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(Sold Out) Common Shade: Death, Dying, and Buddhist Insights
May 31, 2016, 7:30pm–9:30pm
This event is sold out. Make sure you never miss out on tickets again! Green-Wood members get access to tickets weeks before the general public. Join today.
Although it may sound counterintuitive, taking time to contemplate death often works to reduce anxiety and suffering and increase happiness. Meditation and Buddhist practice have always advocated for the daily reflection on death: its inevitability and unpredictability. Confronting death helps us to overcome our fear and to develop an acceptance of death as a natural part of life. It serves to remind us of the preciousness of our time, and helps lessen the surprise and anguish when loved ones pass away. Discuss the how’s and why’s behind the practice with Bhante Suddhāso, a Western Buddhist monk and co-founder of Buddhist Insights, an organization connecting laypeople to monastics in both secular and non-secular spaces. He’ll lead a guided meditation in Green-Wood’s Historic Chapel before answering questions from Common Shade host Evan Michelson and you.
Morbid Anatomy Museum and Green-Wood present Common Shade – a dialogue existing on the borderlands between the living and the dead. Hosted in Green-Wood’s intimate Historic Chapel, Common Shade will cultivate a social space for death – a place to examine death’s prevalence in our lives, and its shifting place in history, art, culture, and society. Drawing from Green-Wood’s bucolic setting and using history as our anchor, each night’s presentations will include dialogue and interviews with guests. Together with artists, practitioners, scholars, and peers, Common Shade discussions will explore our humble acknowledgments of and engagements with death.
$20 for members of Green-Wood, Morbid Anatomy Museum and BHS/$25 for non-members. Drinks will be available for purchase during the event (free for Key Holder members with proof of membership).
Green-Wood trolley tours are fully accessible and ADA compliant. Historic Green-Wood structures, like the Historic Chapel, may not be fully accessible for some individuals. Please call (718) 210-3080, ext. 1 for more information.