Understanding Death For Those Without Faith

A survey of attendees at my last film screening revealed consensus for wanting a deeper understanding of death. While our discussion was amazing in its breadth and coverage of difficult topics such as anger, acceptance, loneliness and the need for help, nothing was said about what happens when you die. No one in the room appeared to have the requisite personal experience.  No near-deathers, no reincarnates, no prophets or seers.

My objective for my workshops is simple-- get people talking about death.  But the survey made me realize that my audience was looking for something more -- specific information about death itself. The traditional place for obtaining an understanding of death is religion. All major world religions have something to say about death whether it flowery fields at the foot of God, the luminous embrace of deceased loved ones, return to the dreamtime, absorption by the mother goddess, or scary visions that send us scurrying back into rebirth for another round. Those with a deep faith may be comforted by the teachings of their chosen path. But this avenue offers little to those who have lost their childhood religious beliefs or never had any to begin with. What can I offer to a person who truly believes at the core of her being that she will cease to exist at the moment of her death? Sixty-two percent of my screening participants either did not report a religious/spiritual identification or said they were Atheist.

In the workshop, I asked people to consider death is an option, a path that might be chosen instead of taking on still more aggressive chemos, more invasive radiation, surgical interventions or high-priced experimental treatments neither tested or approved. My mother had metastatic breast cancer. The surgeons removed 70% of her intestines because it spread there and she could no longer eliminate waste. The surgery gave her about four more months to live. It gave her time to finish up her life. Her oncologist, however, also recommended chemotherapy. I would not have thought her a good candidate. She was extremely underweight, could hardly eat because of a paralysis to the right side of her face and her cancer had spread to her liver. After two treatments, she said "No more." The physical impact was too debilitating, too awful to endure. Physicians will recommend procedures even though the probability of success is miniscule. It is hard to take away hope. Families beg for hope. And well, you never know. Miracles happen. Also, to put it crudely, it's a business model. If a patient never think of death as an option, if he/she never face fears about dying, treatment may continue right up until the very last breath.

Well, why not? If you believe that you cease to exist at the end of that last breath isn't living, even in suffering, preferable to non-existence??? Maybe not. My mother didn't think so. Maybe the atheists at my workshop are not so sure either.  Or maybe they are looking for something else when all hope seems gone.

Besides religion, another way we can learn about dying is from those nearing death. The following list of books look to the experiences of the dying for guidance. Even the confirmed atheist can find something useful here.

• Dying Well, Ira Byock, MD, Berkeley Publishing, Berkeley, 1997 -- Full of heart-opening stories about finishing up relational business, saying good-bye and letting go, this book is primer for dying in peace. His five essential steps are I forgive you; forgive me, thank you, I love you, good-bye.
• Final Gifts, Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, Bantam Books, NY 1992 -- Rich and mysterious stories about the leave-taking process of dying collected over ten years by two hospice nurses. Full of the mystery of this amazing transition.
• The Grace in Dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh, Harper, San Francisco, 1998 -- Pulling together the essence of many world wisdom traditions, (e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Zen, Native American religions, Sufism, the Kabbalah) and years of working at the bedside of the dying, transpersonal psychologist Singh formulates a sort of Jungian process of psychospiritual  transformation from ego to "Ground of Being." Interesting and heady, the book extracts the best teachings from our religious traditions. But it is not for someone close to death.  For those near death, she says, "...put the book down. And know that you are safe. ... If you are dying, your mind will come to know this soon. So go and rest or go and pray or go and meditate, so that when you begin to enter the realms of the sacred you will resonate with those realms gently."
• Who Dies, Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Doubleday, NY, 1982 -- Pioneers in the conscious dying movement, Stephen and Ondrea share knowledge and insights obtained from years at the Hanuman Foundation Dying Project. Included are wonderful meditations on forgiveness, pain and dying. There is also an amazing description of what dying feels like from the inside -- mentally transmitted to Stephen from one of his patients. I read this book after my parents died and experienced a profound shift in my understanding of illness and healing. 

Ultimately the message in all these books is to embrace the mystery. Life is an amazing experience and so is dying. Welcome everything. 

Growing Old and Liking It.

At my 60th birthday party

Not until I reached forty did I notice any signs of aging.  I had that youthful appearance that had liquor stores and restaurants carding me until well into my 30s. When I reach 40, however, my eyes started to go.  I resisted, as most of us blessed with 20-20 vision resist. I only wore readers at night when reading in bed. I recall sitting in an Indian restaurant with a friend trying to decipher the menu in the mellow glow of the table lamp. Gradually and insidiously the need for glasses spread to all my reading time. Now I wear progressive except when I'm walking outside where the signs are graphic or large enough to read.

What really got my attention regarding my aging was the day I ran down a mountain trail and at the bottom discovered that my knees hurt and the hurt didn't go away for several days. I was stunned. That had never happened before. I had been a long distance runner for fifteen years.  I understood fatigue, cramped muscles, temporary aches from over extension, but this was new phenomenon. This was aging. This meant I had to be more careful. I had to learn to respect my body's limits. The bad news is that with each passing year, new limits keep adding on.

I still look pretty good on the outside. I eat extremely well -- organic, mostly vegetable. I do yoga and walk everyday. I've kept my weight down. My small breasts do not weigh enough to sag. Yet something is going on inside that I have no control over. It is the time clock of my cells.

A delightful and yet disturbing book, The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead, by David Shields, goes into great and at times humorous detail about the process of aging without being tedious or too scientific.

Given a list of 24 words, an average 20-year-old remembers 14 of the words, a 40-year-old remembers 11, a 60-year-old remember 9, and a 70-year-old remembers 7.

After age 30, your digestive tract displays a decrease in the amount of digestive juices. At 20, in other words, your fluids are fleeing, and by 30, you're drying up.

That may account for some of the digestive issues I began to experience in my late 30s which I always blamed on the fasting I did at Sufi camp and the inevitable food bingeing that would ensue afterward. I started taking digestive enzymes in my 40s and never looked back.

Shields' lists of age comparisons are interspersed with anecdote from his own life and that of his father who at the time of the book's creation was 97 and heading for 100.

The maximum rate of your heart can attain is your age subtracted from 220 and therefore falls by one beat every years. Your heart is continually becoming a less efficient pumping machine.

You couldn't prove this decline in efficiency by my dad, who, until his early 90s, would awake in darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit. Birds would be just starting to call; black would still streak the colored-pencil soft blue of the sky; my father would be jogging.

The book is also interspersed with the comments of writers and celebrities and interesting stats:

Lauren Bacall said, "When a woman reaches twenty-six in America, she's on the slide. It's downhill all the way from then on. It doesn't give you a tremendous feeling of confidence and well-being."

Jack London died at 40; Elvis Presley, at 42.

Don Marquis, an American newspaper columnist who died at 59, said, "Forty and Forty-five are bad enough; fifty is simply hell to face; fifteen minutes after that you are sixty; and then in ten minutes more you are eighty-five.

I have to agree with Marquis about the hellishness of the fifties. For most women, that's when menopause sets in.  There is no exaggerating the impact that chemistry shift has on a woman's body.

As women lose estrogen, their pubic hair becomes more sparse, the labia becomes more wrinkled, and the skin surrounding the vulva atrophies. The cell walls of a woman's vagina become weaker and more prone to tearing; the vagina gets drier, more susceptible to infection, and--with loss of elasticity--less able to shrink and expand, less accommodating to the insertion of a penis.

Most women will recall receiving the book, Growing Up and Liking It from their school around the age of 11 or 12. It give graphic details about the physiological changes about to take place as a girl reaches puberty.  I seem to have missed the follow-up publication for young girls turning 50, Growing Old and Liking It. All my knowledge was gleaned from the locker room discussions of older women.

I also agree with Marquis about the speed with which the sixties follows on its heels. Remember those old movies in which passing times was conveyed by the leaves of a calendar falling away? (If you don't remember, you're probably too young to find this post very interesting.)  That is how time feels to me now. Yesterday, it was January 1st and today it's more than half way through the year. Is that because I'm aging or because time is really speeding up?

David Shields begins his book with birth and continues to old age and death.  It is an engaging read with some very usable information. Here's his recipe for living longer:

If you want to live longer, you should--in addition to the obvious: eating less and losing weight--move to the country, not take work home, do what you enjoy and feel good about yourself, get a pet, learn to relax, live in the moment, laugh, listen to music, sleep 6 to 7 hours a night; be bless with long-lived parents and grandparents (35 percent of your longevity is due to genetic factors); be married ....

Read the book if you want to know the rest. It's probably in your library.

If you want to know about death, which Shields doesn't discuss, check out my website or come to one of my film screenings.

Departures

Rick Fields' Ashes

In the Japanese film Departures by director Yojiro Takita, an out-of-work cellist accidentally finds a new career casketing the dead. The Japanese, we discover in this film, are as death phobic as we are in the West. This premise makes for a humorous, at times emotional, and very engaging film about life, death and relationships.

The young cellist, Daigo Kobayashi, is reluctant at first to accept this highly questionable vocation. But he learns from his boss to encasket the dead with the elegance and precision of a Japanese tea ceremony. The process is amazing to watch and he is soon drawn into it beyond the lucrative pay that first hooked him. With respect and dignity and various trade tricks deftly concealed behind wraps and cloth, the two men transform the deceased from a thing of horror into beauty before the eyes of the grieving family. Frequently, though not always, their exquisite work opens the family to their grieving.

The film stimulates a lot of thought about how we deal with death and dead bodies in the States. I have already written about our aversion to death as revealed in our obsession with medical technology to stave it off at all costs. After death this aversion continues in our haste to call professionals to remove the body and handle the nasty bits. And what do you think of the undertaker -- that tall slim fellow with gaunt cheeks, solemn face and back silk hat? Mercenary? Insincere? Obsequious? That's how he's depicted by Dickens. But what are your experiences?

When my brother Sandy unexpectedly died, we were able to briefly visit his body at the mortuary. It was not an official viewing, which would have been costly, but rather an "identification." The mortuary was fairly sure it had the right body, but family are permitted to examine and identify their loved one without additional charge. Sandy was laid out on a wheeled table dressed only in a black plastic body bag. He looked asleep, but he was cold to the touch. I must say, there is nothing quite like touching a dead body to comprehend that the former inhabitant is no longer home.

The impulse of my brother's widow was to glance at the body and then leave the room. "Yup, that's him." To be sure she was still in shock from finding his dead body in bed the previous morning. But our culture also supports a hasty retreat. I chose, however, to stay a while, as did my other brother, Skip. We watched and waited to see what might happen, to let memories and feelings emerge, to formulate final words for our brother's unhearing ears. The widow returned, three times, first to berate him for leaving her and finally to kiss him goodbye. I like to think we held the space for her to take her time. But we may only have prolonged her discomfort. Do what you need to do and let others do what they need. It is the best rule at times like these.

I am not sure how I feel about the primping of a dead body. I remember a lot of deprecating comments about how my deceased grandmother looked in her open casket all rouged and lipsticked. She did not look anything like our "gramma." In contrast, my brother Sandy looked very much like himself without any adornment. However, there was something very stark and discomforting about his utilitarian display on the gurney. After my dear friend Marianne died and the hospice orderly had cleaned her up, we dressed her, combed her hair, and applied lipstick to her lips even though her next stop was the crematorium. Doing this felt right and respectful. After our gentle ministrations, her mouth, previously slack-jawed and open, softened into a sweet, contented smile. Was she pleased? Primping seemed the right thing to do in her case. Perhaps the difference lie in the manner of those doing the primping, i.e. with reverence and love. That is why I find the the ritual preparation in Departures is so compelling.

In California, home-based funerals are gaining popularity not only to save money, but also reclaim the ancient and intimate ritual of preparing the body for burial. People trained in the practice of body preparation can be hired to guide a family through the process and paperwork. Or you can read up on it at Final Passages. Keeping the body at home has the added advantage of providing ample time to sit with the deceased, rather than be hastened by the organizational needs of professional facilities.

Although contemplating death and decay may be a time-honored practice among the Buddhists, it is not everyone's cup of tea. Even I, who can wax romantically about the emotional benefits of doing it yourself, pause at the thought of actually preparing the body of my six feet tall, 300+ lbs brother. Distributing his ashes, which nearly filled a tall garbage bag, was task enough.

The chevra kadisha, a team of professional volunteers trained in the burial preparation, offers a middle road approach between the do-it-yourselfers and high-priced professionals at least for those of the Jewish faith. They mix spirituality with practicality as they wash, purify and dress the deceased in a process called taharah. The Jews, apparently, have held on to their time-honored practices of handling death while much of western culture has spent the last 100 years hiding it in the closet. We might learn from them and and from our graceful encasketers in Departures, as we seek our own personal approach to death and the dead. The people in my newest film, The Heart of Grieving, offer some additional possibilities, none of which involve washing dead bodies. When clear cultural instructions are lacking, we do best to follow our hearts.

Mastering Life

In the film Julie and Julia, we are provide with an interesting contrast between the story of Julia Child’s start in the cooking profession and blogger Julie Powell’s one year challenge to cook every recipe in Child’s first cookbook. Child, married to a career diplomat and living in Paris, begins her adventure by seeking to engage her mind and time doing something she loves – eating good food. Julie seeks to prove her worth to herself and her friends, also by doing something she loves -- writing and cooking. It takes Child over seven years to write her famous book and many more to get it published. I found this reassuring given the ten plus years I have spent producing my film series. Julie becomes a stunning success after only a year. I felt dismissive.

Clearly, I have some judgments about Julie that bare examination. Julie was motivated by EGO, the desire to prove herself to her friends. She piggybacked on the work of another and she was an overnight success (ok, over-year success)! Child, in contrast, was motivated by her sheer love for food, was amazingly courageous in bucking gender stereotypes and praise-worthy for her many years of perseverance in writing and publishing her book. She was also played by actor, Meryl Streep, and thus irresistible. Reexamining my judgments I realized that neither woman is better than the other and both have something to teach us about life mastery.

1. Ego: How many of us are not first motivated by a desire to prove ourselves to others. The lesson from both women is to select something that we love to do. Julie shares her struggles with her ego -- her insecurity, her disappointments, her self-absorption and the near destruction of her marriage. We can identify and learn from her missteps and forgive ourselves as we can forgive her. Child, on the other hand, shows us how to stand up for our work, to resist compromising for the sake of acceptance (i.e. being published). Is this ego or not-ego? Was she so full of herself and her book that she couldn’t make the requested changes? Or was it love of her work and those who helped her that would not allow it? She won in the ends. Her book was published in its entirety. So we are grateful she resisted and can learn something about defending the integrity of our own creations.

2. Piggybacking: What artist does not learn from the work of other? It is where inspiration and ideas are birthed. Can any one look at their own creations and truly say they owe nothing to any one else? It is impossible. Of course there are limits. When is it piggybacking, when is it plagiarism, and when is it copyright infringement? It can be a confusing line that, rest assured, our copyright industry protects and expands with vigor. Julie was piggybacking on Child’s work. Child was piggybacking on her teachers. They piggybacked on those they learned from and so on and so forth back to that first caveman who discovered cooking over fire. Each one put something of themselves in the new creation that makes it truly unique. Of course sometimes they don’t, but we’ll let the courts decide.

3. Instant Success. Why degrade instant success? Struggling for years has nothing to recommend for itself. It is simply a belief one clings to in the long years of uncertainty and disappointment. “Got to put in the time!” It is a belief that can undermine us and hold us back right along with thoughts about being unworthy, not good enough and undeserving. Instead of dissing Julie for her relatively quick success, we should be celebrating her and trying to copy her. Of course there is also a lot of serendipity and luck, not to mention good connections involved in achieving what we traditionally think of as success, i.e., fame and fortune. Perhaps we should reconsider the meaning of success.

When it comes to the end of our lives, what will we remember as being most important? In a blog post at Inspiration and Chai we are told of five regrets that recur among the dying: failing to live a life true to one’s self rather than fulfilling the expectations of others, working too hard, not expressing one’s feelings, losing track of friend, and not being happy. Might a truly successful life be better gauged by how few of these regrets we have in our final hours? So, how are you doing?

Meaning of Life

Eddie, an 83 year old war veteran and a very sweet guy, discovers his life's purpose only after he dies, in the film, Five People You Meet in Heaven. Eddie, played wonderfully by John Voight, begins his tale at the end, shortly after he dies. We follow him into the afterlife where he meets five people, one by one, who help him review his life and discover things he did not know. In a series of flashbacks that jump back and forth in time, we piece together the story of a difficult childhood, a promising future, a traumatic war event and the consequent loss of a life dream. The story is neither predicable nor formulaic. It is a complicated examination of a human psyche, with many unexpected twists and turns. Except for the heavenly music which might be off putting for some, the film is definitely worth a look.

In contrast to the hero in Ikiru (the film discussed in my last post), Eddie believes most of his adult life that he has failed to live up to his potential. He discovers, however, that life is not always about what we think it is. Both films examine what it means to have lived well. Interestingly, they come to a similar conclusion -- it is by helping others that we find our deepest satisfaction. In Eddie's case, as the maintenance man of Ruby Amusement Park, it is about the special kindness he showed to the children who visit the park. It is the close attention he gave to the rides to make sure they were safe. And ultimately, it is about his final act of selflessness to save a child from a broken ride. The sacrificial rescue is completely in character. It is who Eddie is -- the big guy who helps the small and the weak. His story is also about forgiveness, but you'll have to see the film for the details.

Both films, Ikiru and Five People You Meet in Heaven, asks us to consider the meaning of our own lives, how well and fully we are living and whether, given a sudden and unexpected death, we would measure up. It is about living heartfully and courageously though not necessarily in a big or flamboyant way. This subject is very dear to my own heart. It is one of the reason for making and sharing my film series, Secrets of Life and Death. They are films about preparing for death, yes, but also about what death can teach us about how we live our lives, about life's impermanence and unpredictability and what is truly important.

Like Eddie, we do not always know the impact of our actions. His story reminds me of another story told by Rachel Naomi Ramen in her book, My Grandfather's Blessings. It's about a business man, George, who thought his life had been a waste. He had two ex-wives and five children whom he knew nothing about because he spent his life building a business and making money. Diagnosed with lung cancer, he now lamented his choice. Rachel, his counselor, knew that he was the inventor of a medical device that enabled people with a chronic disease to live an almost normal life. One of her patients, Stephanie, was a grateful user of this device. Rachel asked Stephanie if she would be willing to write an anonymous note to the man explaining what a difference his invention had made in her life. Stephanie went one better and asked Rachel to invite him to her house for dinner. George agreed, but when he arrived he was met, not by just Stephanie and her husband but by her whole family -- parents, aunts and uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, her husband's parents and many friend and neighbors, the whole community that had sustained Stephanie in the years she was an invalid. They had come to share their stories, the part they had played, basically the story of Stephanie's life from its many angles. At the end of the sharing, more than three hours, Stephanie told George, "This is really a story about you." Later, back at her office, Rachel asked George how many devices he manufactured every year. "Close to ten thousand," he answered softly. Then he said, "I knew the numbers, Rachel, I had no idea what they meant."

Share your story. Who has been a blessing to you? Whom have you blessed? What can you do for someone today?

TO LIVE!

Back in 1952, Akria Kurosawa made a film Ikiru, which means “to live.” It’s about a career bureaucrat, a minor cog in the huge Japanese government bureaucracy, who, along with everyone else there, spends his entire working life doing nothing and avoiding doing anything. When our protagonist, Kanji Wantanabe, discovers, indirectly, that he has a terminal stomach cancer he sets out on quest to find out what life is about. In the end he finds redemption in helping a neighborhood transform a toxic sewage spill into a playground for the poor children. The film is a good reminder about the purpose of life. "Not dead" does not mean "alive."

It is easy to get caught up in the routine of daily life, making a living, paying the bills, keeping ahead of the escalating demands of work and home. Americans work more hours on the job than any other industrialized nation, clocking up nearly two working weeks more than their counterparts in Japan, the second most worked people of the industrialized world. That does not give a lot of time for self-awareness or reflection. 

One of the purposes of my film series, Secrets of Life and Death, is to wake people up to their mortality before death comes knocking at the door. By acknowledging death, we may, like Kanji Wantanabe, be encouraged to have a more creative and fulfilling life. Death exposes the fragility and tenuousness of everyday life, of our whole material existence. This realization can be both ecstatic and shattering. Shattering if like Kanji we waste our precious time in mindless and meaningless repetition until it is almost too late. Ecstatic when we heed the whisper of our hearts and connect to those activities and things that nourish our souls. Death admonishes us to live more fully, to let go of minor irritations, to take chances, show up and pursue our most fervent desires, hopes and dreams.

Kanji shows us that helping others is a worthy pursuit. We do not even need to do something huge and dramatic. It could begin with a simple word of validation. Say something positive to the next person you meet and see how you feel.

Meditation: the art of focusing

Dancing at Sufi camp by George Brooks

I first became acquainted with the art of meditation while in graduate school at Indiana University. A free class was offered on Transcendental Meditation. The procedure seemed easy enough; you listened to a lecture, received your very own magical mantra (meditation word) and off you went. So I went, got my own special word and begin sitting, twice a day, twenty minutes, repeating my word over and over again. I did that day after day, week after week . . . for years. 

Mostly I did a lot of thinking in those twenty minutes.  It was good thinking! I came up with lectures for my classes, questions for tests, and new points to make in the Ph.D. thesis I was writing. By this time I had moved to Minnesota to teach at a Catholic college on the Mississippi River. I did nothing to curb this thinking. Teaching four Sociology classes a semester was a lot of work and I appreciated all the creativity these meditation breaks could give me. I just let the thoughts burble away each time until my twenty minutes were up. The practice of sitting twice a day was probably good for me, but I suspect I did more meditating while jogging in the subzero Minnesota winter.

Years later, I began studying with a Sufi Master from Iraq -- Adnan Sarhan -- at a remote mountain retreat in central New Mexico. It was then that I began to meditate in earnest. Meditation, I discovered, is not about emptying your mind, it is about being focused in the moment. It’s like a cat watching a mouse. Whatever happens -- sounds, colors, smells, feelings -- you are there, noticing. If you can do this for any length of time your consciousness shifts and you begin to change. 

 

At the Sufi retreat, Adnan uses a variety of techniques to draw the mind into the moment. Which is good because the mind is a child always wanting something new. He is an artist at drawing our attention. Chanting, slow movement, deep breathing, dancing, singing, whirling, even reading are all avenues of meditation.

Sometimes I was asked to read his writings to the group. The way they are written -- convoluted stories within stories within stories until you totally loose the thread and point of the tale -- is another strategy for shifting consciousness. It short-circuits the mind’s effort to make coherent sense. The mind finally gives up waiting for the climax or the resolution of the story and just follows the sound and the rhythm of the words. I put a lot of people into a trance with my reading.  Maybe they were just sleeping – but a delicious, relaxing sleep, massaged and cuddled by the sound and rhythm of the words.

Adnan has very eccentric grammar in his writing, probably due to his first language being Arabic. It can be a challenge to read and requires deep concentration. Whenever I started to show off, modulating the sound of my voice, thinking about my reading, I would stumble over his words. I had to let go of my thoughts and my desire to be "good" and just read. So reading was meditating too.

When I am meditating my mind feels all muffully, like my thoughts have been covered by a soft blanket or my brain is being massaged. Suddenly I am aware and focused. I see the visuals on the inside of my eyelids, hear the enveloping sounds, feel the breath in my chest, and smell the apple blossoms outside. It’s wonderful. Or I’ve learned to experience it as wonderful. It usually doesn’t lasts very long. Opps, there goes another thought. What I have noticed is that the focus of meditation improves my focus in other situations. It is easier to pay attention when someone's talking or to enjoy a walk or to make love, without intruding thoughts.

My best meditation form is dance. By focusing on the music, the movement of my body and the rhythm of my breath --- I forget to think. It is very creative from moment to moment and very physical. I get caught up partnering with the music, anticipating, enfolding, immersing in the sound. When thoughts do show up, they are often so creative and pleasurable, they are hard to let go.  I wonder whether these mental inspirations are gifts of the mediation or the tricks of a wily monkey mind trying to get back into control. Don’t wonder, my body whispers, just dance.

Currently I have been doing a yoga meditation called pranayama. This involves a lot of playing with the breath. Inhale for five counts, exhale five counts. Make them even. Now add a pause at the end of each inhale and exhale. Extend the pause to five counts. Now add the bandas, muscular closings that confine the energy of the breath to the chest. Now alternate nostrils holding your nose with your hand. Three curled fingers press against the forehead, drawing attention to this powerful focusing spot. TheYoga of Breath by Richard Rosen, is a step-by-step guide to this practice. It's not as easy for me as dancing mediation, but more accessible in a small house. It requires more discipline and takes me deeper.

Neal Donald Walsh offers several interesting techniques for meditating in his book, When Change Happen, Change Everything. For the beginner he suggests walking meditation. In this meditation you move about, then stop every few moments to focus on a specific things -- like a flower or a blade of grass. You regard it intently, considering every aspect of it -- the color, the smell, the texture, the size, the shape. The goal is to practice focusing the mind. The mind is a muscle. You exercise regularly and it gets stronger.

Group meditation is very powerful practice. The energy or vibration of all those other meditating minds seems to help the focus. I lead a bereavement group at the local hospice and begin each group with a short group meditation. I guide the meditation with directions for breath and attention. I stay very present with my own breath, the feelings in my body and the suggestions of what to say next that pop in my mind. It is so easy to meditate in this situation. After a several minutes, I tell the group to slowly return to their normal breathing. Invariably, my own meditation goes deeper, so deep it is hard to leave. I stay a few precious breaths longer.

What are your experiences with meditation? What do you do? Does it come easy? Closes your eyes and do it right now. . . What does it feel like?