How I Felt When I Journeyed Through a Death Meditation
“The body is not afraid to die. Only fear is afraid to die.”
I’ve had very little experience with death in my life. Don’t get me wrong, I have been blessed and feel grateful. However, I’ve always had a looming fear of death growing up, far into my adult life.
I grew up in a household where we avoided talking about anything unpleasant, including anger, frustration, confusion and sadness. Needless to say, death was a subject no one talked about, or even brought up. Our culture in general, approached deaths with a very solemn attitude. When someone’s loved one has died, she would wear a white cotton flower in her hair and a black fabric band around her arm to let the public know that she is mourning, and to give her space to do so. We knew not to ask her questions or to approach her with anything trivial.
Among the many crucial conversations my parents didn’t have with me, explaining death was one of them. I remember the day when I first contemplated death and what that really means. It was the summer after I graduated from junior high school, sitting on the sidelines watching a basketball game my friends had invited me to. Not being too interested in the game itself, my mind wandered off while looking around, observing everything in slow motion. I suddening began thinking about death, and that one day, none of this would exist for me anymore, that I would stop seeing, feeling, thinking, enjoying this thing called life. I would no longer occupy this earth and simply disappear without a trace, and it scared the hell out of 13-year-old me.
I am well aware of death prior to that day, of course, but had never truly thought about it in depth, because it was so far away. Death only happened to really old people, I thought. It’s nothing I needed to be concerned with, until the moment I really started thinking about it. All blissful ignorance was shattered suddenly and life now had a fast-approaching expiration date. I wish I didn’t think about it, I wish I’d never known about death at all. I spent nearly 2 decades after that day trying not to think about death again, but not successfully.
Around 2006, I attended a 3-day workshop that included the study of behavioral psychology, spirituality, and energy work — my very first of its kind. It was an intense 3 days, averaging 10 hours a day in lectures, discussions, and activities, during which we gave the subject of death quite a bit of attention.
By then, I had already made a certain amount of peace with the idea of death — I mean, there’s no way around it, we are all headed in that direction. But I still didn’t want to think about it or confront it, because I hated the idea that I can’t get out of it no matter what. Even though I was always a believer of the soul being eternal, I hated the idea of the death of my physical body, no less. I also hated the idea of being responsible for living life with a time limit.
When the host of the workshop, Dr. Lee Gibson, began to guide us into what he called The Death Meditation, I immediately felt apprehensive. As open-minded and adventurous as I am, I wasn’t sure it was an experience I wanted and didn’t know how it would affect my psyche. After all, it was the very experience I was trying to avoid. I was afraid it would amplify my fear of death.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Nevertheless, he proceeded with the guided meditation, took us to a relaxed and peaceful place of existence, uttered wise words of what death truly is, and introduced us to the idea of transcending beyond the physical death. Yes, I know all this, I thought. I still didn’t like where this was headed. I understood the concept but wasn’t ready to go through the process yet.
When his words guided us to visualize our bodies laying still, dying, my mind was on high alert, my emotions triggered, and I felt my body resisting his words and the experience. My mind had anticipated this dreaded moment and I was angry at its arrival, out of sheer fear of what I was going to feel next. I’m probably going to start to cry, I thought. I might get really depressed after this and lose my will to live. Still, I played along, braved myself to continue and sink into the experience fully.
So here I am in a pretend death scenario, I found myself thinking, how will I choose to die. Even in a guided meditation, I wanted some form of control over my own pretend death. My mind quickly drifted to the death of the Little Mermaid (from the original fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, not the Disney version), and thought there isn’t a more elegant way to die than turning into seafoam.
I allowed myself to sink into a deep relaxation then visualize my body laying lifeless and ready to pass on. An intense feeling followed — I was committed to the experience. It was one I couldn’t quite explain. A combination of fear, bitterness, anxiousness, perhaps a little bit of remorse. That somehow I’ve been wronged, that it isn’t fair to leave the world like this. I felt my body tense up, my hands clenched into fists involuntarily. As I began to visualize and feel my body dissolve into seafoam little by little, then effervesce into water and air, something interesting happened. My resistance began to dissolve and evaporate as well.
My mind and body began to surrender to the experience, and all of a sudden, nothing mattered. No more words needed to be said, no more bitterness toward the people who had wronged me, no more thoughts about what more I would want to pursue in life. There was simply a deep sense of peace and resolution. I felt a great release then felt myself one with the atmosphere and the cosmos.
I came out of the meditation feeling peaceful and content. Death no longer felt frightening to me. Not only had the death meditation helped me overcome my fear of death, it taught me how to experience life. The sensations I felt during the meditation made me realize how much stress was caused by my mind’s resistance: the expectations I’d formed of what right and wrong looked like, fears borrowed from other people’s experiences, and the concept of death based on what I thought would cease to exist.
What the meditation taught me was that death is merely a transition. How we experience death and where we go after we die is based on how we lived our lives, and our consciousness at the moment of transition. Death can be incredibly peaceful if we stop seeing it as some kind of punishment or an absolute ending. If we lived each moment of our lives as fully as our true selves desired to, there would be nothing left for us to cling to. The fear of death is truly far more frightening than death itself.
