On a recent Saturday night, the interior of Tucktile Mountain, a small, carefully curated shop in Pasadena, was quiet: meditation cushions lay on the concrete floors, white candlelight flickered in the windows, and Rihanna’s “Umbrella” blared from the restaurant next door.
The six of us gathered inside laughed nervously: we were already excited, and a little hesitant: after all, we were there to contemplate our own mortality.
Tucktile Mountain was hosting a two-hour, $55 workshop called “Reflections on Death,” led by Marifel Catalig, a trained death doula and breathwork instructor. Promote on Instagram It was described as “a guided breath meditation aimed at contemplating different forms of death” and the description ended there, so no one knew exactly what to expect.
I went into the workshop hoping that an hour of meditating on our inevitability would ease my fear of death, but I didn’t expect to leave with a deep sense of gratitude for all the ordinary, messy, glorious life I’ve been blessed to live.
Ines Testoni, a social psychologist who directs courses on death studies and end of life at the University of Padua in Italy, said such overwhelming feelings of gratitude are not unusual after such a lengthy training in facing death.
“What I’ve seen over the last 15 years is that knowing we’re going to die helps us appreciate life more and makes us more appreciative of the things we can do and enjoy in life,” she said.
Catalig, 40, greeted us at the door in a white blouse and wide-leg jeans and told us to take a seat. After lighting a candle at the head of each cushion, we began with some gentle movements to release the tension of the day, then focused on our senses: paying close attention to what we saw, heard, tasted, felt and smelled.
Meditations on death are many and varied. In the Buddhist tradition, MaranasatiDeath awareness meditations are designed to remind practitioners that death may come the next morning, the next meal or the next breath, and encourage them to act accordingly. Another Buddhist practice focuses on detailed visualization of the body’s eventual decay in order to let go of attachment to the material world.
Katarig once took part in a death meditation in which participants were wrapped in white sheets to resemble funeral shrouds after death, and on another occasion he led a pre-funeral workshop where participants wrote their own eulogies, which they then read to the group.
The meditation I attended was much simpler, focusing primarily on the kind of life review that many people undertake before dying.
Accompanied by a playlist of instrumental music that was evocative rather than jarring, Catalig asked us to imagine our earliest memories and think about where we were, who was there, how we felt, what we smelled, what sounds we heard, etc. We did the same for childhood, pre-adolescence, adolescence, early adulthood, etc.
As she spoke, memories of the life I’d lived flashed through my mind, mostly mundane but filled with fond feelings: playing in a Fisher-Price barn on green carpets, walking to school in my new saddle shoes, riding my bike on the sidewalk with my sister, sleepovers and middle school dances, late-summer nights wandering through my hometown, days of blissful boredom and aimlessness.
You are the only one who has lived your life. All of your experiences, everything that has brought you to this point, are yours.
— Marifel Catalig, Breathwork Instructor
I thought of scenes from my adult life before I had children, my life as a new parent, my life with small children, and finally my current life with my husband, teenage sons, coworkers, and friends. All the different lives I’ve lived.
“Nobody has lived your life except you,” Catalig said. “All of your experiences, everything that has led you to this point, are yours.”
Then the music changed, and she asked us to imagine that death was approaching. Our eyesight was failing, our hearing was becoming increasingly dull. Food didn’t taste as good as it used to, and we were eating less and less. In my mind, I felt myself moving away from the immediacy of life. A grey mist hung between me and the world. As my experience of the world became more and more still, I felt less fearful of leaving it.
Then Katarig had us imagine our final days. Who would visit us? What would they say? And we envisioned our last breath. “What would you like to breathe in?” she asked. “And what would you like to breathe out?”
We imagined them hovering over our dead bodies, what they would look like, who would care for them. For just a moment, we imagined what would happen next.
In a society that largely discourages thinking about death and dying, many of us respond by denying our innate fear of death, Testoni says. Taking the time to visualize and imagine your own death can help you confront that fear in a productive way.
“I look back and realize I was afraid of something I didn’t know,” she says. “Knowing that I don’t know, but knowing there’s a lot I could learn, definitely gives me peace of mind.”
Once the meditation was over, Katarig invited us to talk about our experiences.
One participant said that meditation helped her look back at times in her life when she thought she was a bad person, and instead see herself with more compassion. Another participant said that she felt that her higher self had always been with her and still is with her. This brought her great comfort.
For me, I left the store feeling euphoric. My fear of dying had subsided, but I was excited to be alive.
If you would like to try Katarig’s Death Meditation, check out her upcoming offerings. Instagram pageOr contact her via her website Breasted Death.
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