Death awareness

It’s the the thing we avoid the most in life, we try not to think about it or perhaps we think about it all the time, our death, death of a loved one, maybe our death feels imminent or maybe it feels like it’s a long way off. Either way, if we are alive, we will certainly die.

The buddhists talk about wearing death on our shoulder as a way to sharpen our lens on life. If we spoke more about death, what might that be like? If we shared with others how we felt more about our own death and/ or the death of those we loved, what might that do? If we woke up in the morning and really looked death in the face, imagining that this could be our last day, how might that change the day for us? How might it change our perspective? Our relationship to ourselves /others?

If we love, we will lose. If we live, we will die. And we go through mini births and deaths throughout our life - morning, evening, awake, asleep, summer, winter… deaths and births are all around us. If we tuned into them more, gave them more attention, more focus, more open heartedness, more conversation, what might this be like?