “when the time comes.” When the time actually comes, what is found then will be what is found now.

“We die the way we live.”

But what if death is sudden? What if we don’t see it coming? Can we still die in peace? Have we healed our disappointments? Have we met our pain with kindness and awareness instead of continuing to ostracize it and send aversion and even hatred into it? Have we learned by meeting our pain with mercy instead of fear how to keep our hearts open in adversity?

Last words are as spontaneous as the life that produces them. If we speak now with care and consideration, if we use our words now to express our heart, that is the voice that will speak for us as our awareness gathers to depart.

Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence. Each is a form of attachment whether “positive,” grasping, or “negative,” pushing away. Both this clinging and condemning ensnare us in a flight-or-fight relationship to the object of awareness that produces these states of consciousness. When the object floating in our consciousness is a hot fudge sundae, our attention is drawn toward it by desire and we attempt to materialize it at our local Baskin Robbins. When the idea hovering before us is death, we attempt to withdraw our attention, to turn away from it so it can’t catch up with us, to dematerialize it at our local church, synagogue, brothel, or McDonald’s, whatever makes us feel the most solid and undying.

Especially in times of stress, we tend to follow well-worn paths and patterns. Our unwillingness to enter each moment fully, without judgment or the need to control it, simply produces more fear and resistance to that fear.

Scrambling for some means of escape from such afflictive states of mind, even death at times may seem preferable to the fear of death.

There is nothing to fear in fear. Enter it. Begin to relate to it rather than solely from it. Do not fear fear, soften that compulsive resistance. Fear of fear is ignorance of fear.

In our fear of death, what calls out first for examination is not death but fear itself. We need to explore this hardness in the belly that is so much a part of the armoring over the heart. There is a technique that is ideal for working with fear and letting go of holding. It is soft-belly meditation, an “opening practice” that dissolves resistance and increases the spaciousness in which the investigation continues. Don’t let its simplicity dissuade you from plumbing its depths. As soft-belly meditation develops into a soft-belly practice, it offers us further access to subtle blockages, and eventually breakthroughs, to our original spaciousness.

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SOFT-BELLY MEDITATION Taking a few deep breaths, feel the body you breathe in. Feel the body expanding and contracting with each breath. Focus on the rising and falling of the abdomen. Let awareness receive the beginning, middle, and end     of each inbreath, of each outbreath     expanding and contracting the belly. Note the constantly changing flow of sensation     in each inhalation, in each exhalation. And begin to soften all around these sensations. Let the breath breathe itself in a softening belly. Soften the belly to receive the breath,     to receive sensation, to experience life in the body. Soften the muscles that have held the fear for so long. Soften the tissue, the blood vessels, the flesh. Letting go of the holding of a lifetime. Letting go into soft-belly, merciful belly. Soften the grief, the distrust, the anger     held so hard in the belly. Levels and levels of softening, levels and levels of letting go. Moment to moment allow each breath its full expression in soft-belly. Let go of the hardness. Let it float in something softer and kinder. Let thoughts come and let them go, floating like bubbles in the spaciousness of soft-belly. Holding to nothing, softening, softening. Let the healing in. Let the pain go. Have mercy on yourself soften the belly open the passageway to the heart. In soft-belly there is room to be born at last, and room to die when the moment comes. In soft-belly is the vast spaciousness in which to heal, in which to discover our unbounded nature. Letting go into the softness, fear floats in the gentle vastness we call the heart. Soft-belly is the practice that accompanies us throughout the day and finds us at day’s end still alive and well.

What we describe as “our life” is not the sum total of what has passed through our hands but what has passed through our minds. Our life isn’t only a collection of people and places, it is a continuum of the ever-changing feelings they engender. As one practitioner said, “Even our past has a life of its own. It isn’t only what you’ve touched, its what you’ve felt of what you touched.”

To know your life is to know intimately what you are feeling. Or, to put it another way: to be aware of what state of mind predominates in consciousness. This noting of mental states encourages a deeper recognition of what is happening while it is happening. It allows us to be more fully alive to the present rather than living our life as an afterthought.

This technique becomes refined through practice. To begin with, close your eyes, focus the attention inward, and count how many states of mind come and go in just five minutes. At first we may notice only a dozen or so. But as the method of relating to these states, instead of compulsively reacting to them, develops, they no longer distract us from our observation and they are gradually exposed to inquiry, joining the lineup with all the other suspects.

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This constant appraisal gives rise to numerous states of mind, from aversion (ranging from fear, anger, and disappointment to guilt, shame, and hatred) to attraction (including anything from appreciation, gratitude, and the deepest love to lust and greed). Note which states of mind accompany each moment of liking and disliking. What are the states that comprise the feeling of being safe? What states create a feeling of being unsafe? When we say we are happy what are those constituent states? And which states create a feeling of unhappiness or turbulence? When Socrates suggested we should know ourselves, this was the level he was referring to. When we recall the statement “Physician, heal thyself,” this is where the healing begins.

It can be hard to die when we have forgotten so often that we are alive. Noting is a remembering of the present. It creates a living trust. How many states of mind in five minutes, in five hours, in five days, in five lifetimes? How often has our life passed unnoticed? How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die?

We take responsibility for being alive, recognizing that responsibility is the ability to respond instead of the compulsion to react. We explore it all: that in us which at times wishes to be dead as well as that in us which never dies. That which blocks the heart and confuses the mind as well as that which clears confusion and dissolves obstruction.

When this mindfulness practice associates with the cultivation of gratitude and forgiveness, ordinary miracles often present themselves as sudden understandings, insights into the nature of the mind and body, and spontaneous glimpses of our enormity.

Practicing the soft-belly meditation, we make room in our body, mind, and heart for the healing that needs to be done. Once soft-belly has been practiced for fifteen minutes a day for a month or so, we are ready for a mindfulness/insight practice that can make very skillful use of the spaciousness established. Practice soft-belly before the mindfulness of breathing exercise. Focusing one-pointedly on the breath, come back to soft-belly each time you become lost in thinking, returning to the sensations in the breath by softening and opening the space in which they can be observed. As we watch the breath, everything that arises in the mind is noted at its inception as thought, sensation, memory, and emotion, momentarily obscuring the clear reception of the living breath, accentuating how difficult it is to remain present, and how easily we lose contact with our life long before we die.

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Having written extensively about the practice of mindfulness in A Gradual Awakening I suggest that you refine your practice with this book as well as Jack Kornfield’s excellent A Path with Heart.

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until one day we will realize how much of our life is a compulsive attempt to escape discomfort. We are motivated more by an aversion ’to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive.

Dying and abject suffering are no longer always synonymous. On the other hand, it must be said that to plan for a painless death would be unwise, as there is often some discomfort that attends the shaking loose of the body by the ascending spirit.

Atheists don’t use their dying to bargain for a better seat at the table; indeed, they may not even believe supper is being served. They are not storing up “merit.” They just smile because their heart is ripe. They are kind for no particular reason; they just love.

We get down to what Buddha said was the job we were born for, knowing that letting go of our suffering is the hardest work we will ever do.

Pain is a given in life. If you have a body, if you have a mind, there will be pain. However, suffering is a reaction rather than a response to mental and physical discomfort.

If there is a single definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay. Nothing prepares us so completely for death as entering those aspects of our lives that remain unlived. We need not die defeated by death, feeling a failure, disappointed, constipated with remorse. It is possible to die at peace, mostly without pain, still learning, filled with gratitude.

Dying is the domain of the body. Death is the domain of the heart. Keep dying in its place—the body Don’t let it affect death. Dying is to death as birth is to life. Each is preceded by what seemed the only possible reality, and each is followed by the next remarkable scenario. As one teacher put it, “We fall from grace to grace.” Our next moment of grasping, hell; our next instant of letting go, heaven. Dying, like birth, is begun by the body and completed by the heart.

The difference between fear and fearing is the difference between freedom and bondage. Fear arises uninvited. At times it believes it’s protecting you, and occasionally it is. But far more often it is based on imagined tigers, or imagined selves to be devoured. It is a deeply conditioned, automatic reaction to any feelings of being physically or emotionally unsafe.

Don’t pull back from fear. Soften the belly and gently enter it. Relate to the fear, not just from it. Explore the physical and mental patterns that accompany this state of mind. How do you know this state of mind is fear? What are its attributes? Define fear’s body pattern. What is happening in the belly, in the anal sphincter, in the spine, in the hands, in the toes? Where is the tongue in the mouth? Is it curled up against the palate? Forward toward the teeth? Pushed downward? Allow the pattern fear imprints in the body to emerge slowly like a photo developing in a darkroom. Let the tensions in the body and the numbness here and there display their configuration for closer inspection. Focus awareness on the changes unfolding in the mind. Fear is an ever-changing process of grieving. Note the multiple states of mind that comprise this intricate process. Watch an instant’s tremulous inquiry turn to trepidation, then to distrust, then to avoidance and doubt. To helplessness and feelings of inadequacy. To aggression, and pride, and then to trepidation once again. Let fear float, and begin to dissolve, in the spaciousness of soft-belly. Let it come and let it go. There is nothing to fear in fear. The sincere exploration of fear results in a fearlessness which does not even wish fear to go away but to become open and free.

Our fear of death is our fear of the uncontrollable unknown. It is the same old fear. It lies in wait behind our eyelids as we awake each morning. It is the fear of fears. It needs space to breathe.

Allowing the fear to float in an awareness that relates to it relates of from it, we examine the warp and woof of its textures in the body instead and examine its process in the mind as if it were occurring to our only child.

When attempts at control become a prison only letting go of control will result in freedom. When we turn toward our fear of no control, and do not attempt to alter it, our edges become less concrete and we have less to protect.

Our fear of the unknown, however, is not as amorphous as we would care to admit. Our fear of death is also our fear of Judgment Day We are concerned that we may have to account for our actions, that our unfinished business at Karma Savings and Loan may have left us overdrawn or even bankrupt. But as it turns out, there is no Judgment Day, only judgment echoing in the momentary heaven or hell of the mind, scrambling to become acceptable in the eyes of God. We have so little mercy for ourselves and we expect the same from him.

Heaven and hell are not places on some metaphysical map, but levels of consciousness we carry with us wherever we go. We create them from our own image and likeness. Heaven is an emanation from the center of the heart. Hell is the heat produced from the friction of opposing desires, a dissonance between what we thought we should be and what we thought we were.

even the hard personal truths that burn are beautiful because they are the truth.

At that moment, just before we feel the lightness lifting us from our body, while we are still trying to capture each molecule of oxygen just to stay alive another instant, we suddenly remember we are not the body, never have been, never will be! and all resistance vanishes into a glimpse of our long-migrating spirit. We cut the moorings and dive into the ocean of being, expanding from our body, floating free the mind. I do not know if this is “the moment of death,” but I do know this insight changes everything.

Dropping our body is like watching an ice cube melt. We lose our defining shape,     as we return to our fluid center,     and evaporate into thin air. Expanding to fill the room invisible and ever-present. Like the ice cube we go through enormous external changes     but our essence remains unaffected. What once was the ice cube is still absolutely H2O. And we are still the immense unnameable. Dying into death is like that. Death is another matter altogether. Anyhow, as Ondrea says,     Life is the grossest form of being.

Let who you have always been become who you are.

And offering me her shoulder she whispered, When a thousand people look at the moon there are a thousand moons.

Let us not wait to review our lives on our deathbed. Consider the possibility of finishing your business before your lease is up.

Once the soft-belly practice is established and the fear contemplation has cleared some space, it is a good time to begin the life review practice to release the past so as to make room for the future.

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don’t allow the mind that is so scared of death, of life, even of its own shadow, to make the decision to clear the future by cleaning up the past. Offer that decision to the heart that has so often been obscured by unfinished business. Offer it the option of finishing farewells, honoring friends and teachers, directing forgiveness to some and asking for it from others.

A primary aspect of the life review is gratitude meditation. It is begun by recalling warm times, old friends, special days, moments of insight and healing, and the love that made it all worthwhile. With gratitude and appreciation we invite each person individually into the heart and open a dialogue with them. Such conversations tend to become quite revealing. After you have shared a real connection, whether it takes several minutes or just a moment, thank them, and as the memory dissolves bid them farewell. Greet each memory with soft-bellied appreciation and part from each reflection by saying good-bye. Each time you leave a memory, pleasant or unpleasant, depart mindfully. There is no assurance you’ll ever come that way again even in memory. This simple ritual is not so easy or superficial as you may imagine. Whether made with some sense of loss or with a sigh of relief, our good-byes become more heartful with each departure from the past.

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Generally, there are three kinds of memories: pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. Those that touch our heart are the pleasant memories toward which we direct gratitude. Those that tighten our gut are the unpleasant memories to which we send clarity and forgiveness. Some individuals in our past elicit both responses. The mind may even hold some slight resentment toward those we love. Some whom we feel have hurt us may also have been those with whom we shared special moments and for these we may feel grateful, although our forgiveness practice is tested. The process becomes refined with practice and an openness to unexpected feelings.

The clarity comes from mindfulness of the changing states of mind. The forgiveness comes from a heart that can no longer stand to be closed to itself or anyone else, a heart that values freedom more than it wants to disguise its pain. Forgiveness finishes unfinished business.

It really isn’t the act of contrition that sets the mind at rest but the intention not to repeat actions that cause harm.

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’The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it.”

Amends feed the heart and quiet the mind.

“The thought of a tiger is not a tiger.” The memory of an event is not that event, but its reflection on the constantly changing surface of the mind. These images on the screen of consciousness, some refer to as a kind of gymnasium for the heart, in which we do not attempt to pick up the heaviest weight but to put it down, let it go. Others refer to this stage of relating to the contents of memory-consciousness as being like a rehearsal, an opportunity to work with the feelings attending such situations should they confront us again—say, on the journey through death.

It is the fear that makes death seem like a shallow pool viewed from a high cliff.

When the forgiveness takes on a life of its own and the suffering has subsided around painful events sufficiently for us to comprehend what they have to teach us, then the past takes on a different meaning.

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The life review is a matter of focused reflection. We look back at our life, not as if we still owned it but as though we were about to give it up.

In many ways, a life review is not so much a contemplation of events gone by as it is an inventory of residual feelings—a recognition of work completed and healings yet to be accomplished.

each person. Letting ourselves be forgiven is one of the most difficult healings we will undertake. And one of the most fruitful.

As one fellow said, memory is more like a painting than a photograph. And some of those paintings are a little abstract. Their styles range from Fra Angelico to Picasso. Some have cracked and faded with age. Their outlines have become vague and restless, never quite taking form long enough to be appraised. Even the best intentions at retrieval and completion of such events and feelings may be thwarted.

Our reaction to the past strongly influences our experience of the present.

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Memory is no less an illusion than any other thought. It constantly changes perspectives and is susceptible to influence from surrounding attitudes.

This insight is called “awakening in the dream.” It recognizes how much memory is a function of our self-image and that our self-image is no more substantial than a thought. At this level we begin to observe the memories there before us as being as weightless and insubstantial as the dreamlike “floating world” that so many refer to in the interstice between dying and death. We awake to watch ourselves dream ourselves. This awakening does not necessarily get us out of the dream, but it does allow us to recognize that we are dreaming. When we recognize this we are ready for the next level. We can begin to reread our book of life, this time without skipping the footnotes, adding dialogue, or pretending that it is nonfiction.

As we relate to the passing show of consciousness—and memory in particular—we recognize that the ghost in front of us is the ghost within. We see that to the degree that we can send healing awareness into it now, we will be able to convert it later from a hindrance into an ally, from a roadblock into a milestone.

“Any point of view is too small for the whole truth.”

These attitudes are the bones that comprise the skeleton we have hung in our closet. They create this world as much as the next. In this world we project them onto others. In the next they are projected back to us. We are frightened of what the mind might do after death because we know the mind has a mind of its own.

THE LIFE REVIEW PROCESS

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Approach difficult memories as you would a great bonfire. Take one step at a time. Sit down and become accustomed to the heat, then stand up and take one more mindful step forward. Then sit once again to adjust to this new perspective. There is no need to jump precipitously into the fire so the ego-hero can die a Viking’s death. Such bravado does not cauterize our wounds. It fuses our helplessness and hopelessness into an imposing sense of personal inadequacy.

We make peace with our lives one image at a time.

Until we stop defining ourselves by memory we will never find out who we really are, or who we really aren’t.

If we hold on to this fear we experience hell, but if we release it we find ourselves in heaven. Anything that can float can take you to the Other Shore.

Death will free us from the body, but we will have to walk the rest of the way on our own.

Even an unsuccessful attempt at forgiveness has the considerable power of its intention.

To the degree you insist that you must suffer, you insist on the suffering of others as well.

read Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg.

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Gratitude is the highest form of acceptance. Like patience, it is one of the catalytic agents, one of the alchemists secrets, for turning dross to gold, hell to heaven, death to life. Where there is gratitude we get the teaching. Where there is resistance we discover only that it keeps us painfully ignorant.

Gradually it becomes clear that detachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be.

Recording states of mind in a journal is a written form of noting. For most of our lives we have given so little attention to our mental states that we hardly know anything about our inner process. Investigating in writing the origination and interdependence of states of mind can be quite illuminating. When we observe a state of mind and appreciate that anger or fear are not single states but processes that include such other states as pride, doubt, helplessness, and self-protection, it is possible to start relating to these states instead of just from them.

Personal altars can become a substantial accompaniment to a life review. Photos and mementos provide a mirror for our life and times. An altar that honors the work still to be done as well as that already completed.

Build an altar to your life. Let it be an artful counterpart to the journal in which you record your changing states of mind. Like the journal, the altar constantly evolves with each memory and insight. It grows and changes over the years just as we do; in fact, precisely as we do. It is the endless sky in which impermanence floats.

Before we can leave the body effortlessly we have to inhabit it fully. A remarkable means of heightening life as well as preparing for death is to enter the body wholeheartedly, sensation by sensation. It is a gentle guiding of awareness through the body beginning at the top of the head and extending to the tip of the toes.

Awareness resuscitates those parts of the body that have become numbed by fear and encourages their participation in the whole. It also balances the tension in areas bursting with imprisoned energy. It brings the disparate aspects of the body, loved and unloved, into harmony.

We certainly may not be able to control the situation, but we may be able to relinquish some of the resistance to it that turns the difficult to the intolerable.

The second exercise is a bit more to the point: Leave your hands by your sides and let yourself be fed. Also let yourself be dressed by another. Watch frustration. Do not lift your hands.    The third practice is blind walking. Allow someone you trust to lead you blindfolded around the house. Watch distrust and fear. To take the surrender to another level practice this one by yourself, walk alone, blindfolded, in a dark house.    The fourth is to spend a day or some substantial part thereof doing nothing, absolutely nothing; not speaking, not watching television, not listening to music, eating little or nothing; no sex, no drugs, no rock and roll. Watch the unstimulated mind display restlessness. Soften your belly and surrender into the dance.

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There is no thought we have ever had that did not have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everything in consciousness is constantly dying and being reborn. One thought dissolves into another. One feeling evolves into the next. There seems nothing permanent, nothing that is not already dying. And we wonder in the midst of such impermanence if there is anything “real” enough to survive death.

We have been taught that we need our body to exist, but it is just the other way around. When who we really are departs from who we thought we were, the body collapses and instantly becomes a disposal problem. It is the ultimate in natural conservation in which the container is discarded but the contents are recycled. Anything that can die, will. That which cannot, won’t.

That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom.

We have gone mad looking for a solid center but there is none. Our center is vast space. Nothing to die and nothing to hang your hat on.

read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind from the vast heart of Suzuki Roshi.

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In death as in life most retreat along habitual pathways, no matter how painful, just to find a recognizable neighborhood no matter how unsatisfying. We think too small. In fact, thought itself is not big enough to encompass the truth.

Thought is to the mind what your momentary face is to your original countenance. Thought simply describes itself. For the truth we need something bigger and more intuitive that, even when the mind is confused, knows its way home by heart.

Many shudder when they speak about the possibilities of a cruel afterworld. We suspect our life is not up to the scrutiny. We fear punishment. We imagine death as altogether different from life, although it is constructed from the same projections of mind.

There is nothing noble about suffering except the love and forgiveness with which we meet it. Many believe that if they are suffering they are closer to God, but I have met very few who could keep their heart open to their suffering enough for that to be true. Most who talk about hell are in it at the time. In my experiences with the dying and into death, much less the visions beyond, I have seen nothing of the sort. In fact, concepts of dying into a heaven or hell seem a good deal more political than spiritual. The closest thing I found to hell was the fearful attachment to heaven on the deathbed: the lack of trust in the process. Hell is the obscured heart.

Karma is for the emerging spirit what an accurate diagnosis is for an unknown illness: an opportunity to recognize what blocks healing and a chance to become whole once again.

When we stop protecting ourselves from life, each moment takes on a new significance. We come to treasure our being even more than our becoming. Each moment of remembering is precious, the eternal moment in which there is no other.

the gates of heaven to the degree we can surrender that in us which creates hell. Hell is just a hangover that passes with proper nutrition. It’s just detox. It is the anteroom to heaven in the same way heaven is the anteroom to a yet more spacious paradise.

As one very wise old woman said, “I think death is what you think it is.” She was as close to the truth as thinking occasionally gets.

A single life review is difficult enough. Let’s take one life at a time. Perhaps the best way to do that is to live as though there were no afterlife or reincarnation. To live as though this moment was all that was allotted.

When we awake mindful of our aliveness and go to sleep contemplating our deathlessness, we are practicing conscious rebirth.

The development of lucid dreaming is considered by many to be one of the most skillful means of preparation for navigating wisely in the afterworld.

Having not discovered their own great truth, having not received the healing they took birth for, they have settled for success. Whether their dream was stardom or starshine, their book published, their true love found, or their temper defeated, they believed that their life was incomplete.

To discover what we already possess is to go beyond our limited idea of who, and even what, we are. Discovering our true nature is called “finding our lotus” by some. The lotus is not difficult to find if we know where to look. Lotuses proliferate in the wild, given their natural environment of compassionate service and nonattachment to the fruits of our labors. They can often be seen blooming in the hothouse of the meditation center or the deathbed.

The lotus represents that which rises above fetid waters to share its unexpected beauty. It is a symbol of liberation from painful attachment to that through which our life must pass in order to reach its original light. We nurture our lotus by letting go of the urgency for imagined accomplishment that stunts its growth. It is said that some walk easily across the river of death, stepping lightly on their lotuses, while others row their boats guided by its fragrance. Some leap the luminous river on faith. Others just arrive because it was on their way. And some, though they grease their bodies in the manner of the masters and have studied all the books about swimming but have never gone near the river, drown into the next unconscious womb before they are halfway across.

It was not only the impossibility of satisfying every desire, much less keeping it that way, it was not not getting this or that, or losing it the next day The cause of suffering was desire itself.

He saw that it was not in the object of desire that lasting satisfaction resided but in the absence of that desire. He mentioned that when something wanted was received, he noticed a momentary spiking of pleasure and the experience we call satisfaction. But to his surprise the satisfaction did not come from the having but from the momentary flash of getting when the light of his great nature was for a moment no longer obstructed by a mind full of desire. It was the absence of desire which offered that feeling of satisfaction, of temporary completeness. The very nature of desire was one of dissatisfaction with any moment in which the object of desire was not present. Desire lived more in the future than the present. It had a quality of longing rather than being. He saw the mind was doomed to feel something of a failure if it did not comprehend that it is unrequited desire itself, which, like a hungry ghost, always calls out for more. This recognition of the painful nature of desire did not make him desireless but allowed him to treat desire with a new respect. He said that he did not even care if his lotus ever bloomed now that he had found it. This reminded me that one of my teachers used to say once you have turned toward the light it doesn’t really matter how far away it seems as long as you keep your eye on it.

  • Importante

He had put so much effort into religious ritual and so little into the deep inner work that always needs doing, he reached a momentary hell instead of an eternal heaven.

There is a Native American saying, “Today is a good day to die for all the things of my life are present.” This embodies the possibilities of a life reviewed and completed. A life in which even death is not excluded. I am speaking here of a whole death that succeeds a whole life. A life caught up to, and lived in, the present, that rides the breath and knows the power of thought to create the world, experiencing itself in its fullness and emptiness.

When everything is brought up-to-date, and the heart is turned toward itself, it is a good day to die. Once opened, our original lotus knows its way home by heart.

Thus, it is suggested that we practice dying (find a perfect day to die) with a very interesting and enjoyable and sometimes frightening exercise called “Taking a Day Off.” It is a daylong contemplation of seeing the world without ourselves in it. It speaks to that place within us that asks, How can I not be among you? Some call this practice “Dead for a Day.” We walk the streets as though we were not there, as though we had died yesterday. We see the world in our absence. We act as though we were already dead and had this last chance to visit the world we have left behind. We grieve for ourselves and go on.

Just as yesterday we pretended to be dead, today we pretend we are alive. We walk the streets filled with presence. We watch the gratitude at our rapid recovery. We cut out the middleman of death, not needing to die in order to take our next incarnation, we take birth now, in the middle of the street, in the midst of a life redoubled by new birth. We enter life so fully that even if we died it would not spoil our day.

The benefits of developing a heart song/death chant are unmistakable. Thus, as part of the “dying experiment,” it is suggested we find and cultivate our own personal healing/death chant over the next year. Develop a refuge that gets stronger with use. Sit quietly in the heart and listen. If no song comes to mind settle into the state of patience. In fact, if we never found a song but developed instead the timeless spaciousness of patience, it might support us just as well on our deathbed. Audition lines as they arise. See which remain when the others are forgotten. Experiment.

  • Ejercicio

Aging teaches us to follow our life force inward. It is an object lesson in how awareness is gradually drawn toward the center, as in death, leaving the extremities (including the outer senses) to fend for themselves. Perhaps that’s why so many people of advanced years speak of feeling like youngsters in their heart. The gradual decline of the body is fascinating. It is a slow cemetery meditation. It’s our reflection in the funeral parlor window. It reminds us how short life may be and how sweet it might become.

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