Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this guided meditation, Thubten Chodron leads practitioners through an extended contemplation on death and its approach. Beginning with an imagined diagnosis of terminal illness, she walks the meditator through the emotional and physical progression of dying: receiving the diagnosis, watching the body weaken, becoming bedridden, losing independence, and finally reviewing one’s entire life. Throughout this sequence, Chodron poses pointed questions: How do you feel? What regrets surface? Who needs forgiveness? Who do you need to apologize to? The meditation culminates in returning to present health with clear-eyed reflection: What is truly important? How do you want to live the time remaining? The instruction emphasizes karma, purification, and making one’s life meaningful before death arrives. Suitable for practitioners at any stage seeking to develop genuine spiritual motivation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 GM.mp3
UUID: 5d69c27c-e876-46ac-b7e7-ef9191760990
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~526
Now we’re going to do a meditation imagining our own death. This helps us to prepare for the time when we will die. So just imagine you haven’t been feeling well. You go into the doctor for some tests, And now you’ve just met with the doctor to hear the results of the tests, and they aren’t good. You have a terminal illness.
So you leave the doctor’s office. You sit in the waiting room just to collect your wits around you. And how do you feel? Doctor said six months at the most. How do you feel?
What are you gonna do? Who do you wanna talk to, and who don’t you want to tell? So some time goes by. Your body’s getting weaker. You can’t do the same things you used to be able to do.
You watch your friends so full of energy, but your body can’t do that anymore. How do you feel? Everybody else is going out and having a good time. All your friends are healthy. They’re all attractive.
And you look at your own body, and it’s wasting away, becoming quite unpleasant to look at. More time goes by, and now you’re completely bedridden. Simple things that you used to be able to do, like brush your teeth, feed yourself, things you did so often and took for granted, you can’t do anymore. You’re completely dependent on other people. What does that feel like to be so dependent, so incapable of caring for even the simplest needs of yourself?
And since you’re just lying in bed with not much to do, automatically, you start thinking about your life. So you begin to review your whole life, everything you’ve done in your life, the time you were a child until now. So as you look back in your life, what has been worthwhile doing? What do you feel good about having done? What has created good karma that will help you have a good future rebirth?
And as you look back over your life, what do you have regrets about? What weighs on your mind as you approach death? What mistakes have you made in your life? So before you die, who do you need to forgive? How can you let go of that anger and the grudge?
And before you die, who do you need to apologize to? We’ve all harmed people when we’ve been alive. We need to acknowledge that, apologize to the person. Or even if the person is no longer alive or if they’re unwilling to talk with us, we need to purify that karma. We need to forgive ourselves too.
So come back now to being in your comparatively healthy body and knowing that one day you will die. What is important in your life? The time you have left before you die, what is important for you to do, and what is useless for you to do? How do you want to live the rest of your life? So really get a sense of how important it is to make your life meaningful and make some definite conclusions on how you want to live.