Up until the end of the 19th century our relationship with Death and dying was much closer than it is today. Our understanding of this process was an innate part of living. However, after the 1st and 2nd world wars, it became the norm that people would no longer be at home to die. They would go into a hospital where suddenly the process and the familiarity with death became forgotten. We are now at the point where we don’t like to talk about death, we do not know how to talk about death, we have become uncomfortable with death.
Kind of crazy as we are all going to die one day and our relationship with this reality can be the difference between us living fully and recognizing that every day, regardless of how challenging, is a gift, and living in apathy and despondency.
Knowing death as a friend can quite literally enable us to become more present, having death as a guide can enable us to be more vital and more dynamic. Knowing death is with us can assist us in being more kind and compassionate towards ourselves and towards others.
The Shaman knows that we have to make a friend of endings to get closer to living fully. The Shaman’s relationship with Death enables small symbolic deaths and endings to occur whilst we are still living, giving us an opportunity to transcend outmoded ways of thinking, believing and seeing. This brings with it the gift of ensuring there is never any unfinished business. This means we say what needs to be said. We make amends. We say I love you, I forgive you and thank you in the moment. We do not hold grudges; this is considered too great a weight to bear and if we leave it, it will be our children who have to pick up the thread and close the door/or not. This can and does continue legacies that carry a huge burden on ourselves, our family and our children as patterns, beliefs and ways of behaving carry on unconsciously from generation to generation. Ensuring all endings are completed we can create ourselves anew at any moment and to shift the world in which we are living. This can also enable us to die peacefully knowing we are leaving no heavy burden for our children to carry.
All of life is a vibrational experience and the Shaman knows that our direct experience starts from within us. So, if we are stuck in heavy emotional levels of engagement or physical pain and discomfort then it is likely that all we will continue to experience is more of the same.
Instead a gentle internal inquiry and recognition of what is really creating our experience can bring conscious awareness to our state of being and guide us to a place of overcoming whatever it is we are facing in a graceful and committed way.
Death plays a vital role in this and our ability to accept this depends on our left brain becoming more acquainted with death and endings. Our left brain is programmed to only look for what is wrong and certainly does not do endings. This is programming from the beginning of human kind and is therefore a major hiccup in our ability to move beyond places that are hurting us or keeping us in uncomfortable situations because the discomfort is, in a weird way, comforting.
The Shaman teach us how to gently accustom our left brain to acknowledge endings and the more comfortable our brain is with endings and death, the easier it is for us to die to an old way of being whilst we are still living and, even more importantly, our actual openness and peace with death helps us when we take our final transition from this life time.