Embracing Mortality

Psychologist and bestselling author of The Wisdom of Your Body Hillary L. McBride offers a deeply spiritual, trauma-informed guide to overcoming death anxiety through forty guided practices.

In a culture that avoids death even as it is haunted by anxiety, loss, and impermanence, psychologist Hillary L. McBride invites readers to discover a surprising truth: when we learn to face mortality honestly, we can begin to live with greater freedom, meaning, and presence. Embracing Mortality offers a gentle but courageous path through one of our deepest fears, showing how contemplation of death can become a doorway into a fuller experience of life.

Blending spiritual wisdom with modern psychology, McBride lays the groundwork for why mortals fear mortality before guiding readers through a sequence of embodied practices designed to help them befriend rather than avoid the realities of death and grief. Through meditations, reflection prompts, breathwork, imaginative exercises, and rituals of release, readers move from preparing to face mortality, to practicing forms of dying and letting go, and finally into a deeper embrace of aliveness, gratitude, and purpose.

For anyone wrestling with death anxiety or avoidance, caring for aging or ill loved ones, navigating grief, or longing to live more awake to what matters most, this book offers practices for meeting fear with courage and mortality with wonder.