Meditation practice teaches us presence. It's about holding still, holding space. Accepting what is happening around you, to you, in you, and acknowledging it.
But how often does this really ever extend to an awareness and exploration of our own mortality?
The Tibetan Buddhist tradition actively encourages 'Meditation on Death', to go to the edge most of us spend our entire lives avoiding. Death is so central a theme to Tibetan Buddhist practice, that Sogyal Rinpoche dedicated an entire work to it in, "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying".
Anti ageing creams, Botox, stem cells: elixirs that hold the promise of a forever-life flood the tabloids. The glorification of youth and perpetual life is now immortalised and burned into the retinas of an instagram generation by every snap-chat-tumblr-posting-twitter-feeding-selfie obsessed individual.
But it is an unavoidable fact. Without death, change, and new life cannot begin. The death of the tree in the forest, relinquishing its life to decomposition, allows a new generation to be nourished. Death gives way to new life. Stepping back and viewing life on the macro scale of a planetary lifespan- not a human one - can be a humbling and deeply calming practice.
Through an appreciation of death comes an appreciation of life. It also brings an appreciation of the place of the individual within the interconnected structures of the natural world - life cycles of blossom and decay which we are all subject to. From a deep awareness of these cycles, arises a compassion and desire for union with others within those structures.
So meditate on death. Imaging the how and when, imagining the moment of your final release without melodrama or romanticism, and invite that awareness back into your meditation practice and daily life. It is capable of opening a deep, expansive joy and freedom. Life's value is, after all, only apparent by its proximity to death.
