DEATH & DYING
A Dialogue with Death
With Kamala Angel

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Who Dies? 

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Welcome to our Sukha Mukha Mentoring Session on Death and Dying.

In our first hour we will look at the yogic philosophy of death and the afterlife, and where better to start than with a young teenager fighting with his father and challenging Yama, the Lord of Death himself, to explain the meaning of it all.

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This is the delightful story of Nachiketas from the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, the young boy whose greatest drive was to understand the purpose of life and the nature of death.

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We will then look at the lokas, the realms of existence, and yogic teachings on the significance of our final thought.

The Search for Meaning. This brings us to the search for meaning, and here we will look briefly at the reflections of some of those who have borne the unbearable. How, then, shall we live?

Now we ask, if it is possible to embrace death as an advisor and bear the unbearable, what should our practice be? In our second hour we will look at some helpful practices from three of the four main paths of yoga and see how we can bring them into our everyday life:

• Virāma-pratyaya-abhyāsa, the practice of terminating all thought from the Pātañjalayogaśāstra;

• Ātma-nivedanam, the final surrender of the bhakta as taught by Kṛṣṇa in the Bhagavad-gītā; and

• Sākṣī bhāva, witnessing; abheda bodha vākya letting go of ideas about ourselves; and vichāra (Self inquiry); three practices of Jñāna Yoga which help us to let go of who we think we are.
 

Letting Go
Finally, we will settle down in comfort with a profound and compassionate guided meditation by Stephen Levine: a Meditation on Letting Go.
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Kamala is a Sivananda accredited Yoga Teacher who has been teaching in Katoomba (Blue Mountains, NSW) since 1989. She commenced her practice in Sydney in 1977 with respected Yoga Teacher Acharya Upendra Roy, and taught at Acharya’s Yoga Meditation Centre in 1979 under his guidance.

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Kamala completed the Sivananda Yoga Teachers’ Training Course in 1981 and the Advanced Yoga Teachers’ Training Course in 1988 under the direction of renowned Yoga Master Swami Vishnudevananda Saraswati. In 1992 Kamala accompanied Swami Vishnudevananda on a Ganga Parigrama – a pilgrimage down the Ganges from its source at Gomukh in the Himalayas. Since 1999 Kamala has been cataloguing Swami Vishnudevananda’s archives – personal papers, lecture tapes and photographs – in preparation for his Biography. In 2003 she edited the Autobiography of respected Vedantin and Sanskrit scholar, Swami Chaitanyananda of Uttarkashi. In 2006 Kamala edited Vishnudevananda Upadesa, a collection of extracts from the existing transcripts of Swami Vishnudevananda’s satsangs, talks and lectures. She is currently auditing Swami Vishnudevananda’s lectures, satsangs and talks for uploading to the web (http://audioarchive.sivananda.eu) and editing Swami Swaroopananda’s Advanced Raja Yoga Course lectures for publication in 2012. Kamala has been giving workshops to Level I and Level II Yoga Teacher Trainees since 2006.