“Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely”

Buddha

As I reflect over my life and some of the extraordinarily difficult things I have had to go through, somehow, I have always had a sense of joy. Moments such as welcoming the sun in the morning, feeling aliveness of dipping my toes in the sea and smiling every time I hear birds singing.  With this,  realising I am alive, this is it, this is another day of my life.

When my first baby died 40 years ago, I was so ill equipped to cope with that experience.  Yet, somehow, I still managed to maintain a sense of positivity about my life.

Yes, my life, this is it, day by day and one day it will end.

So I have aways had a strong sense of each day, no, moment of my life being something I could never get back and I hated it when I felt a day had been wasted.

Many years of mindfulness and meditation practice have taught me that even the difficult days are important and not wasted, because we learn so much from them. Mindfulness helps us to be with our experience, whatever it is, and helps us to navigate what is difficult so we don’t suppress it.  Whenever I push away or suppress difficult experiences and emotions, it feels like they become vacuum packed in my body, only to explode in their full magnitude later in life, when triggered.

Ageing and maturity are bringing with it a deeper sense of wisdom along with the awareness that time seems to be speeding up.   Here I am, an old age pensioner (according to the government) equipped with my bus pass, but recognising that my appreciation of joy is becoming ever more important to me in daily life.

If I take myself back 25 years to when my parents died and, whilst I did all I could with what I could at the time, there was so much more I could have done if I’d had the wisdom, knowledge and practice that I have today. So I live with some element of regret about the richness I could have brought to them at that time, rather than the ‘doing what I could’ without the embodied presence I have today.

Yes, isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing!

Death

A big turning point was the death of my aunt in 2012.  She died in a busy, noisy London hospital, in a ward of 6 other older women, in an uncomfortable bed, with a green curtain pulled around her bed space.

Because I realised that I had not given my parents my all at the end, I did everything I could to help her in her final year of life and her death.  For her 80^th birthday I took her on a short cruise, because I wanted her to wake up on her birthday on the same cruise ship she and her husband sailed on with what she called the best memories of her life. That impulse was probably one of the best things I did, because I created a few days of joy, for her and for me, as to this day it fills me with a sense of delight that I was able to do this for her. She died just 8 months after this birthday.

Apart from sleeping and driving to and from the hospital I spent the final few days of her life at her side. I had started practicing Taoist meditation, Reiki and other forms of healing during the ‘seeking’ phase of my life and did everything I could to hold this space for her. I turned to the Buddhist teachings on dying and the book Living Dreaming Dying by Rob Nairn for some quick advice on how to help.

The experience of my Aunts death was incredible and intense in ways I had never anticipated.

This experience motivated me to want to learn more and I immediately booked a course to learn how to be a ‘Soul Midwife’. My intention was and still is to hold the space for anyone who is in the final stages of life in the best way I can.  I often reflect on how it would have been for my Aunt had she died alone in that scary cubicle in the hospital

Joy

Another important motivation arose from these experiences and that is joy. Joy of life.

Rick Hanson tells us that with just 20 seconds of noticing (or remembering) moments of joy a few times a day we can actually rewire our brains for happiness.

Filling our days with moments of joy and bringing more mindfulness to our daily lives can help us to enrich each day of our lives so that each day is lived well.  I like to use the analogy of a pie chart where sometimes in life we feel that we have been overcome with 100% misery. We wear it like a cloak.  However if we take the time to notice, we might realise that there are things in our lives that aren’t so awful.  We might like listening to the birds singing or appreciate music, or the feel of the sun, and suddenly we have a 10% chink in our pie chart. We might have a good friend or relative which creates another 10 or 20% chink in our pie chart. Suddenly we might find, yes, the difficult is still there, but there are good things too and we can allow them to be there side by side.  Mindfulness helps us to become more skilful at doing this so we can allow joy in and navigate the difficult too.

When I am approaching my death I want to feel that I have no regrets, that I am not holding on to resentment and that I have enjoyed each moment of my life as much as I could.  I did not do this in my former years, but I can certainly do this now. We can only start where we are, but we can start TODAY.

This is why I felt passionately about developing the Living Well to Die Well Course with Heather Regan Addis.  Heather experienced her own motivation for the course which you can read about here. But together we are about to run the fourth cohort of this course.  Teaching this course has been one of the richest experiences of my mindfulness teaching career.

It’s what it’s all about. We shy away from it, but facing up to the fact that life is impermanent, we will die some day and so will others we love, but how about we start living well and joyfully now?

The next Living Well to Die Well course is online. It starts on 21^st May and runs in the evenings over 6 weekly sessions. Click here to read more and book.

Jacky Seery

by Wendell Berry

Now in midlife I notice that I’m looking for role models and images of the maturity that I can feel myself moving towards. If as younger people we have the sensation of climbing a hill anticipating the ascent, perhaps here in midlife, we’ve reached the top and a new scene comes into view. This poem speaks to me of this new scene and it provides me with what I see to be a truthful, real and deep-hearted perception of the fields of the second half of life.

A mix of tender, reverent and bittersweet feelings emerge in my heart on reading this poem. When we look at what is beautiful and singular about the sycamore, we soon find the tragedy. And when we see the tragedy, we find more beauty shining out from right there. The beautiful and tragic merge into something ineffable and mystical. Wendell Berry (who is an American farmer and poet) celebrates the tree in its maturity, sees it has powers of self-healing and survival, gathering ‘all accidents into its purpose’. He also knows this tree-being of grandeur is wounded and dying but in that dying it is generous and noble, giving itself back to the earth.

What is the principle that Wendell Berry recognises in it, that he too would be ruled by? I’m sensing it could be a mature isness, a perfect imperfection in just being what and how it is. ‘It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.’ I happily absorb the wisdom of Wendell Berry’s sycamore and want to let it teach me how to be.

Ps. If you would like to receive more life wisdom through poetry you might life to come along to our next Mystical Poetry meets Mindfulness course which begins online in September.

Photo by Gilly Stewart on Unsplash

then —

why spend a moment more refusing,
worrying about who might disapprove,
measuring every move
as if there is some fixed formula you must
find? Why hold tight to anything?

Why not, instead, love every honeyed drop of yourself,
why not leap into life—belly-laughing
and light, light like the soft kiss of moonlight,
light like the light that you are,
have always been, will always be—

why not take this quickly passing day
by the hand and dance
like there’s no tomorrow? And if you’re too tired
to dance, why not rest lightly here
just as you are?

by Julia Fehrenbacher

I remember as a teenager the Christmas speech of the Dutch queen including the following sentence: “It is the approach of death that makes life even more precious”. It was the first time that this idea landed with me and it hasn’t left me since, although there have been times it’s been more, or less, in the foreground.

Recent events of loved ones being closer to that passage into the great unknown, have brought it very close to home again, and so the poem by the wonderful mindful poet Julia Fehrenbacher struck a clear chord. And the poignancy of the first lines touches my heart directly – it’s real, and it includes absolutely everyone I know and love… It also made me smile to see the link with the poem Fay shared a while ago: The Dakini Speaks. Same theme, different tone of voice, similar invitation: to dance!

Or to rest. And I don’t find it easy to value rest as much as ‘dancing’, or doing in some way… and I think I may not be alone here. Recently I’ve received no less than three recommendations for the book Rest as Resistance by Tricia Hersey, you’d almost think the universe is trying to tell me something! I guess it’s the same principle that leads many people to struggle prioritising practice: it seems like doing nothing, and therefore can’t be much valuable or important. But what if dancing and resting was like the in- and outbreath, and a full, well-lived life included a good balance of both… indeed, why not?!

PS if you’d like to explore how to live well so that in time we can die well, there’s a course on that very topic, you can read more about it here…

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash

It is widely acknowledged that in our modern culture and society there is a fear of confronting our own death, as well as the deaths of those we love. Research suggests that those who are the most religious or who have no religion at all tend to be the ones who are least afraid of death. Those who are most afraid of death tend to be those who have doubts about their religious beliefs.

My approach to death is embodied in the tattoo that I bear on my right forearm:

After all, to the well organised mind, death is but the next great adventure.
Albus Dumbledore

This attitude is based on the recognition that the only thing that is certain in life, is that we are going to die. If it’s definitely going to happen, why worry about it?

I was fortunate to be present when my grandfather died. He was a good kind man, not at all religious. As he died the most beautiful smile appeared on his face. I felt a serene sense of joy and wonder in that moment and since then I have not felt afraid of death. Although, I do have a concern about the illness and pain that I might experience in the run up to my death, but not in the death itself.

Before my grandma died, she lived with dementia for some time. I saw her relive some of the most difficult experiences of her life, which she had not come to terms with, and which caused her a lot of distress. This was an object lesson in letting go of regrets and resentments and coming to terms with the most difficult experiences of life, while I was able to.

I have been very fortunate to train my mind in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition for almost twenty years. This has included doing courses and reading books on death and dying in this tradition, which has further reassured me. I have reflected daily on death and impermanence for several years and this has engendered within me a more accepting attitude.

As Ponlop Rinpoche says in Mind Beyond Death “If we choose to look in the face of death directly, then we can be certain of transforming that meeting into a profound experience that will bring untold benefit to our spiritual journey”.

On seeing the suffering around me that is caused by fear of and denial of death, I was keen to find a way to support others, of all religions or none, to develop more acceptance of death and to use mindfulness and compassion meditation to support them in living well in preparation for death. This resulted in my work with Jacky Seery on the Living Well to Die Well course. Jacky has trained as a death doula and so has much experience to offer in supporting ourselves and our loved ones in dying well.

As Rob Nairn says in Living, Dreaming, Dying:

“The mysteries around death and dying are unnecessary. There is no reason for us not to care for the dying. In fact, there is every reason we should, because caring for those we love, or for any person during his or her final days, is the last and greatest gift we can offer the person.”

We can train together to face the inevitable while supporting each other. In the meantime, we can live well together. A great gift indeed!

Kind Wishes,

Heather