Sundays, September 22 - October 6 & November 9 - December 22, 2004
11 am - 12 pm ET (NYC Time)
$20 per session or $85 when you bundle five

Select the date you would like to attend from the drop-down menu below

PLEASE NOTE: These sessions are not recorded for later use

Death Meditation is an ongoing guided meditation practice familiarizing participants, regardless of religious or spiritual background, with a feeling-based awareness of themselves. This awareness will be strengthened through mindfulness and guided meditation with the aim of awakening one’s inner-guide to assist us as we pass between life and death.

In eastern esoteric spiritual traditions, life is ultimately seen as an occasion to practice and prepare one for death. Being born in a body is the opportunity to advance the soul towards the ultimate liberation known as Nirvana because each moment is perceived as a practice to transcend identification (the cause of suffering) with the illusion that the body presides in.

The instructor’s 20+ years of meditation, combined with ongoing End of Life Doula training, merges Eastern experiential knowledge on death and dying with a keen sensitivity to The West’s avoidance of—and fear of—death.

The goal of this class is not only to assist you to reduce your fear of death and prepare you for the end of life but also to establish a community of like-minded people with whom to share this collective experience.

Bryan Melillo has studied meditation in the Jñana and Bhakti yoga traditions for the last 23 years. Having experienced a classically identifiable Kundalini experience in 1997 his path eventually led to Tiruvannamalai, India, where he’s been with the same teacher since 2001. Here, he began learning (and eventually teaching) a variety of breathing (pranayama) and mantra techniques. His exposure to many esoteric practices opened him to insights around the great eastern traditions on the death and dying process. Bryan recently completed an End of Life Doula certification training as his goal is to integrate eastern understandings of death with the growing western end of life care, death with dignity movement. Bryan has an active art studio and is an assistant professor at NYC’s Parsons School of Design.

Image: Hieronymus Bosch, Ascent of the Blessed (detail), 1505-1515