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By Root 942 0

death and dying. These rites give us solace and security in the face of the tenuousness and insecurity of existence. Do we go on? Do we just come to an abrupt end? Is there nothing more? What about heaven? Hell? Is there an afterlife? Will we face God or karma? Truth or consequences? How can we know any of this for certain? Can it be verified, or is it just myth and imagination that we are asked to believe in and trust? Are we to believe the people who say they have returned from near-death experiences? Are we to believe Edgar Cayce and the other psychics? Are we to believe the incarnate lamas, many of whom say they remember their past lives and seem to have some kind of conscious control over the process—as if evolving, by choice, through the different grades of life’s spiritual school? How can we know? Who knows?

Buddhists have long realized that contemplating one’s own mortality helps us focus and prioritize. The spiritual life, the journey of awakening and making sense out of our lives while learning to love, is actually as much a matter of life as it is of death. The tenuousness of life itself helps us be totally awake in the present moment.

What Tibetan Buddhism offers, along with its pragmatic, ethical, here-and-now life teachings, is a way of dealing with the death experience itself—a way of facing death in the present moment. This training can vastly help us deal with the reality of the moment of death. In so doing, we become far more appreciative, tender, and mindful of the richness and fullness of each moment of life, made all the more poignant because of its impermanence.

By learning to let go in this life, we learn to live each moment without regrets. We learn to make each decision without regret. Each decision becomes the right decision. By learning to let go in this life, we relinquish our grudges, gain forgiveness, and unburden ourselves of resentment, bitterness, and hostility. In this way, we find closure and are able to let our old hang-ups, hurts, and frozen patterns die. This is how we die without regrets, while learning to live anew. In this moment. Breath by breath. Here is a meditation that helps us do that:

Take a deep breath and completely relax. Let everything settle. Be totally present, naturally present, effortlessly present. You are just sitting for one moment, one eternal instant at a time. Don’t miss it. This is the only moment, right now.

Just sense everything, as it is. Be present, aware, wakeful, and relaxed.

Open to effortless presence, pure awareness. Total presence. Aware of awareness itself, a luminous, centerless awareness here and now. Let everything proceed effortlessly, transparently. Let go of control, manipulation, and judgment.

With each breath, let go just a little more. With each exhalation, let go, relax, open, and center a little more deeply. Each exhalation is like a little minideath. Simply attend to the exhalation. Inhale and exhale and with each out-breath, let go a little more. Let go of someone or something you may be holding onto. With each exhalation, let go a little more. Release a little more … loosen the knots in your psyche. Let go. Drop everything. Release that little tension in the shoulders, breathe it out. Breathe out that thought bubble, that memory, and let it go, go, go, go …

Let go of the out-breath. Die a little with each exhalation. Die into the present moment. Whatever sensations you may feel, let go of them. Drop your body; let go of your mind; let go of your thoughts and personality. Drop it all. Let go. Let go of your self-image, your house, possessions, plans, and career. Let it go. Everything is perfectly resolved in the unborn and undying natural mind.

Let go of any attempts to control the mind. With each exhalation, let it go. Push the clutch of spiritual detachment and disengage your habitual gears. With each exhalation, let go of one more thing—whatever comes to mind: a sensation, an emotion, a feeling, a relationship, a person, a fear, a possession. Breath by breath, fleeting moment by fleeting moment—simply let go. Get used to evolving,