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Making Friends with Death: A Buddhist Guide to Encountering Mortality
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About Making Friends With Death: A Buddhist Guide To
Product Description Drawing from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist teacher “provides [readers] with the essential guidepost for embarking on the journey of life and the journey beyond” (Journal of Hospice and Palliative Nursing) In Making Friends with Death, Buddhist teacher Judith Lief, who's drawn her inspiration from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, shows us that through the powerful combination of contemplation of death and mindfulness practice, we can change how we relate to death, enhance our appreciation of everyday life, and use our developing acceptance of our own vulnerability as a basis for opening to others. She also offers a series of guidelines to help us reconnect with dying persons, whether they are friends or family, clients or patients. Lief highlights the value of relating to the immediacy of death as an ongoing aspect of everyday life by offering readers a variety of practical methods that they can apply to their lives and work. These methods include: • Simple mindfulness exercises for deepening awareness of moment-by-moment change • Practices for cultivating loving-kindness • Helpful slogans and guidelines for caregivers to use Making Friends with Death will enlighten anyone interested in coming to terms with their own mortality. More specifically, the contemplative approach presented here offers health professionals, students of death and dying, and people who are helping a dying friend or relative useful guidance and inspiration. It will show them how to ground their actions in awareness and compassion, so that the steps they take in dealing with pain and suffering will be more effective. Amazon.com Review One of the best ways to live a vibrant life is to stay closely connected to death, according to Buddhist teacher Judith Lief in Making Friends with Death. Drawing heavily from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Lief specializes in interpreting the paradoxical Buddhist teachings surrounding death, making them understandable to Western sensibility. In fact, she modeled her cleanly written book after her highly popular course "The Psychology of Birth and Death" at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, starting with theory, then meditation practice, then practical application. In the opening section, Lief's insights are plentiful, showing readers how we all experience daily reminders of birth and death in the form of routine transitions, or helping readers examine the ways they hold death at a distance either though false reverence or media-driven numbness. At the end of every chapter, she offers contemplative exercises, such as pondering the mystery of birth and death or paying attention to one's breath and noticing the turning point between inhale and exhale. When she moves into the middle section on "Mindfulness Meditation," her teaching experience shines through as she explains how to understand and then meditate upon the Buddhist virtues of simplicity, acceptance, kindness, and compassion. In the final chapters, she shows how the theory and meditation can be applied toward taking care of someone who is dying. But don't be misled--this is really a book for everyone who wants to be more fully immersed in living, not just those who are tending the terminally ill. As Lief points out, "cultivating an awareness of death is at the same time cultivating an awareness of life. We are reconnecting with the spirit of actually living a life." --Gail Hudson Review "Peppered with useful and startling meditations as well as wise reminders, this is a thoughtful approach to a difficult aspect of living."— NAPRA Review "Filled with meaningful examples of real people facing real problems. It provides us with the essential guideposts for embarking on the journey of life and the journey beyond."— Journal of Hospice and Palliative Nursing "A manual on how to die, how to relate to dying and death, how to open up to the stages beyond death. Lief's book is also a weave of stories, insights, advic
