Death is a vast landscape with a multitude of features. Each of us will have our own unique relationship with dying, and how we choose to navigate that process involves a multitude of intimately personal decisions. The enormity of experience offered through the dying process is not something that can be plotted or codified into one particular program. There is no set sequence of steps in a perfected recipe for conscious death. We do not graduate from a specific stage and get promoted to the following one, eventually arriving at completion as we master death. Rather, The Way of Conscious Death allows us to be mastered by death, to learn from death throughout each of our living moments.
The Way of Conscious Death includes:
- Educating ourselves about what is dying today
- Allowing our dying to wake us up to life.
- Seeking and offering support to one another through all our dying processes, creating help with dying.
- Practicing for our deaths rather than theorizing about them.
- Learning from our ancestors as well as our contemporaries, from religious traditions and medical, psychological, and social resources.
- Integrating our private death discussions with our public death discussions.
- Surrendering to all the deaths in our lives, both physical and metaphoric, both personal and communal.
- Weaving together the questions, “How do I want to die?” and “How do I want to live?”