This from Laurence Freeman:
‘St Benedict says always remember that you are going to die: ‘Keep death constantly before your eyes.’ Now, he doesn’t mean go around thinking about death all the time, but don’t repress it. Benedict is not being morbid. He is expressing a universal spiritual practice, which you find in Buddhism and elsewhere, of being memento mori, being aware, being mindful of the fact that you are mortal. And the consequence of that is that you are free. All of that energy that goes into the repression of the fear of death is set free. Why should the awareness and the acceptance of death bring us to a fuller sense of wholeness? I think because it is part of the whole picture, and it needs to be integrated. We need to have a certain conscious space that is aware of our mortality and even aware of the complete unpredictability, the randomness of our mortality. We don’t know at any moment when we might die. So there should be a certain space in our available consciousness in which we welcome and accept this element of our mortality, and that makes us more whole, more integral.’
(Listen to the full talk here)