Hey Old Man: A Mahamudra Instruction

Hey old man,

You are getting older now. Your body is beginning to feel it, and you know more clearly than before that time is no longer on your side. Your grip weakens, you tire more easily, and you carry pain more visibly than before.

And yet, right here, right now, your experience is always fresh.

This body may be a bag of bones, but awareness itself does not age. Seeing, hearing, sensing, knowing, none of this has grown old. Awareness is fresh and ever-youthful. 

The path of Mahamudra is simple and direct. What makes it difficult is the willingness to sit down and meet experience without distraction and without waiting for better conditions.

You still have time. More than that, the entire path can be traversed in a single session. But it is up to you to do the work.

Let me offer you a simple path forward.

First, find stillness.

No instruction will take root if the mind cannot rest. Stillness is the first door. An agitated, restless mind obscures its own nature, it's too busy chasing movement to recognize what is already present.

Choose an object and commit to it. The breath. A Buddha image. A visualization. The object itself is not the point, your commitment is.

Use it as an anchor. Return to it again and again until the mind settles and you can rest in stillness. This is the doorway to equanimity, peace, and stability.

Once you are familiar with stillness, it becomes accessible anywhere. Sitting at home. On a park bench. Standing in line at the grocery store. Stillness stops being something you search for and becomes something accessible to you.

From here, you learn to work with movement.

Movement is everything that arises in experience: sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions. Normally, movement carries us away. Seated within stillness, you can let movement be free in its own place.

Rest in stillness and let experience unfold. There is the stable equanimity of stillness, and there is the play of whatever arises. When you do not interfere with what is coming up, when you neither chase after nor suppress what's happening, movement reveals its nature.

When you find freedom in movement, all appearances become your friend. Because they are the play of emptiness, they are pure by nature. Nothing that arises needs to be rejected. Everything can be brought onto the path and made part of your practice.

No matter what appears, it fades away without leaving a trace. Thoughts come and go. Emotions pass. Sensations change. When you trust this process, practice becomes easy. Whatever arises becomes a support for recognition.

Forget philosophical language. When you see directly that nothing in experience lasts, that everything is continuously unfolding, that nothing can be held onto, this is the lived meaning of emptiness. Apply this insight to your own mind. Your thoughts, identities, fears all arise and resolve. There is nothing solid to defend.

As you become familiar with resting within movement, something else becomes evident: spontaneous presence itself.

Whatever appears is already free. Experience has no edge, no center, no ground you can locate. Awareness has no basis, and yet it flows without interruption like a river.

This is spontaneous presence. Nothing needs to be added. Nothing taken away. What you have been looking for is already here in the nature of mind: stability, peace, openness. Qualities like equanimity, love, compassion, and joy are the natural expression of this presence.

Seeing this clearly, you develop the far-seeing eye of Dharma. Impermanence, suffering, karma, and interconnection are not ideas to believe in, they are obvious when we look at experience unfold.

When you practice in this way, everything manifests as your friend. Awareness is present without interruption, and in every situation you are never separate from the true nature of reality.

With this realization, even though the body will break down and die, awareness itself does not end. What continues is not a self or a story, but the same pristine knowing that has always been here.

This is not something you need to imagine. It is something you can recognize in the immediacy of your own awareness.

You can walk this path. You can do this work.

And in doing so, you can meet death the way you meet an old friend: without avoidance, without fear, without confusion. How we meet death is no different than how we meet life, for death is a part of life.

I trust you to take this practice seriously. Not tomorrow. Not later. Now.

This letter was composed on January 3, 2026, the day of the full moon connected with Chenrezig, the Buddha of Compassion, for an old friend, a self-described “old man,” who has come to terms with the fact that his body and mind are no longer as strong or sharp as they once were and that long texts and philosophical teachings are no longer easy to put into practice. Acknowledging that time is no longer on his side, he asked for a concise Mahamudra instruction that opens the doorway to liberation, so that he may meet life and death with simplicity and an open heart.