I am practicing dying. It’s scary as fuck. But I’m up for it. Digging deep for the courage to face death. To move toward the thing I am most deeply afraid of.
Last weekend I participated in a workshop called Dancing With Death led by a good friend of mine. I didn’t know what would happen but I knew I had a need and a calling to become more intimate with death.
In our relationship to death, I would categorize us as anxious avoidant. We secretly feel fascinated and curious, but we’re easily overwhelmed and frightened by how it may engulf us. We move toward it in all kinds of ways everyday and then when it comes too close, we run.
We won’t survive, and that’s the truth. The good news is dying over and over again through our lives, brings us deeper and deeper into the present moment. Stories wash away, identities disintegrate, protections dissolve. There we are left in the unknown.
During the workshop, we explored our fear of death and the thread running through all of my answers was the fear of the unknown. Maybe you relate?
What will become of me? How will I exist without a body? Will their be scary energies I’ll encounter? Will the act of dying itself be painful? Right now, I only know myself through the lens of this embodiment. I can’t imagine not being her anymore. What will the experience be like of letting this body and identity go?
I feel myself trying to hold on, to grasp, to run from the way I feel death coming for me. And this is how I’ve lived. Holding on for dear life.
Only, because of my death grip(pun intended), life always slips through my fingers before I’ve even felt it. The practice of dying is the art of living. Dropping yourself fully into any moment with full gusto is dying to that experience. It is full surrender. I will let myself be fully engulfed by the love, beauty and magic of this moment.
More often than not, we won’t allow this full surrender to the majesty of life. If we did, our hearts would be a pile of goo. A squishy soft landing place for everything to touch us profoundly. We are terrified of feeling this much. Because we can feel the death in it.
We would have to fire the sentry holding guard at the entrance to our heart. Then anyone could get in, and who knows what they might do to us. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Our survival instincts fight to keep us alive, but they won’t let us live.
It has been said so many times that to live you must die before dying. I’m grateful for those showing the way, shepherding us through death so we might live. They are everywhere around us if we just pay attention.
It’s in the flower that wilts in the vase on your table. It’s the tree that sheds its leaves. It’s the friend who holds vigil with you while you succumb to heartache. It’s the loved one whose deathbed you sit at as they are quietly pulled into the ethers. It’s in the moment of orgasm when you fully die into the pleasure of it all. It’s the grieving loved one wailing and thrashing in pain who shows us how to die into our pain.
If you don’t know what transformation lies latent within completely giving yourself to death, you are missing out on death’s very creative force. Like the oak living within the acorn, life is the seed within death.
During the workshop, we went through the surrender of death in a meditation and then were asked to write something about our own death that came through. I wrote this poem. Incidentally, one thing I’m dying to is fear of sharing myself, particularly in speaking. So, before I could think about it I shared this poem out loud. The man next to me gave such a visceral exclamation after I shared it that I was filled with the gratitude for support of my courage, and the knowing that what I have to give from within me is needed. I felt alive.
This is what came through me in that moment:
It was so good Even when it was bad And, believe me, there was a lot of bad It hurts to leave it And it feels good to let it go What's left is the love It fills me It is me now All of me I'm now who I always wanted to be Interestingly, I had to die to become myself I tried so hard in life To be who I am now I spent my life learning how to die To release more of what was trapped And contained in that body So limiting and limited In it's expression Maybe the goal of life is death Dying might be the greatest expression of creation
Recently I was interviewed about some of the challenges on my journey into purpose. Click on the thumbnail to read the full article.
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From my heart to yours…