When I checked my emails this morning, there was an invitation for a spiritual conference call to meet death. Oh, no, I thought to myself, it's too early to meet death at 10 am. I'm not a morning person. But it is now 9 pm in the evening and I am ready for death. It's the right season, as the leaves are falling and we are all preparing for Halloween and the Day of the Dead.
It would be a ride in the park if meeting death was about meeting vampires, ghosts, or zombies. The "meeting death" that spiritual teachers talk about is much scarier than that. It invites us to stop all the running around and the busyness, and face our deepest fears. It invites us to let go of the attachments that are causing us suffering. It invites us to acknowledge and accept our losses and to move on. It invites us to let go of our identities--the masks that we present to the world--so that we can discover who we really are.
My "meeting death" this Halloween season has to do with the loss of what I thought was my secure position with the hi-tech company I've been working for. I have had to face my survival fears. What if I can't get more work? How will I live? Where will I live? Etc., etc.
My meeting death also has to do with the loss of a relationship that has been loving, intense, and painful. This relationship has died over and over, but has been reborn like the phoenix rising out of the ashes, because we keep coming back and telling the truth. But this time I think the death may be final.
Losing a job or a relationship are two major losses, but death can show up in many ways--sickness, aging and loss of beauty, losing our home, losing friends, actual death--pretty much the loss of anything that we have been attached to and through which we have lived our life. While painful in the moment, this death is calling us Home to freedom, to joy, to more love, to being who we really are.
If we really tell the truth, what ever we are losing has been causing us pain. The job was probably boring or stressful, and we were just doing it for the money. The relationship was probably disempowering, painful, or abusive. What ever we are losing is for our own good, as it is freeing us up to have something new come into our life.
There can be no rebirth without death, and this is a time of death.
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