The Benefits of a Mortality Meditation, Part 2

The contemplation of the awe-full fact of death is a reminder of the awesome fact of life.

If you're concerned about spiraling into depression at the thought of your own demise, though, apply what psychologists call “systematic desensitization,” a behavioral technique often used with fears and phobias. It involves gradually exposing yourself to the thing you fear and simultaneously relaxing. In other words, go slowly, take deep breaths and small bites, and chew before swallowing.

After all, this is about death awareness—watching your feelings arise and then gently letting them go, shifting from anxiety or anguish to, say, acceptance or even gratitude. It's not about grabbing onto emotions or over-identifying with them. Just watch them and see where they take you. It's a mindfulness meditation, and a profound one.

“Of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme,” said Buddha. “Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.”

Death awareness—in particular the refusal to allow denial to be your default position in regard to it—is excellent practice for dealing with any difficult emotion. It's a highly transferable skill. To be sure, a mortality meditation can be painful, rife with sadness and anxiety, if not a side-order of holy terror. But just beyond this very natural response is often relief at having faced it, if not a greater commitment to affirmative action; a redoubling of the effort to live fully, to clarify your priorities and bring your deeds in line with your values.

Being a reporter, I know this much about deadlines: they get things done! And the thing about use-by dates is that they encourage you to use it before you lose it.

But for mortality’s payload of insight and perspective—of aliveness—to be delivered, it’s got to be a close encounter, either imaginally or physically.

Death is something we know all about but don’t really know at all. On one hand, we’ve heard it all before: life is short, here today gone tomorrow, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, out out brief candle, death and taxes, to be or not to be. On the other hand, many of us know it intellectually but not emotionally. It hasn’t penetrated to the level where it impacts our behavior and decision-making, and leads to the kind of change that lasts.

We all owe God a death, Shakespeare said, and we owe it to ourselves to practice for the occasion. Here, then, are some ways to do that:

1) Embrace loss, rather than push it away. Since death is ultimately about loss, all losses are good practice. When you experience loss—financial, vocational, relational, physical—let yourself feel what you feel without reaching for an immediate fix. Loss is a skill, not just something that drops on you from a 3rd-floor window.

2) Contemplate impermanence by meditating on the breath, and notice that each has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

3) Go visit ruins, and bring a journal. Open yourself to their standard-issue revelation, and the main tentpole of wisdom: all things come to an end. Allow it to sadden you and spur you to live all at once.

4) Read Stephen Levine’s book A Year to Live, and hospice-nurse Bronnie Ware's article “The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying.”

5) Take a contemplative stroll through a church graveyard.

6) Spend time with the dying.

7) Google the phrase “Things I want to do before I die” and peruse the lists people have compiled.

8) Try this simple death-awareness meditation, referred to as the Daily Recollections, brought to you by Buddha: “I am of the nature to grow old; I am of the nature to sicken; I am of the nature to die.”

9) Or try this visualization, from Larry Rosenberg’s book Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive: picture yourself on your deathbed. Imagine the person you love most in the world coming to your bedside, and imagine saying goodbye to that person forever.

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10) Seek encounters that offer you a look at the Bigger Picture, and your place in it. This will help you, ironically, to focus; to remember that this is your time in the game and to make the most of it. The health of the eye demands a horizon, Emerson once said, and the same goes for the spirit.

These encounters could be, as Emerson meant it, the enormities of the natural world. Or it could be the study of history, geology, archeology, anthropology, paleontology, mythology, cosmology, spirituality. And ideally field study, because the more tangible an experience of the big picture, the better. Turn fossils over in the palm of your hand. Stand on the platform of an observatory and look through a telescope at Saturn and its rings. Stand before cliffs and see huge slabs of time at a glance—epochs, not calendar pages. Walk through the ruins of a city come and gone. Stroll down the aisles of vast libraries.

11) Consider death in the context of deep time. The British scientist Richard Dawkins suggests an imaginative exercise:

Spread your arms wide. The tip of your left hand marks the beginning of evolution and the tip of your right hand marks today. The span from the tip of your left hand all the way to your right shoulder brings forth nothing more than bacteria. The first invertebrates make their entrance near your right elbow. The dinosaurs appear in the middle of your right palm, and die out near your outermost finger joint. Homo erectus and homo sapiens appear at the white part of your fingernails. And all of recorded human history—the Cro-Magnon caves of Europe, the neolithic Fertile Crescent, the god-kings of Assyria and Mesoamerica, all the spreading trade routes and codified laws and languages of the world, the rise of nation-states and the fall of the Roman empire, right up to the Rolling Stones and reality TV—all of it would be erased by the single stroke of a nail file.

12) Consider this passage from a commencement speech the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky gave to the 1989 graduating class at Dartmouth College: “The most valuable lesson of your life is the lesson of your utter insignificance. It puts your existence into its proper perspective, and the more you learn about your own size, the more humble and the more compassionate you become; the more you’re charged with life, emotions, joys, fears, compassion. It is the anticipation of that inanimate infinity that accounts for the intensity of human sentiments. Passion is among the privileges of the insignificant, and a remedy against boredom.”

To learn more about Passion, visit www.gregglevoy.com