The society that most of us have been brought up in has an avoidance of death, both as a topic of discussion and as a concept in general. Everyone seems to live in fear of dying but also of losing people, things, and change in general. Meanwhile change (and death really) are a couple of the only consistent and unavoidable things that all humanity has to face. Getting comfortable with death and loss can help us live more fully, free from the fear and even the aversion to pain. Death combines a lot of our fears, of loss, of the unknown, of change, of pain, of endings. We must face it directly to understand what it holds over us, and to be free from its shadow over our lives. Doing this can be approached similarly to the other things like our pain, our shadow parts, and our younger selves. We can find a connection point to it within our own experiences and explore from there, taking it in pieces, and being careful to do only what we have the energy and spaciousness for.
Grief comes with our experiences of loss, it is difficult and heavy, but it is fundamentally an experience of love though it takes lots of energy and time to work through and process. We can get stuck in it and it can linger if we don’t move through it and release it and the emotions the it brings. There are many forms of loss change, and they feel similar, distinctly different from the flavour of the other things we have to work through from our pasts and our many internal parts. Even positive change carries with it at least a twinge of grief, though how and why it arises way vary greatly from the loss of how things were, to a sort of bitter exhaustion when we are suddenly free from something horrible. There is a complexity to grief as it encompasses so many different emotions, including anger and sadness, but also gratitude and love. Loss itself is often not simple, whether it be of ourselves, parts of ourselves, of others, of things in the world, and can be particularly challenging when we lose lots of things that matter all at once.
There are traditions that see the pain of grief as suffering coming from the attachments we have to the things we lose. While we can certainly make ourselves suffer by trying to refuse to accept the reality of the loss, the pain of grief itself is simply a part of the experience of life and being an emotional being. If we can be present to the experience we ca find the beauty in it, the love that is being felt and expressed. We can also be present to it in a way that allows for the whole experience to flow, and we don’t have to be swept up in it or have it control us, but see it as something that comes and passes, and can even be savoured for its depth, lessons, and wisdom when it comes by. By being aware of our attachments we can moderate our experience, and instead of detaching completely and dissociating from the world and trying to feel nothing and care about nothing, overcoming our attachments actually means being able to live through the human experiences without being bothered at any deep level by it.
Facing the things that have power over us, that control us whether we like it or not, is part of freeing ourselves. This is certainly true for our fears in general, and as part of our shadow work we can me time to work through them directly, sitting with the uncomfortable feelings that they bring, letting us move through what we fear. We can also do this with loss, facing it piece by piece and preemptively, spending time on letting go of the objects we own, possible loss of security and stability, and all the people we love and care about. This is very heavy work, and is not the sort of thing to be randomly jumped into, but we may be prompted by our lives, by other loss, or the the fears popping up from our subconscious. When these things do arise we can intentionally make time, space, and gather energy to work through them. By doing this we will find it easier and more manageable if and/or when the events we fear or the death or loss actually takes place. In effect we are expanding our window of tolerance to include these difficult experiences.
Though not necessary before the time draws near, all of us eventually have to face letting it all go, our own lives, our loves, our beliefs, our mental constructs, and our definition of self. When we get to this point in our internal journey we can experience what is known as the Dark Night of the Soul, a period of challenging and sometimes destabilizing and scary emptiness before the light shines in. We may experience this once having systematically let everything go bit by bit, or we may face multiple versions of it as we let go of significant pieces, encounter intense shadow parts, or rearrange our internal beliefs. Much more of ourselves than we might think is actually malleable, but there are some parts that are innate and cannot be changed, and it is for each of us to find out what those are for ourselves. This is also why it is so important to choose to re-fill and heal ourselves with love, and find that love for others in equal measure, for if we empty ourselves out and do not invite love in, we leave that space open to be filled with something else.
Facing death itself is not just a concept or intellectual process, but can be done as an internal guided experience that includes working through the grief of letting go of ourselves as we are, as if we are truly dying. Then allowing ourselves the meet the very moment of ending and go through it. You may be surprised by what you find in this process, and experience for yourself how death in our original and basic understanding is somewhat illusory, and how all endings are in fact beginnings, all death is transformation. At this juncture we may choose to be re-born as a new self in place of the old, and may invite love to come live permanently within us as that new self. Though facing our own deaths may open to the door to this, we might also find this possibility as we work through other things, as each person finds different wisdom in different places. We may also experience becoming a new and transformed self more than once, especially if we have several intense cores of trauma, past experiences, or shadow to work through. Each spiral of lessons may result in a transformation, the sum of which can result in the new self made wholly of love, and even after the full letting go of self and the re-birth of the loving self there may be more transformations and new iterations of ourselves to fully grow into ourselves, like potting up a plant as it grows.