Make Death Your Ally
Shed societal conditioning and establish respect for your own time over money by learning to embrace the presence of death.
Most successful people understand that time is their most precious asset, far exceeding money. That’s why the wealthy trade money for time while the poor trade time for money. To maintain this dynamic, mainstream media weaves the narrative of money being scarce and your time being abundant. You’re being deluded by just another control mechanism.
This reality is hard to believe if money factually is a scarce resource for you. Start by understanding what has led you to this scarcity. It is the actions you have chosen to take throughout your life, which you derived from the beliefs you have chosen to believe. Therefore, if you want to create an abundance of success, you must start with adopting new beliefs.
Here’s a list of the most common ways people disrespect their own time by valuing it less than money to be gained or to be saved:
- Coupon clipping for discounts in supermarkets
- Queuing in front of department stores
- Queuing in front of restaurants
- Consuming advertisement in exchange for goods or services
- Commuting with a much slower means of transport because it’s cheaper
- Choosing the cheaper product that needs to be replaced sooner
Face it, if you’re standing in line at a store for an hour because it offers a special discount that day, you have very little respect for your own time. Additionally, the people you meet reflect your beliefs back to you and will treat you and your time the same way you treat it.
The only exception to the above constellations is if you leverage your waiting time. Learn how to by checking out that other article.
Ferdinand Kutschker
Exercises for the Brave
If you want to regain your sense of time and its value, you need to remind yourself that you are going to die. Similar to your life, death is a certainty, and it may take you any time. Most people prefer to ignore this most basic fact and therefore never dwell in true appreciation for life. Life and death form one inseparable entity.
Only death puts life into perspective.
Realize that you are going to die. What cuts right through all conditioning, distraction, fear, and the need for external validation is near-death experiences. But few consciously experience one. And even if you’re one of them, the effect doesn’t last. The momentum must be utilized to make awareness a discipline. Thus, the most potent tool in your arsenal is to establish a routine of imagining and reminding yourself of death.
One way is to look into your own eyes through the bathroom mirror every morning and tell yourself that this might be your last day. Then you close your eyes and imagine dying tomorrow. It takes courage to go there. You will feel the resistance and discomfort within your body. You will feel the physical fear response to threat. You may feel a buildup of energy, the release of which ranges from a tingling static on your skin over a punch in the pit of your stomach to panic. Stay. Keep breathing. Don’t shy away, don’t flee. Embrace the energy. You may use a mantra to ground yourself: I am safe in my body. When you’re ready, shift your awareness to your current life situation and utilize the impulses arising from the energy burst to realign your choices of action for the day with your higher purpose.
If you do this exercise correctly, you’ll probably encounter a strong desire to produce or create something meaningful. I usually feel the call to go to the gym. Whatever comes up, put it on your calendar, then tackle the day.
Another way is to utilize the minor day-to-day near-death experiences as a reminder; let’s call them far-death experiences. Whenever a minor or major inconvenience happens to you throughout the day, confrontation, pain, harm, a fight, or an accident, you pause, and recognize the constant dance of life and death. Realize that you are still alive in this very moment—that you survived—and adjust the course of your ship.
Especially in modern-age cultures, death is not an aspect of common education, neither in schools nor families nor in average social circles. We are alienated from its presence. We dismiss it, avoid it, separate from it. Thus, we fear it.
These exercises will help you to make peace with it. Stop avoiding and start facing. Every single day in everything you do. Practice living and dying simultaneously in every present moment to make the most of your existence.
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