Why Do I Want to Live Well? Because I Want to Die Well!
Motivation for Living Well to Die Well
“Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely”
Buddha
As I reflect over my life and some of the extraordinarily difficult things I have had to go through, somehow, I have always had a sense of joy. Moments such as welcoming the sun in the morning, feeling aliveness of dipping my toes in the sea and smiling every time I hear birds singing. With this, realising I am alive, this is it, this is another day of my life.
When my first baby died 40 years ago, I was so ill equipped to cope with that experience. Yet, somehow, I still managed to maintain a sense of positivity about my life.
Yes, my life, this is it, day by day and one day it will end.
So I have aways had a strong sense of each day, no, moment of my life being something I could never get back and I hated it when I felt a day had been wasted.
Many years of mindfulness and meditation practice have taught me that even the difficult days are important and not wasted, because we learn so much from them. Mindfulness helps us to be with our experience, whatever it is, and helps us to navigate what is difficult so we don’t suppress it. Whenever I push away or suppress difficult experiences and emotions, it feels like they become vacuum packed in my body, only to explode in their full magnitude later in life, when triggered.
Ageing and maturity are bringing with it a deeper sense of wisdom along with the awareness that time seems to be speeding up. Here I am, an old age pensioner (according to the government) equipped with my bus pass, but recognising that my appreciation of joy is becoming ever more important to me in daily life.
If I take myself back 25 years to when my parents died and, whilst I did all I could with what I could at the time, there was so much more I could have done if I’d had the wisdom, knowledge and practice that I have today. So I live with some element of regret about the richness I could have brought to them at that time, rather than the ‘doing what I could’ without the embodied presence I have today.
Yes, isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing!
Death
A big turning point was the death of my aunt in 2012. She died in a busy, noisy London hospital, in a ward of 6 other older women, in an uncomfortable bed, with a green curtain pulled around her bed space.
Because I realised that I had not given my parents my all at the end, I did everything I could to help her in her final year of life and her death. For her 80th birthday I took her on a short cruise, because I wanted her to wake up on her birthday on the same cruise ship she and her husband sailed on with what she called the best memories of her life. That impulse was probably one of the best things I did, because I created a few days of joy, for her and for me, as to this day it fills me with a sense of delight that I was able to do this for her. She died just 8 months after this birthday.
Apart from sleeping and driving to and from the hospital I spent the final few days of her life at her side. I had started practicing Taoist meditation, Reiki and other forms of healing during the ‘seeking’ phase of my life and did everything I could to hold this space for her. I turned to the Buddhist teachings on dying and the book Living Dreaming Dying by Rob Nairn for some quick advice on how to help.
The experience of my Aunts death was incredible and intense in ways I had never anticipated.
This experience motivated me to want to learn more and I immediately booked a course to learn how to be a ‘Soul Midwife’. My intention was and still is to hold the space for anyone who is in the final stages of life in the best way I can. I often reflect on how it would have been for my Aunt had she died alone in that scary cubicle in the hospital
Joy
Another important motivation arose from these experiences and that is joy. Joy of life.
Rick Hanson tells us that with just 20 seconds of noticing (or remembering) moments of joy a few times a day we can actually rewire our brains for happiness.
Filling our days with moments of joy and bringing more mindfulness to our daily lives can help us to enrich each day of our lives so that each day is lived well. I like to use the analogy of a pie chart where sometimes in life we feel that we have been overcome with 100% misery. We wear it like a cloak. However if we take the time to notice, we might realise that there are things in our lives that aren’t so awful. We might like listening to the birds singing or appreciate music, or the feel of the sun, and suddenly we have a 10% chink in our pie chart. We might have a good friend or relative which creates another 10 or 20% chink in our pie chart. Suddenly we might find, yes, the difficult is still there, but there are good things too and we can allow them to be there side by side. Mindfulness helps us to become more skilful at doing this so we can allow joy in and navigate the difficult too.
When I am approaching my death I want to feel that I have no regrets, that I am not holding on to resentment and that I have enjoyed each moment of my life as much as I could. I did not do this in my former years, but I can certainly do this now. We can only start where we are, but we can start TODAY.
This is why I felt passionately about developing the Living Well to Die Well Course with Heather Regan Addis. Heather experienced her own motivation for the course which you can read about here. But together we are about to run the fourth cohort of this course. Teaching this course has been one of the richest experiences of my mindfulness teaching career.
It’s what it’s all about. We shy away from it, but facing up to the fact that life is impermanent, we will die some day and so will others we love, but how about we start living well and joyfully now?
The next Living Well to Die Well course is online. It starts on 21st May and runs in the evenings over 6 weekly sessions. Click here to read more and book.
Jacky Seery