*This is an excerpt from my new book out now, All In This Together: Stories and Teachings for Loving Each Other and Our World
Dear ones,
We spend so much of our lives trying to keep what we love from slipping away—people, moments, youth, comfort, control. Yet every tradition reminds us that to truly live, we must learn how to die.
The Buddha called this remembrance maranasati—mindfulness of death. It is not morbid or despairing; it’s the opposite. It wakes us up.
Once, at a retreat, a student asked me, “How can I make peace with the fact that everyone I love will die?”
I said, “First, see that it’s already happening.” Every breath is a letting go. Every sunset, every passing season, is a small rehearsal in surrender. To make peace with death, we have to practice making peace with change itself.
When we face death honestly, life becomes luminous. In hospice rooms and at the bedsides of the dying, I’ve witnessed more love, clarity, and presence than in most boardrooms or parties. As people approach their last breath, what matters simplifies: Did I love well? Did I live fully? Did I learn to let go?
Sometimes the most powerful death teaching comes not through words but through quiet grace. I once sat with a woman named Margaret, who was dying of cancer. Her breathing had grown shallow, but her eyes were radiant. She whispered, “I’m not afraid. It’s all love. I just didn’t realize it before.”
That realization is what every spiritual path points to. The end of the body is not the end of love. Love is the fabric that holds it all.
When we live with this remembrance, we stop postponing our life. We stop waiting for everything to be perfect before we offer our heart. We see that each encounter, each breath, each act of kindness is a moment of return—of coming home to what is eternal within us.
The great teachers say that at the time of death, we hear an inner voice calling, “Oh nobly born, remember who you really are.” That same voice is whispering now, in the midst of your busy days. It invites you to let go, to love completely, to awaken to the vastness that holds everything.
You don’t have to wait until the end. You can begin today—with one breath, one bow, one act of letting go.
Because in truth, the Great Return is already underway. Every falling leaf, every quiet goodbye, every act of love is a small rehearsal for freedom.
Metta,
Jack
