Sharing insights from decades of sitting with the dying, RamDev explores how to live and die with awareness and an open heart.
Pick up a copy of RamDev’s new book, How to Live So You Can Die Without Fear and check The Living Dying Project’s numerous, free support groups for grief, illness, and more.
In this episode, Chris and RamDev have a conversation on:
- Ramdev’s extensive work with the dying
- Learning to live while remembering our mortality
- Open hearted joy that transcends suffering
- Seeing the same patterns in different traditions
- Leaning into what’s difficult rather than shying away from it
- Deepening our practice into the fabric of our being
- Ram Dass and returning to presence after we’ve veered off the path
- Grief and feeling separate from others, separate from the divine
- Recognizing the universality of grief and the many forms it arrives in
“With very few exceptions, the most beautiful Americans I’ve ever met are people who are almost dead because they’re more willing to be themselves. It’s not like ‘am I having a good hair day or not, or how much money do I have, how’s my body looking today or my personality.’” –RamDev
About RamDev:
RamDev Dale Borglum is the founder and Executive Director of The Living/Dying Project. He is a pioneer in the conscious dying movement and has worked directly with thousands of people with life-threatening illness and their families for over 30 years. In 1981, Dale founded the first residential facility for people who wished to die consciously in the United States, The Dying Center. He has taught and lectured extensively on the topics of spiritual support for those with life-threatening illness, on caregiving as a spiritual practice, and on healing at the edge, the edge of illness, of death, of loss, of crisis. Check out RamDev’s podcast, Healing at the Edge, on the Be Here Now Network.
“How deep is your practice? It’s not the books you’ve read, it’s not what you’ve got in your mind, it’s what’s really deep in your soul. It makes me think of when Ghandi was assassinated—he was saying ‘Ram Ram’. How can he say ‘Ram Ram’ if he was unexpectedly shot in the chest? Because he was saying it all the time. He wasn’t saying it because he was shot, he was saying it and he was shot.” –RamDev
Photo via by PerfectWave003
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