AWAKENING IN THE END

C von Hassett is a certified end-of-life practitioner ready to support, sit with, offer presence and considered guidance throughout the end of life process: that noble journey toward our seeming end.

In service to this sacred commitment, and a major underpinning of his doula practice, C von is a 40-year practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, with sole emphasis those four decades on its peak wisdom practice of Dzogchen. Dzogchen’s transformational teachings point the practitioner toward a rigorous examination of one’s own mind so as to see, with direct perception, its imperishable, inexhaustible, and sourceless nature — a nature in and of itself entirely distinct from the body, and one through which we endlessly perceive, beyond time, beyond our countless births and dyings.

As it pertains, though, to the dying we experience in this life, in this body, and our sense of dis-ease in its certain approach, the teachings skillfully prepare us to look Death square in the eye to find full liberation from the failings of our form. Such liberation occurs at the level of Mind, and it comes, in part, by seeing the very ideas of living and dying, life and death, the here and thereafter, as being but empty concepts, albeit strongly impressionary ones. Death, then, rather than an ending, is seen as a grand opportunity for Awakening. Into what do we awaken? The sheer magnificence of our ageless selves — open, spacious, everlasting — the qualities of which are present right here in the very bodies we exist in, this same body we’ve been graced to live in while experiencing life on this extraordinary Earth.

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C von has studied under such eminent masters as Namkai Norbu Rinpoche, Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, Sogyal Rinpoche, Lopon Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, and his practice remains constant under the unwavering counsel of Tsoknyi Rinpoche, already considered one of the great Dzogchen masters of the 21st century.