Remaining Days

Today we did a “Death Meditation,” which is a type of analytical meditation. It is probably one of the most powerful things I have ever experienced. However, I think I was only a passive observer than an active participant. Unfortunately, I have to say that most the analytical meditations don’t seem to work for me. It appears to me that I have some kind of blockage that doesn’t want allow me to experience the meditations in a way that I am supposed to. 

Death meditation is considered very important in Tibetan Buddhism. One of the first things that the teacher said before he started the meditation was that “real practice only starts when we think about death. “Thinking about death, in particular our own, helps us to really understand what it means when we say life is impermanent. Death meditation is a particular type of analytical meditation in which we visualize a story line of our own death. For example, we imagine that we are determinately ill and only have another 6 months to live. Then, we ask ourselves questions such as what we regret having done in our lives, how we want to spend our last 6 months, who we want to forgive and who do we want to ask for forgiveness. Towards the end of the meditation, the teacher also asked us to visualize the last couple of minutes of our life and who would come to tell you “goodbye.” At this point, I think, most people started crying. For me it was amazing to observe people’s ability to visualize so vividly that they were touched by it in such a way. Having done analytical meditation for a while now has helped us to get better at visualizing things, stories, feelings and emotions. People are being more and more able to visualize things in an increasingly more realistic way. There was so much energy in the room. Although I was still in my meditative state with my eyes closed, I could hear people from all kinds of corners crying. 

This experience made me realize that meditation can have a lot power and potential to help people get deep inside oneself in order to find the things that truly affect one. Let’s say people haven’t been asked to meditate on death and to think about the people who they would ask forgiveness for or who they would give forgiveness, maybe they would never know that this has such a strong effect on them. And in extreme circumstances when things are kept undiscovered, those unresolved issues might manifest in symptoms that would further lead to a mental illness such as depression I know that this is a very farfetched idea but I think it’s worth giving it a thought. 

On the other hand, this experience has also made me realize that meditation or this type of treatment possibility is not for everybody. I am the best living example for this. I really wanted to get deep into myself and follow the guidance of the meditation to the best of my abilities but for some reason I was not able to. There was a blockage, a dead end. Didn’t work for me; period. Even though I put a lot of thought, effort and willingness into this, it still did not work. For other people who might not be as dedicated this might even be less likely than for me to work. Therefore, I believe that this option of meditation as a form of treatment is extremely difficult to achieve and would for most people take a lot of time and effort and for others it might not work at all. 

After all, I have found a success story, in which depression was cured by meditation. Our monk teacher claimed that his depression was cured with meditation so I asked the teacher about his depression and how he was able to cure his illness with mediation. The teacher monk confessed to us that he suffered from severe depression in his early 30s and after he had gone to a 6 months meditation retreat, he was able to cure himself. He said that he was cured through gaining the understanding that his depression is nothing more than the mourning of memories of past experiences. At the retreat, he developed the inside of the impermanence of these past happy times and was able to meditate on those new insides which have further cured him from depression. 

My explanation is oversimplified but if it comes down to it this is what he says and what he believes. At the end though it is up to us to believe what has cured his depression.