Ep. 81: Accepting Death and Dying with Judy Lief- Buddhist Teacher, Writer, and Editor

Judy Lief has been a Buddhist teacher for over 35 years. She was a close personal student of Ven. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who trained and empowered her as a teacher in the Buddhist and Shambhala traditions. Judy’s teachings focus on how the insights and meditative techniques stemming from the Buddhist tradition can be applied to the challenges of everyday life and to pressing global issues. She is the author of the book “Making Friends with Death” which expands on Buddhist traditions in how we change our relationship with death. Judy also teaches at Naropa University in Boulder, CO. On death, Judy exclaims, “The fact is we have a very limited time here on Earth. That's a fact. It's an amazing, wonderful, incredible gift to exist, even with the pain and even with the suffering.”

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Show Notes

[1:32] Interesting thing about the virus that we're experiencing now is that it's something that affects everyone. You know, so many times there's pockets of suffering and in pockets of relative good situations, so to speak, or privileged situations. With the covid virus is an impersonal kind of force, a living thing that wants to thrive and grow, and finding hosts is its way of doing so. So that affects everyone, there's no kind of bias, particularly it doesn't seem.
[2:25] I think what's best is just to keep it very simple.
[2:41] The simple connections, it's so inspiring, you know, so much is positive and good is coming out as well. In the traditional thinking for every bad thing that happens is a good thing that comes up in response. [3:19] I think it's important to keep up with the news, but I think it's important to refrain from obsessing about the news.
[3:44] And I think both we think we have more control than we actually have and we think we know more than we actually do. And we're very uncomfortable that we don't know everything and we can't control everything. [4:13] But fundamentally, we are part of something much larger than ourselves. We are part of something much more magical and mysterious than we could ever imagine. And I think it's a bit of human hubris to think that we're separate, we stand apart from the world and we can somehow conquer and control it.
[5:07] The fact is we have a very limited time here on Earth. That's a fact. It's an amazing, wonderful, incredible gift to exist, even with the pain and even with the suffering.
[7:17] At some point, some of the students in the class would say, "Can you do something more general based on the text? A more general Buddhist approach relating to end of life loss and change. Can you recommend something?" And I didn't really have a good thing at the time I could think of recommending that presented things the way I wanted. So that's how I ended up writing the book.
[8:11] Realize that death is a part of life from the very moment we take birth.
[8:30] Life could not exist without death. They are not separable, fundamentally. Every fresh arising is also a dissolving.
[8:46] And when we remind ourselves of the reality of death and continual change, it makes our daily experience so much more vivid and it cuts through the sense of something out there, somewhere else coming to attack us in our solid life.
[9:13] And every single breath cycle is like a little life.
[9:31] I think a lot of times our view of life is like it's a long string, you know our lifeline. And it goes along and we try to make it go along as strong and long as we can, and then it gets chopped off. Then it's gone. In fact, there's never that thing there to begin with. There is no one solid life. There's only our experience moment to moment, always fresh and always dying. It's like each breath. So the idea that we have this solid thing that is so threatened by death would be like, if we breathe in and we just hold it as long as we can. And the longer we hold it, the better we feel.
[10:38] Fear is natural, of course, and sorrow and pain and suffering. It's not that there's a magic thing where you just breeze through life and, you know, like a rock. Nothing affects you, you're just hunky dory all the time. Everybody suffers. Everyone has lost.
[11:05] What is it we actually fear? Sometimes we're not so sure, we just feel anxious. We just feel scared. And I think all we can do is really not struggle against that, not to beat ourselves up.
[11:37] And some kinds of fear is really important.
[12:34] Nothing has changed, nothing has threatened you. It's your own mind. And we look everywhere else around us to find out where the source of that fear is. And it's within us usually.
[12:54] And so much has to do with observing and being curious about how your own mind works, because we're each different.
[13:37] Because a lot of fear might be an immediate reaction, but then we sustain it. We sustain it because we dwell on it and we make it more and more solid.
[13:53] But to feel what you feel, but be willing to then let it go or to find ways to disrupt.
[14:13] And I think maybe there is some kind of thing about humans that sometimes when you're feeling bad, you just want to keep feeling bad.
[16:13] We incorporate all of what is there. So we're not taking some parts of ourself that we accept and like and then we're burying the rest.
[16:37] It's all a part of you. Your bad experiences, your mistakes, hesitations, your doubts are as much a part of you as all your wonderful qualities of insight and love and compassion and what not.
[16:54] You know what arises for me in this covid period so much, in particular the relationship sides of things, the incredible pain by being separated from those you love.
[17:37] I believe that our connections of love and compassion are not totally bound by space and time.
[17:56] We're so fortunate, many of us, have at least some kind of electronic connection. Even so, you have your heart and psychic connection, which I think goes beyond the usual conventional limits of I'm here in your next town over and I can't see you.
[18:20] In the Buddhist training that I've had, the go to place is always to think of so many others who are also suffering. To have a sense of expanding the compassion, it's not just about you. It's part of the human condition.
[19:16] And everybody has this incredible gift of being able to express love and kindness and able to do simple acts of help for one another.
[20:23] You could say, I would like to do this, but you have to always have a sense of the humility of things. The world has its own way of deciding what to do.
[21:26] Nothing is ever the same thing. You're never the same. The situation is always slightly different. And that's great because what's happening in the present moment is so alive.
[22:57] People do feel good about being generous. People want to be generous? Deep down, they want to be kind. You know, they want to be loving, even if on the surface they're being very dysfunctional and messed up.
[23:26] Because there's no point in being grateful for all the good stuff. You should be grateful for challenging things.
[24:58] So one of the aspects of meditation and dealing with emotions is just simply slowing down. You can see before they build whether it might be irritated, but we're not furious. And we begin to see where we can cut the force of the emotion before we're just tried. Easy to describe, but not that easy to do.

Thank you for joining us on Health Gig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.

“We are part of something much more magical and mysterious than we could ever imagine.” - Judy Lief
“Nothing is ever the same thing. You're never the same. The situation is always slightly different. And that's great because what's happening in the present moment is so alive.” - Judy Lief
“I believe that our connections of love and compassion are not totally bound by space and time. I feel you can have love and compassion and be connected with people you love, even if they’re on the other end of the Earth.” - Judy Lief

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