Cultivate self-love by deeply understanding, forgiving, and accepting your limitations, rather than fixating on self-hatred or grandiosity. This approach fosters a more fluid and flexible relationship with the self, moving closer to understanding the emptiness of self.
Explore the concept of dependent origination to understand the multi-causal nature of your being, thoughts, and feelings. This understanding leads to self-forgiveness and a sense of ‘innocence,’ removing egoic stakes from self-exploration.
Prioritize cultivating and expressing love deeply in your life, both for yourself and others, as this is the most salient legacy at the time of death. This practice helps ensure your life feels whole and complete, preparing you for the end of life with a heart pervaded by love.
When anger or aversion arises, view it with skepticism, reminding yourself that delusion is present and there’s more to be seen. This helps you avoid the negative outcomes of aversion and move towards deeper understanding and love.
When aversion or anger arises, remind yourself that it’s not the final truth and commit to looking more deeply into its causes. This practice undercuts the certainty of aversion, leading to less reason for hatred and a deeper sense of love and understanding.
When justifying anger or aversion, pause and rigorously examine your mental ‘case,’ looking for missing information or premises that might weaken your justification. This prevents the mind from cobbling together a biased case for anger and instead moves towards care and understanding.
Incorporate high-dosage Metta (loving kindness) practice, repeating phrases like ‘may I be happy, may I be healthy’ while envisioning yourself and others. This practice helps suffuse the mind with warmth, foster acceptance, and remove subtle aversive judgment from your mindfulness practice.
After accepting inner thoughts and feelings, practice seeing them as impersonal, not originating from a fixed ‘self’ but as a mysterious process driven by causes and conditions. This helps release responsibility and self-blame for inner chaos, leading to deeper self-forgiveness.
In moments of intense suffering or when habits feel overpowering, strive to experience humility rather than humiliation by not taking the pain or habit personally. This prevents self-hatred, softens the heart, and consolidates motivation for practice, seeing it as an opportunity for deep self-compassion.
When confronting moral incoherence or dissonance, tolerate the resulting disorientation and resist the urge for the ego to re-establish familiar ground. This tolerance is crucial for ethical evolution and growth, allowing for deeper commitment to meeting the world’s conditions.
Consciously live with the awareness of moral incoherence (e.g., privileging personal comforts over global suffering) without immediately shutting down or rationalizing it. This awareness can catalyze significant action and ethical evolution, fostering a deeper commitment to the welfare of others.
Explore the questions and principles of effective altruism, considering how they might deepen your commitment to the welfare of others. This can lure your heart into deeper commitment, potentially leading to more renunciation and care for others, and help understand compassion in a world with tractable suffering.
Engage in meditation and self-observation as a gradual, long-term training, understanding that skills and strength accumulate over time. This approach helps build resilience and prevents reactivity from becoming overwhelming, allowing for more skillful responses to suffering.
When meditating, avoid the compulsive tendency to constantly assess your progress or whether you’re ‘doing it right’ after each breath or moment. Instead, surrender to the practice itself, trusting that growth will be appreciated at a reasonable cadence, not moment-to-moment.
Attend live guided meditations or access recordings focusing on Brahma Viharas (loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, sympathetic joy). These practices are designed as an antidote to anxiety and can have psychological, physiological, and behavioral benefits.
Explore the ‘many chambers of mind’ and cultivate love (for self, others, and widely) to foster a sense of completion in your life. This practice can diminish the fear of death by creating a feeling that life has been ’enough’ and whole.
Actively practice letting go and ‘unclenching the fist of grasping’ in daily life, whether in meditation or other situations. This repeated practice prepares you for the ‘grand surrender of control of ownership’ that occurs at the end of life, making it feel more complete.