The Teaching That Nearly Made Me Quit — and Ultimately Changed Everything

My First Buddhist Training

When I first encountered Buddhist training — during a period of my life when I was doing absolutely everything in my power to figure out how not to die — one of the earliest teachings nearly made me quit before I started.

My teachers wanted me to become comfortable with my own death.

My first response was...

"Are you crazy?!"

I remember thinking: these people are out of their minds. I'm fighting for my life. I'm researching, experimenting, changing my diet, and changing it again, all in an effort to figure out how to live — and you want me to accept my own death?

In my hubris, I was certain they couldn't possibly know what they were talking about.

And yet — even through that wall of resistance, (and ignorance) — I proceeded with half a mind to quit at any time.

Here's the lesson...

We enter this world through birth. And in the western world, birth is celebrated without reservation. It brings joy. It brings possibility. Every new life is greeted as something unambiguously good.

Death is treated as the opposite. It's morose. It's final. It closes doors rather than opening them. We avoid talking about it. We avoid preparing for it in any meaningful way — leaving most of our arrangements to what can be written on paper. And above all else, in a way we rarely examine directly —

we fear it.

But here's where the Buddhist training began to break the edges of my own resistance:

If death is as natural as birth — if it is simply the other side of the same passage — where does the fear actually come from?

What I discovered is that fear — in fact most of the fear we experience in life — comes not from what we know about death, but from what we don't know. We have no road map for what follows. And in the absence of a map, the mind fills the unknown with dread.

But the absence of a map doesn't mean the territory is hostile.

It simply means we haven't been there yet.

Knowing Your Own Death

And then there's this — the thing that shifted something fundamental in how I think about living.

This isn't a teaching that arrived accidentally midway through the training. It was placed at the very beginning. Deliberately. Because the teachers understood something most of us have never been invited to examine:

Almost every decision we make — at every level of our lives — is quietly shaped by the avoidance of death. The avoidance of risk. The avoidance of anything that brings us too close to our own fragility.

We don't always call it fear. Sometimes it looks like caution. Sometimes it looks like responsibility. Sometimes it looks like wisdom.

But underneath it, the driver is the same.

And the training asked: what if you made decisions differently? Not from the avoidance of death — but from a growing, deepening love for life itself? Not to preserve your existence — but to demonstrate it at its highest capacity?

I think of people like Thích Nhất Hạnh, who risked everything during the Vietnam War to serve others. I think of Gandhi, who placed his life in harm's way repeatedly in service of something he believed mattered more than his own safety.

These are not reckless people. They are people who understood that their first purpose in life wasn't to preserve it — but to demonstrate it fully. At its highest capacity.

And that takes courage most of us are still growing into.

I'd like to tell you I'm there. But I can't.

Even after everything I've been through and everything I've studied, the well-worn tracks of caution and safety are usually the first to inform my decision making process. I usually have to work through them to get to the place where my decisions feel like I'm paying the highest homage to this life I've been given.

Insanity to Liberty

The Buddhist training that once seemed insane to me now seems like one of the most radical acts of self-liberation available to a human being.

Not because accepting death is giving up on life.

Because accepting death as equally natural as your birth — understanding that it carries as much purpose and meaning as your life — might be the very thing that sets us free.

Can you identify decisions you're making right now that stem from the fear of death?

And how might they change if you made them from a deep love of your life — and the purpose you've been given — instead?

Until next week,

Patricia