The Importance of Envisioning Yourself 5 Minutes After You’ve Died

When you karate chop a board in half, you don’t target the board, you target BEYOND the board. When we practice striking BEYOND the board, it trains us to see past the perceived physical limitation. When we train ourselves to see BEYOND our physical death – even five minutes beyond — it demystifies it and shows us it’s nothing to fear. Wait, how do you practice seeing yourself BEYOND the body?? We train ourselves to see beyond the physical body by practicing exercises such as these two:

— Exercise One. Changing our self talk relative to death by repetition of thoughts to reprogram old beliefs into new possibilities. We no longer allow our thoughts to linger on fearful “what ifs?” We instead envision an instant closing of the eyes and awakening into consciousness, minus your physical body. Maybe you’re watching over yourself at the time of passing. Watching from a peaceful place, realizing it’s all part of the plan, part of the process. You feel a joy and understanding that allows you to watch with compassion and a sense of completion, without longing or heartache. Changing your thoughts and self-talk to consider the following scenarios will help re-program your old belief:

As you’ve seen the caterpillar begin its next life as the butterfly, you know you’re being lifted elsewhere. You’ll be aware of your surroundings as you transition. Your mind and eyes – no, your awareness – will allow you to experience familiar settings, the same as walking into different rooms at home, interacting with passed loved ones, until you are ready to experience new settings. New settings will simply be new locations, the same as a first vacation to the beach or the mountains, new trails to walk down, pleasing new sights to see. Seeing what you consider beautiful and awe-inspiring in this lifetime will be stations you come across after you pass, so it will feel familiar and comforting to you. You will have a choice where to land and for how long.

For this exercise, it helps to have places in mind that you enjoy experiencing the beauty of. So find your happy place and at each doubtful thought of “death,” review these happy places in your mind. As you do, you will be guided to new thoughts and ideas as to what comes next.

Our guidance system continues after “death.” Yes, our guidance system continues whether we have a body or not. We continue to be guided via thought and images that come into our consciousness.

— Exercise Two. Practicing daily separation of consciousness from the body via meditation. A lot of people believe we have one physical life and this is it. A lot of people believe we die and are reborn over and over. Evidence proves the latter. When I learned we get one lifetime after another, I realized there’s plenty of time later for me to pursue being the concert pianist or ballerina. It freed me to take more time in the Now moment to savor where I am and what I am doing. One thing that helps remind me is a daily meditation practice.

A MEDITATION TECHNIQUE
You can begin by simply sitting quietly twice a day for 10 minutes – heck, start with 2 minutes if it’s all you can do — following your breath as it flows in and out of your nostrils. Thoughts will arise, simply breathe them away on the exhale. Click here for my own meditation technique and many links about meditation.

An important thing to know about meditation is that you’re not just sitting there quietly with eyes closed, being bored. There’s a whole lot going on. The practice of breathing deeply and calmly — on purpose — as a daily practice will begin modifying your neural pathways. This strengthens your reasoning center. You will begin thinking more clearly and when you experience scary or upsetting sensations, you can more easily look at them rationally. For example, when you experience pain, rather than becoming anxious and assuming it means something is wrong with you, you can watch the pain rise and fall without becoming ensnared in a story about what it might mean. On the other hand, you might be guided to a particular word or phrase to research that may shed light on it.

At some point in your meditation, you will relax into it enough that your internal guidance system will kick in and begin offering you blocks of thoughts to consider. At first you will think these are your own thoughts and you will release them on your breath. Don’t worry, they will come back around. Your internal guidance system won’t give up and go away. It will simply wait until you consider for a moment, “Hey, maybe this thought is from Guidance instead of from me.” When you begin contemplating THAT thought, guidance will send you supporting information.

Hard as it is, get used to death
Her perception upon dying
A Friend and I Talk About Dying and Easy Transitions
Remember “we” survive after death of the body
How to forgive and find closure if the other is unwilling, absent or dead
Why pretend loved ones aren’t going to die? Let’s get over the fear
When we experience ourself outside the body, we understand there is no death

The End of Death As We Know It: What The Crossing Over Experience Was Like, As Reported By Those Who Made The Transition

Thich Nhat Hanh on death
Rumi on Death