Relax, You're Going to Die

I found "Relax, You're Going to Die" right after college and it truly helped open my mind. I recall lending it to someone, which is now hopefully being passed along to others as well.I highly recommend you read this book/booklet. I have it on my coffee table for all curious visitors to pick up and breeze through at their own pace.Doesn't matter what page you start, just open and you will pause at the words. Reflecting on so many moments from your past. This will remind you to be present and to calm your mind. Now is always the time to relax and let go of control.Thank you Buddha in Blue Jeans and to all who led me to this masterpiece.

This is a short read, one that you can get through in 10 or 15 minutes. But if you truly read it, it will change your perspective of death.We live in a world today where everyone buries their heads in the sand. It's inconceivable to us that one day we will cease to exist. We remove all signs of death and dying from our eyes -- the elderly are put in nursing homes, where we go visit them once a month (sometimes less), as we don't want to be reminded about death. We hide the terminally ill away in hospitals so they can "die in peace" (what is peaceful about dying in a hospital?)We suffer because we deny death. We spend our whole lives struggling and kicking against death. The great irony is, should we just come to the realization that death implies life, and life implies death, we could be at peace with it, and truly live!

Someone I knew died recently, and I've been thinking about and fearing death constantly ever since. This short book really helps put things in perspective for me. What helped me understand it was when I had this following thought - what I think of as "meditation" is actually the "practice of being dead". When we physically die, we transition into what we've always been, but without the body. So spirit (or being dead) + body = being alive. It's hard to conceptualize, but it makes sense to me. Most of us are just the body (ego comes with this) going through the motions, but we must accept death and come to peace with it to feel alive. We are dead and alive simultaneously.I inhaled green before reading this book, so that paragraph might have made zero sense.

Let your body relax.

Until you makepeace with deathit is impossible to relaxin the core of yourself....Understanding living and dyingis the core of deeplyrooted spiritual life.Beneath these gentle poems is the breath of life and the peace of dying -- two sides of the same coin, as the author says. "Free falling into Dying" expresses it so well, bypassing my intellect and going to my spirit. "Death is an Invitation" might be hard for most western minds to accept -- but doing so leads to "a simple alive flowing life." Each of these 15 poems are more than poems --- they're about the essense of living in full acceptance of who we are.

Each of us, in utter defiance of reason, is both ego and the whole cosmos. Being ego makes us tense and "dis-eased." Loving something intensely we forget ourselves and feel blissful. Pagans pray this love to the moon and Sun...and feel blissful. Christian mystics pray in worshipful love to God...and feel blissful. Tai Sheridan, because he loves redwoods this way, describes leaning into a redwood, describes the dissolution of his ego (death)... and feels blissful. I gave this book five stars because in reading this book, Tai Sheridan gave me the poetic wink and nudge that reminded me of my kind root guru, Charles Prebish, who stressed the simplicity and power of practice. I read and re-read this book to remind myself what's important, and how to live/die/relax/be happy/practice.

This is really a book of poems regarding death yet it does make the point of how short life really is, one can suddenly face death by illness or accident. This book would be a help to someone say with terminal cancer to read or other serious illness.This book is an eyeopener regarding the subject of death (a fate we will all have to face at one time or the other).Personally for me, it was not what I was looking for but for others, it may be just the book.

"Relax, You're Going to Die," is a great title - it really does hold within it the basis ofBuddhist thought - we will get old and decline and die. No ifs ands or buts. But itintroduces the idea that this is normal - most of us think of dying as abnormal. Thatis very strange - death (and renewal) are all around us, as this book points out. Ifwe can absorb this idea, we need no longer fear death.

As someone who has an excessive fear of death (particularly catching infectious disease with a ridiculously low probability of doing so), I am indebted to the message of this book: which is that all beings die, and to worry about death is to die in itself. Rather than worry about the distance between your two doors - birth and death - realise that life is more than the length of a piece of string.And this book has helped me to attain freedom from my own shackles. One day, one breath, at a time.Thank you, Tai Sheridan

Read. This!!This will blow your socks off!Simple as that!There is no woolly alternative nonsense here, just unexpected clear thinking .A breath of fresh clear air.No fear in death...

Short but helpful little book, particularly if you're afraid of death. Some beautiful prose, and messages, that require you to sit quietly and digest what the author is trying to get across. Makes you really think about things.

Just beautiful. I saw the title of this book on a random kindle search, I'd never really thought about death much and wasn't looking to read about it, but I was compelled to download it! It's a very short book but it is profound, beautiful, enlightening and emotional.

This book is written in the form of prose, a bit like the sayings of the Dalhi Lama or Buddha. Some of the content was quite profound, but overall I didn't feel that inspired. Not at all what I expected.