Tag: emotional release

I have been toying with the idea of a post about death for several years now.  I wrote one earlier this year and never posted it.  It ended up being a personal revelation I had which I do not wish to publicly write about at this time. However, I am sure you will hear a thing or two about it if you were ever to go on retreat with me.

Death is all around us whether we choose to see it or not. We can turn a blind eye to it, or embrace it just as we embrace birth.

So many of us , in-fact the majority, grew up fearing death and dying.
What if we took a few steps back and looked at it from a different perspective? What if we approached it in a different way?

We spend our life trying to preserve ourself staying healthy, fit, doing check ups. Some of us may manage to live for decades and others may not be as lucky, or so we think. No matter what we do no one has managed to stay alive eternally.  Isn’t this telling?  Isn’t this a phenomenon worth noting?

We begin to die the moment we are born.  In other words, there is no birth without death.  There is something in us that we shed and something new emerges in its place. Death is a renewal. Even the cells in our body and all our organs renew completely every seven years. We are never the same person from moment to moment as even our psyche is constantly shifting and changing, constantly in flux.

If someone handed us a manual that listed the steps of what will happen after we die, most likely some if not all this fear may dissolve. If you knew exactly what to expect, wouldn’t that put you at ease?
I personally would appreciate that very much. We have to learn to be okay with not knowing. The sad truth is we aren’t. We want to know now.  In an age where google, and SIRI have all the answers, perhaps they can help us out on this a bit? Ha!

The Pain

I mean yes of course there is pain. I am not bypassing this whatsoever,  and yes there is an aspect of sadness and grief for the loss of our loved ones.  I am not proposing we do not feel the pain.  I am proposing we change the story from a fear based myth to a more integral wisdom.
We don’t know anything until we experience it, it may serve us well to understand at a very early age that there are some things that remain  mysterious in life, no matter how much we want answers to them. It is the mystery that makes life such a magical place.

When I was a little girl I was told that if I’m good, when I die my grave will expand and I’d be in the company of angels until judgment day,  and if I’m bad I will burn over and over for all eternity. What a story to tell a child. Right ? Even if there was truth to it, why does a child need to hear this? This is fear mongering. Every which way we turn we are fed some taboo story that does not serve our development, growth and evolution. It is high time we change these stories into more honest, truthful stories steeped with integrity and wisdom. Yes we need wisdom not superstition. I see an overlap with the stories we tell our children about sex. How can we expect not to have sex addicts, juvenile sex offenders, rapists and abusers in our world when we keep feeding them such lies? Why not tell them the truth?

It is time we re-write these taboos that have not served us for millennia. I sure have taken it upon myself to do just that. I am doing my share with my soon to be completed book on sex.  My focus is mainly sex as in the actual act. I have witnessed two extremes in two different cultures,  and I am looking for the balance.

Where can we find the balance with the stories about death and dying? Where can we help ease the pain of the beloveds left behind? What can we do to make such transitions simpler so that the grief can be experienced without the need to push it away? How can we be at peace with the way things are?

Celebrate the Gift of Life

My grandmother always said when her time comes she does not want anyone mourning her passing. Absolutely no one is allowed to wear black, instead she wanted us to wear white.  She wanted us to celebrate. As a child it was not difficult for me to understand what she was saying. Her words resonated with me on some level and yet I could not quite understand it as I heard two conflicting stories. Today I feel like I know what my grandmother was saying, at the end of life, celebrate that you had the chance to live. Celebrate the fullness of your experience rather than mourn the loss of it.

What a gift it is  to be able to be live even for one day.

What a gift to die to our ego.
What a gift to die to the things we do not want in our life.
What a gift it is to be given chance after chance at being alive.
What a gift it is to be recycled for some grand purpose or to become a tree or a rock.

As I write these last few words on this page, part of me cannot help but wonder about Jesus’s resurrection, a metaphor for the life of every single human being alive today.