Why I Started Meditating on My Own Death Every Morning
And the strange peace, clarity, and purpose it gave me.
Recently I’ve been meditating on death as part of my practice.
It’s been uncomfortable. It’s been confronting.
But it’s also been deeply liberating.
Here are my reflections.
Death.
It awaits us all.
We avoid it like a plague.
We sit in delusion thinking it will probably never come to us.
That we are permanent.
We avoid conversations about it.
We look for ways to extend our own lives.
Only recently I decided to meditate on it every day. Every morning. I wanted to face death with an open heart. I no longer wanted to avoid it. I wanted to go into the fire.
Within the meditation of death I found a precious diamond that was waiting for so long.
“Neither fire, nor wind, birth, nor death, can erase our good deeds.”
As I look death in the eyes every morning. Imagining what it would be like for myself. Knowing that every breath I am getting closer to death.
Knowing that I cannot take my friends, family, body or material possessions with me.
I look at the deep nature of death and realise it is the door that has been waiting for me to knock throughout all my lives before.
As long as one avoids death, he avoids life.
Death creates a healthy sense of urgency to not die with your music still inside you. To listen to your heart and your Dhamma (or your faith) and do what is for the highest good. To benefit all beings. To give yourself to your purpose and your gifts.
This life only feels like it gets shorter and shorter with time. Faster and faster. There is no way to escape the ever-suffocating shadows of our inevitable death.
You are going to die. You are already in the process of it.
Meditate on this.
May this guide you every day to act for the greatest good. With love and compassion… because that is all you can take with you onto the next life. Your love and compassion or your fear and hatred.
The illusory pleasures of this world create a never-satisfying hunger which goes onto future lives. Constant meditation on death shows you how temporary this life is. That the chase for shiny objects, power and accumulating everything but love, peace and gratitude is quite ridiculous.
May the meditation of death motivate you to be of benefit to those around you. To do something worthwhile. To listen to your heart and the songs it wishes to sing.
Do not die with your music still inside you.
Written from the quiet corner of my practice this morning.
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— Matt
Modern Monk
