While I am not a Buddhist, I find great wisdom and potential liberation in the Tibetan Buddhist teachings on death. They offer a beautiful understanding of life’s end to those in the west who are still under the influence of a societal death taboo.
Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, has a particular skill in drawing out the universal messages of these teachings. He makes them understandable to the western mind without losing their authenticity, purity, and power. What follows is a summary of his teachings on death and impermanence.*
According to Sogyal Rinpoche, reflections on death and impermanence are the very cornerstone of all spiritual paths. Among Christian contemplatives, for example, is the expression ‘Memento mori’ – ‘remember that you will die.’ Buddhist teachings encourage awareness of the fact that we could die at any moment. This helps us to maintain awareness of the preciousness of life and encourages us to sort out our priorities.
From a Buddhist perspective, the root cause of all our suffering, is the fact that we do not take enough time to come to know ourselves. We are encouraged to discover our true nature, our enlightened, ‘Buddha’ mind through prayer and meditation.
Beyond our ordinary everyday mind is our true mind. It radiates the qualities of tremendous light or brilliance (wisdom) and great warmth (love and compassion). Sogyal Rinpoche uses the analogy of the sky to contrast this state of enlightenment to our everyday mind. Our daily thoughts, feelings, and actions are like temporary clouds that come and go in an endless sky. The sky, like the enlightened mind, is beyond birth and death.
Coming to know our true nature requires overcoming our ordinary mind and moving past our ego.
In our day-to-day lives, we become absorbed and distracted by our thoughts, feelings and activities. It is easy to allow our ignorance, negative emotions, and actions to obscure our true nature. This occurs much the same way that clouds block our awareness of the endless sky.
We all have the potential to connect beyond our ordinary minds to our deeper state of profound wisdom, love, and compassion.
It is this state of mind that is said to endure past death. If we do not come to glimpse our true nature in life, we will not be prepared to recognize it and enter into it at death.
This transformation of mind is essential preparation for death. Like cleaning the smudges off your eyeglass lenses, it also allows us to see more clearly in life. Our very perceptions transform and circumstances will appear differently. Whether or not we are able to see clearly, remember that even when our ordinary mind is cloudy, the sky-like nature of mind is still there. Weather is only on the surface. Deep in the sky-like nature of our minds it is pure.
In many western spiritual traditions, we use the expression ‘let go and let God.’ Similarly, the Buddhists teach that the essential path to personal transformation and freedom comes from learning to stop grasping after impermanence. Indeed, everything is in a constant state of change.
The message of impermanence is that one of the main causes of suffering is grasping and attachment. Since what we grasp for is impermanent, grasping is an act of futility.
We have to learn to let go. We don’t have to change. We simply change our minds and recognize that impermanence is the very nature and fabric of life itself.
We associate impermanence with losing and death, but when we really understand it – it is the most secure thing. When we lose the clouds, we gain the sky.
The most permanent thing is impermanence. When we realize that, we are made stronger spiritually.
Our fear of death, according to Sogyal Rinpoche, is the fear of life, of facing ourselves. Looking into death is actually facing ourselves because sooner or later we have to come to terms with ourselves. That is why we tend to think of death only when we are dying.
To look at yourself and your life at death is too little too late where personal transformation is concerned.
That is why Tibetan Buddhist teachings stress that we should always contemplate death and impermanence. It is a way of breaking through to our true nature.
Rainer Maria Rilke said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure. Our fear of the impermanence of life and all that we grasp after awakens in us an awareness that nothing of this world is real and nothing lasts.
Milarepa, a revered Tibetan poet and sage, said it this way – “All worldly pursuits have but the one unavoidable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings in destruction; meetings in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should, from the very first, renounce acquisition and heaping up, and building, and meeting; and faithful to the commands of an eminent guru, set about realizing the Truth (which has no birth or death).”
We discover that this understanding about impermanence is really our greatest friend. It drives us to ask:
“If everything dies and changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances? Is there something boundless and infinitely spacious in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Is there something, in fact, we can depend on that does survive what we call death?”
Allow these questions to occupy you urgently and reflect upon them. You will slowly find yourself making a profound shift in the way you view everything. With continued contemplation and practice in letting go, we come to uncover in ourselves something we cannot name or describe or conceptualize. It is something we come to realize lies behind all the changes and deaths of the world.
Our myopic focus upon our desires, what we are grasping for, and that which we are trying to avoid, begins to dissolve and fall away. As this happens, we catch repeated and glowing glimpses of the vast implications behind the truth of impermanence.
Sogyal Rinpoche describes this transformation saying:
“It is as if all our lives we have been flying in an airplane through dark clouds and turbulence when suddenly the plane soars above these into the clear boundless skies. Inspired and exhilarated by this new dimension of freedom, we come to uncover a depth of peace, joy and confidence in ourselves that fills us with wonder and gradually breeds in us a certainty that there is in us something that nothing destroys, that nothing alters, and that cannot die.”
He further describes, “as the new awareness becomes vivid and almost unbroken, there occurs a personal and utterly non-conceptual revelation of what we are, why we are here, and how we should act which amounts in the end to nothing less than a new life, new birth – almost a resurrection . . . You discover something in yourself that does not die.”
He also speaks of death using the analogy of being on a train platform waiting for a train. We know that we must take that train but don’t know when it is coming. We have great anxiety because our bags are not packed. We do not prepare for death or live thoughtfully because we think we will live forever. We know we will die someday. But, we prefer not to absorb that thought. Instead, we pretend that we have an unlimited lease on life.
We become lazy in how we live our lives. The particular kind of laziness in the west is an active one. We do everything and anything to avoid ourselves. We fill our lives with so many activities that there is not really a chance for the truth of ourselves to be revealed. There is no gap. Yet, we live with an abiding anxiety since we have not faced ourselves or our death. There is a deep anxiety and a deep fear because death represents our ultimate fear.
Learning to live in the immediacy of death helps us to sort out our priorities and to realize what is truly important in life.
We learn that there is really not much time to waste. Death helps us to look into our life in a deeper way.
We come to realize that only two things really matter when we die – how we have lived and the state of our mind.
When we take care of those most important things, then we can relax. Milarepa said my religion is not to be ashamed of myself when I die.”
An unenlightened mind sees death as defeat – a tragedy. These teachings show us it is really an extraordinary opportunity for transformation and personal liberation.
When we die, it is only the end of one cycle finishing. The delusions of this life will end if we allow it. However, those who hold tight to their illusions don’t allow for their liberation to take place. Those who allow it not only surrender to the death of their bodies but they allow their ordinary mind to die with all its delusions as well.
Milarepa described it this way: ‘In horror of death, I took to the mountains. Meditating again and again on the uncertainty of the hour of death, I captured the fortress of the deathless unending nature of mind. Now all fear of death is done and gone.”
Tibetan Buddhist teachings provide three pieces of advice for the moment of death. These also serve practitioners well in how to live their lives:
Let go of all graspings, attachments, and aversions.
Keep your heart and mind pure.
Unite your mind with the wisdom mind of the buddhas.
Those practicing these techniques in life who are really able to let go inside themselves, find they are able to cope better with outer stress. They are less bothered or worried by what transpires in their life. When we stabilize and integrate this view as part of our being through meditation and action, we can meet death fearlessly. By practicing getting into the high ground of our consciousness during life through meditation and contemplation, we prepare ourselves for the moment of death.
There is also advice given for those who are helping the dying. Essentially, we are called upon to simply be there maintaining a consciousness of unconditional loving — free of attachments. Love is not expressed by grasping after the life of the dying. This kind of attachment, Sogyal Rinpoche teaches, is actually what spoils love.
To truly realize love for one another, we have to let go.
When a loved one is dying, we can best serve them by giving them our permission and blessing to die and by surrounding them with our love and encouragement.
*This article is based on the teachings of Sogyal Rinpoche presented in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and the following four lectures: Transcending All Fear of Death; The Essence of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (parts one and two); and Reflecting on Death.
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What Do You Think Happens When We Die?
In the U.S., we have a culture of silence around dying and death. It’s a great taboo that fills most of us with anxiety about life’s end without any way to reduce that anxiety. We all know we are going to die, yet we don’t talk about it. The entire subject has become a mysterious and ominous kind of black hole in our consciousness, and we learn not to go there.
I think it would be really healthy for us to break through this taboo and normalize our conversation about death. It would free us to examine our beliefs, thoughts and feelings about death, both individually and collectively. Perhaps it would change how we feel about war and violence. By embracing the reality of death, we might be able to perceive a greater value and a deeper meaning of life.
Many people have never challenged what they were taught about death as children. This is not surprising in a society that doesn’t talk about death. Some of us question and affirm what we were first taught while others find it a starting point from which their beliefs evolve. I fall into this latter category.
When I began to explore the reality of death more deeply, I found that I was less afraid of death itself than I was of dying. I was anxious about not knowing when and how I would die. It terrified me when I thought of it. It was as though we all walk around with a huge question mark over our heads, not knowing how much time we have left. Here today, maybe gone tomorrow.
At first, I thought that God had a mean streak or a bad day when inventing death. I thought it was wrong and that we should live forever. But when I thought about that, I wondered what forever would be like — an endless story, a giant run-on sentence with no ending punctuation. Would there be no aging of the body or maturing of our minds in an endless now? Would we be stuck in a perpetual state of changeless being? The more I thought about the mixed blessings of being an infant, a child, a teen, a 20-year-old, a 40-year-old, and now a person in my 70s, the more I valued the exquisite design of this progression of maturation. I wouldn’t want to live endlessly in one frozen form without the punctuation of time passing. The more I thought this way, the more normal and appropriate death seemed.
When I delved further into the question of what happens when we die, I looked first at what I had been taught as a child. Just as many children learn to be good to get great presents from Santa, I was taught to be good in the way I lived my life so that I could earn eternal life with God. I had no idea what that meant other than that I shouldn’t be “bad.” It was a great inducement for conformity to the rules.
As I matured, my ideas about life, death, God and eternity evolved. I found myself to be eclectic in gathering bits and pieces of wisdom from around the world that resonated with a truth that existed inside of me. Where did that truth come from? I do not know. I just know that I have always recognized what is true for me by a process of reflection and inner resonance.
When I think about what happens to us when we die, I realize that I cannot address the matter without simultaneously looking at the purpose and meaning of life. Life and death seem to be woven together in an endless process of one birthing the other. I once wrote the following poem about this:
I believe that we are all souls having human experiences for the purpose of coming to know our divine nature in human form. We are coming into a oneness through and with God. In this context, what we commonly refer to as death is simply the death of this body and personality. It is the dropping of a human form by our real self — the soul. As far as I can tell, we really do see a bright light and loved ones on the other side of this death as we journey forward in our process of awakening. I believe that we do re-embody again and again as we strengthen our awareness of our own divinity. So, while I am saddened by the loss of connection to loved ones that occurs at death, I am comforted by my belief that this is one in a series of lives.
I know that many people do not share my particular beliefs. That is fine with me. Personally, I find it quite fascinating that “the truth” resonates differently in each of us.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.
How to Maintain Your Inner Well-Being – Part 2
Did you know that your brain gives preference to visual information?
Researchers L.D. Rosenblum, Harold Stolovitch, and Erica Keeps refer to our senses as learning portals. They offer the following statistics regarding the percentage of data processed by each of our five senses:
Why is this significant?
Unaware that we are “seeing” the projection of an internally-filtered reality, we misinterpret our perceptions of reality to be reality itself. Consider the heated arguments between individuals of opposing political points of view. Each sees a different reality and believes that they are “right” and those on the other side of the aisle are “wrong.”
For most of us, our socialization includes indoctrination into a binary model of consciousness. In other words, we are taught to sort people and experiences into right/wrong, good/bad, beautiful/ugly, desirable/undesirable and so on. In fact, life is far more complex and messy than that.
Learned biases and preferences short-circuit the process of developing curiosity about those differences that we are taught to reject. There is a built-in bias against diversity in this way of encountering unfamiliar people and experiences. Therefore, diversity requires a new way of perceiving beyond our autopilot right/wrong sorting process.
By about the age of five or six, we have the foundation of our self-image in place and we begin to unconsciously protect, conceal, or improve our image of ourselves and to become competitive with the self-images of others. We spend most of our time focused outward through our self-image as we negotiate and navigate our way through the world and relate to the imagined self-images being projected by others.
We selectively see things that support our existing beliefs and filter out things that do not agree with our way of seeing things.
Another paradox of our visual orientation is that it makes it very difficult for us to verify and trust the existence of non-physical reality. This is the territory of self-knowledge, intuition, and spiritual awareness.
Paying attention to non-physical reality is a bit like being a salmon swimming upstream against the current. It requires an intentional redirection of our focus. To turn inward, we must engage in a more intimate relationship with ourselves. To awaken ourselves spiritually require a different state of mind.
Learning how to become more conscious of our own unique data sorting process is essential to mastering the art of being who we authentically are.
Spiritual awakening involves consciously and intentionally developing our ability to override our usual way of being and perceiving. It requires looking within rather than being drawn to an external focus by the dominance of visual sensory input we are receiving. It means cultivating a non-judgmental perspective towards differences and an awareness of a level upon which we are all the same.
This requires cultivation of a childlike curiosity rather than a defensive and competitive stance regarding our perceptions versus those of others. It requires an entirely different kind of awareness — not based on sensory data. Rather it is a matter of attunement to something greater than our physical form that is shared by all. Language and empirical science fail us in speaking clearly about such matters, but do not negate their existence.
Each of us has our own unique life to lead. As we learn about the power of the Reticular Activating System (RAS) it becomes clear that the quality of our consciousness determines how we experience our lives.
In case you missed it, here is the link to Part 1 of this blog post.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.
How to Handle Family Dynamics Around a Dying Loved One
Families can be complicated, to say the least. When they are beautifully loving and caring, it’s one of God’s most delightful gifts. But often, when the well-being of a critically-ill loved one is involved, tensions can flare. We don’t all love in the same way. And, love is often tainted by self-serving motivations or competition for power and influence in decision-making.
In fact, terrible things can be done in the name of love. And, the dynamics of power and influence that can develop among family and loved ones can be shocking. Tensions can escalate as judgments and discord fester. Frequently, childhood politics surface and you suddenly find yourself the seven-year-old kid who used to be bullied by her older sister.
Everyone might sincerely believe they all have the patient’s best interest in mind. Yet, they may have diametrically opposed views about what that would look like and how it is to be accomplished. Unfortunately, all too often family members polarize against each other behind the scenes rather than uniting in support of the patient.
Here are some guidelines to help families navigate these stressful and emotionally challenging times.
Respect the patient’s right to make his or her own decisions as long as deemed mentally competent.
Recently, a client shared her family’s drama around their terminally-ill mother. Behind the scenes, some family members are under the impression that mother is depressed and needs antidepressants. They emailed her doctor urging him to prescribe them. Others are concerned about drug interactions and over-drugging mom. They worry about masking feelings that she needs the opportunity to process. When I asked what the mother wanted, my client didn’t know. No one had asked her. They were too busy campaigning for their point of view behind her back.
Be sure that the patient designates a healthcare proxy before being deemed mentally incompetent.
A client told me that her father was the healthcare proxy for her mother. However, he was terribly uncomfortable dealing with death and dying.
The choice of who to appoint should not be primarily governed by the person’s rank in the family pecking order. Rather, the patient should thoughtfully decide based upon who is most able to communicate comfortably with the patient about their needs and care. It should be someone ablle to advocate for the patient with doctors, nurses and caregivers. For example, a family member might hold a strong personal or religious belief that is quite different from that of the patient. This could prevent that individual from following the patient’s wishes. Therefore, they would not be a good choice to serve as healthcare proxy.
No matter how strong your opinion, that doesn’t make you an expert.
As a family member, you may have concerns about the treatment protocol and care being given to your loved one. Address it either with the patient and/or their healthcare proxy. Do not take it upon yourself to try to direct their care. Feel free to express your point of view, but respect the right of the person who is making the decisions. Be careful not to make others wrong for not agreeing with you.
Clarify, agree upon, and respect a pecking order for the flow of information and influence.
The role of the primary caregiver and/or healthcare proxy should be respected. They typically have the most up-to-date knowledge about the patient’s condition and needs. If you really want to demonstrate your love for the patient, than do everything you can to support this person. Offer your help. Be a team player. Help to keep communications clean and above board within the family.
Avoid the temptation to judge and talk about each other behind backs. If you have a problem, address it directly with the person(s) involved.
Having a loved one who is critically-ill is stressful enough. Do not make matters worse by bringing your personal animosity toward another family member into the situation.
Handle your emotional needs on your own. Don’t act them out around the patient.
It is important to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about how you feel and to deal with that within yourself. Be respectful of the patient’s needs and the normal routine that has been established for the patient’s care.
It is not uncommon for relatives who live at a distance to visit and try to overcompensate for their absence. They may be acting out of guilty feelings by playing the hero or trying to make a larger-than-life impact on the situation.
For example, don’t take it upon yourself to feed the patient two big bowls of oatmeal because that used to be his or her favorite breakfast. Find out what the patient is eating now and stay with that. Also, consider the possibility that if you did manage to feed him or her that much oatmeal it wouldn’t necessarily mean that it was a good idea. They may be fully aware of your need to feel helpful and be eating it to please you even though it will cause digestive distress later.
In most cases, an in-law should focus on supporting their spouse in handling the emotions, tensions and concerns regarding the situation. It is usually not their place to be a major player in decision-making.
There are exceptions. For example, an in-law may be the primary caregiver and/or supervising the day-to-day care of the patient. Then his or her knowledge of the patient’s needs should be highly regarded.
Visitors should always seek the primary caregiver’s guidance about what is in the best interest of the patient. This is especially important if the patient is living in the home or in a nearby facility while other family members are not local to the situation.
Remember that you are writing family history through your behavior. Consider giving the patient a wonderful experience of loving, united family support.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.
How to Maintain Your Inner Well-Being – Part 1
If any of the following sound familiar, you will be delighted to know you can eliminate them all!
Each and every one of these is the direct result of specific beliefs, fears, or misconceptions through which you are filtering new experiences in your Reticular Activating System.
The Reticular Activating System (RAS) is truly a marvel of human design. Here’s what it does:
Do you have any idea how much new information your brain is constantly processing? In his book, Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson quantifies the human brain’s unfathomable ability to process information as follows:
Without our RAS, this barrage would quite literally blow our minds! We live in a constant state of data bombardment.
The fact that the vast majority of our data processing is unconscious is a great kindness in human design. However, this unconscious filtration system runs on autopilot while determining what incoming information we value, devalue, or fear based on our accumulated past reactions.
Mosby’s Medical Dictionary, 9th edition © 2009, Elsevier
The RAS is located in the brainstem. It consists of a network of nerve pathways. They form a link between the brain stem, which controls most of the body’s involuntary functions and reflexes, and the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of consciousness and our thinking ability. By connecting these two regions of the brain, the RAS functions as a filtering system for the mind. It controls our attention, awareness, thinking, and emotions. It quite literally causes us to construct our own internal worldview.
The good news is you have the power to change the settings on your filtration system. Through increased awareness of how this system works and by paying attention to all forms of imbalance you experience, you have the power to change your inner and outer experiences.
We are biased to the status quo of how we already see things.
One of the consequences of this misconception is that we believe that anyone whose perspective or way of being is different than ours is “wrong.” What we imagine to be our perception of empirical truth is merely a reflection of an aggregated inner point of view.
It is important to remember that no one else on this planet has an identical inner world to the one you live in. The assumption that others see the world as we do is the source of an enormous amount of our misunderstanding about ourselves and each other.
The majority of our perceptions and thoughts are merely the product of our primarily unconscious sensory data filtration system. They exist only in our private inner world.
We access this opportunity by paying attention to where things are not working well for us in our lives. To bring our autopilot ways of responding to our experiences into conscious awareness, we need to identify what is on our filter. So, take a good look at your underlying conditioning, beliefs, assumptions, expectations, prejudices, preferences, fears, memories, judgments, illusions, delusions, hopes, and dreams. Only then, do we have the option to challenge our default settings and change them as appropriate.
Another way of saying this is we need to clean our data processing filters. In doing so, we can update our default settings. Our freedom lies in recognizing that our RAS makes our lives a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is simply doing what we tell it to do. When we update our default settings, we are redirecting the perspective of our RAS so that it will now validate our new point of view.
Consider this simple example. While on a weight loss journey, I got to within one pound of what I viewed as a major threshold. I plateaud there for six weeks. I was doing everything “right” in terms of complying with my program. What was going on? Upon evaluation of my RAS filters, I noticed that I held a belief that crossing this particular one-pound threshold would put me into a level of success that I had not previously experienced.
Underneath that I discovered that I was fearful and did not trust myself to maintain this success. In this context, my weight loss plateau made perfect sense. Once I identified the source of resistance to further progress, I was able to bring more of this pattern into conscious awareness and to challenge myself to see my situation through new eyes.
When we get stuck, we need to look to see exactly what beliefs and fears have been preventing us from moving forward. Then, we can choose to replace them with new, affirming beliefs and assumptions.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.
What’s Wrong With Right/Wrong Thinking?
My friend Roy was a great teacher for me. He was a retired farmer who had dropped out of school at an early age. But, he had more wisdom than most of the world’s great scholars. I remember when I used to complain to him about other people who did things I didn’t like. When I sought his validation of my point of view, he would simply say, “It’s different.”
He got me thinking about how I thought about differences.
Our internal data processing determines the our perception of reality. When we judge someone, we think we are reacting to an external reality. In fact, we are simply encountering our own internal interpretation.
Most of us are indoctrinated into a binary model of thinking. We are taught to sort people and experiences into right/wrong, beautiful/ugly, desirable/undesirable, good/bad, and so on. In fact, life is far more complex and messy than that.
Learned biases and preferences short-circuit the process of developing curiosity about those differences that we are taught to reject. There is a built-in bias against diversity in this way of encountering unfamiliar people and experiences. Therefore, diversity requires a new way of perceiving beyond our autopilot right/wrong sorting process.
In a binary approach there are only two choices. That means if we encounter someone who is different, we can’t both be “right” or “OK.” As a result, we develop very narrow tolerances. In this context, differences are threatening.
When we are quick to judge, we shut ourselves down. We close ourselves off from additional information available to us. Our myopic view blinds us from alternative ways of seeing ourselves, others, and new situations.
The best way to override dualistic thinking is to activate your curiosity by calling on your inner detective.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it can save us from many a faulty assumption, preconceived notion, and narrow-minded interpretation of our shared reality. It is a vital key to rising above the limitations of right/wrong thinking.
Choose to be open and curious next time you encounter someone or something that threatens your preconceived notions of how things should be. Practice developing greater tolerance of differences and curiosity about how others see and experience our shared world. See if you can expand your comfort zone by choosing a both/and rather than an either/or state of mind.
Instead of making different perspectives wrong, inquire and invite dialogue for the purpose of gaining a deeper appreciation for other points of view. The simple fact is that differences do exist. They don’t have to be perceived as a threat. It’s how we choose to respond that makes all the difference in the world about our ability to peacefully co-exist or to wage wars against each other.
For further insight into mastering the art of being you, read more here.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.
7 Tender and Magnificent Lessons That Death Can Teach Us
This is a picture of me with my mother, Grace Mundy, six months before her death in 2006. We shared a home during the final nine years of her life. Being her friend and caregiver through to her death was a walk through the valley of the shadow of death. But, it also taught me the following life and death lessons that I will always treasure.
1. It’s okay to be afraid. It is perfectly normal to have fear about your own death or that of a loved one. Every fiber of our being has been acculturated to survival and to fear of the unfamiliar. So, don’t deny your fear . Get specific with yourself about exactly what it is that you are afraid of. You can’t move past it until you own it. Realize that what you are afraid to experience is just one possibility of how the future will unfold. I was so surprised to discover that some of the things I feared most turned out to be doorways to tenderness and deeper love. Fear can either stop us in our tracks or be used as a steppingstone to learning and growing and strengthening ourselves. The choice is ours to make.
2. Let nothing be more important than loving each other. When all is said and done in our lives, our greatest treasures are sweet and heartfelt moments shared with others. So remember that as you journey through your life. Next time someone you care about is feeling blue, receives a terminal diagnosis, or is simply getting really old, make time to share your heart with them. Override the temptation to make excuses about not having the time or not knowing what to say or do. Let yourself be inconvenienced or uncomfortable. Just show up with your heart wide open.
When my mother was dying, there was one person she kept asking to see because there was unfinished business between them. Four times she asked — one when in intensive care with a 50/50 chance of making it through the night. Each time I called this person and shared my mother’s request. Each time, she showed up four days later with an entourage that minimized the opportunity for them to have one-on-one time together. The resolution never occurred between them. But, my mother told me she had made peace with the situation in her own heart before she died. Fear, discomfort, and ego positions prevent the flow of love between people. And sometimes time runs out.
3. Everyone who is dying needs an advocate who loves them. When someone is critically ill or simply frail, they need their own energy just to cope and to heal if that is an option. There may be all kinds of specialists being called in to consult on the case. All too often the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Someone needs to keep track and connect the dots.
In my mother’s case, for example, she kept getting infections commonly spread in hospitals. Each infection brought on yet another antibiotic with another set of side effects. Those would make her susceptible to yet another opportunistic infection and another antibiotic would be prescribed and so on. I used to spend seven to ten hours a day with her when she was hospitalized just to keep track of all the things they were doing to her. I was busy all the time. It wasn’t until after it was all over that I realized I should have kept a notebook handy.
4. Death is not a popular topic among doctors. The medical model for terminal disease and death is a work in progress. Many doctors, having taken an oath to preserve life, perceive a patient’s death or the need to surrender them to palliative care as a personal failure. Expect most doctors to do everything they can think of to keep your loved one going. And, don’t wait for them to broach the subjects of palliative care or death. Be assertive and initiate that conversation on your loved one’s behalf.
Between hospitalizations, my mother had many trips to the ER. It was there that one brave doctor finally took me aside and told me that there was really nothing further medically that could be done for her. He suggested that we consider hospice care. I burst into tears. He held me, and comforted me until I was over the shock of hearing what no one wants to hear. My mother was going down a slippery slope toward death. I will always be grateful to him for telling me the truth so we could adjust our expectations accordingly.
5. No matter how anyone else’s behavior looks to us, they are doing the best they can. I’ve adopted a favorite expression:
Each of us is a complex assortment of skills, abilities, fears, traits and preferences. Compassion comes forward when we realize that how we think another “should” behave is of no significance. Indeed, if we walked in their shoes, we would likely behave no differently than they do. Particularly in stressful times, compassion for one another goes a very long way.
6. When someone you love is dying, it is their dying not yours. Sometimes a loved one will become very bossy and pushy about their point of view. They may be convinced that their ideas of what should or should not be done are the “right” way. It is important to help them realize that their job is not to lead the way. It is to follow the lead of the one who is dying. Let them die their way, not yours. If they want to be alone, let them. If they don’t want to eat, let them. If they want to change their will, let them. If they want to talk about dying, let them. Your job is to support them not to direct them.
There is a kind of emotional dance I experienced with my mother. Each of us did our best to be true to ourself without hurting each other. We learned to pay attention inwardly and to be bold about honoring ourselves as well as each other. I learned to follow her lead. I paid attention to what was important to her and what she didn’t care about.
7. Don’t leave yourself with any regrets. My mother and I shared many profound conversations during her final years. We intentionally cleared the air between us on a regular basis. We had an agreement not to withhold our upsets with each other when they occurred. We also helped each other find forgiveness for loved ones who were unable to give us the support we wanted.
Keep the emotional air quality as fresh and clean as possible. If toxicity remains with someone, don’t forget to practice forgiveness for both of you. That will free you inside yourself to accept the situation as it is and to choose to love this person and yourself unconditionally.
Above all else, just remember:
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Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on Death and Impermanence
While I am not a Buddhist, I find great wisdom and potential liberation in the Tibetan Buddhist teachings on death. They offer a beautiful understanding of life’s end to those in the west who are still under the influence of a societal death taboo.
Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, has a particular skill in drawing out the universal messages of these teachings. He makes them understandable to the western mind without losing their authenticity, purity, and power. What follows is a summary of his teachings on death and impermanence.*
According to Sogyal Rinpoche, reflections on death and impermanence are the very cornerstone of all spiritual paths. Among Christian contemplatives, for example, is the expression ‘Memento mori’ – ‘remember that you will die.’ Buddhist teachings encourage awareness of the fact that we could die at any moment. This helps us to maintain awareness of the preciousness of life and encourages us to sort out our priorities.
From a Buddhist perspective, the root cause of all our suffering, is the fact that we do not take enough time to come to know ourselves. We are encouraged to discover our true nature, our enlightened, ‘Buddha’ mind through prayer and meditation.
Beyond our ordinary everyday mind is our true mind. It radiates the qualities of tremendous light or brilliance (wisdom) and great warmth (love and compassion). Sogyal Rinpoche uses the analogy of the sky to contrast this state of enlightenment to our everyday mind. Our daily thoughts, feelings, and actions are like temporary clouds that come and go in an endless sky. The sky, like the enlightened mind, is beyond birth and death.
In our day-to-day lives, we become absorbed and distracted by our thoughts, feelings and activities. It is easy to allow our ignorance, negative emotions, and actions to obscure our true nature. This occurs much the same way that clouds block our awareness of the endless sky.
It is this state of mind that is said to endure past death. If we do not come to glimpse our true nature in life, we will not be prepared to recognize it and enter into it at death.
This transformation of mind is essential preparation for death. Like cleaning the smudges off your eyeglass lenses, it also allows us to see more clearly in life. Our very perceptions transform and circumstances will appear differently. Whether or not we are able to see clearly, remember that even when our ordinary mind is cloudy, the sky-like nature of mind is still there. Weather is only on the surface. Deep in the sky-like nature of our minds it is pure.
In many western spiritual traditions, we use the expression ‘let go and let God.’ Similarly, the Buddhists teach that the essential path to personal transformation and freedom comes from learning to stop grasping after impermanence. Indeed, everything is in a constant state of change.
We have to learn to let go. We don’t have to change. We simply change our minds and recognize that impermanence is the very nature and fabric of life itself.
The most permanent thing is impermanence. When we realize that, we are made stronger spiritually.
Our fear of death, according to Sogyal Rinpoche, is the fear of life, of facing ourselves. Looking into death is actually facing ourselves because sooner or later we have to come to terms with ourselves. That is why we tend to think of death only when we are dying.
That is why Tibetan Buddhist teachings stress that we should always contemplate death and impermanence. It is a way of breaking through to our true nature.
Rainer Maria Rilke said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure. Our fear of the impermanence of life and all that we grasp after awakens in us an awareness that nothing of this world is real and nothing lasts.
Milarepa, a revered Tibetan poet and sage, said it this way – “All worldly pursuits have but the one unavoidable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings in destruction; meetings in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should, from the very first, renounce acquisition and heaping up, and building, and meeting; and faithful to the commands of an eminent guru, set about realizing the Truth (which has no birth or death).”
We discover that this understanding about impermanence is really our greatest friend. It drives us to ask:
Allow these questions to occupy you urgently and reflect upon them. You will slowly find yourself making a profound shift in the way you view everything. With continued contemplation and practice in letting go, we come to uncover in ourselves something we cannot name or describe or conceptualize. It is something we come to realize lies behind all the changes and deaths of the world.
Our myopic focus upon our desires, what we are grasping for, and that which we are trying to avoid, begins to dissolve and fall away. As this happens, we catch repeated and glowing glimpses of the vast implications behind the truth of impermanence.
Sogyal Rinpoche describes this transformation saying:
He further describes, “as the new awareness becomes vivid and almost unbroken, there occurs a personal and utterly non-conceptual revelation of what we are, why we are here, and how we should act which amounts in the end to nothing less than a new life, new birth – almost a resurrection . . . You discover something in yourself that does not die.”
He also speaks of death using the analogy of being on a train platform waiting for a train. We know that we must take that train but don’t know when it is coming. We have great anxiety because our bags are not packed. We do not prepare for death or live thoughtfully because we think we will live forever. We know we will die someday. But, we prefer not to absorb that thought. Instead, we pretend that we have an unlimited lease on life.
We become lazy in how we live our lives. The particular kind of laziness in the west is an active one. We do everything and anything to avoid ourselves. We fill our lives with so many activities that there is not really a chance for the truth of ourselves to be revealed. There is no gap. Yet, we live with an abiding anxiety since we have not faced ourselves or our death. There is a deep anxiety and a deep fear because death represents our ultimate fear.
We learn that there is really not much time to waste. Death helps us to look into our life in a deeper way.
When we take care of those most important things, then we can relax. Milarepa said my religion is not to be ashamed of myself when I die.”
An unenlightened mind sees death as defeat – a tragedy. These teachings show us it is really an extraordinary opportunity for transformation and personal liberation.
When we die, it is only the end of one cycle finishing. The delusions of this life will end if we allow it. However, those who hold tight to their illusions don’t allow for their liberation to take place. Those who allow it not only surrender to the death of their bodies but they allow their ordinary mind to die with all its delusions as well.
Milarepa described it this way: ‘In horror of death, I took to the mountains. Meditating again and again on the uncertainty of the hour of death, I captured the fortress of the deathless unending nature of mind. Now all fear of death is done and gone.”
Tibetan Buddhist teachings provide three pieces of advice for the moment of death. These also serve practitioners well in how to live their lives:
Those practicing these techniques in life who are really able to let go inside themselves, find they are able to cope better with outer stress. They are less bothered or worried by what transpires in their life. When we stabilize and integrate this view as part of our being through meditation and action, we can meet death fearlessly. By practicing getting into the high ground of our consciousness during life through meditation and contemplation, we prepare ourselves for the moment of death.
There is also advice given for those who are helping the dying. Essentially, we are called upon to simply be there maintaining a consciousness of unconditional loving — free of attachments. Love is not expressed by grasping after the life of the dying. This kind of attachment, Sogyal Rinpoche teaches, is actually what spoils love.
When a loved one is dying, we can best serve them by giving them our permission and blessing to die and by surrounding them with our love and encouragement.
*This article is based on the teachings of Sogyal Rinpoche presented in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and the following four lectures: Transcending All Fear of Death; The Essence of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (parts one and two); and Reflecting on Death.
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Never Forget These Two Numbers: 11 Million and 40 – They Rule Your Life
Every second, we are bombarded with information.
What Do We Perceive?
In his book, Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson quantifies the processing capabilities of the human brain.
The fact that most of our data processing is unconscious is a great kindness in human design!
How does anyone process so much information? It’s a wonder we don’t blow our own minds! How we sort and store this massive amount of information is one of the greatest wonders of the world.
Don’t be fooled. It is easy to falsely assume that a conscious perception is more impactful than an unconscious one. In fact, being unconscious does not make a perception any less potent in impacting our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. When something is unconscious, it means we have no awareness of it. And, if we have no awareness, we can’t do anything about it.
This is why it is so important to intentionally excavate your unconscious mind when you are out of balance in your life. Self-observation is a great place to start. Pay attention to your beliefs, fears, doubts, and concerns. Bring them to your awareness. See if you can challenge their accuracy to change your point of view.
Remember, we are not only perceptual beings. We process and interpret data as well. We are intentional beings who place our focus here instead of there. We choose this action instead of that one.
Consider the fact that the sheer magnitude of unconscious data creates the need for a system of filters to organize incoming information. These filters become autopilot decision-makers for how we respond unconsciously, and they determine the content we perceive consciously.
Furthermore, we may not even be aware of those 40 bits that we take in consciously if we are not focused upon them. For example, I might notice your smile but not the clothes you are wearing while both are among my 40 bits that second.
Where does all this data come from? We gather data from our environment. We also gather information about how people treat us and how that makes us feel. Impressions are made.
Our visual perceptions dominate all others. Our brains give preference to visual information. Researchers L.D. Rosenblum, Harold Stolovitch, and Erica Keeps refer to our senses as learning portals. They offer the following statistics regarding the percentage of data processed by each of our five senses:
Sight *: 83%
Hearing: 11%
Smell: 3.5 %
Touch: 1.5 %
Taste: 1.0 %
*(both through our eyes and unconscious visual perception)
How Do We Decide What is Normal?
Patterns of “normalcy” are initially taught by others. We learn to catalog some things as good and others as bad. For the first five years or so of our lives, we are like little sponges. We absorb it all before our frontal cortex sufficiently develops for us to begin to evaluate our own perceptions. Thus, we begin by seeing through the eyes of others. And, they may or may not be seeing clearing themselves and might not have our best interests in mind.
Our sense of reality is skewed by the autopilot filtration settings of our data processing, largely programmed by others – our parents, teachers, friends, affiliations, and culture.
What should we do?
Here’s an example. One day, well into my own process of self-exploration, I made a profound psychosomatic connection. I held my arms fully extended in front of me with my hands turned upward like stop signs. This was to demonstrate to someone how I had been living my life. I had come to believe that I needed to protect myself. So I lived as though keeping everyone at arm’s length so they wouldn’t be able to get close enough to hurt me. It was a fundamental survival strategy I was unconsciously enacting. As I looked at my arms, I understood why I had developed carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists and bone spurs in my shoulders. Once seen, I began to deconstruct the scaffolding of this way of being. I consciously rolled my shoulders and dropped them at my side whenever I was scared or unsure of myself. This in turn caused me to experience the vulnerability of lifting my chest up and letting my heart lead me forward into the world. Through conscious and intentional repetition, I was able to override my old pattern. I stepped into a healthier and more trusting way of moving through the world.
This kind of remedial inner work is essential to personal freedom. We are all broken in some places within ourselves. But if we don’t take the time to find out where, we limp through life when we could be skipping. Most people don’t do this inner work. Those who do have access to a kind of freedom and inner peace that is absolutely delicious. So, remember those two numbers and let them motivate you to do your inner work. It’s a matter of mental and emotional hygiene and ecology.
Remember as you move through this world, it doesn’t matter so much what is going on outside of us. It matters what we do with that inside ourselves. That is ultimately what determines whether we exist at the effect of external circumstances, or we thrive from the inside out.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.
What Are You Afraid Of?
Fear can get triggered in many ways. Some people are afraid of dogs or snakes or spiders, for example. Others fear experiencing such emotional states as humiliation, rejection, shame, loneliness, and failure. Still others fear such life occurrences as poverty, serious illness, or death.
Whether your fear is a momentary reaction or a sustained state of being, energetically, fear is a contraction. It is also a figment of the imagination.
It helps to understand what happens in our bodies when we become afraid and to know that we have the power to interrupt this response. Bruce Lipton is a cell biologist whose work contributes to bridging the gap between science and spirit. He explains that fear literally contracts our energy. It paralyzes us from thoughtfully and compassionately responding to the object of our fear. He explains:
When we are in a happy state, we are in a state of growth. When we get afraid, we get in a state of protection. And when we get in a state of protection, it completely changes the blood flow to the body, because when you are in a state of growth, you are nourishing the viscera, which is really the organs that take care of maintaining our health, etc.
But when we start to get afraid, we want to send the blood to the arms and legs because the arms and legs are what we are going to use for fight or flight to escape the issue or deal with the problem. So the hormones and stress cause the blood vessels in the gut to squeeze shut, which forces the extra blood to go to the periphery where we are going to nourish that fight or flight behavior.
Well, interesting enough, the same hormones affect blood vessels in the brain, because when we are in a state of happiness and growth, we are using our conscious reasoning and our thinking and our logical thought. But in a state of a reaction to a threat, conscious reasoning is not very helpful, because it is a very slow process.
So, basically what happens is in the presence of stress hormones, blood vessels in the forebrain, which is the center of conscious reasoning and logic, are squeezed shut just like the blood vessels in the gut, and this forces the blood to go to the hindbrain.
Well, the hindbrain is reflex and reactive behavior, so basically it says from the moment you get under stress you actually shut down the thinking processes of the conscious mind and open up the reactive, reactionary processes of the hindbrain. . .
Simply put: when we are under stress, we become less intelligent.
Clearly, some fear reactions are justifiable, such as coming face-to-face with a big bear. In other cases, we can learn to retrain our fear response. Fear does not necessarily have to incapacitate us.
Consider the following two fear reactions by contestants on a recent show of America’s Got Talent. Both were singing their hearts out seeking their big break. Each was faced with an alarming experience. Simon Cowell interrupted them and asked them to sing a different song. The 30-year-old young man was like a deer in the headlights. Simon offered him the opportunity to come back later in the day which he eventually did successfully. But in the moment, he just stood there speechless and unable to think what to do. In contrast, the eight-year-old girl who was similarly interrupted by Simon was also stunned initially. Simon offered her some water and she smiled and said, “Well, that just happened!” She composed herself and sang another song.
In the moment of our fear being triggered, we can unconsciously allow our physiological response described above to kick in and take over. Or, we can do what that little girl did. She overrode her autopilot response by acknowledging that something unpleasant happened and then affirmed that she was OK.
Here are 5 simple steps to retrain your reaction to things you fear:
For further insight into mastering the art of being you, read more here.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.
Do You Know the 6 People in Your Marriage?
No matter what the topic, whenever you get into an argument, does it always seems to turn out the same way? That’s usually because you are shadowboxing with the wrong person.
Let me introduce you to the six people in your relationship.
#1: You, when things are going along fine between you .
#2: Your partner when things are going along fine between you.
#3: How you see your partner when he/she has pushed one of your emotional buttons.
#4: How your partner sees you when you have pushed one of his/her emotional buttons.
#5: How you see yourself when your partner has pushed one of your emotional buttons.
#6: How your partner sees him/herself when you have pushed one of his/her buttons.
What emotional buttons inside of you is your partner pushing?
You might have noticed this all boils down to how we react to when one of our emotional buttons gets pushed. Unfortunately, most of us are unaware of our internal emotional wiring and how and why we are getting triggered. We prefer to think the problem is always our partner’s fault. So, we end up trying to get our partner to change his/her behavior. Instead, consider looking within yourself. Seek to understand how and why you react as you do. What exactly is making you angry, defensive, or feeling misunderstood.
Stop blaming your partner and do your inner work.
Stop blaming each other and start decoding your inner dynamics. This will put you on the road to significantly improving the health and well-being of your relationship.
Let current button pushing show you where you need to heal leftover hurts from the past that are being activated. Getting hot-headed and blaming each other will eventually drive you apart seeking seemingly greener pastures. Instead, how about embracing the opportunity to transform your relationship into a safe emotional haven for you both.
Here’s an example of the six people in action.
The following example might help you to recognize the six people in your marriage or partnership in action. Remember, most arguments seem really stupid when you replay them.
Meet Robin (#1) and Jack (#2). They are in love, have been dating about a year and are becoming disillusioned by their habitual fights. To make it easier to follow, I’m just going to present explanations of Robin’s behavior and leave Jack’s perspective (#4 and #6) to your imagination. Robin is a graphic designer and marketing expert and this is her first serious relationship.
A recent argument went as follows. Everything was just fine between them. Then, Jack told Robin he was planning to develop a new website. His plan was to lay out his vision of what he wanted. Then he would have his friend Chip do the graphic design work that would bring his vision to his website. Robin became incensed. Why didn’t Jack even consult her for her graphic design expertise? She began spinning reasons in her head about all the things that are “wrong” with Jack, fueling her upset. She got more and more angryas she told herself how “right” she was (#5) and how “wrong” Jack was (#3).
She condescendingly corrected him saying it would be Chip who created the vision – not Jack. Jack felt insulted that Robin thought he was not creative and would have no creative input in the design of his own website. Finally, Jack, running late for work, headed for the door. Robin was left in disbelief that he could just walk out like that.
Here’s the decoded version of what was really happening in the above scene. All was fine between them until Robin (#1) got triggered by several things that she misinterpreted about what Jack way saying. She took offense that here she was a graphic designer and loving partner (#5) and it didn’t occur to Jack to ask for her input. This reinforced her belief/fear that Jack didn’t value or respect her professional competence (#3). That’s the person she was fighting with.
I asked Robin to focus on the feeling she had when Jack first pushed her button. Then I asked her to trace it backward in her life. Where else had she felt that way? She immediately recognized this feeling being associated with her relationship with her older sister. A specific image came to mind of playing with their Power Rangers. Her sister always took the pink one and never even noticed or cared that Robin would have liked the pink one too. This had become a pattern in her life.
So, standing there with Jack, her sensitivity to being left out of consideration by another was the trigger. The old, unresolved emotions with her sister wereskewing and fueling the intensity of her reaction to Jack. Angry, she asserted her authority (#3) by correcting Jack’s description of turning over his designs to a graphic designer to execute. Jack, with his own sensitivity to believing that Robin didn’t think of him as having any creativity (#4), got angry and disgusted with her. He also felt that, as usual, she was making an issue where none existed. He headed for the door because he wanted to get away from her and this craziness.
Robin, outraged at his choice to leave at that moment, feared that he was leaving her forever. That was another childhood fear that was being triggered. She told me how her father used to storm out in disgust with her mother. As a child, she was always afraid her father would never return and thouht it was all her mother’s fault. With Jack gone, she began turning her anger on herself and blaming herself for pushing him away, afraid he would never return. Got the picture? Each one was having an entirely different experience and conversation – doing battle with figments of their imagination in the theater of their minds.
Get rid of your old emotional baggage.
This is common behavior between “normal” people who have not cleaned up their old emotional baggage. And inevitably, past baggage gets triggered in present relationships. So, what do you do? If you can afford it, I suggest getting a marriage counselor or mentor with a good sense of humor. Learn what your respective triggers are and how to deactivate them. This will allow you to approach your differences in a constructive, exploratory, and non-blaming way.
Alternatively, try to do this decoding on your own. The place to begin is always to turn your attention inward instead of outward. Shift from the blame game to truly healing and transforming the quality of your communication. It is important to realize that we each need to become intimately aware of how we are wired based on past experiences. Otherwise, it all runs on autopilot and runs amuck as in the example above.
If your partner is not willing to do this together, don’t let that stop you from pursuing your own inner work. He or she simply might not be as convinced or ready as you are. Take the lead. Do your part to take ownership of your own baggage. Discover how past hurts are creating current sensitivities. Once you start behaving differently – as in doing a different dance step — your partner will follow along eventually. When six people are fighting, no one is being heard.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.