Death as an Advisor

Either you detach yourself from your personal history or you begin to fear that death or injury will remove it for you. Life consists of continually facing the terror and pleasure of becoming a new individual without history. I know from my study of childhood dreams that removing personal history is the crucial lesson that everyone seems destined to learn from birth. Your earliest memories or dreams often involve a dramatic conflict and threat to your identified self; demons, witches, and monsters chase you.

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DEATH AS AN ADVISOR

There are times when you want to die, and all of us will die one day. Separating from an old identity, system, or relationship is like dying. I realize only after one of these separations that I have died. Since I am so stubborn, it takes a lot to kill me, and I die painfully and unconsciously. Afterward I reflect and realize what has happened, like the spirit of a dead man who leaves his body and only then awakens to what has happened to him.

There are easier methods. If you give them a chance, fantasies or death will erase your personal history: the way in which you work, the expectations you have of yourself, and your predictable and worn-out patterns of relating to others. According to a Buddhist ritual, you must meditate on your death every day. Many teachers agree that death is the only wise advisor you have.

Were it not for fear of death, you might never have the courage to change and jump over the obstacles created by history. When you use death as an advisor, however, you remember that you can no longer put off detaching from yourself and your apparent significance or insignificance.

Think of a client of mine who recently died. When she had come to see me for the first time, she was dying of cancer, and her tumors were beginning to inhibit her breathing. She wanted to see me because she was terrified of death. I asked her if there were still something she would like to do with her life and urged her to follow her most important wish. She said immediately that she wanted to fulfill a lifelong dream and travel to Finland in the summer.

"Go ahead," I said. "Take a trip to Finland."

"Oh, no," she answered, I couldn't do that. My husband hasn't any free time just now. He has to work."

That conversation took place in May. Instead of taking time off from work and going to Finland, her husband took time off in July, just when his vacation time came up, to bury and mourn his wife. Death meant little to that woman. Everything else took precedence: her husband's job, her children, her household. She spent her life postponing the things that meant the most to her so that she could maintain her personal history as a housewife. She could have used her death as a wise ally if she had been prepared to experience her disease as a force asking her to free herself from her personal identity. Instead, it simply erased her.

Such near-death situations can make death, in the form of terrifying diseases or body experiences, appear as your wise dreamingbody advisor, the best and most trustworthy one you have. From this viewpoint, fearing death or even getting ill is a fortunate experience because it signifies detachment from your identity.

Every time you fear the worst or are preparing to defend yourself against inner or outer forces, experiment first with imagining your own demise. Feel what it might be like to die. Even go through the act of dying. Imagine how you will die, what you will look like, what you will experience. It is important not only to think that you are going to die, but to imagine what will happen next.

Go through the details of the death fantasy, whether it is of falling off a cliff, dying of cancer, or being struck by an automobile. These fantasies are trying to get you unstuck. Bury yourself. Die before you die. Write your own epitaph: Here lies poor, little old me. He did some things well but could not make the turn and allow the new me to happen. He died at that point so that now I can live on, free. Now I am not myself anymore but have been replaced by taking part in and witnessing whatever is happening.

from The Shaman's Body by Arnold Mindell