Raghu Markus and Ann Tashi Slater dive into The Tibetan Book of the Dead, bardo states, and how embracing death and impermanence can help us live with greater presence and purpose.
Pick up a copy of Ann’s September 2025 book, Traveling in Bardo
This week on Mindrolling, Raghu and Ann discuss:
- The Tibetan Book of the Dead and how it can help us in modern Western culture
- Bardo states: the in-between, liminal spaces between death and rebirth, birth and death.
- How we regularly experience metaphorical death through the impermanence of relationships, identities, and moments
- Accepting the reality of death and impermanence to avoid struggle and suffering
- Finding grace in life-lessons and why Ram Dass initially thought his guru gave him the stroke
- Ann’s Tibetan lineage and strong connection to her grandmother
- Ensuring that we are living in alignment with the things we care most about
- Why reflecting on death while alive can lead to more conscious, intentional living
- Maintaining traditions as a way to accept reality, process grief, and find meaning in loss
- Recognizing our interdependence and having compassion for other people
Check out the film The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Way of Life, narrated by Leonard Cohen
About Ann Tashi Slater:
Ann Tashi Slater has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, Tin House, Guernica, AGNI, Granta, and many others. Her work has been featured in Lit Hub and included in The Best American Essays. In her Darjeeling Journal column for Catapult, she writes about her Tibetan family history and bardo, and she blogged for HuffPost about similar topics. She presents and teaches workshops at Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, Asia Society, and The American University of Paris, among others, and was a regular speaker at NYC’s Rubin Museum of Art during the museum’s 20-year run. You can learn more about Ann and sign up for her newsletter at http://www.anntashislater.com.
“The really fundamental lesson of the bardo teachings is that awareness of impermanence allows us to actually, counterintuitively, find the happiness that we’re looking for. When we struggle against it, we make ourselves miserable because there’s nothing we can do to change it. Things end.” – Ann Tashi Slater