Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 3.8-minute teaching, Ven Sangye Khadro introduces mindfulness as preparation for death through a concrete example: a Malaysian woman who, after one year of Vipassana practice, managed terminal cancer pain entirely through meditation rather than medication over six years. Mindfulness, she explains, means observing your thoughts, feelings, and sensations without judgment or getting swept away by them. Combined with metta practice—generating loving-kindness for others—it trains the mind to remain calm amid extreme suffering. By her death, the woman had reached a peaceful, blissful state, free from pain and self-concern. The teaching shows how ordinary practitioners with modest experience can transform their final hours through these two core Buddhist practices.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 3.10 Mindfulness.mp3
UUID: ee1f5ff5-b6ae-4e0a-9861-9ba74c452ff9
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 3.8 minutes
Words: ~583
So a second practice that we can learn and make ourselves familiar with while we’re alive that will be helpful for us at the time of death is the practice of mindfulness. So mindfulness a practice that we develop in meditation, but ideally learn to practice at all times and in all circumstances. It mainly involves being aware of our mind, our thoughts, our feelings in a non judgmental way. Not judging whatever comes up in our mind, but also not letting ourselves get caught up in the thoughts and emotions, especially the negative ones. So it’s learning to step back from and observe in a detached way the contents of our mind, the coming and going of thoughts and emotions in our mind.
Again, this is something that we learn in meditation. There are courses, there are retreats, there are groups you can go to learn mindfulness. There are lots of books about mindfulness. Learning this and practising this during our life can be very helpful at the time of death. Because again, it’s quite likely we’ll have difficult experiences at that time, such as physical pain or discomfort, emotional problems, fear, anxiety, sadness and so forth.
And mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness will enable us to simply observe these experiences coming and going, rising and passing, and not be caught up in them, and instead be able to remain calm and peaceful. I heard a very inspiring story of a woman in Malaysia who died a number of years ago of cancer. And just one year before she was diagnosed with cancer, she attended a course on Vipassana, or mindfulness meditation. So she only had about one year’s experience of this practice by the time she was diagnosed with cancer. And she wasn’t, you know, a great practitioner.
She was a housewife and a mother, so she probably spent most of her time taking care of her family. But when she was diagnosed with cancer, she spent the next six years battling with the cancer, having operations and treatments and so forth. But in the end the cancer won. And she died of the cancer. And during the whole time she was suffering with cancer, she never wanted to take any pain medications even though she did sometimes experience very intense pain.
Instead, she dealt with the pain through meditation rather than meditations. And her main practice was mindfulness, just observing the experiences that she was having without being caught up in them. She also did the practice of metta or loving kindness. Generating love for others, wishing them happiness, sending out loving kindness to others. So these were her two main practices.
So this enabled her to deal with the pain without having to rely on medications. And shortly before she died, she reached a point where she was no longer bothered by any pain. She was in a completely peaceful, blissful state of mind, not at all concerned for herself, feeling this beautiful love for her family and other people, but not attached to them. You know, able to let go of them and go off to the next life. So She had an incredibly beautiful and blissful state of mind at the time of death as a result of these practices that she had.
So it was a very inspiring story of what is possible even by someone who isn’t a monk or a nun, a full time meditator, but just an ordinary person living an ordinary life.