Ram Dass

When our bodies start to decay, when they start to fail us, it can often send us into despair or depression, into ever thicker ego states, unless we remain mindful. Let me give you an extreme example of that. Before my stroke, I used to work a lot with dying people. It’s part of what I’ve always loved to do, because it seems to me the richest broth of spirit I can consume on this plane. Someone who’s dying has very little to lose, so you have opportunities for moments of real truth with another human being, and that’s very, very rare. I was visiting once with a fellow who was in the last stages of ALS-Lou Gehrig’s disease, the illness causes the muscles to seize up and stop working one by one. When I visited him he had just two functioning muscles left: he could pucker his lips for a dot, in Morse Code, and raise his eyebrows for a dash. Those were the only movements left in his body.

When I walked into that room, the first thing I felt was the most extraordinary claustrophobia in myself; the idea of being trapped inside a body where those were the only movements left to me was terrifying. But I realised that if I stayed in that place, all I would be offering him was reinforcement for the pain he already had at being in that situation. So I reached in my pocket for my mala — the prayer beads — and I started chanting my mantra: “Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram.” And because I have worked with that mantra for a long time, and invested it, it quieted me down, it helped me centre. Slowly, my reactivity settled down, and I realised that I’d forgotten once again — that once again I’d gotten sucked in by the incredible intensity of a human story line. — Beliefnet.com