by Christy Hart
The global pandemic created new opportunities to share the dharma online. What a wealth of teachers that are now accessible to those of us who usually wouldn’t travel to a retreat center. We have created new opportunities for those of us who missed practicing with others and those opportunities have continued to provide us with support.
Mid America Dharma hosted David Chernikoff for an online retreat on June 2-4, 2023, titled “Befriending Death, Embracing Life: Live Fully, Live Well, Die Joyfully”. David is a guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Community of Colorado. He says that death has been his major spiritual teacher.
Our encounters with death can open up in places where nothing else can. There is ripeness to change when everything is blown to pieces in our minds and hearts and we become open to something new.
David’s father died when he was 13, he lost several friends when they were young. He began practicing in the early 1970’s with respected teachers who taught the importance of death awareness practice. His desire to continue to understand the complexity of our relationship to death and dying led him to his psychotherapy degree and work with hospice in New Mexico.
David shared poems and quotes and his own deep reflections about life and death. He opened his Saturday dharma talk with Mary Oliver’s poem, “When Death Comes” and in particular these lines:
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighting and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.¹
I know that many of us have heard this poem and it still evoked deep feelings in many in the group. “Married to amazement”.
How often we go through our day recognizing the miraculous nature of being born into this life, and as we know, the awareness of how lucky we are to hear the dharma. May we continue to be those people who “have little dust in their eyes”!
Online retreats can be difficult for many of us householders. I invited Mid America Dharma Board President, Lucy Freeman, to join me in finding a place where we could attend the retreat together and maintain silence and the companionship of practice. Our two became three when Bridget Rolens joined us and then Lucy’s sister, Elizabeth, decided that she could come, too. We found a three-bedroom house in Beardstown, IL, that had enough bedrooms along with interior and exterior space. We could participate on Zoom and have a more intimate experience with each other. (The big drawback being that we did not have our food prepared for us. That led to some quiet dance like maneuvers during meals!)
David led us in two very powerful reflections. The first was imagining ourselves going down a long set of steps. At the bottom of the stairs is a door that says DEATH. Next to the door is a key. We are to get the key and open the door. And then we are to imagine what is beyond the door. What a variety of imaginings! Terrifying, empty, reassuring imaginings of what may be behind the door of death.
And later, he gave us a set of prompts regarding the day of our death. What do we imagine to be the “perfect death”? This was a powerful, tearful exercise for our small group and for the larger group on Zoom. One question was “Who did we not want to be there?” I could very quickly see that I am carrying some unwholesome and vivid negative thoughts about several people.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation of the Maranassati Sutta on Mindfulness of death (www.insighttoinsight.org):
“If, on reflecting, he realizes that there are evil, unskillful mental qualities unabandoned by him that would be an obstruction for him were he to die in the night, then he should put forth extra desire, effort, diligence, endeavor, undivided mindfulness, and alertness for the abandoning of those very same evil, unskillful qualities.”
David reminds us again, that awareness of our death is what encourages and deepens our practice. It can lead us to coming back to the Eightfold Noble Path, again and again. May our mindfulness of death not be a place of sadness and grief but open, aware amazement.
1. Mary Oliver, New & Selected Poems: Vol 1. Beacon Press, Boston, 1992
Christy Hart is a practitioner of the dharma and a volunteer for Mid America Dharma. She lives in St. Louis.