Stalking Death
In this retreat Ken McLeod guides participants into a direct and often unsettling encounter with the reality of death. Drawing on stories, meditation practices, and subtle shifts in perception, he shows how opening to the inevitability and unpredictability of death becomes a path to clarity, compassion, and freedom.
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1. The Mystery of Experience
Ken opens this retreat by challenging the usual way we perceive reality and encouraging participants to shift from subject-object duality to the immediacy of experience. “Experience arises. How many of you know what experience is?” Topics covered include the three levels of change—outer, inner, and hidden—and the emotional resistance that arises as we open to the truth of impermanence.
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2. The Forms and Illusions of Duality
Ken explores how false dualities such as good versus evil and self versus other shape our suffering and obscure direct experience. “When you open to the totality of change, you may experience a shift—a shift into just experiencing.” Topics covered include sensory, bodily, and hidden change, the movement out of subject-object frameworks, and the liberating presence that arises through embracing impermanence.
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3. Living with the Paradox of Death
Ken guides participants into a contemplation of mortality, emphasizing both the inevitability of death and its unpredictable timing. “Death is inevitable. We’re all going to die.” Topics covered include physical and emotional forms of dying, the illusion of permanence, the paradox of order and chaos, and how dying to fixed identities opens us to presence and direct experience.
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4. Meeting Death with Confidence
Ken leads a deep reflection on the paradox of death—its inevitability and its unpredictability—through stories, teachings, and Milarepa’s poetry. “To live, you have to die. And when you die, you live.” Topics covered include dropping identity, opening to the full range of experience, the symbolism of animals in contemplative verse, and six transformative ways of meeting death with clarity and confidence.
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5. Dissolving the Elements
Ken offers a detailed exploration of how the five elements—earth, water, fire, air, and void—dissolve at death, both physically and in terms of perception. “Death is your last opportunity to wake up.” Topics covered include the illusion of subject/object, meditative familiarity with dying, and using present experience to prepare for the end of life with clarity and presence.
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6. Stalking Death, Embracing Life
Ken wraps up the retreat with a summary of the death process and a powerful meditation on doing nothing—fully resting in awareness. “Death stalks us, but we also stalk death.” Topics covered include the stages of dissolution, the paradox of certainty and uncertainty, the power of presence, and how dying becomes a path to profound clarity and freedom.