What are Sadhguru’s views on mindfulness and meditation? What difference does he believe they can make in your life and your death?
Sadhguru is a spiritual teacher and founder of the Isha Foundation. The foundation teaches spiritual practices including yoga and meditation, offers holistic medical services, and organizes large-scale environmental activism. According to Sadhguru, mindfulness and meditation help you live and die well.
Keep reading to understand Sadhguru’s concepts and practices surrounding mindfulness and meditation.
Sadhguru on Mindfulness and Meditation
Although Sadhguru doesn’t formally identify with any religion, many of his spiritual ideas overlap with those found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern traditions. According to Sadhguru, mindfulness and meditation can help you overcome the fear of death, die well, and even break the cycle of reincarnation. Let’s look at his recommendations and the reasoning behind them.
Practice Mindfulness Throughout Life
Sadhguru urges you to cultivate the habit of mindfulness at all times. He explains that, when you’re mindful of the nature of life and your immediate experience, you’ll realize that there’s nothing more you need. Once you make this state of mind a habit, you’ll have no trouble maintaining it through death, no matter how and when you die. Thus, you’ll break the cycle of reincarnation.
(Shortform note: Mindfulness isn’t just useful as preparation for death—many experts contend that it has great practical value in daily life. In 10% Happier, Dan Harris asserts that the greatest benefit of his mindfulness meditation practice is how it strengthens his ability to intentionally respond, rather than emotionally react, to any situation. Increased awareness of your emotional state will remove its power to control your behavior, allowing you to choose to act in ways that improve a given situation rather than make things worse.)
According to Sadhguru, one way to practice mindfulness is to intentionally focus on the experience of hunger. Just before you’re about to prepare or eat a meal, sit and wait for a short time. Pay attention to the experience of hunger and notice that although food is something that your physical body needs, it’s not something that your consciousness—your true self—needs. This will help you become aware that your body isn’t really part of you. The ego-reducing effect of this experience is why fasting is such a common tradition in many world religions.
(Shortform note: Although Sadhguru asserts that so many religions value fasting because it reveals the split between consciousness and body, adherents of those religions describe a wide range of other reasons for their practice. For instance, Muslims fast for a month, from sunrise to sunset, to help them empathize with those in poverty and to cultivate an attitude of pious discipline. Experts note that fasting also helps Muslims strengthen interpersonal bonds within their communities. Thus, if you’re fasting to practice mindfulness, as Sadhguru recommends, consider encouraging a group of like-minded peers to fast with you.)
Be Mindful of Your Death
Sadhguru recommends spending five minutes a day thinking about the fact that you’re going to die. Doing so will quickly improve your life—you’ll find it easier to appreciate life as it happens, and you’ll feel compelled to seek the meaning of life and other important truths, furthering your spiritual growth.
| Meditating on a Fate Worse Than Death Social scientist Arthur C. Brooks expands the concept of a death meditation. He contends that, although many people aren’t severely afraid of their physical death, pretty much everyone harbors a “death-fear” of some kind. That is, they’re terrified of some specific tragedy that would cause the death of their identity—the self-image that brings them contentment. For instance, Brooks says it makes him happy to think of himself as someone who uses his intelligence to support his family. Thus, his death-fear is succumbing to dementia and losing the ability to think, leaving him unable to work and support his loved ones. To meditate on your death-fear, Brooks recommends intentionally imagining it in extreme sensory detail. He imagines getting an early-onset dementia diagnosis, then telling his family the bad news, then slowly losing his mind. Brooks contends that directly confronting your death-fear in this way will help free you from it, as you accept that such a fate isn’t as bad as you assumed it would be. While Brooks doesn’t practice this kind of death meditation for five minutes every day, as Sadhguru does, he does encourage making it a regular habit. He practices this meditation once a week—which may be more manageable than a daily practice if you find that meditating on your death-fear is a truly intense experience. |
Meditate to Practice Death
According to Sadhguru, one way you can overcome your fear of death is through meditation. In a sense, meditation is a way of practicing death. Once you can quiet the mind, the karmic components of your illusory self will fade out of your experience, and you can temporarily feel what it’s like to be dead. In doing so, you come to understand that this disappearance of the self isn’t painful or anything to fear.
(Shortform note: Some Buddhist experts maintain that mindfulness meditation—in which you sit and observe the mind’s activity—isn’t just a means of experiencing death. It’s also a means of experiencing immortality. Once you allow the illusory self to fade away, you can experience dharmata, or “suchness”: the true nature of all reality, which exists outside of time. In the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, those who achieve enlightenment experience a permanent state of dharmata; this is the goal of spiritual practice. Thus, meditating may help you do more than overcome your fear of the death of the self—you might feel more drawn to pursue an egoless state of mind.)
Practice Mindfulness Near Death
Sadhguru recommends dying alone, rather than being surrounded by loved ones. If you focus on the faces of your closest friends and family while you’re dying, it’ll strengthen the attachments to your illusory self that you’re trying to break. You’ll be recalling emotional memories you have about these people rather than maintaining equanimous mindfulness.
Sadhguru discourages the choice to die in a hospital. Many terminally ill patients use medical technology to prolong their lives for as long as possible. However, stretching your life past its natural expiration date will only preserve the body, not the mind, making a mindful death more difficult. Sadhguru is clear that you shouldn’t avoid hospitals and modern medicine if you’re sick and need to recover. But, if the doctors declare that it’s likely you’re going to die, prolonging your life further may do more harm than good
(Shortform note: While most medical experts don’t explicitly advocate for mindfulness at the moment of death, some agree with Sadhguru that hospitals generally intervene too much for their terminally ill patients. Many doctors hesitate to discuss the possibility of preparing for death with their patients, fearing that patients will react badly. Consequently, many patients fail to realize how low their chances for survival are and agree to aggressive treatment until the end. Although transitioning from aggressive treatment to palliative care may seem like giving up, it has several benefits: Research shows that it results in lower rates of depression and greater quality of life among patients.)
