Aging, illness, loss, and mortality can quietly haunt us — especially when they touch the people we love or our own bodies. In this talk, I explore how to meet these realities with compassion and wisdom, and how to rest in something deeper than what inevitably changes.
Great is the matter of
Birth and death
Quickly passing, gone, gone
Awake each one, awaken
Don’t waste this life
– Dogen
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Talk: Wisdom for Aging, Illness, and Mortality
Timecodes & main topics:
- 00:00–01:57 — The Four Messengers – Aging, illness, death — and the possibility of peace in the midst of them.
- 03:31–06:15 — Compassion Comes First – Turning toward our own vulnerability and the suffering of others with kindness.
- 07:28–16:34 — Wisdom Without Bypassing – What Buddhist wisdom offers — and why it can feel unbearable without compassion.
- 18:33–21:35 — “Be an Island Unto Yourself” – What it really means to rest in yourself as refuge — trusting practice, not permanence.
- 22:32–27:21 — From Doing Practice to Being Practiced – Dōgen’s radical shift: allowing life and the universe to practice through us.
- 28:41–33:16 — The Dewdrop and the Moon – Holding individuality and universality together — fragile and vast at the same time.
- 34:08–End — Knowing Who You Are – Facing death, loss, and change while resting in what does not come or go.
A Meditation: Resting in the Sense of Your Innate Goodness
When your mind feels busy, self-critical, or weighed down by worry, pain, or unrealistic expectations, it can help to settle the nervous system and come home to your body – which this meditation is designed to do. Through gentle awareness and self-compassion, you’re invited to lay down inner pressure and reconnect with a felt sense of steadiness, kindness, and your own innate goodness.
Additional Quotes Referenced:
[T]he simultaneous existence of individuality and universality in our lives is the truth of our existence. This truth is itself “Buddha constantly manifesting Buddha,” and when we awaken to this truth moment by moment, Buddha is manifest. . . . [W]hen we place ourselves on the ground of reality, letting go of our individuality with practice, our practice manifests Buddha.
– Realizing Genjokoan by Shohaku Okumura, p. 66
We live together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.
– Li Po, quoted by Joseph Goldstein, Tricycle, Winter 2023, p. 109
[R]ecognize all practices and experiences as backlit by the sun of their own great completeness . . .
– Anne Klein, Tricycle Fall 2023, p. 57
I know your burden’s heavy
As you wheel it through the night.
The guru says it’s empty.
That doesn’t make it light.
Leonard Cohen
May we all grow in grace and peace,
and not neglect the silence that is printed
in the centre of our being.
It will not fail us.
-Thomas Merton
