Regularly contemplate your own death (e.g., five times a day, as per Bhutanese maxim or Stoic memento mori) to align your mind with truth, cherish the present moment, gain perspective on worries, and make better choices, which ultimately feels better than running from this reality.
Align your mind with what is true, especially regarding mortality, as running from reality is more painful. An accurate map of reality helps the mind make better choices and generate good thoughts.
Accept that you are of a nature to age, get sick, decay, and die. This acceptance helps your identity be flexible, reduces surprise at physical changes, and opens the door to loving-kindness and compassion for all beings who share this fragility.
Reflect on your own mortality and the shared condition of all living beings to overcome the feeling of separation from the universe, fostering a sense of connection that feels good.
Engage in practices (like death contemplation or meditation) and prepare yourself ahead of time to cultivate a ‘sublime acceptance’ of death, aiming for a serene and less painful dying experience.
Cultivate self-awareness through meditation; while it may initially make you more aware of pain, it ultimately leads to less suffering by reducing the likelihood of acting out or feeding negative emotions.
When you feel anger, notice its physical sensations in your body, which can make you less likely to immediately yell, scream, or say something snide, fostering non-judgmental awareness.
Be aware that neurotic, obsessive thinking re-ups anger; by not feeding it with these thoughts, you can shorten its natural, brief half-life and reduce prolonged suffering.
Through consistent meditation, you can catch anger more quickly even if initially overtaken, allowing you to apologize or stop negative behavior sooner.
To meditate, close your eyes (or keep them slightly open), sit with a reasonably straight back, bring full attention to the feeling of your breath (in and out, picking a prominent spot like nose, chest, or belly), and when distracted, gently start again.
Practice meditation to drop into yourself and notice your presence in your body and with your breath, which can recur throughout the day, leading to increased happiness and well-being by counteracting a head-disconnected state.
If you rely on guided meditations, try practicing on your own by setting a timer (even an analog one) and following the basic meditation steps, which helps build independent meditation skills.
If mindfulness meditation is frustrating due to ’nervy energy,’ try Kundalini yoga, which involves mantra, mudra, repetitive movements, and holding positions to help focus and channel that energy.
Explore shamanic meditation using drums or rattles at a certain frequency to induce a very light trance state, facilitating vivid visualizations and cathartic experiences.
Practice a 3-minute death contemplation exercise nightly: reflect on past generations who have lived and died, then systematically consider the finite lives of people you know, and finally, reflect on your own mortality.
Utilize an app like ‘We Croak’ (or similar methods) to receive randomized, frequent reminders of your mortality throughout the day, which can help interrupt distracting or unhelpful thought patterns and bring you back to a larger perspective.