"We won’t truly know how to live until we learn how to die."
- a wise person once said.
Death has been calling me my whole life…
I guess it really started shouting at me with the death of my mother when I was 25 (she was 48).
I nursed her through cancer and dying.
It broke me.
It was the drawn out catalyst of my spiritual awakening as I groped about in the void of despair and confusion - left alone with a 2 year old.
And an eye opener to the brutality and clinical coldness of the mainstream medical system; brewing a deep distrust of the status quo for dealing with our dead in the UK.
A deep primal energy overtook me as she died - all I wanted was to keep her home - to hold her and sing to her - to be with her as I felt her soul slowly slowly begin to leave…
I felt a victory in screaming the morgue away for 24 hours of precious time with her… Little did I know I was channeling deep ancestral wisdom of rituals of tending to our dead that until very recently we would have upheld in every household…
And then the deeply lonely process of grieving began - amid awkward avoidance from friends - throwing myself into endless death admin - stifled cracked face, chest clenched collapse into the pillows at night to hide from my daughter the pain I believed too deep to not consume us both…
Until the chasms in my heart began to fill with new light - painfully slowly - mixed in with bitter blood - achingly slow time beginning to knit its scar tissue fibre by fibre…
Flash forward 14 years, a change of country and career (following a deep Spirit calling) and two more significant deaths in quick succession.
The death of my divine dog - a shocking sacrifice of her life to teach me that when I don’t listen to my intuition bad things happen…
And to teach me in real time that when a soul leaves a body it is a process -
And we need to assist it to leave peacefully -
With touch, with song, with reverence, with tears to create a river to carry them home.
And then the death of a beautiful soul in ceremony - aged 49, totally unexpected, shockingly fast, surrounded by loved ones in a temple, deep in ethereal healing -
teaching me so much about the way a soul deserves to die (even longs to die) versus our aggressive interventionist systematised protocols of fighting against what is our only birthright.
How death is a divinely ordained experience we will all face and how “nothing is going wrong” (his soul whispered as police descended)…
He starkly showed me how death would follow me now until I accepted my calling… And helped me to understand how strangely familiar and okay I felt with her.
I was guided to see how my ritual and ceremonial practices were needed to extend beyond the Medexine world into the ultimate psychedelic experience of Death.
And so I began to study death more…
And more downloads came about how we must work with our dying
- How we can celebrate this time as an ending, a letting go, a retuning to source, the completion of a cycle with many gifts of wisdom - both for the soul leaving and the ones left behind.
- How music/ sound healing is pivotal in “singing the soul home”.
- How we must bring death and dying back into the home to embrace it as part of the process of life - not banishing it to the outskirts of our lives.
- How we need to embrace death fully to live; it is one of the central paradoxes of the universe; the other side of the coin of life; the only way life is possible… To deny death is to become a cancer - it is what is causing the destruction of our world.
- How we are active participants in the dying process of all our loved ones through care, taking time, presence, support, body work, Medexine work, emotional release...
- How our denial of death is part of our denial of the divine feminine - the receptive - the darkness - the void - the restive - the fecund - that which is imperative for life - supports all life - the mud from which the lotus flowers…
- And how this denial of death is coupled with a denial of the darker emotions within the divine rainbow of expression we hold- and we need to learn to embrace sadness, grief, pain, anger, fear and despair as part of the divine symphony of this life.
As Martin Pretchel speaks of, in “Rain Falling On Dust” ,
“Grief is the highest form of praise.”
It was the Christian invasions that condemned us to contain and shame our emotions. Denying their purpose as necessary and cathartic processes of praise, reverence, honouring and transcendence, as we release parts of who we are and honour the loss of loved ones in this realm.
Indigenous practices across the globe understand the importance of deep sensory and emotional engagement in the dying process to both honour and accompany the dead and heal the living.
And they know the deep need to be present with the body. It is our honour to hold the liminal space between worlds - something we glance rarely - in birth, in death, in altered states - to honour the transition and to somatically experience the Truth of an existence beyond the body. It allows us to touch the unseen realms, the divine…
As I said - death is the ultimate psychedelic experience.
That’s why we work with the Medexine - to prepare us for death - to practice letting go of this physical form…
I hold people through smaller deaths every ceremony I hold.
Life is a cyclical process of letting go - letting go of the distortions we receive within the first 7 years of life as we entrain with societal norms. Then, as we “awaken”, we are re-aligning with our pure heart through this process of letting go - preparing for death, when we will return to that pure energetic form/ Oneness, whilst learning more about ourselves and therefore growing the consciousness of the Universe.
The shamans always say we must have death on our left shoulder as our advisor - it was an image that stuck with me since my earliest shamanic studies…
The knowledge that we could leave this world at any moment is what keeps us awake and not in a trance…
So now I have finished my foundation Death Doula training with the Living Well Dying Well Foundation in the UK.
It was a deeply practical and emotionally explorative training with a beautiful structure and community. The training covered invaluable knowledge around the physical/ administrative/ emotional/ social/ familial dying process and tools for accompanying people through it, as well as space holding and personal work.
I am volunteering in hospices to gain more experience first hand and have also finished my Reimagining Death course with the EKR Foundation Mexico, led by Wilka Roig. This wove ancient world and indigenous knowledge from around the world into our personal cosmo-visions as ways to approach death and dying.
This is why I call myself a Death Dakini and not a Death Doula -
Because I am reimagining a way of stewarding death that draws on ancient practices; that honours the tantric philosophy of the divine being within all; that embraces the dying process as a divine act of somatic connection and release…
I have had a dream of living in conscious community since I was 16 (you can read more about that here) - I call it Rainbow Moon.
More recently I have given it the subtitle of “Centre for the Healing Arts and Conscious Dying”, as I want it not only to be a space for ceremony, somatic practices, off-grid living and community connection, but also a space where we can learn to die consciously - together - held in love, in touch, in somatic healing, in community, in compassion, in life.
There has been so much research to show the benefits of working with psilocybin and end of life (Google for more- also see a beautiful film with Gabor Mate about it here.) There has been so much research to show the benefits of being held in community and meditation when dying (Ram Das and Steven Levine were key to contemporary understandings of this). There has been so much research to show the benefits of sound healing at end of life.
All of this was known by our ancestors through thousands of years of practice based research…
It is time we remembered our magic and our birthright and how to honour our dead to be able to honour our life!
If you would like to be part of this reimagining through your own dying process or that of a loved one, then please get in touch.
Links for further exploration:
The Smell of Rain on Dust - Martin Prechtel
Healing Into Life and Death - Stephen Levine
Living Well Dying Well Foundation
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation: México Centro - evolving our death culture
