Death is good news. How can it not be? Every time we let go, every time we die to something, every time we surrendered a chapter, something always comes next.

There may be a pause or a period of contraction or a shift of lanes but there’s always more insight, more transcendence, more growth, more learning, more oneness.

How could it be otherwise with death? It’s good news because we come from nothing – and emerge with fully intact informed and intelligent essences. We depart into nothing and take that essence with us.

In between we get to taste and feel and experience. There’s no other contemplation or practice that brings us so exquisitely in touch with our aliveness, the rarity of it, the uniqueness of it, the temporariness of it, the gift of it.

This month builds on the integration from “Walking Towards a Good Death” (audios included with course and a prerequisite to this deep dive).

Let’s consciously prepare for our own deaths. 

The body is the portal to the great mystery. It holds all our memories and the map of our future. In fact, The body knows how to live. And it knows how to die.

Yet many of us live outside of our bodies, detached and disassociated due to trauma and unhealthy patterns. As we let ourselves experience both grief and pleasure, we learn to ride the waves of embodiment and make more space for us to inhabit ourselves more fully.

Both grief and ecstasy are SENSUAL experiences. And vulnerable ones. Being mortal is vulnerable. Yet as we inhabit the body we become more present, more alive, and more of our essential selves.

When we come into this body – our sexuality opens, our imaginations open, our hearts open, our lives open. As we build the muscles for feeling all of ourselves through being with our sensations, gradually we can sit with more and more.

As we become resourced, we expand our capacity for discomfort and bliss. We begin to trust ourselves. To stay embodied in the face of all that’s emerging is MASTERY.

Once embodied, we unlock codes and microbiome components that allow joy to emerge. We tap into our own genius. 

William Stafford said: “there is a thread we follow that never changes. It is our heart’s journey, and it is hard to explain to others because they cannot see it: the thread is ours alone. Life proceeds, circumstances change, tragedies occur, yet all through life we never let go of the thread. We know as long as we hold onto it, we will never get lost.”

We will practice surrender and learn to ride the wave of the life/death/life process. We know from countless near death experiences that death feels like a surrendering into a divine love.  Let’s practice that while we’re still alive.

Surrendering reveals patterns. The warp and the woof, the yin and the yang, the ebb and the flow. As we trust the surrender, these patterns become our closest allies and greatest friends.

To die before we die we employ the tools of sacred openness and vulnerability. This helps us get more comfortable on the surfboard of our lives.

Instead of looking outside of ourselves for security and guidance, we look within. We adopt a stance of a non judgemental receiving of life. We deepen our intuition, knowing, and inner guidance. Then, energy begins to flow and an alchemy begins to occur as life and death walk side by side.

As we surrender more and more to our own soul’s wisdom we are in deep collaboration with the ultimate intelligence. We come to accept our existence as important and we begin to hear our own song. 

We are nothing without community. We are sick, isolated, and disconnected without the village. The village represents all the ways in which we’re reweaving, reviving, and regenerating sane, holistic, integrated, and intact culture. Village is the only way we will heal. Village is the only way we will find the truth of oneness.

Traditionally, the celebration of life, including the tending for the death and dying has been embedded into community. We cannot have a good death without it. It’s part of the map of the new paradigm.

And so must we return.

Let us remember and reinvigorate our DNA coding for village tending, death tending, and life walking with others. Let us rise to our particular form of leadership in forging these pathways. Let us discover, design, and support each other towards ecstatic living and dying in the context of community.

This may include helping people die, death care teams, village building in it’s myriad forms. 

Many cultures around the world had and have wisdom ways of knowing about death and life. This is the place of the shamanic “upper world,” and the Christian notion of heaven, and the ancient ideas of  ancestors and spirit allies. 

As we’ve been deepening into learning, life and death are sacred parts of the same whole. When we move beyond the polarity consciousness we discover a more magical reality.

This magical reality has been there all along. Yet we’re just stepping through the veils to discover it. The truth is that we’ve been supported all along.

The biggest contributor to losing our fear of death is a connection with the unseen realms. Realms that delight in our journey and that love us beyond measure.

As we relax into this truth, we experience our own delight in ourselves, our lives, our fate, and our journey.  This joy is our birthright.

As we relax into life, we realize that death is a birthing of what’s next for us. A birth back into the spirit realms. 

Modern culture is youth obsessed. Yet aging is not an accident. It’s an elegantly designed, honorable, and natural cycle.

We’ll explore how to revere and delight in the aging process. How to support ourselves and each other to become elders and then ancestors. How to we become, as David Whyte says, “intimate with our own disappearance. ” How to make that dissolving process become the most important task of our lives.

Living into the Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter seasons of our lives carry special gifts. We’ll look at balancing out the yang (active, outward, focused, productive) components of our lives with the yin (inward, mystical, restful, integrating) components of our lives.

Aging offers us exquisite practice in dying before we die as we let go of our many identities. As Mary Lane says, “The fewer identities we have at the end of life, the easier it is to let go into the “no identity” that comes with the death of the body. And, as the identities fall away we are more connected to the eternal part of us that is our soul.”

As we sit with this topic, we develop a more integrated understanding of the life/death/life process and how it weaves into an entire sacred framework known as the cycles of life. 

@TimJeffsArt