By Andrew Holecek — 2017
Death is a journey into the unknown, but like any journey it goes better if you’re prepared. Andrew Holecek offers meditations and teachings from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition to help you prepare for the end of life—and what comes next.
Read on www.lionsroar.com
CLEAR ALL
I’ve discovered that growing older hasn’t been a Lego-like replacement of “young” Ken figures with increasingly older versions. Instead, all of these younger selves are still very much alive and thriving, layered and integrated over the years.
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in anatomy class in my first term, our textbooks contained almost nothing about aging or frailty or dying.
A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out—a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver.
1
The meditation-and-the-brain research has been rolling in steadily for a number of years now, with new studies coming out just about every week to illustrate some new benefit of meditation. Or, rather, some ancient benefit that is just now being confirmed with fMRI or EEG.
Every day, I get closer to the brink of everything. We’re all headed that way, of course, even when we’re young, though most of us are too busy with Important Matters to ponder our mortality.