What meditation and mortality work have in common
Jun 02, 2026I didn't get kicked out of this retreat. If you're wondering why that's worth mentioning, there's a backstory.
Five days of silence with Louise Kay, a teacher of non-duality whose “embodied awareness” approach was new to me. The whole retreat was organized around a single instruction: rest as the aware witness. Notice what arises. Don't engage with it.
That instruction sounds simple until you try it. The mind wants to grab onto everything, every thought, every sound, every sensation, turning each one into something to analyze or push away. Sitting in silence, I watched that urge arise over and over without acting on it.
On the third day, something settled. The thoughts were still there, but I had stopped being quite so identified with them. What remained was presence without content. Awareness, with nothing particular to be aware of.
The thought that arrived was: this must be what dying is like.
Sogyal Rinpoche writes in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying that Tibetan Buddhist practitioners spend their entire lives preparing for exactly this recognition, awareness itself stripped of everything we normally mistake for who we are. The moment of death offers a natural opportunity for that recognition, but only if we've practiced. Otherwise the habit of grasping pulls us away from it.
What struck me, sitting in that hall, is that this is also what I've watched happen when people take the time to explore the reality of their mortality.
When people sit with questions like, what matters to me, what feels unfinished, how do I want to be remembered, and what am I actually afraid of, something similar occurs. The distractions fall away. What's actually true becomes easier to see. People describe feeling, sometimes for the first time in a long while, like themselves.
You don't need a retreat to practice this.
Eckhart Tolle calls the accumulated weight of our unprocessed pain and reactivity the "pain body." In both meditation and mortality work, what we're practicing is learning not to be ruled by it. Presence has to become stronger than identification with all of that noise. For most of us, that takes practice, and most of us don't start until something forces us to.
You don't need a five-day silent retreat. You don't need a terminal diagnosis either. You need a willingness to sit with the question of what this life is actually for, and some structure to help you do it.
The 7 Tools for Making Sense of Life and Death workbook is exactly that kind of structure. It's a set of guided reflections that help you get underneath the noise, your hopes and fears, your core values, who and what matter most to you, and what you want your life to have meant. Some people work through it alone. Others do it in a group. Some people work through it alone. Others do it in a group. Some do it as part of a self-directed online course. Any way, it tends to produce the same thing I noticed on that third day: a settling.
What would it mean for you to practice that settling now, before life forces it?
