Get ready because this is going to be a deeply emotional article.
How does it feel facing aging, facing illness, and facing death in your own life? Let's find out!
Oh my gosh. I have been meditating on the Buddhist Five Remembrances for a week or so, but it was Kaira Jewel Lingo‘s version and Lisa November’s version that blew me away and meant so much to me.
Here is Thich Nhat Hanh’s version of the Five Remembrances, so those non-Buddhist folks will understand where this is coming from…
- I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
- I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.
- I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
- All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
- My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
If you would like to read my earlier thoughts on this topic, you can read an article I wrote in 2021 titled PLANTING THE SEEDS FOR OVERCOMING SUFFERING: BUDDHISM’S FIVE REMEMBRANCES. But now, let’s move into this difficult work I did this morning.
Facing Aging: I am of the Nature to Grow Old. I cannot escape Growing Old.
This morning I meditated on aging. I had to laugh as I visualized myself as an old wrinkled man with an old white beard down my chest, bald and all wrinkled up.
Then I visualized my father who was the strongest man I know. He was big and so physically strong his whole life. Now, this is changing and that is hard for me to see. I was overwhelmed with love and sadness and how much I need to connect with him in the time we have.
Facing Illness: I am of the Nature to Have Ill Health. I cannot escape Illness.
Facing Death: I am of the Nature to Die. I cannot escape Death.
Then I moved to death. In this meditation, I explored my death bed and my last breaths. I did these a few weeks ago and my focus instantly went to my wife and holding her hand and telling her how much I love her and how lucky I was to have her in my life.
Today however my mind went to my boys and hugging them and how much I wanted to share with them and tell them what’s really important in life so they could live their best life with as much love as possible. This made me realize that nothing in life is important. The only important thing in this life is love. That is it. That is all we need to do… live as lovingly as possible.
FACING IMPERMANENCE - Everything Will Change: Everything and Everyone are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
Then this meditation moved to how everything in life will change even if I do not want them to. This idea is of impermanence and it reminds me that when my car was stolen, that was impermanence. The photo of the Toyota Camry was the car stolen from my driveway in a TX winter like this.
When in-laws passed, that was impermanence.
As people age and/or get sick, that is impermanence.
As I get breathed on the easiest of things or tasks these days when I try to play seriously with my kids, that is impermanence.
Seeing my babies grow from being cute little babies into independent boys who slowly are not needing me, that is… impermanence.
Facing What are our True Belongings: My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
Then the last part of this meditation reminds me that my actions are my only true assets or things I own. And after this deeply emotional tear-filled meditation, I realized that this is the filter for life and what I do daily. Are my actions moving me closer to making the world better or making the world worse?
That may be for others to judge, but for me, I can just try my best to live my best life, and love as deeply as I can, and forgive as many as I can, and teach others these lessons. This is why I teach and coach and constantly learn and set goals to help others learn this stuff.
Moving from Doing This Meditation alone by myself to doing it with a group…
Following this solo meditation, I did this meditation as a group in my sangha, or meditation group. Again it brought up deep emotions. I cried through both meditations (the solo one and the group one). Hopefully, I’m able to always remember how important my actions are.
Hopefully, when I forget and do harm to others or myself, I am able to “catch myself in the act” and maybe do this meditation again and refresh my memory on why I am on this earth and what it means to live a skillful, loving, wholesome life.
In my sangha conversation, this thought was shared. It is a powerful thought on how we may wish our funeral to play out. Read it and see if you also do not see how this eases our suffering about our own death or ideas of our own funeral.
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed.
You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every BTU of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you.
And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time.
You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly."
Anyhow, this is a bit of an overwhelmingly emotional meditation but it is… good work. It is hard, but nothing good in life is easy is it? This may be some of the hardest work to do.
As I mentioned, this work comes from a Buddhist tradition and is called the Five Remembrances and the meditations I did on my own were pulled from Kaira Jewel Lingo’s book We Were Made For These Times and from her meditation exercises/training on the meditation app Insight Timer (this is on the paid portion of the app, but this course by the same name may easily be worth the price of the annual membership fee).
May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
If you are brave and want to face down your fears this meditation may be one of the best meditations you could ever do. This has been the most powerful meditation I have ever experienced and I’ve done thousands of meditations and hundreds and hundreds of hours of meditating over the last decade. I am not sure I’ve ever been moved to be emotional or as motivated to live my best life as soon as possible after any meditation the way I had here by doing this meditation.
Peace, Love, and Respect to you, my friends!
Thank you for reading.
If you’d like, share your comments below and let me know how it felt reading this article.