Excerpts from The Book

“If you have the goal of making an experience more pleasurable — and this idea applies to just about any experience — that goal is necessarily going to lead to a higher quality of experience. And if you are consistent, your standards as a whole will rise over time and uplift your overall quality of life.”

“Here’s the twist, though: you cannot produce — or reproduce — pleasure in a formulaic manner.”

“You may have noticed how words like ‘presence’ and ‘attention’ — words typically used to describe Eastern meditation techniques — are surfacing in our discussion of pleasure. This is because true meditation and true pleasure both place you squarely in the ‘now.’ The practice of pleasure, then, can accurately be described as a meditative one.”

“And here’s what I learned about happiness: it’s much more inclusive than we’ve been taught. Real happiness actually includes life and death, sorrow and joy, the fabulous and the dumb shit. It includes the mess of real life. Welcomes it, actually. Embraces it. And real life, yours and mine: it’s all right now.”

“Seeking out delight is actually an important aspect of a death vigil. This is because people who are gratified have more space to be generous than people who are depleted. They have more capacity for compassion and generosity, which is a useful space to be in when one enters the mysterious realm of active dying. Being in a state of gratification allows you to be present to the majesty that is available when someone exits the realm of the living. And you wouldn’t want to miss that.”

“In any case, the process of making the final phase of life more pleasurable allows you to become the kind of companion in death who is uplifting to the person dying, and most likely other folks in the vicinity, and most importantly to yourself. Pleasure is just the context. What’s actually happening is that relationships are forming and deepening. And that’s a gift you can keep long after the person is no longer here physically.”

“We live in a culture that is so frightened of death, sorrow, and the “dark” that we separate these natural processes from the rest of life. It is normal to perceive them as abnormal, shameful, something to hide from, something to be shocked by — even though we all will die and also most likely will experience the grief of someone we love dying.

What if, though, we brought these processes into the light? What if we took the radical leap of letting them take us higher by insisting that they, too, are a part of the life cycle and that they, too, can — must — be pleasurable?”

“Grieving becomes an elevated, sacred rite when we are willing to do this — willing to fully feel all of what wants to come through. We become aware of our majestic capacity for emotion, our infinite capacity to love. We are rendered more deeply human, more fully ourselves, more at home within ourselves. We have accessed the sheer space and permission to have all that is available to be felt and thus transform an experience of heavy stuckness into something life-affirming and possibly even transcendent.”