By Maria Popova
“Zen practice … requires great faith, great courage, and great questioning.”
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CLEAR ALL
Part of being human means that we do experience the natural ebb and flow of life. This brings sadness and joy, despair and happiness, pain and beauty, loss and love. These aspects of the human experience are normal.
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Most of you know her as Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, founder of the MISS Foundation and professor and researcher at Arizona State University. Her expertise is helping those affected by traumatic death.
The firebrand writer died unexpectedly over the weekend at the age of 37.
The fear of death and dying is quite common, and most people fear death to varying degrees. To what extent that fear occurs and what it pertains to specifically varies from one person to another.
This month’s conversation in our series exploring religion and death is with Karen Teel, who has been a member of the department of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego since 2007.
It’s always useful to learn about death in different cultures. And Taoist beliefs about death—both religious and philosophical—are interesting and complex. By learning about Taoist beliefs about death and life after death, you can better understand many philosophies around the world.
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in anatomy class in my first term, our textbooks contained almost nothing about aging or frailty or dying.
"But now we’re asked — and sometimes forced — to carry grief as a solitary burden. And the psyche knows we are not capable of handling grief in isolation." - Francis Weller
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The mismatch between the knowledge and the longing is perhaps the most anguishing of all human experiences.
The truth is that many of us just don’t know the right words to comfort someone who is dying.