How to Prepare
for Your Death
If we are duly prepared, I can promise that the moment of death will be an experience of rejoicing. If we are not prepared, it will surely be a time of fear and regret.
—anyen rinpoche
A central theme or practice in my life for more than forty years has been to meditate. I found it brought peace and calm to my anxious mind. As I look back, it seems magical how I was pulled into meditation. I have never quite understood this deep yearning to connect with something other than the outside world. I question now, in my seventies as I write this book, what quality of mind or nature of mind do I want to be in when I die? I want to familiarize myself with the quality of mind while I am alive so I am prepared for the powerful moment of death, as Osho suggested.
I began my research on the death process by studying the psychospiritual aspect of dying. Psychospiritual pertains to the relationship between the mind and spirituality. The psychological approach works toward an understanding of your personality identity in the context of discovering that it is part of something larger than who you think you are. Psychology is concerned directly with the state of your mind during the dying process. Spirituality relates to the transcendent awareness, to something beyond your normal thinking and reaction patterns. Both the psychological and spiritual aspects of your life will be encountered in the various stages of death.
Most people have some familiarity with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s psychological stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.4 These stages represent some of the psychological content of your mind as you approach death. What I am calling spiritual is what transcends your psychological mind and expands awareness beyond the normal five senses. It is this spiritual part of life that religions, mystical systems, music, art, and poetry open within us. Dying is a journey of turning inward both psychologically and spiritually to confront the resistance, the process of letting go, and the ultimate transformation of your life. Fundamentally, dying is the process of letting go of your beliefs, perceptions, identity, others, nature, and the cosmos itself to move into the vast mystery that is death and beyond.
In my studies on dying, I found that my earlier work and book exploring meditation and brain frequencies applied to the dying process as well. I also found that the energy centers (chakras) of the body, as described in many ancient spiritual traditions, play a part in the dying process. Integrating brain-wave frequencies and chakras began to make sense of what happens when we die. As I wove brain frequencies and chakras together, I had a realization that the process of dying is really the same as the spiritual awakening process that many traditions describe. In the sections that follow, you will be exploring and weaving together these two aspects of your physical and metaphysical body: brain waves and chakras.
Of greatest importance as you begin your exploration is to face your fear and the natural resistance that comes with confronting the mystery of death. Note, however, that the more you know about the dying process and the similarity of spiritually waking up to your inner nature the more the fear of dying dissolves. The reduction of your fear of death can change you both psychologically and spiritually. Through meditation practice and other contemplative methods, you can reach a quiet space of balance in preparation for the moment of your death. You can also be living a life of freedom and joy now before you die.
The basic fact of your life is you will die. When you will die and how you will die is the unknown. We all carry this unknown within us. As we begin this journey to explore dying, there are two basic questions to consider. The first is How do I use this absolute fact of my dying in my daily life? The second is How do I open up my heart and mind to release my conscious and unconscious fear of death? In the pages that follow, you will explore how prepared you are to answer these questions. You will also be given the opportunity to consider what is really important for you to do now in your life to prepare for your death. Although we will explore the dimensions of the dying process, we will also explore how to live more fully today.
4. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970).