Imagining your own nonexistence paradoxically helps you feel more alive now and deepens your gratitude for being alive. Your priorities can shift when you are aware that the time you have on this planet is finite and that the possibilities for your life during that time are more than enough. If you have read Stephen Levine’s A Year to Live, you will already be familiar with this exercise; it’s a practice you can do anywhere, anytime.
1. Focus your attention on your own embodiment of yourself – knowing you are in your body, walking, standing, or sitting.
2. Notice your physical surroundings: a room in your home, walking through your neighborhood, in a store.
3. Imagine everything in your surroundings still existing exactly as it is now – without you there. It still exists; you don’t.
4. Return your awareness to yourself existing in your own body right now. You do still exist – whew!
5. Play with imagining that you exist, you don’t, you do, while the landscape remains unchanged.
Playing around with being and nonbeing, developing an equanimity in the skillful flow between the two, and anchoring your resilience in that equanimity vitally strengthens your ability to cope with anything, anything at all. You experience yourself as simply one particular amazing form of that consciousness that can – does – hold everything that has ever been or will be.
— Linda Graham in Resilience