Tai Sheridan - Relax... You're Going to Die

Death is the root
of your core anxiety

Relaxation is the root
of your core aliveness

Until you make
peace with death
it is impossible to relax
in the core of yourself

Until you relax
in the core of yourself
it is impossible to
make peace with death

Your intellect can’t resolve
this chicken egg existential paradox
yet without resolution
you will succumb
to angst dread loneliness grief
for not claiming your
birthright of contentment

Understanding living and dying
is the core of a deeply
rooted spiritual life

Dying is an
ongoing event

With every breath
you are dying
With every breath
you are living

Living and dying
are present each
moment of your life

Being vitally alive
is a function of
your awareness about
how you live
and how you die
each moment

Breathing and awareness
are the gates to the garden
of living and dying

Being close to your breath
transforms spiritual philosophy
into spiritual experience

Death isn’t
an abstract event

Making it abstract intellectual
a belief or other worldly
protects you from deep grief

To make peace with death
you need to make
peace with grief

It requires tremendous
inner strength to dwell deeply
inside the loss of those
you dearly love

It requires
the same strength
to dwell deeply
inside the knowledge
that you will lose
your precious life

You may tend to avoid
accepting the biggest truth
about living which is
that everything dies

Deep acceptance will
change you forever

When you are afraid
of death you contract
and thoughts muscles emotions
become tense narrow hardened

Fear of death is death itself

You become desperate for
a soft cushion to land on
to protect you from facing
what you know will arrive

There is no soft cushion
there is only free falling into dying
that is now that is forever
it can’t be stopped or started
because living dying
being loving
is life itself

To die before you die
is the secret of the spiritually awake

What dies is your self-centered ego
and personal identification
with the stories that you have told yourself
for as long as you can remember
about who and what you are
as a separate person

which you have reinforced
to substantiate yourself

and which
the world has reinforced
to substantiate you

you sadly have come to believe
that the fiction you call me
is the whole story

our impoverished ego
only knows how to protect itself
from the mysterious truth that
there is no substantiality whatsoever
to hang on to and call me

this is strange
wondrous magical
hard to understand
hard to accept
hard to realize

but if you are committed
to making peace with death
then your journey will take you
to understanding that
who you call me is a dream

When you think of ‘me’ dying
it disconnects you from
the fabric of your existence

Which is the intimate bond
you have with everything that is alive
and with everything that has or will exist
how could you possibly be separate
from any single thing

The fact is that
if everything that exists
throughout all time space
didn’t exist as it is was will be
then you wouldn’t be here

The miracle is that your body
is made of atoms and minerals
formed in interstellar space
the miracle is that who you are
can never be separated from
the totality of all existence

Death is the door to radically changing
your perspective on what is going on
in the depths of your Being

You can’t think about death’s door
without thinking about birth’s door

These are the two doors of your life
the one you came in
and the one you will go out

Which is a half truth
because although your body
was conceived by a man/woman
womb grown and worldly born
and although your body will decompose
ashes to ashes dust to dust

It doesn’t account for the fact that
you are part of a huge cosmic event
that defines you as bigger
than just the distance
between these two doors

The fear of death is the fear of total aliveness
which isn’t excitement or fulfilling dreams

At the core of dynamic living
is a great presence not just of yourself
but of the whole works of existence
as it courses through your veins
and pumps oxygenated moonlight
through synapse and cell

It is the certainty
that you exist
connected to everything
your feet on the ground
your breath flowing freely
your eyes wide open
celebrating the joyful
shimmering of things