Get on your deathbed

Frightening topic, isn’t it? Yes! but that too, the part of life :)

Recently, I had a chance to read a good book “100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever” by Steve Chandler. There he says lot many ways to motivate ourselves and lessons of life. "Get on your deathbed",this is the first way and interesting one, which he explains with an instance. Have a look! I've underlined some interesting lines.

“A number of years ago when I was working with psychotherapist Devers Branden, she put me through her "deathbed" exercise.

I was asked to clearly imagine myself lying on my own deathbed, and to fully realize the feelings connected with dying and saying good-bye. Then she asked me to mentally invite the people in my life who were important to me to visit my bedside, one at a time. As I visualized each friend and relative coming in to visit me, I had to speak to them out loud. I had to say to them what I wanted them to know as I was dying.

As I spoke to each person, I could feel my voice breaking. Somehow I couldn't help breaking down. My eyes were filled with tears. I experienced such a sense of loss. It was not my own life I was mourning; it was the love I was losing. To be more exact, it was a communication of love that had never been there.

During this difficult exercise, I really got to see how much I'd left out of my life. How many wonderful feelings I had about my children, for example, that I'd never explicitly expressed.

At the end of the exercise, I was an emotional mess. I had rarely cried that hard in my life. But when those emotions cleared, a wonderful thing happened. I was clear. I knew what was really important, and who really mattered to me. I understood for the first time what George Patton meant when he said, "Death can be more exciting than life."

From that day on I vowed not to leave anything to chance. I made up my mind never to leave anything unsaid. I wanted to live as if I might die any moment. The entire experience altered the way I've related to people ever since. And the great point of the exercise wasn't lost on me: We don't have to wait until we're actually near death to receive these benefits of being mortal. We can create the experience anytime we want.”

We don’t want to be so harsh in imagining often about death. But just to give a break from all our worries and to revive us, sure this thought will help.