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Bit late to the party, but I will offer my two cents anyway:
Yes there is - meditating on death is, imho, a profound technique. I would not recommend afterlife meditation myself, but that is perhaps because my imagination does not go further than seeing it as idle fantasy.
Meditation death though, is quite meaningful because, as existential therapist Irvin Yalom put it, "it is not possible to leave death to the dying" - Psychologically speaking, it is an unavoidable presence in life that we have a persistent, albeit often suppressed, relationship with. And having a healthy and conscious relationship with the spectre of death is in fact an opening to the present fact of our life in a very direct manner that can alleviate the existential angst that most people invest truckloads of energy into repressing, when the very same energy could be opened up and used as one of the most profound catalysts for authenticity and urgency in our life. As Yalom put it "the physicality of death destroys man, but the idea of death saves him."
As for death meditation, I would recommend a simple reflection to open with: "I am of the nature to die, as are all living things." - A sort of baseline reminder that death is a natural pattern in the world to be accepted and not a uniquely tragic event in your own personal narrative.
From there, there are 2 angles to contemplate: Death as a mirror for life and Death as a fear of the unknown.
In the first, you just conjure up scenarios of "what if get hit by a bus tomorrow?" or "what if I die of a heart stop a year from now" - whatever scenario you can work with - And hold that up as a mirror for your present life and see what such an event would tell you about the current state of affairs. At first, you may find yourself in some "oh ****, I've wasted my life" scenarios and feel an urgent need to clean up your act, as you realised how much energy you've wasted because you assumed (or, as you may come to discover in the second part, deeply wanted to assume) that you had plenty of time in the future to do all that stuff you wanted to do, or time in the future to become the person you wanted to.
Use that energy, without overdoing it. Dose it on one thing at a time, else you'll end up overwhelming yourself with the immensity of having to live up to the totality of your existential responsibility overnight, which is not a doable task. Over time, you will find that this energy and urgency channels itself not so much into the zeal for making changes as it does the urgency for devoting yourself more fully to what is on your plate. But use the energy as it comes to you, without trying to make it something other than what it is.
As you may be able to tell, this is not a meditation you can do in a discrete sessions and then go about your day. The meditation session is just to light the fuse properly, so you can carry the mindfulness of death with you in your daily life.
The second aspect of the meditation is engaging with the fear of death itself in a more investigative manner and beginning to discover the strategies our minds have conjured up to avoid the fear of death. The classic one is simply irrational disbelief - Acting as if death is not in the cards and that there will always be time in the future to do the things that really matter. This is how frightening death is to us at a gut level - We would rather take the things that are so important to us and push them into the future instead of now, just to feed the belief that we actually have a future to do it in. Not very logical to the logical brain, but the emotional brain has its own set of rules and its own natural logic.
So this second aspect of the meditation is to, in similar visualizations to before, conjure up your own death in a way that you begin to feel that fear of it and feed that enough that you can maintain contact to that fear. And then, as if you were a therapist and that fear was a client afraid to open up, you ask gentle and empathic and open-ended questions of it, inviting it to find its voice. It could be questions like "what is it about death that frightens you so?" or "can you tell me some of the things you've done to avoid facing death?" and then listening for your inner voice to speak.
This requires some practise in letting go and stillness and some attunement to your intuitive inner dialogue. I would recommend only starting on this second aspect of death meditation after having familiarised oneself with the first mirroring practise.
Overall, I'd say meditation on death is more of an existential life choice than a method. But if you feel like giving it a go, give it a go! I'd recommend sharing some of your experiences. It is a possibility for some of this to go into overdrive and start down some borderline traumatising paths if you are not careful. So if you experience anguish or difficulties in the process, do reach out.
Best wishes
A / Mitodin
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