The Death Meditation

These ideas are taken from The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Managing your Business and Your Life by Geshe Michael Roach and Lama Christie McNally. Yes another "self help" book. But the concepts discussed within have made sense and have been working for me. The book was recommended by my nephew Mark and I appreciate him for it.

The Death Meditation


"To put it simply, you just wake up in the morning and stay there in bed, lying down, without opening your eyes. And you say to yourself: 'I'm going to die tonight. What would be the best thing to do with the rest of my time?' "

At first you will probably think of things like: I'll eat a huge piece of cake. I'll go shopping. I'll take the day off work. I've always wanted to go sky diving, today is the day. I'll watch movies all day. I'll have sex until I go blind.

The Death Meditation practice has to be done on a regular basis, over an extended period of time and that's when it has its strongest effect. One result you'll find comes pretty quickly is that you streamline your life. You cut out the things that you own or do that slow you down. This is the beginning of a new kind of freedom, both physically and mentally.

For example, how many pairs of shoes do you have? Or where are the pictures of your old vacations, the ones that you don't look at anymore? In you mind when you hear these questions you start picturing all the different shoes that you have: Your mind goes into your closet and looks at least eat the ones you use most often. And then your mind goes to a cabinet or dresser somewhere and sees a few stacks of photo envelopes; goes inside one or two; sees roughly what a couple of the photos are about.

This proves that, somewhere, on some level, you are keeping a mental inventory of all the things your own. Which also means that some part of your mind space is taken up with these details; remember that the mind is like the hard drive of a computer, it only has so much space. Why clutter it with an inventory of those things that are no longer important in your life?

How do you clean up your computer (mind?) Start throwing out or giving away things in your house that you don't need or use. If you haven't used it in the last six months or year, throw it out. Give it away!

Next you might begin examining your career or other parts of your life and cleaning them up. At the final evolution of the Death Meditation, this kind of thinking flowers into an instinctive attraction to those things in a human life which really are of the greatest beauty and meaning.

At this point you begin to "take back your life." It is a good feeling and easy to do.

Finally you realize that some of the ideas you had early in the meditation practice are not really that important, like eating cake or watching a movie. What would you do on the last day of your life? This is an important questions because it could very well be the last day of your life. Spend it well.