Good Life, Good Death: One of the Last Reincarnated Lamas to Be Educated in Tibet Shares Hard-Won Wisdom on Life, Death, and What Comes After

by Rimpoche Nawang Gehlek

The best thing to do to prepare for death is to practice patience, love, and compassion in your daily life. Practice patience whenever you can so that anger doesn’t arise; train yourself in pure love so that attachment doesn’t arise; check your ego so that its grip of fear is destroyed; and try as much as possible to develop unconditional love and compassion. If you can do that every day, then you won’t panic at the time of death. Positive thoughts will become a habit and will arise naturally.

To tackle your negative emotions, you have to live, eat, drink, sleep, and die with your practice—that’s how it makes a difference.

When you wake up in the morning, think the way Allen Ginsberg once told me he did: “I am happy not yet to be a corpse.” Be happy to be alive and decide that you want this to be a good day and that you want to be good and kind to everybody.

Refuge renews our source of inspiration; generating unconditional love and compassion sets the proper motivation; the seven-limb prayer helps us to accumulate merit or luck in developing our minds. Mantras protect the mind and keep it on track. But you can leave them out.