The Power of Vulnerability
No one gets out of this game of life alive. We all have a finite and unknown amount of time to be here, and for some people, that thought is paralyzing. The fifth klesha is abhinivesha, which means “fear of death”; we’re clinging to life at all costs. Sometimes people have an existential crisis around that idea. What’s the point if we’re all going to die? Sometimes people deny that reality or hold on tightly, trying to control everything—and by everything, I mean other people, outcomes, or even the weather. Other people attempt to run. They keep themselves so busy and distracted that they don’t have time to remember they’re mortal. The thing is, until you accept that you’re going to die at some point, you really can’t live in the now, because there’s no way to appreciate life for the gift it is. You don’t love with your whole heart if you take tomorrow for granted. You might leave important things unsaid or undone. Embracing your mortality is essential so you can live well and, when the time comes, you can die well, too.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my aunt and uncle and their four kids, my cousins, who were a little older than I was. I loved going to their home. It was such a great taste of family life—two boys, two girls, a game room downstairs, and the love and affection at the center of it all: the marriage of my aunt and uncle. They laughed easily and teased each other in the best ways. They hugged and kissed and talked to each other about everything. It was obvious they were the best of friends.
My aunt had a cookie drawer in the kitchen, and she filled the house with the smells of great Italian cooking. My uncle used to bite my cheeks so hard he’d leave a mark, but I loved it. He’d swing me around and tickle me and pick me up whenever I asked, and also when I didn’t. To me, he smelled like aftershave—and love. During the summers, we’d all go to my grandmother’s house at the Jersey Shore. Some of my best memories are of running on the beach with my cousins, going to the amusement park, and drinking iced tea in my Nanny’s backyard, with the smell of her tomato plants growing up the side of the house.
Eventually, my cousins started going off to college, and my aunt and uncle began conceiving of their new life with an empty nest. After years of shuttling around four kids, it was going to be just the two of them. They decided to take the first vacation they’d be on alone since my cousins were born. My aunt had a business trip out in California, and my uncle was going to meet her there at the end of it.
The day before he was supposed to fly, my uncle showed up at a friend’s house, pale and not feeling well. He had a sudden heart attack and couldn’t be saved. There were no warning signs, no family history of heart disease. He was with us, and then he was gone, in an instant.
My eldest cousin flew to California to tell my aunt in person and to bring her home. The shock of his death hit our family hard. My mother, who’d lost her father at thirteen and her mother at twenty-eight, was now the only remaining member of her family of origin.
To this day, many years later, my aunt still wears her wedding ring. She’s still married to my uncle. She always will be. Death is not the end of the bond we share with people; it’s not the end of the relationship. It hurts, though, and it leaves us reeling with shock. A person, a whole universe, is suddenly gone. Of course we want to touch the person we love. We want to hear their voice, see their smile, smell their smell. We want to know that they’re okay, and we’d love to know that we’ll be with them again at some point.
This is part of the human condition; we have an amazing capacity to love, and we deal with unknown parameters. There is no way to love without making yourself vulnerable, and there’s no way to truly live without loving.
One way to honor the reality of our vulnerability, impermanence, and potential for heartbreaking loss is to live each day fully. We want to release our attachments to the things that are really meaningless and to invest our time and energy in making sure the people in our life know how much we love them, how much we treasure them, and how grateful we are. That way, at least, if someone is ripped from us, we will know that we loved them out loud, every day. And maybe within the grief, we can also feel gratitude for having loved that deeply.
I think most of us live with this reality, but sometimes we push it down. We know we aren’t going to live forever, but at the same time, we behave as if we have time to waste, and we tend to take tomorrow for granted. We do that for the people we love as well. That’s why death hits us so hard. We’re in shock. We knew, but we didn’t think it was really going to happen to us, or to someone with whom we were so close and for whom we’d give anything.
I think we tend to push down this knowledge because it’s so uncomfortable and unsettling and because we all tend to be afraid of the unknown. And what is less known than what happens to us after we die? Of course we want to avoid thinking about that. You might have your ideas, and I have mine, but none of us knows for sure. And we don’t want to live in fear. We don’t want to start each day worrying about all the things that could potentially befall us or our loved ones. I’m not suggesting it should be otherwise.
Having said that, I think we tend to push our fear down too far. I think it’s important to grapple with these unanswerable questions and come up with our own ideas about what’s happening. Because if we ignore the parameters and the mystery, it doesn’t make them go away. They become like a thorn in the mind. We know they exist. We know we exist. We don’t all have to agree about what’s happening, but we do have to come up with our own individual ideas that make sense to us. Remembering our vulnerability can be inspiring instead of paralyzing.
And what is the fear? Is the fear that we cease to exist? That we are just … gone, and our life turns out to have had very little impact? I’d argue that your actions every day, large and small, create a ripple effect that does, indeed, have an impact on the world around you. But a lot of people are strongly attached to their own identity. It’s hard not to be. We need a way to make sense of our lives and the world around us. And it’s very challenging to just trust that whatever is coming next, some essential part of us will continue when the body dies.
The Fear of Death
Yogis call this fear of death abhinivesha; it’s one of the kleshas. The idea is that our love and attachment to the earthly life is the root of most of our fears. Life is constantly teaching us to deal with loss, in little ways and big. Maybe you lose your keys or your glasses and you have a moment to acknowledge your vulnerability. Maybe you lose your way in an unfamiliar neighborhood and you feel helpless or exposed. Relationships change, people change, the seasons change. Life is teaching us all the time to open and release and pay attention.
Our children change and grow so quickly. Our parents begin to age in ways we notice. We get our first gray hair. Maybe we dye our hair so we don’t have to notice what’s happening. As a culture, we resist aging. People try to look twenty-five when they’re sixty, probably because they’re terrified. Part of the reason, of course, is that we celebrate youth and vitality as a culture, and our wiser, older people are largely ignored, which is part of the reason we’re so lost. We have homes for people when they get too old and too messy and too sad to handle. Sometimes you have to have full-time care for your aging parent, so please don’t misunderstand me. I’m just saying we tend to undervalue the older segment of our population as a source of inspiration, and those are the people who understand what’s important. They’re in that final chapter. They’re being forced to let go, to say goodbye, to release their attachments to this human experience. They can’t pretend it isn’t happening anymore. The memory slips. The knees ache. Just standing up is a reminder. There’s no looking away. Those are the people to talk to about life.
Of course, it’s easier to tell people not to be scared of death when you believe in reincarnation. If you know that you get to come back again and that it’s likely you might even incarnate again with the same souls, it’s less scary. Many yogis believe that we arrive in this world with a karmic inheritance from our past life or lives (samskaras) and that our experiences here are the ones we need for the evolution of our soul. The idea is to use your practice to liberate yourself from the need to keep coming back, so that eventually your soul is so evolved, you don’t need a body or this earthly existence to work things out anymore. You achieve enlightenment.
Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that you have to believe any of that. I’m just sharing these ideas. As for me, I love the idea of reincarnation, the idea that we have more than one chance to get it right. I love the idea that the people I treasure most might be with me again or that we could all end up hanging out together as pure consciousness, just being love and sending love. That sounds awesome. But since I don’t know that for sure, sometimes I cling to the idea. I am not ready to leave my body or this earth or the people I hold dearest. Not even a little. But I want to live my life in such a way that if I make it to ninety, or one hundred, or one hundred and eight, I’ll feel like I gave it everything I had. I think if I can look back and feel that I gave every single bit of myself that might have been useful or helpful or meaningful, that I loved as much as I could, as hard as I could, as completely as I could, and that there isn’t a shred of doubt in the mind of anyone close to me how I feel about them—then I might be ready. I think the hardest thing for me would be to arrive at death’s door and feel full of regret. That scares me more than death. But it doesn’t scare me in a way that closes me down; it scares me in a way that moves me forward.
It’s easy to take things for granted. We just assume we’ll be getting up tomorrow (and I hope we all do). We make our plans and we have our schedules. I think we’re trying to control those things we can in the face of all the uncertainty about how long we’ll be on this planet and what will happen to us after we die. I mean, at least let me put my mat down in the same spot every time I go to my yoga class, right? At least let me count on that!
The reason we long to create order is because we’re faced with chaos, so sometimes we freak out about the small stuff. Maybe on Tuesdays we do the grocery shopping, and if they’re out of our favorite peanut butter, we’re annoyed. Maybe on Thursday night we spill red wine on a white silk blouse we love and on which we spent too much money, and now it’s ruined. It’s easy to get attached to the little things. Life will give us plenty of big things to grapple with, and wherever you release your grip, you free up space. Not having your peanut butter doesn’t bring you closer to death, and neither does the loss of your blouse, but you do have those chances to practice letting go. We can let go in bigger ways, too.
It takes bravery to allow a situation to unfold, to release our need for it to be one way, and to trust in our process. This is part of practicing—to let go of people who want to run, to let go of ideas that are holding us back. The more we cling, the less we fly. Life has an amazing way of surprising us if we let it. If the vision you have of how life should be or how things should go does not come to pass, maybe something even more incredible will happen. There’s no way to know what’s ahead of us, but we can definitely make our “right now” miserable by deciding that only one outcome will suffice and by clinging to the life we know.
Maybe we’ve lost someone we don’t know how to live without, and it happened so suddenly that we’re in a state of shock. Our limbs work, we can put one foot in front of the other, and we seem okay to those around us, but inside we’re bargaining with the universe. We’re trying to come up with some way to get back the person we lost, as if that might be possible.
Some things are so painful that we look for a different route, a formula that creates an outcome we can live with. We might do this by retracing our steps. We think, if only we’d done or said such-and-such, then maybe these other events wouldn’t have transpired and life would still make sense. If only we could go back in time and redo one decision, then perhaps that would have had all kinds of implications that would have saved us from the current pain.
And here’s the thing. When you’re dealing with those big losses—the loss of a person, for example—it’s a process, like anything else. It’s not something you can rush, and there isn’t any how-to book that’s going to speed things up. You just have to move through your pain in whatever way you can and hope that the people in your life show up for you, nurture you, and make sure you get a little sun on your face. Sometimes we go through experiences that make us feel like we’re in a bubble, like there’s an impenetrable film between us and everyone else. In her book God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours, author and inspirational speaker Regina Brett says, “You have to give time, time.” Time doesn’t heal every wound, but it helps lessen the crushing, incomprehensible pain of sudden grief. That experience of waking up and having to re-remember what happened fades away over time, because eventually you will integrate it; you will know it in your bones. You won’t wake up in the middle of the night, disoriented and panicked, and feeling as though you’ve forgotten something urgent.
Also, there’s this: nothing comes from nothing, and nothing truly dies. Before the Big Bang, there was something. I don’t know what it was, but there was something. It’s the old chicken-or-the-egg question, but it’s one or the other. There was a chicken or there was an egg. There was something. Your time of birth might be recorded on your birth certificate as the moment at which you took your first big inhale, but you existed before that moment. In fact, you’d already had a profound experience: a journey through the birth canal. And before that, you were in your mother’s womb, and in your mother and father before that, and in all your ancestors. You would not exist without them. You were in them, and they are in you, and when you die, you will not be nothing, no matter what you believe. If you decide to be buried or cremated, eventually you will become part of the earth; you’ll be watered by the rain and you’ll grow into the trees and into the air and toward the sun. Your soul, if you believe in souls, will go on its own journey. But even if you don’t believe that there’s something eternal that goes on, you will not be nothing. You can never be nothing. The fact that you are here is a miracle, scientific or otherwise. It’s a miracle any of us are here.
So much of our trouble comes from our strong identification with the body we’re in—with our names and our jobs and our weight and our hair color and our huge fear that we’re going to die and become nothing. This is why we cling. This is why we struggle and try to control and force things. This is why we forget to live sometimes.
Different Kinds of Loss
We deal with all kinds of loss in life, such as the loss of our innocence (whenever that comes), the loss of our trust when someone betrays us for the first time, and the loss of the idea that we’re invincible. Sometimes we deal with the loss of our faith in ourselves or the world at large. It could be we’re dealing with the pain of rejection, and we keep writing a script in our head about what’s really happening and how we’re going to get our happy ending down the line, as if we could bend reality to meet our will.
Losing our keys is just a moment when we get to practice not panicking. Dealing with a car that won’t start is a chance to realize that the things we take for granted won’t always work the way we want them to or think they should. The more we accept that life is really another word for energy, and that energy is always in motion, the less we’ll expect things to be stable, predictable, and safe. Learning to love in the face of uncertainty takes bravery, discipline, and dedication, but it’s a much better way to move through life.
It’s not a coincidence that many physical yoga classes start out in child’s pose (balasana) and end up in corpse pose (savasana). Ideally, the physical practice gives you an opportunity to work on more than just the asana part. Hopefully, it mirrors life. There are moments that are wonderful and pleasurable and moments that are challenging and confrontational. There are days when you feel open and strong and days when you feel tired and weak. Always there’s the chance to listen to your intuition, to quiet your mind, to observe your tendencies, and to respond with compassion for yourself. To direct your energy and breathe through the challenging moments and the ones that feel good. To use your body and the poses as tools to quiet the redundant and obsessive thinking while also taking care of your physical body, which is a gift. And, of course, corpse pose at the end isn’t a literal death. I doubt yoga would be so popular if it were. But it’s a nice eight to ten minutes where we get to practice surrender and presence.
Journal Exercise
1. What are your ideas about death? What do you believe happens after death?
2. Do your ideas about death run counter to what you were taught growing up? Was death talked about or experienced in your household?
3. Do you believe in the soul? Do you think there’s some essential part of us that continues on even after the body is gone? If yes, why? If no, why not?
4. How do you remember and honor the people you’ve loved and lost? Do you have any rituals around remembering, such as lighting a candle or going to a particular place?
5. Does the idea of death scare you? If so, why? Are there things you want to be doing in your life that you aren’t doing or things you need to say that you’re holding back? Why is that?
6. If you knew you only had six months to live, what would you do with the time remaining?
7. If you knew that your loved ones only had six months to live, what would you do with the time remaining? What would you say?
Yoga Exercise: Savasana & Guided Meditation
We’re going to practice savasana (corpse pose). Lie down on the floor. If you have a yoga mat, that will be more comfortable, but lying on a blanket on the floor is also fine. Don’t take savasana in your bed unless you’re ready to go to sleep. Having said that, if you have insomnia, savasana is a great idea. Wherever you are, tuck your shoulder blades underneath you and make sure your shoulders are not up around your ears. Lengthen the back of your neck. If you find that your jugular is exposed due to the shape of your spine, put another blanket under your head. If your lower back bothers you, roll up another blanket and place it underneath your knees. Your arms are by your sides, but create a little space between your arms and your body, and turn your palms to the sky. Let your legs fall open, about hip-width apart. Breathe naturally through your nose. If the breath is deep, that’s fine; if it’s shallow, that’s also fine. Just observe the breath without controlling it.
Systematically move down your body, from the crown of your head to the tips of your toes, about two inches at a time. Simply be curious about sensation. Notice if you feel any tingling in your scalp, or any tightness. Some people don’t feel a lot of sensation in the scalp, so just observe for a moment and keep going. Notice the space between your brows, the muscles around your eyes, and the eyes themselves. Notice the hinges of your jaw, your mouth, your tongue.
Notice your throat, the space at the front of your heart, and the space behind your heart. Notice the rib cage, and the way it rises and falls. Feel your lungs moving. Notice the belly, the lower belly, and the pelvic floor.
Feel the arms, from the shoulders, to the biceps, to the forearms, and to each hand. Feel the fingertips and notice how they naturally curl inward.
Notice your hip flexors, your quads, and the space behind your knees. Observe your calf muscles, the arches of your feet, and every toe. Anywhere you feel resistance, see if you can soften and release and relax.
When you relax the body and stay curious about sensations, you also rest the mind. You aren’t thinking about yesterday or tomorrow. You aren’t thinking at all; you’re just witnessing your experience. You’re not attached to your ideas, your likes, your dislikes, your name, your job, or the different roles you play. You’re simply breathing in and breathing out, and observing. It’s excellent practice for life—and for death.