RELAX… YOU’RE GOING TO DIE
by Tai Sheridan, Ph.D.
He not busy being born is busy dying.
Bob Dylan
If you scratch beneath the surface, you will find that many of your anxieties, worries, and fears are associated with death and dying. Relax, You Are Going To Die is an invitation to examine your relationship with death and your ability to live with grace and dynamic vitality.
If we examine death, we usually ask: What happens when I die? What happens after death? Where did I come from? Will I be reborn? What role does God or a deity play in life and death? What is the meaning of living and dying?
Buddhists ask a different question. They ask: Who is doing the asking?! This question results in an examination of the ego, which is your accumulated personal and conditioned identification. When you lessen the hold that your ego has on the full experience of your body, heart, and mind, perhaps, you may glimpse your life as an integral part of the fabric of all of existence. The death of the ego is the birth of true living.
The question of death and dying is an inseparable part of a spinning two headed coin. One side says “dying”, and the other says “living”. I wrote the poetic contemplations in this book in order to help you see the spinning coin more clearly and to help you deepen your relationship to the mystery of living and dying, which is the basis of living a wise, kind, and beneficial life.
Death is the root
of your core anxiety
Relaxation is the root
of your core aliveness
Until you make
peace with death
it is impossible to relax
in the core of yourself
Until you relax
in the core of yourself
it is impossible to
make peace with death
Your intellect can’t resolve
this chicken egg existential paradox
yet without resolution
you will succumb
to angst dread loneliness grief
for not claiming your
birthright of contentment
Understanding living and dying
is the core of a deeply
rooted spiritual life
Dying is an
ongoing event
With every breath
you are dying
With every breath
you are living
Living and dying
are present each
moment of your life
Being vitally alive
is a function of
your awareness about
how you live
and how you die
each moment
Breathing and awareness
are the gates to the garden
of living and dying
Being close to your breath
transforms spiritual philosophy
into spiritual experience
Death isn’t
an abstract event
Making it abstract intellectual
a belief or other worldly
protects you from deep grief
To make peace with death
you need to make
peace with grief
It requires tremendous
inner strength to dwell deeply
inside the loss of those
you dearly love
It requires
the same strength
to dwell deeply
inside the knowledge
that you will lose
your precious life
You may tend to avoid
accepting the biggest truth
about living which is
that everything dies
Deep acceptance will
change you forever
When you are afraid
of death you contract
and thoughts muscles emotions
become tense narrow hardened
Fear of death is death itself
You become desperate for
a soft cushion to land on
to protect you from facing
what you know will arrive
There is no soft cushion
there is only free falling into dying
that is now that is forever
it can’t be stopped or started
because living dying
being loving
is life itself
To die before you die
is the secret of the spiritually awake
What dies is your self-centered ego
and personal identification
with the stories that you have told yourself
for as long as you can remember
about who and what you are
as a separate person
which you have reinforced
to substantiate yourself
and which
the world has reinforced
to substantiate you
you sadly have come to believe
that the fiction you call me
is the whole story
our impoverished ego
only knows how to protect itself
from the mysterious truth that
there is no substantiality whatsoever
to hang on to and call me
this is strange
wondrous magical
hard to understand
hard to accept
hard to realize
but if you are committed
to making peace with death
then your journey will take you
to understanding that
who you call me is a dream
When you think of ‘me’ dying
it disconnects you from
the fabric of your existence
Which is the intimate bond
you have with everything that is alive
and with everything that has or will exist
how could you possibly be separate
from any single thing
The fact is that
if everything that exists
throughout all time space
didn’t exist as it is was will be
then you wouldn’t be here
The miracle is that your body
is made of atoms and minerals
formed in interstellar space
the miracle is that who you are
can never be separated from
the totality of all existence
Death is the door to radically changing
your perspective on what is going on
in the depths of your Being