Traditions

There’s something that you will never forget in your life. I know I haven’t. It’s the first time you see a dead body—the first time you meet Death.

Death plays a pivotal role in the history of yoga—the original objective of practice was ending rebirth. At some point between the earliest Vedas and the time of the Buddha a thousand years later, the doctrine of karma changed people’s priorities.

Creative healing methods, including ritual therapy, offer us ways to address all kinds of grief: subtle to catastrophic, known and unknown, recent and historical.

In more than one contemplative tradition, the crossroads signal literal and metaphorical death. They symbolize a crisis or a point where a shift must be made to claim an alternate future.

The bardo, or “antarābhava” in Sanskrit, is one of the central concepts in Buddhist descriptions of what happens after we die.

In the Vedic universe, evolution depends upon the habit of our thought. It means that our consciousness can be impressed. It means we construct our reality both present and future by how we routinely think.

Death is one of the most precious experiences in life. It is literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Is the ripping open and continuing destruction of the Earth’s life systems with all its extraordinary, abundant life forms, the price we are paying daily for not mixing death into all our seeing?

If it is true that we take with us from one life to the next all the unresolved issues around our relationship with ourselves, it is important to understand the dynamics in which we reject ourselves.

Death always comes as a surprise even when we know it’s coming. It’s as much a part of life as birth.

What to speak of death, even life is appreciated differently by people with varying values. Seers have stated that those who don’t pursue a spiritual goal are dead while living.