Embracing Life Through Death

Through the 'Conflagration of Love'

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about death lately. I can see this has come about as in my regular mortal life I’m feeling my ageing for a number of reasons. There’s my body, with the expected greys, lines, sagging, crackles and pops, and hot flushes. Which I honestly don’t mind so much.

There’s seeing my parents age and become more frail and dependent. A little harder, as their inevitable ending feels more confronting. I’m seeing my children grow up and hit their own important milestones of finishing school, imagining and enacting their own futures, marriage, having babies. This is obviously wonderful to witness them essentially becoming themselves and walking their own paths. But it also means they’re needing me less, if at all, or needing me differently.  

Then I’m being nudged – intuitively, or by Spirit – that my work and carer life requires revisioning, and so there’s change here too, where I’m being called to reimagine how I might work in the future.

So I’m describing a parallel; of a literal death or dying that comes with the passage of time and physical changes, and a symbolic death, where something is coming to an end, with the ‘what next?” not so clear. I’ve touched on this before in an earlier blog, on the life-death-rebirth cycle. For the last year or 2, I’m feeling myself in the depths of a big ending or dying phase.

So what is dying off? Aside from my cells!, my roles and identities … of mother, daughter, therapist … ? And all the beliefs and rules that go along with these that specify what a “good mother/therapist/ daughter is supposed to ..” do or be …”.

Most of us don’t really questioned whether these roles and rules are valid or not as they’ve just been what encases our day to day and provided purpose and structure. We just accept that this is what “a mother/therapist/daughter does… Right?”. So as these self-defining structures and beliefs crumble, naturally confusion and fear comes in. When these raw emotions aren’t fully or immediately being understood as a natural response to a security or false knowing falling away and ‘dying’… then sadness and despair for the uncertainty of it all comes in … for,  “if not that? Then what?...”

I can honestly say at times this has felt like a real physical and psychological pain. Literal heart ache, fatigue, sleeplessness, pulling away, questioning everything, impatience. I recently mentioned to a colleague how I’d been feeling depressed the last week. Not a scary depression; as I feel I’ve built up resilience and awareness to recognise what was going on.  That my depression was a symptom of my psyche being reorganised; an effect of fear of the unknown, intermingled with grief from inevitable change and loss. My ego – the part that likes certainty, lives by imposed rules of an external authority, so holds and enforces the expectation and roles -  was experiencing the loss that felt like dying in my body and mind. The cool thing is that another part - the Soul part – is totally ok with what’s happening, is cool to just hang with it. The part of me connected to Soul was not afraid as it knew it was the “false Self” that is dying off.

I’m not saying my experience is extraordinary. As a specific time of life, popular culture calls this mockingly a “mid-life crisis”. However Richard Rohr dedicates his book “Falling Upward” to viewing it as an important spiritual rite of passage; where we move from obedience to an external authority and societal law to being guided from within. So its is ideological death of “the first half of life” and an initiation into a the “second half of life” where there is no map for how to be, and inner knowing rules instead. Scary, depressing, but ultimately rewarding for Soul, just not for our preconceived ideas of success.

But beyond big initiatory moments like “mid life” (which Rohr says can happen at any time of life – from your 20’s through to your 80’s), a symbolic death can happen any time we ‘lose’ something. And so far as depression goes, can we start to consider that in our despair, what is happening is we are deeply grieving the loss of something that has contained us, and so kept us feeling safe and secure, but perhaps also blinkered, for some time.

So when  … a relationship falls apart, a job opportunity doesn’t workout, we don’t get the grades or recognition we want,  we become ill or debilitated in some way, a choice we made has an unexpected/unwelcome outcome, we didn’t make a choice and live now with regret, a virus rampages through the community dashing many well-laid plans. When these things happen it can be painful, depressing and we think that life isn’t working out the way it should. Or we personalise it and think it’s because there is something flawed or bad within us [the belief “if I’m a good boy/girl I’ll be rewarded and bad things won’t happen to me/ if bad things happen i’m bad or being punished”]. And while we lose the “thing” what is often being sacrificed alongside it, is a belief we held about ourself, or our worth, or a sense of deserving. It can feel like dying.

When I am at a loss, when something doesn’t’ work out or fail, what is the automatic idea or image I hold about myself?

In a chapter titled “Hopelessness and Death”, Pema Chödrön discusses the idea that as we fearlessly (or I would say courageously-fearfully) practice turning toward the inevitability of change and impermanence, we’re effectively allowing ourselves to give up hope of any solid ground to stand on, and live with doubt, lack, disappointment, embarrassment, shame, etc and acknowledge it and be straight with it.

We’re (trying) not to be in a hurry to get out of the feeling of hopeless, by quickly grabbing at and replacing it with false or temporary notions of hope or feelings of comfort and ground. The pattern is, we like things to endure; the habitual part of the psyche resist and holds on and wants things to stay as they are or get better and better and better. This will lead to disappointment and depression. Justine Bateman (of Family Ties fame with Michael J. Fox) caused a stir (mostly applauded but was also slurred), for letting her un-plumped, un-pricked with botox, uncut from surgeries face adorn the cover of her book. It was confronting because it went totally against what many believe is the proper way to deal with ageing specifically, but falling apart more symbolically. That we fight it.

When things start to fall apart, how do I grab for comfort and certainty when I’m feeling the ground fall away from under me? What behaviours, impulses, people, things do I gravitate towards?

I know it sounds counter intuitive. And I am certainly not suggesting to wallow in your shitty situation. As a therapist (see, there I go again with the identification), witnessing people come in depressed and anxious, and feeling like they truly want to die is not a time to be flip and dismissive. This trust that; the world turns, and this ending I’m feeling so painfully right now is also a beginning, is a truth that requires gentle introduction and inoculation, and has to be weighted against the safety of the person who has come in a world of pain.

When people feel suicidal, like they want to die, I wonder how much of that is a psychic confusion with the idea or way of being they’ve clung to must die, not them! And if they knew that, they wouldn’t buy into the need for literal annihilation.

So here, there is necessary physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual skill building and scaffolding which I perhaps sell as helping soothe the pain. But in reality these become new habits and ways of being that help build resilience they will turn to, as they move through the inevitable symbolic deaths in everyday life that will happen over and over and over again.

Think of a time in your life where something came to an end. Maybe a painful end. Maybe you felt like dying? Can you recall what happened? I’m not asking if things got better, although that could have happened. What changed in your situation after the ‘death’? What long held beliefs, roles, behaviours fell away or were adjusted with this ending?

Aside from techniques and practices that lead to resilience, key to learning to be with the cycle that brings life – death – the life again, in particular to be with death part, the loss, failure, endings, is to do so with compassion and love for ourselves at the same time. I adore James Hillman’s phrasing that transformation happens in the “conflagration of love”.

Can it be as simple as loving ourselves through the pain? Being in awe of ourselves as a part of us burns away?

Tara Brach also talks at depth about this pairing of clarity and compassion in her book Radical Acceptance.  So in learning to be with the cycle we’re aware that exponential growth and expansion is not the natural course so we learn not to expect it and instead “embrace this life in all its realness – broken, messy, mysterious and vibrantly alive”.

Mendy xx