There are many forms of the death meditation practice in the Hinayana and Mahayana,
and that's a good thing.
It's good to have many different modes and methods!
The Final Journey: A Guided Buddhist Death Meditation
But a very brief practice to contemplate
might be around the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air.
If you have a few moments
just to sit in a place or even in motion – you don't have to be sitting –
but think, what's the earth element?
What's the physical constituent of my body?
And imagine all of those dissolving,
like all the cells beginning to shrink.
Billions and billions of cells that make up my body –
maybe they start slowing down
and they're usually continuously in motion.
Earth element.
Now water: fluid, blood, cerebrospinal fluid,
which is continuously moving, moving, moving.
Imagine all of that water fluid movement
beginning to slow down and coming to stillness.
Water.
Fire.
Think about the warmth, the heart
and the blood is continuously generating warmth and distributing it throughout
the whole body.
You can begin to think that all the warmth
is beginning to dissipate
and even become cold.
And then air. It’s earth, water, fire, air.
So air can literally be the air
as in respiration, in breathing,
that our breath begins to get shallow
and then actually stops.
There's no more movement of air through the nose, through the lungs,
no more oxygen delivered to the each cell in the body.
So it's really slowing everything down
into stillness.
And then even,
you can say there's a fifth element,
sky or consciousness, that gross levels of consciousness.
My name, my self,
words, languages, language begins to dissolve.
And there's no more thought.
There's not even subtle thought or concept.
Then even inner and outer
stops.
And then again, stillness.
And then out of compassion,
we regenerate
the energy of earth, water, fire,
air, consciousness or sky,
the components of what makes up a human being.
And they are generated and propelled back into shape,
form, energy, out of care and compassion for others.
So in one way, you can do this very quickly,
in a few breaths, or you can do it over a few minutes, or you can do it over an hour.
You can do it in the middle of sitting on a bus or a pizza shop or in the street
and think about how literally all these elements could dissolve,
and then be re-energized.
That's a very brief but powerful practice.
I think that if you do this regularly,
then an appreciation for impermanence,
the transient nature which, you know, just biologically we know
from moment to moment cells are dying and new cells are being made.
That is a biological basis for that.
You know, the neurons are firing, stop firing, thoughts arise
and then they dissolve by themselves without doing anything.
So that appreciation, that kind of visceral
feeling of impermanence, appreciation for impermanence,
means that anything that I use to identify myself
is changing from moment to moment.
Earth, water, fire, air, thought, physical, nonphysical.
These are just momentary flux fluctuations
and there’s nothing good or bad about that.
But the self that I project onto
that is a choice.
And if that's a choice, then there's more freedom.
Then it gets interesting!