The Bardo of Becoming: the ceremony of living & dying.

This post shares some of my views on birth and death and the bardo, the space in between, we call life.

I was inspired, compelled really, to write this piece after recently posting a photo of my dead husband Sterling (after he died), as part of a memorial post to celebrate his 8th year graduation.  A lot of this has been on my heart mind for a long time, so please forgive the length. This post shares some of my views on birth and death and the bardo in between, we call life. 

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In my recent post I also shared 3 photos of Sterling. One of him as a character on a movie set (a biker), in another, he was covered in roses and crystals before his cremation, and the last was of his ashes in a circle with aspens on a tree stump. 

Because Sterling and I have a lot of ongoing communication I have little doubt that he approved of all these images in the same way he chose his own music for his funeral celebration after he died. For those of you that knew him in body and for others who are getting to know him in spirit, he had/has strong opinions. In the days after he’d shed his skin suit, he actually chose his music by flickering the lights on and off in our house where he died. The electricity went haywire. After each song we’d play during the creation of his memorial video I’d stop and ask him, “what about this song?” And we’d play a clip from the list of religious songs his mother had sent over. He’d flick the lights on and off for yes or no. Thank god my brother, who is a spiritual skeptic, witnessed this. Even after his body's death, Sterling was still showing up, lit up about music and organized religion - just as he was when he was alive, and he wasn’t interested in the songs on the list. We settled on Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, not on the list but one of his favorites and it references God in a way that was resonant for him, so it felt like the art of compromise. This was actually a very challenging moment for me. I wanted to honor his mom and her faith, and Sterling also had totally different world views and faith views from hers, so I was relieved that he was communicating about it in spirit. We did create a spot during one of the celebrations for his uncle, a preacher, to share his views on where he felt Sterling went. I wanted everyone to feel included. I wanted to honor the truth of who Sterling was while simultaneously honoring the unspeakable grief of a family, especially a mother, who was losing her son.

I rarely post on FB these days and when I do it’s often a strange experience. The fear of putting something out into the world that’s real and vulnerable, the desire to be seen, the questioning of what’s more noise and what’s of service. All that and more, more often than not, has me saying, “never mind”. 

When I posted a few days ago I didn’t consider that the image I shared would hurt anyone, because I saw in it only beauty.  When it comes to death I often see beauty. Even the pain, the grief, the heartache, I tend to experience as the beauty of life and death on a continuum. Perhaps that's because Sterling’s death opened a doorway for me to remember a love that’s so big, it illuminated everything. 

This can happen sometimes when we get stripped — we see more clearly. And I saw it, without any psychedelics, I experienced our original nature, is/as love, and I walked through the world, completely from this lens, for about a year. It’s been the armoring and closing down from this remembering that I’ve mourned the most. To armor my heart is the most painful experience I’ve ever lived, and it’s often armored in some way to walk in the world. In the moments when I get there again, in that pure surrender, I can remember what it felt like to live in the place that I walked in, when I was so cracked open to all of life, I could live in the Truth, that there’s no place where love doesn’t live. 

Love is the fuel, and the frequency, and the fiber of everything. One of my teachers, Ram Dass, used to wag and point his finger and say “Sub Ek”, All One.

I should probably share that my vocabulary doesn’t usually include words like corpse or morbid, or even narcissist. I tend to steer clear of pathologies and my spiritual practice is non-dual in nature. I’m committed to breaking down that which separates.

So, when a person's comment popped up on my latest FB post suggesting that I remove my husband's photo, I took their request to heart. They expressed that to share a photo of a corpse was deeply “unconsidered” for emotional, spiritual and community reasons. I felt a little defensiveness arise but I posted a community care message and used my “culture’ card to try and explain my worldview on death. Then a friend messaged that it was hard for them to see the image as well. They thanked me for the community care note, but mentioned that the image still showed up on their feed anyway and that they didn’t want a corpse coming across their view so they muted me. Then Sterling’s mother posted, after having positively commented on my post, that the photo actually hurt her heart because it was morbid. The FB dance had begun. The original commentator DM’d me, suggesting that I may be a narcissist and that posting the photo of my husband had spiritual consequences. 

My first instinct when I saw the original comment was OMG, I would never want to hurt anyone or ask anyone to look at or read anything that isn’t consensual for them... and I questioned myself, touching in on my own myopic view of death as beauty and understanding that not everyone sees beauty in the same way. I posted a community care disclaimer denoting the content, then after my mother in laws message, I took the photo down. 

This is my Truth, I’m committed to creating more love, beauty and joy in the world and doing less, not more, harm. More than anything, I’m committed to Truth with a capital T. I see it as our only pathway to liberation. To be honest with whatever arises, to create safe space for difficult emotions and conversations, and to trust in each other enough to do so. 

I am more committed to the truth than I am to being comfortable.

So, here it goes. Of course I care about the community and want to create a safe space for people who want to experience what I have to share. And, when I took the photo down, I immediately felt fire rise in me, I felt censored. I felt the eons of people who had censored and been censored. I felt the fear of silence. I felt the part of me that wants to hide, to not be seen, because she has controversial views. I felt the angry "fuck this",  and the passivity of "never mind". I felt the shamed part, and the "am I out of line" part? I got a headache which is often my body’s way of titrating when I’m running too much energy and need to slow it down but am not paying full attention to my body's needs. Then I called my friend Angel, one of my lighthouses, and she reminded me to feel all these sensations while staying connected to the part of me that is aliveness, my true nature.  

And so I paused to witness the dance we’re all in. The confusion. The double standard. The fear. The divisiveness. The judged and judger. All of it. The beauty in all of it. The opportunity to not contract from the contraction. It was and is all  arising simultaneously. And I could feel the love behind all of it. I knew that this was the edge Sterling was pushing me towards. 

I find death to be beautiful and intend to continue to share my perspective in the most sensitive ways I can, AND I recognize that this last post was unconsidered. I apologize that I wasn’t more aware and considerate for those in the community who don’t share my particular worldview or lens on beauty. I get that Facebook is an open portal and not a private contained space where those who are invited in can be held to process and I also get that FB creates an invitation to be held as a sacred container. I’ll definitely be more mindful of this when I share in the future.

I do think it’s important to say that I’m not apologizing for finding the sacredness and beauty in the image I shared, or even for posting it. I'm genuinely sorry that I posted something so sensitive in nature without giving each of you full agency and choice over what you do and don’t see. For those who would like to sit with the photo of Sterling after his death, I’m going to share the images in an album (when I figure out how to do that :)) so it doesn’t automatically show up on your feed if it's troubling for you to see someone who no longer has breath in their body. I’ll also share several other photos where even though he was still alive, in my opinion, Sterling looks as dead and alive as he does in the image of him covered in roses. 

In truth, part of me still feels that this way of sharing is in some way hiding death behind a curtain, or album, but the part of me that’s relearning the art of titration, of loving what arises, and of sharing in a safe and loving way in community, understands why. 

I do believe that there’s a double standard that’s arisen, especially in our western culture, around death that’s ready to be dismantled. While Death and Birth are the sacred bookends of life, our culture has mostly relegated death to the shadows. As I write this, there’s a growing movement in our culture to re-sanctify life by reclaiming the sacredness of birth and death. We’re all invited to this party. We took birth to learn how to die, and we were born for these exact times. 

In some cultures, like Tibetan Buddhism, they begin training for dying from a very young age but most of us only begin the dance with death after someone we love dies or we’re in the active dying process ourselves. When our loved one does die, we often rush through the process of being with the body, moving so quickly into the funeral in an almost manic panic to avoid the pain, grief and ultimate beauty of being with our dead. The culture we live in teaches and feeds this panic. The laws and regulations that dictate what we can and can’t do with our dead enforce it. This in turn, perpetuates our inability to fully be with all that's dying in our natural world. In our culture, we hide and deny the truth of death with the rush of getting the body to the funeral home, with many people choosing embalming to create a certain untrue look, and with concrete vaults that slow the decomposition process even after a body is in the earth... and so naturally, we will now be at a place culturally where we have trouble looking at a body that no longer has life animating it.

From what I’ve observed we memorialize birth in a different way than we do death. Most of us celebrate births in the community with amazing photos of pregnancy and the joy of a new being made manifest into the world, but we rarely have permission to celebrate the beauty in and of death the same ways, unless it’s somehow exotic and makes its way to National Geographic. 

When my dad died, the year before Sterling, it brought death to our house in a new way. I’d had a foreshadowing dream days before my dad died, so I actually had the opportunity to have a last call with him and share how much I loved him. The next morning, he had a massive heart attack, and I began my more active initiation with death. Sterling and I began our journey of bringing death into our house and to our dinner table. We started having difficult conversations that we’d never had before. We'd talked relentlessly before about faith and religion, but now we started to also talk about cremation and embalming and what we liked and didn’t like. Definitely no make-up. A year later, when he died suddenly, I’d thankfully had a tiny preview. Death 101 I called it. 

When we first entered the pandemic, part of the guidance that came through was that we were individually and collectively "in the birthing rooms of our own becoming. That we’re in the bardo between the death of what was and the birth of what we'll become". That we were moving from the Me to the We, and that we needed to cultivate resilience. As often is with guidance, my linear mind didn't understand exactly what it meant, besides it sounding poetic, but I knew it was true and it’s now becoming much, much clearer. There's so much we have to learn from death and birth that can guide us into the new world that we are collectively birthing, and remind us how to cultivate more resilience.

When my husband first died, all I wanted, besides of course to bring him back to life, was to be with his body. To be with the last of what I identified at the time as “him”. To lay, sit, touch, rage. To grieve. To be awestruck by the mystery. So while his body lay in an Albuquerque morgue waiting to be autopsied, I continued my initiation working with his spirit, and “Spirit” itself. I began to understand that I was being guided and instructed in every step of the process. Who to call. What to offer. Where to be. The 1am call to his only other beloved whom I’d never spoken to, who answered my call, and then brought me into meditation, so that together we could guide Sterling into the light. All the ceremonies and celebrations that were, before that moment ,unknown to me— were all guided by the great mystery, spirit, the divine. The Powa, a Buddhist transformation of consciousness ceremony. The Mescalero Apache medicine man who drove many hours from the reservation to offer a death and rebirth ceremony, for the first time, to a non-native and her community. The music festival in the park. The year of grieving and traveling ceremonies that followed. All guided. I was moving as if in a dream.

I began to learn then how much our spirits and ancestors love to be honored and ritualized.

The week after his death, when I saw Sterlings body at the funeral parlor, I still wanted to crawl inside that cardboard box. Instead, because I didn’t feel that kind of permission, we covered him in flowers, stroked his face, said our prayers, his sister and I cut locks of his hair and gave him ours. It was as close to death as we could get. For weeks after his death I slept with a bedroll of his clothes, formed into a long shape like his body, on his side of the bed. I could smell him. I could feel him, everywhere. Nothing had died except that his body was gone. He showed up in dreams. We had wild sex on the astral plane. He gave dictation. Guidance. Shared his reincarnation. In so many ways we had then and still have a better relationship after he shed his skin suit than we did when he was “in” his body. There certainly was/is a lot less chaos and drama. In death Sterling was finally free to be as big as his spirit was, and in his release, I was free to begin to learn what it is to truly live. This doesn't mean that I'd wish him dead, to be very clear for anyone who feels compelled to misinterpret. It means I understand now - through the path of intense mourning and allowing - that we had a much bigger spiritual contract, that life doesn't end after death, and that not all beings are meant to live long lives.

I share all of this, because I had no training or experience with death or how to be with it until I began to get initiated. Our culture has not only swept death under the table, it’s locked it so deeply away that our collective fear of immortality is an element that is driving our own destruction. 

We’re so often terrified of slowing down enough to feel what is arising that we perpetuate the cycle of disconnection, all the while longing for safe containers, for the space to feel, to remember our own divinity and wholeness and then to embody it. To remember ourselves home, as whole, is to heal our disconnect from our planet. While the numbness and disconnect has helped us survive, because our accumulated grief has been so suppressed, it’s now amplified out to acidify our oceans and melt the icecaps. Our body/culture’s brilliant way of surviving, is now keeping us from fully living and from thriving. 

I say all of this not to separate myself out from any part of it. In the same way I know the love and the beauty, I know the terror and the numbness, and I know the disconnect and the fear. Intimately. I've lived it and am living it, right along with the rest of you, unpacking and learning how to feel everything… peeling back my own individual layers of lived traumatic experiences, in tandem with our cultures, and stumbling and bumbling through the bigness of this human experience. What I can say is, I'm committed to this embodiment process and I’m here to say YES, to everything that arises. Yes, and thank you.

Birth, Life and Death are community experiences. There’s a reason they say “it takes a village to raise a child”. It also takes one to walk someone home, in death. I learned this because of the incredible love the community showed up with when Sterling died. We didn’t get here alone. We need each other to move through the bardo of our own becoming and birth in a more beautiful resilient world. We need to learn from each others stories and experiences, to share our tools, to learn how to titrate- to slow down enough to explore what is arising moment to moment, to digest the experiences and feelings and then open to feeling each expansion and every contraction. We need practices and safe spaces to explore, and we need community to co-regulate with. We need our anchors and our living lighthouses, to help illuminate our way. The Sequoias are burning, our original lighthouses and cosmic antennas. They're here to remind us that we actually took birth to be these lighthouses for each other. To shine our brilliance so brightly that we reach every dark corner and crevice, and fill it with love. A lighthouse doesn’t discriminate, it just shines. 

My grandmother, Pushpa, was this for me. She was one of my anchors, and a lighthouse. I actually owe her my life, but that’s another story. When she died a few weeks ago, one of the ways I wanted to honor her was to bathe her. In Hindu culture that’s an important part of the death ritual and I imagined it to be a deep privilege, plus she hated to be dirty. Even when she could hardly move at 98 she’d make her way to the bathroom, sometimes falling, all to avoid wearing a diaper. When I visited her in June I tried to find a green burial place that would keep her body on dry ice, at home, for long enough for me to fly back to Houston and wash her body when she died. Nothing existed and so I asked my uncle to bathe her if I wasn’t there. It was a real edge for him to imagine bathing his own mother. He comes from a culture and time where they didn’t see their mothers naked, much less bathe them, so I completely understood his dilemma. 

When she did die, the sheriff came immediately. They asked a lot of questions. They needed proof of her identity and other papers. Despite all of the hustle and shock, my uncle remembered to bathe his mother. I asked him if he could play her favorite Hindu chants knowing that the spirit stays close for a time after the body stops breathing. He already had them going. I asked him to light candles and incense, and all the while the sheriff would come inside every 15 minutes to urge him to make arrangements immediately or they’d have to take her body to the county morgue. When I heard this, it was the first time I actually felt angry. Not angry at the sheriff because he’s doing his job, but fired up, like Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. I was angry at the entire system that so profoundly misunderstands the depth and sacredness of what’s at play. Which is like saying, I was angry at myself, as a manifestation of our culture, for being part of that system. 

Untethering ourselves from our cultural programming is a life long journey. For the last many years I’ve embarked on this process exploring what it is to have been born both colonized and a colonizer, and am still often discovering how and where this programming lives in me.

The way that we’re birthing, living and dying, when it’s co-opted the sacred, when it’s medicalized and monetized, is planting seeds in our collective field of consciousness in the same way that pouring love, ceremony and ritual into birth, life and death feeds that field. We get to choose which seeds we want to plant and what we want to water.

We’re experiencing right now what happens to our spirits when we come into this life, so big and beautiful, filled with so much love and are met with a scheduled c-section, the shock of missing the first bonding moments with our new mother. When a mother orangutan is killed so that her baby can be sold on the black market for $50. We’re living what happens when we die and our spirits don’t have the space to release because we’ve never been trained, and our dead are frozen and pumped full of chemicals that then merge with our collective body, our soil and our water. We're living what it's like when it’s more common to have anxiety and depression and live on pharmaceuticals than it is to have dirt under our fingernails. 

The way that we’re birthing and dying is perpetuating the culture of numbness, fear and disconnect that we then birth new life into. But this old story that breeds separation is in its final dying process and we get to choose how we’ll hold our new baby that’s rebirthing. We get to choose soft presence on the out breath. We get to choose this much love. We were born for it.

Thank you for the gift of your time and presence. Sending love from my lighthouse to yours.

Dream

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