Step 1:
Running Away from Death
We humans cannot bear much Reality.
—t. s. eliot
In the Sufi teaching tradition of Islam there is a character, Mulla Nasrudin, who is characterized as the “wise fool.” Here is my retelling of one of those stories. Mulla Nasrudin bumped into Death on a street in Mecca. Death registered a look of surprise and the fool’s blood went cold. That night, Nasrudin fled on a sleek stallion and rode away from Mecca faster than the wind. The next day, he was in a hillside village far from Mecca. Rounding the bend in the road, he again bumped into Death. In terror he heard Death say, “I was surprised to see you as you were in Mecca. I had an appointment with you in this distant village this very morning.” 11
Many of us will naturally feel afraid when we first face the possibility of dying due to an accident, a catastrophic diagnosis of disease, or simply the process of aging. Like Nasrudin, many of us try to run away from the time of our death. As we face death, we will fear pain and the loss of all that is precious to us about life. This is the normal part of grief we all will feel. We will fear and grieve the loss of our capacities, our possessions, our relationships, and our dignity, and face what is beyond death.
What we often don’t recognize is that, in our daily lives, we experience many similar losses. We are unconsciously impacted by fear of death beneath the day-to-day experience of loss in our lives. Many other events confront you daily to grieve as loss, such as a precious artifact from your parents accidentally breaks, your children leave home and “their” room in the house to live on their own, or your long-term relationship ends in divorce. When you confront a disease or fatal illness, however, it finally hits you that now your entire life, your reality as a physical being, is going to leave this life and that everything you know and have experienced will be over and gone. At this point, you can become traumatized, despairing, and even terrified. You try to run away from death as fast as you can. You have no idea what is going to happen to you. Unconsciously and even consciously like Nasrudin, in the previous story, you can feel trapped by death’s closeness.
Fear is often what drives you to seek to sustain your life through heroic medical treatments when your physical condition worsens. These interventions often result in a quality of life that becomes disabling and worse than your life before you take the treatment. You and I will attempt the heroic intervention because we view death as an enemy that we must fight and overcome. However heroically we fight death, it will still win. Many of us say that we want to accept death when it comes. Accepting death sounds simple, but there is still fear and it will be a deep challenge for you. Rather than running away from death as the basic option, the challenge is to discover if there is a possibility of facing death differently. Can you find a means or process of facing your fear with courage?
The ancient and famous Tibetan yogi Milarepa, after he left his old path as a robber, was afraid of his death and what would come after his death because he had killed many people. His fear of death led him to a snowcapped mountain cave in Tibet where he meditated on the uncertainty of the moment of his death. Through long years of meditation practice, he reached the true nature of an awakened mind, and his fear of death vanished. Milarepa experienced the triumph over terror. What he teaches us is that it is possible to be fully alive in our bodies, living happy lives and in service to others, and not be afraid of death. This is the option you and I want to discover before we face physical dying.
Life and death are amazing gifts. The Buddhist teachings say that a human life is so precious and the odds and chance of you or I being born into this life are so small that this gift of life is like a blind turtle rising from the depths of a vast ocean to poke its head through a small floating golden ring. Life and death are actually one event. How you live and how you die are the same thing. Learning to live and learning to die are the amazing gifts you’ve been given.
You are like the turtle poking your head through the golden ring of this existence. If you haven’t committed to learn to live well and die well, you need to ask yourself and explore inwardly now for help to do it. Life is short and you and I need to take this moment in time to gain the wisdom of our heart as we begin to ask different questions. Roshi Joan Halifax sums up our challenge: “One who is free of fear knows that at the deepest level of realization there is no suffering, no birth, no death.” 12
In this chapter, you can explore through a series of exercises your beliefs about death, the question of suffering and pain and how to confront it, how meaning plays a part as you face resistance to death, the gift of acceptance of your death and how meditation is a significant means to prepare now for dying.
Reflect on the following questions of belief, knowledge, and practice.
• Intuitively, will my death be painful? If so, how am I to prepare for dealing with the pain?
• What is it like for me to be accepting of my own dying while living? Give some examples.
• What do I believe about whether there is an afterlife of some kind?
• What other questions come to mind about approaching my death?
Write your initial responses in your notebook or computer. If you are in a group, share your answers.
Exercise: The Constricted Self
The ego or constricted self has the qualities of resistance when we are living inside it. Examine what you need to know about your constricted self in order to recognize how these resistant qualities can play out in your life. Write your responses in your journal as a way to continue observing your constricted self and how it works in your life. If in a group, share your thoughts.
• Describe what you think your constricted self is and how it plays out daily in your life.
• Make a list of the times when you experienced the constricted self as the dominant force in your life.
• When have you been in resistance and then shifted into self-acceptance about a struggle you’ve had? Give an example.
• What is it like to be accepting of your own dying while living? Give examples.
• What do you do to avoid or escape the fear of the present moment? Why?
Suffering and Pain
In the classic children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit, Rabbit asks the Skin Horse, “Does it hurt to be Real?” The Skin Horse says, “Generally, by the time you are Real most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all because once you are Real you can’t be ugly except to people who don’t understand.”13 Most people are concerned about the pain they will experience as they die. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, we ask: Does it hurt? Is death going to be painful as we get our hair loved off, our eyes drop out, and we get “loose in the joints and very shabby”? It is true that as we age and as we have physical ailments, we may feel more physical discomfort and pain coming to us at the end of our lives.
Throughout life, we are dependent on the strength of our bodies, but as we age this strength naturally deteriorates or is affected by various ailments and diseases. We become increasingly unable to care for ourselves. The loss of control is difficult to accept, but what is worse is judging ourselves and grieving the loss of the younger, more mobile person we were. To make matters worse, pain may be exacerbated by psychological feelings of helplessness, abandonment, shame, lack of control, and isolation. The reality is that at any age by an accident, disease, or war we may suddenly die. At any moment of our lives we may face the pain of our dying.
As all aspects of your life change, it is easy to feel vulnerable and powerless. It seems as though you will die a thousand little deaths before you physically die. As you experience growing uncertainty and the disintegration of the normal patterns of your life, physical and mental loss begin to tighten your body and increase your emotional reactions. As you experience pain and the dissolution of your body and mind, you may begin to enter an increasing cycle of deepening inner suffering at the loss. The truth we want to explore, however, is as you move into the various stages of your death, physical pain may become inevitable but psychological suffering can become optional for you. Remember what the Skin Horse said to Rabbit in the book, The Velveteen Rabbit: “…By the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby … but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.” 14
The Nature of Pain
Science tells us that pain is really made up of non-pain components. The components consist of sensations, intensity, and rhythmic pulsation. You continually interpret these sensations as pain and you make up a mental story about the experience of your pain. You and I make up these pain stories all the time. For example, your story may be, “My pain of arthritis grows worse because I have to be on my feet all the time. I can’t get rid of this pain!” The pain is neither good nor bad, but the story you made up about the pain creates the distress you have.
Pain is part of the daily drama of being a human. How you approach pain is essential to both your living and dying. If you are willing to explore the elements of your pain, you may come to a realization that you don’t have to be so upset and reactive when you are in pain. Pain has a transient nature; it is always changing in one way or another. To explore pain may create a different pattern of thought, such as: “I will sit and notice the pulsation of pain in my arthritic knee and feel myself relax. I offer my pain on behalf of the many that have even worse pain.” Consider the notion that the courage to face your pain consciously may actually be a gift of patience, a development of strength to endure when needed, a means to help nourish compassion, and a deeper capacity to open to gratitude and the insight that life is fragile and precious.
Joan Halifax once asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama about what to do when pain can’t be worked with through spiritual or psychological means, and he was emphatic that we should always do the best to help relieve pain and suffering, whether with modern pharmacology or meditation and understanding. 15 In that conversation with Joan Halifax, he went on to tell her that if medications are used, they can cloud the physical and psychological mind, but not to worry because the nature of the True Mind—that essence of ourselves beyond the physical and psychological mind—is what is liberated at the moment of death. He affirmed that if the dying person has had a strong meditation practice then even if medications are taken and the person is not very conscious, it is still possible at the moment of death to become one with the nature of the Expanded Mind. Like the Skin Horse says, “Once you are Real these things don’t matter at all.” 16
Either prerecord this exercise to guide you with your eyes closed or have a partner or a friend read it to you. Give sufficient pauses between each statement. Write your reflections in your notebook.
• Close your eyes, take several deep breaths, and consciously take some time to relax your body.
• Remember a time when you were in pain. The pain can be physical or emotional. Imagine now that you are in an intense state of discomfort and pain. Imagine letting yourself be present and simply observing in this situation of your pain.
• Look through and beyond the pain of wanting it to be different and of struggling to push the pain away. Without wanting it to be different, simply acknowledge that you feel and have pain.
• Move your attention into your heart area. Feel the warmth, pulsating, caring, and comforting feeling radiating through your body pain. As you stay centered in your heart, affirm and say to yourself, “My True Mind nature is free from all the pain.”
• Breathe into the heaviness of the pain with this affirming heart and exhale the cool light air out of your heart into your body. Continue with this pattern of breathing into the heaviness and breathing out lightness.
• Be present with this pain. Imagine you are breathing through all the pores of your body.
• Watch the pain shift, move, and dissolve. Be conscious of the inner peace and gratitude that you can be with pain and move beyond pain. Rest in this peace.
• Open your eyes and move your body when you are ready to do so.
Exercise: Confronting Physical and Emotional Suffering
Consider how you confront both physical and emotional suffering. Contemplate and write in your notebook or on your computer your responses to the following questions. If working in a group, share your answers.
• What would you do if you were in physical pain or discomfort? Would you face the pain, ignore it, deny it, drug yourself, or embrace it?
• Which of the previous options do you choose today to deal with physical pain?
• How would you feel and what would you do if you were not given permission to grieve your life (as you know it now) as you entered the death process? Perhaps if you died suddenly of a heart attack or a car accident.
• How will you react if you are judged by family or friends if you get out of control with any of the reactions that Kübler-Ross and I describe (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, despair) due to your physical and emotional circumstances?
• How will you handle other people—spouse, family, friends, caregivers— when they become upset with you because you begin to withdraw and isolate yourself?
• How will you know when you are acting like a victim to your situation and give your power away to your family or caregivers? Give some examples of how you’ve responded as a victim up to now in your life.
• What are your strategies for working with the intensity of pain? Examples would be trying to ignore it, using drugs, exercising, or finding alternatives like painting your pain, setting your pain to music, writing about it, softening into the pain mentally by accepting it, or exploring the sensations of your pain mentally (where it is located in the body, its intensity, etc.).
• How do you work with your pain? The following phrases may support your practice in being aware of pain. As pain arises now in your life, experiment with one or more of these phrases as a focus for you.
* “I am kind to the source of my pain.”
* “I realize that my pain is not permanent.”
* “I let go of my want to control pain.”
* “I know that I am not my pain.”
* “My pain is neither a good process nor a bad process in me.”
* “I know that the pain does not limit the kindness of my heart for myself.”
Life’s Meaning as Part of Resistance
I remember my father saying to me before he died, “What have I done in my life that was worthwhile?” My father died more than thirty years ago. At that time, few books about death were available. I did, however, read a book about near-death experiences. The book was Raymond Moody’s Life After Life. I read it when my father got sick because I had hoped Moody would give me a glimpse of what my father was experiencing.
In this book, Moody described how to relieve painful suffering and how to accept death. Moody suggested that, as we die, it is important to recall our worth, significance, and the meaning of our lives. Because of Moody’s insights, when my father asked me the question, “What have I done in my life that was worthwhile?” I was able to have a conversation with him about the qualities I saw in him. I told my father that he was a giving, reliable, and kind man. It was clear to me that my simple sharing shifted his tightness and uncertainty about his dying. My words put a smile of love on his face. My father’s simple question is one many of us will ask about our worth and meaning at the end of our lives. I have no idea where he got the question, but it was an important one for his dying process, and I believe it is important for all of us.
The playwright Edward Albee famously said, “What could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn’t lived it?” 17 The important question then is: What is meaningful in your life today? In the process of dying, if you have not explored your inner life and what is meaningful for you, you will not easily move forward to the acceptance and surrender stage of your dying. You will not move forward to accept your death until you feel safe and have let down your defenses. When you are willing to let down your defenses, you will begin to feel relieved and accept the goodness and beauty in life, no matter your physical condition. If you are willing to change or release even one negative or selfish pattern, you are a step further toward freedom in your dying.
It has been found by psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Viktor Frankl, among others, that simply existing day by day working at a job, making money, being housed, being fed, and having some form of safety and security is actually unfulfilling, empty, and has little or no essential meaning for one’s life. You know that when there is some form of personal sacrifice or devotion to something larger than yourself, your life takes on an inner radiance of purpose and meaning. Life has value if you see yourself as part of something greater than personal survival. This something larger can be found in your spiritual life, your family, your community, and society at large with all its issues and concerns. All this is expressed in some form of service to others. That sense of service to others was what gave meaning and worth to my father’s life. Frankl, in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning,18 said, “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” And “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’”
Exercise: The Meaning of Your Life
Remember, you will die. When you go to bed at night, you assume and are convinced you will wake in the morning. But some of us do not wake up in the morning. Also, some part of you is convinced you will live to an old age. But you know that at some point in your life, death will take you and you may not be old and gray. In this exercise, you have the opportunity to look back on your life and evaluate if it has had meaning and value for you.
Prerecord to listen to and be guided by the exercise or have a partner or friend read it to you. It is best to lie down on a bed or on the floor for this exercise. Give time to reflect between statements.
• Relax your body by tensing and releasing your shoulders, arms, hands, and other parts of your body and then close your eyes and breathe deeply as you focus your breath in your heart.
• In this state of calm relaxation, imagine you are a very old person on your deathbed. Ask yourself your age. Imagine that your face has deep wrinkles, there is stiffness in your limbs, your breath is shallow, your hands and feet are numb, and you feel deeply tired and frail. Your body is ready to die.
• Notice where you are—in a home, in a hospital, where? Is anyone with you? What is this old person like that you are? Ask yourself, “Do I like myself as this older person?”
• As the old person, ask yourself, “What have I achieved in life? What have I done to create a life of meaning?”
• Imagine now that you are ten years older than you are right now and you are lying on your deathbed. How old are you? Who is with you, what have you achieved that is meaningful by this time? Recognizing yourself ten years from now, what can you do today to gain what you want as meaningful for your life? Said another way, ask yourself, “What can I do today to have a meaningful death tomorrow?”
• Imagine that you will die in one year. You are lying in your bed, preparing to die. What can you do right now to support a peaceful death? What would you do differently from what you are doing today? What might you need to forgive in yourself and in others? Who might you need to forgive? Ask yourself, “From what do I need to let go?” Imagine you will die in a month. Who do you want with you to share your last moments of this life? Ask yourself, “What has been meaningful for me as I look at my life in the past six months?”
• As you are falling asleep, you realize you will die tonight. Ask yourself, “What is the biggest gift I have received in this life? With whom will I share this gift before I die?”
Lie still for a while with eyes closed. Absorb these different stages of dying and what has been meaningful for you at each stage. When you get up, record your insights in your notebook or on your computer. Reread the questions in each section to remind you of your reflections.
Exercise: What Gives Me Meaning?
Reflect on and answer the following questions. Write your responses in your notebook. If in a group, share your answers.
• What have I accomplished in my life?
• What has given me purpose and meaning throughout my life?
• What have I done to help, support, and serve others?
• How much care, respect, and attention have I been willing to give to my relationships?
• Where in my life have I stretched beyond my limits with courage to heal my psychological wounds?
• Do I have awareness and perspective about my life, and have I accepted myself and my life as I’ve lived it?
Acceptance
In the eye of the storm after the initial realization that your death is coming for you, there arrives Kübler-Ross’s stage of acceptance and surrender. If you as a dying person have worked through the chaos of your emotions and resistance to dying, you can enter into a place of calm and peace. In acceptance, you are giving up and surrendering to your own death.
Many spiritual teachers have been heard to say, “Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet death is up to us.” How will you meet your death? In the following list, check off the ones that are appropriate for you now. These statements are some of the acceptance characteristics that you will face as you are dying. As you contemplate them, write in your journal what comes to mind about the conditions in your life that are currently creating your response and feelings. If you are in a group, share your responses.
• I can sense the inevitability of my own mortality.
• My coming death is marked with remorse, regret, and a feeling of inward hopelessness that I haven’t fulfilled my purpose in life.
• I can feel that I am close to my death. The sand of my life is rapidly passing through the hourglass toward my death. It is going faster than I thought it would.
• I know I have not touched rock bottom about the inevitability of my death. What I am resisting is …
• I am aware of what calm and peace would feel like in the process of my dying.
• I believe there is still a strong possibility of my continued existence. I am not going to die yet.
• I sense a suicidal panic attack due to not being completely aligned with the physical and psychospiritual aspects of my death.
• I am tired, weak, and want to sleep like a teenager. I want to go unconscious and avoid the threat of death.
• I want to be drugged and not be aware of my dying.
• I have not moved into my interior self because I still fall back into fear of dependence, neediness, and being a burden, and not feeling lovable.
• I still have a strong yearning for what I have not fulfilled at this point in my life. What is it?
• I am terrified of the hidden, unconscious, dark shadow in my mind of dying and losing control of my life.
• I have strong anxiety and fear of being separated from all that I love.
To accept your death is to accept the fear of dying. Not fearing death is all a matter of perspective! The filmmaker Woody Allen famously said, “It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”19
Respond in your journal to the following questions. Before answering them, become still in silence and breathe deeply so that your mind and heart settle and you can listen to the deepest part of yourself. If in a group, share your thoughts.
• What is it that I am afraid of accepting about my dying?
• Describe everything you think of as “you.”
• What is the lifestyle I have lived? Is there another style of life I would have preferred?
• Describe the characteristics of your life that are easy to accept and those difficult to accept.
• What do I most appreciate about my life?
• How do I want to be remembered after I die?
Thus far we have considered some of the challenges we face as we confront the fact of our dying. The following visualization practice is to shift to the positive aspect of what dying can be for you. Record these instructions to guide you or have a partner or friend read them to you. For this exercise, lie on a bed or on the floor. Give time to pause between statements. Record your experience in your notebook or computer.
• Take a few moments to relax your body, breathe deeply, and close your eyes.
• Imagine a person—it could be a spouse, family member, or friend—has just died. See them in a bed with eyes closed and not moving.
• As you visualize the body, see their consciousness take the form of a small ball of light moving from the base of their spine up to the top of their head. Observe that light quickly flying out from the body at the top of their head like a shooting star and then dissolving into the heart of a Presence of immense light above the person.
• As you see this illuminated being, ask or pray that the person be freed from suffering as they become merged into the light of this Presence.
• Imagine this small light becomes like a star being released from this Presence into an even vaster luminosity. In this expanding sky of luminosity, the individual entity is no longer present. Become aware that they have merged into the sky of luminosity and there is only this star that is the true luminous nature of their being.
• Remain in this state of awareness for a few moments observing this luminosity. Be aware of any emotional feelings, body sensations, or thoughts you may be having.
This exercise was to give you an insight into the luminous nature of your being as the potential experience of your death. This short practice gives you the experience of the light of the true nature of your own mind and how it can benefit all beings, especially those you are leaving behind. To know and experience before you die the luminous nature of what death holds for you gives you the possibility to accept and be present to your own experience of dying even now before death comes for you. As I will describe in the next section, one of the most powerful ways to keep working with your mind and your own death before you die is meditation.
Meditation
Meditation is a practice that prepares you for death. A daily meditation practice trains you to release and let go of your constricted self every day. The practical function of a daily practice is to train the mind to let go of the busy resistances of daily life. When you are in the dying process, meditation practice prepares you to relax, stabilizes your mind, opens you to compassion, and creates a dynamic shift that reduces your anxiety and fear.
In many ways, meditation is a type of dying. It is first a letting go of your mental patterns, thoughts, and emotions that occupy your daily life. Whether using the breath as a focus or a mantra or a chant that repeats over and over there is a letting go of the mental world and a “falling into” your senses and then a growing expansion beyond the boundaries of your body. As meditation becomes deeper, the sense of your identity weakens and your ego can become frightened just like you will experience as you go deeper into your dying process.
The value of meditation is that beneath the busy mind is a space of peace and calm. Meditation concentration accesses this space of peace and calm by allowing you to let go of your patterns as well as your needs, fears, and wants. The fruit of this practice occurs in an open space of knowing. In this knowing, you realize that you have everything you need within you. Thus the letting go to death is just another letting go of what you practice in meditation. By learning to let go in your daily life, you let death take care of itself as it occurs in the natural course of your life.
Unfortunately, if you have not learned to let go daily in meditation, your resistance to your death may be a time of unrest, confusion, and terrifying emotionality. A developed meditation practice can be the most powerful tool for you when you are dying.
Exercise: Reflection on Meditation Practice
Respond in your journal to the following questions. Before answering them, become still in silence and breathe deeply so that your mind and heart settle and you can listen to the deepest part of yourself. If in a group, share your thoughts.
• If you have a meditation practice, describe it. How much time do you spend practicing daily? Consider how you believe it can help you in preparing for your death. Is the practice strong enough for the time when you will die? Do you need to alter or do a different practice or in some way deepen your meditation practice? Simply reflect on the value and daily helpfulness of your practice for your dying.
• If you don’t have a meditation practice, decide if you want a practice. If you want to experiment with meditation, seek out a form of meditation practice that would be appropriate for you. My book and CDs can help guide this process as one way to explore meditation.
Sogyal Rinpoche urges that we practice meditation because “We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don’t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home. Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home.” 20
11. Idries Shah, The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin (New York: Penguin, 1993).
12. Halifax, Being with Dying, 132.
13. Margery Williams and William Nicholson (Illustrator), The Velveteen Rabbit (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 6–7.
14. Ibid., 6–7.
15. Halifax, Being with Dying.
16. Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit, 5.
17. Academy of Achievement, “Edward Albee—Academy of Achievement.” http://www.achievement.org/achiever/edward-albee/#biography.
18. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 22.
19. Woody Allen, Without Feathers (New York: Random House, 1975), 99.
20. Sogyal, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.