In the highly popular book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", one of
Stephen Covey's suggestions is to visualize your own funeral. Who all are
there? What are they saying about you? About how you lived your life? What kind
of relationships you had? What would you want them to say?
I did an online course in January 2019 called
"Speak and Inspire" by Lisa Nichols. One of the exercises we had to do as part of
the course was to visualize our own funeral, exactly like in Steven Covey's
book. So when I imagined my own funeral , I visualized my family and friends. I
visualized them saying nice things about me. The next question to answer for us as
part of that exercise, was "What would you want them to say about you, that you
haven't done yet? In other words, what legacy do you want to leave behind? What
gifts do you have to share with the world that you wouldn't want to take to
the grave with you? There's also a great quote by Les Brown related to this. "The
graveyard is the richest place on earth because it is here that you will find
all hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never
written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared,
the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take
that first step, keep with the problem, or determined to carry out their dream.
So when I gave this question some thought - the question of what legacy I want to
leave behind - I realized that I do not want to die, not having shared the gift
of meditation with as many people as I can. I want to inspire people to meditate
because that's the best way that I think I can help people and do my tiny bit in
making the world a better place. That online course ended in January and in
February - in the beginning of February - I started my YouTube channel called
Crushing Meditation. Doing that visualization exercise was very powerful
for me. I always had it at the back of my mind that I want to make videos about
meditation, but you know how we are, we always have things that we want to do or
plan to do but we never get around to actually doing them? Imagining my funeral
made me see mortality face to face like I had never seen before. It brought a
sense of urgency to my calling. I realized that I could be gone any moment.
There's no guarantee that I would live to be 70 and if I were to die tomorrow, I
don't want to regret that I knew what a gift meditation is, I knew how it can
transform people's lives just like it did mine and I had the gift of speaking,
I had the gift of inspiring, and yet I let it go to waste. That feeling of not
wanting to die with that regret, was so strong that all my excuses and fears for
delaying my youtube-channel - things like I don't have time, I don't know how to
shoot videos, I don't know how to edit videos, it is too scary to put myself out
there for everyone to judge me, what if I fail, and a million other fears - they all
became conquerable. So as much as thinking about your own mortality, about
your own death, is very uncomfortable to do, see if you can do it. It's not for
everyone, that's why I'm saying see if you can do it. So a simple way to do this
meditation is this: You visualize your funeral in great detail. Who all are
present at your funeral? What are they saying about you? What are they saying
about the things that you have done in your life? About the kind of
relationships you had? And then think about what have they not said yet, that
you want to be remembered for? What legacy do you want to leave behind?
You can either stop at this point or you can continue with this question:
How would my priorities change if I had only five years to live?
If I had only one year to live?
Doing such a meditation can help us to get a massive reality check.
When you confront your own death, it does put things into perspective.
That might cause us to change our priorities. Things related to ego, status, personal grudges
become much less important and you focus on what's really a priority
which for most people tends to be relationships, finding meaning in life and giving back to
society. That's all for this video - I know
this was a serious and a heavy video but thank you for watching and I'll see you
in the next one.
The next part of the exercise was...
I knew what a beautiful thing meditation is, I knew how it can transform lives just like it did...
it can...