How to ease the fear of death with mental exercises

by Martijn
How to ease the fear of death with mental exercises

What you will find in this article

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Some years ago when I suffered from anxiety for over 2 years, every single day, I was very much afraid of death. Over the years this fear has subsided and I think I know how I did it. These are the mental exercises that helped me to make that happen.

Five exercises to ease the fear of death

These are the five exercises that helped me to ease the fear of death.

  1. Recognize the true importance of your life
  2. Do what you love often
  3. Live a healthy life
  4. Surrender to things outside of your control
  5. Understand that you are not the body, not the soul, but pure Spirit

Let’s dig a little deeper into each of these five points, so you get a better understanding of how you can actually implement these exercises into your life to ease the fears of death for yourself.

Recognize the true importance of your life

So, let’s start with the first one. Recognize the true value of your life, the true importance of your life. Think about it for a moment. What would it really matter if you die? How important is your life really? Think of how enormous the entire universe is. Only already on our planet, there are billions of people. And many die every day. And the world continues, the universe continues, for millions and billions of years. What does your life really matter?

Even if you are famous, have a lot of influence on the people around the world, think of Kobe Bryant, for example. Who passed away now more than 1 year ago. That made a huge impact and still many people think about it and talk about his legacy. However, 2000 years from now everything that he did will be forgotten. The world will be different. The things will continue and nothing that he did made any lasting impact.

So often we make our own lives too important. We really don’t matter. And it’s not meant as a negative point of view. But making things too important causes a lot of mental issues. And I can speak about that because of my own experience. Life will play out exactly as it was meant to be. The most important life skill that you can develop has nothing to do with making your life important. It only has to do with how you deal with your life and everything that happens in your life in your mind.

There’s another side to this first point though. Because so often most of us tend to believe that our lives are better than they really are. And we cling to life but we don’t realize that life is actually the thing that is causing us pain and suffering, more than it provides happiness and joy in most people’s lives.

So when you are honest with yourself. And think about it for a moment, would you really be that bothered if you cannot continue living this life of suffering and pain? Everyone has problems, everyone suffers. And most of us are not capable to deal with the suffering in our minds. To actually take advantage of the suffering and the pain is a skill that is very rare among society, among the human race.

So when you put these things together in the scope of the entire universe nobody will even notice that you’re gone. And then, when you look at your personal situation, would it really have any impact on yourself if you die? The truth is, it really wouldn’t.

Do what you love often

Knowing this and understanding that it really doesn’t matter if you’re here or not, then how do you spend your time while you are still here? What makes you feel the presence of the fear of death? I remember from those years that I suffered from anxiety and feared death every single day it was exactly that that made the fears present. The worries and not really doing and living what I wanted to do right now. I was always anticipating what would happen in the future and that caused me to not being able to enjoy and love what I was doing at that moment. So, especially in these challenging times that we are facing now around the world, a good thing to do would be to do what you love often. As often as you can.

That doesn’t mean you need to change your life around. It could, but it’s not necessary. As an example, I still have my day job and I work many many hours. Often 12 hours or more on one day. But at the same time, I love working on this project. This is what provides me joy and really distracts me from everything that’s happening in the world, at the job, absolutely everything. So, with all the restrictions that we have in the world right now, I focus a lot on the project, on creating content, writing, designing, and creating videos.

And then when I still have some time left, I try to spend as much time as I can with my cats. I love these little animals and they just make me smile every time I spend time with them. And when I’m purely present working on my project or spending time with these little creatures, I forget about the future. And I don’t need to anticipate what will happen. What would happen if I die? It’s not important.

Live a healthy life

Another thing I recommend to you is to simply live a healthy life. You don’t need to obsess about it. But not being healthy very often makes you worry about death. Because when you’re not healthy that’s a very real possibility and something that could happen to you.

And this also brings me to a point that I find very interesting myself. Because I don’t really think people fear death so much. I think people fear suffering much more, to feel pain, disease, the discomfort. We always try to avoid it. Death itself doesn’t hurt. You’re just gone. But I think we’re so much more afraid of what happens just before we die.

Anyhow, I found for myself that, the better I take care of myself, my body, and also my mental health, the less I worry about death. Because at least I know I am trying to create a healthy environment for myself and I’ve done everything I could to prolong my life in that sense.

Surrender to things outside of your control

But of course, there are always things in life you cannot control. So many things every single day. Anything can happen. And most of them you don’t really control. So, I found that was another very important part for me to be able to release the fear of death a little bit more every single day. Surrendering to your life, to your destiny, to anything that is outside of your control. Which, in reality, are most things.

You can control how you deal with it mentally but you cannot fully control how things play out physically in your life. Accidents happen every day and people die every day in those accidents. At work, in traffic, airplanes crash, and I know this might sound very negative or very discouraging but it’s just the reality of life. The life we all live and we all try to enjoy to the best of our abilities.

And the truth is, the more you try to control everything that happens, the more you will try to anticipate your future. And the more you will worry about how things will play out in your life. So it’s vital for your happiness and inner peace to surrender and to just let things unfold the way they’re supposed to in your life.

Understand that you are not the body, not the soul, but pure Spirit

And that brings us to the last point which actually is by far the most important one. And that is that you need to understand at some point that you cannot die. That death is an illusion. And life, as we experience it in a human body, is just a tiny little fragment of what life really is. You are Spirit, I am Spirit. The same Spirit as you. And when at some point you manage to identify, little by little, with that unique and one identity that we all have in common. How can there be fear? How can there be fear of death when all we are is life?

The only thing that can really happen is that you start to realize that life as you perceived it to be, actually is death. And in reality, is the one thing that is keeping you from really living. This realization will also help you to slowly disidentify from your body, your personality, your character, from the role you play in this life on this earth, in this universe.

And this disidentification will help you to live freer, to live without expectations, and to surrender to the moment. And when your time is there you might actually be a lot closer to eternal life and to the complete elimination of fear forever into eternity.

View the video here.

Find more articles about personal development here, and mental health here.

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