Because of my new spiritual care provider role within hospice and palliative care, I am doing a lot of processing about what it means to help people die. The physically dying process is understood well but death is not just a physical process. It also involves a spiritual dying process. Over the past 2 months, I have been digesting an eighteen video series titled “The Wisdom of Life and Death” taught by A. H. Almaas, co-founder of the Diamond Approach. I have been a student of a Diamond Approach spiritual school in Ontario for over 14 years now. Within this video series, Almaas shares how the process of spiritual dying that has to happen in the physical dying process is very similar to the spiritual dying process that is necessary for spiritual growth and maturation. In this blog, I want to highlight some of the key teachings that Almaas shares about the spiritual dying process. Within the Diamond Approach, spiritual dying involves the dying to the egoic self. We are born with a spacious soul but as we develop as children and then adults, we develop an egoic self or ego for short. This ego structure is made up of many parts that consists of all our beliefs, coping patterns, self images, attachments, object relationships, compulsions, relationship patterns, etc. that we have developed throughout our lifetime, many of them developed during difficult times in our life. Our ego is also very self-centred, always looking for ways to avoid pain, especially the pain within our unresolved memories, and to seek after pleasure and our desires. When we are operating from our egoic self, we are trying to manage our life to make life the way our ego wants it to be. When this happens, we rarely experience the present moment as it really is. This is unfortunate for when we live from the spacious part of our soul, that part of our soul which is free of the structures of our ego, we no longer seek to control our life. Instead, we experience the present moment in life as it really is, as it is emerging from one moment to the next. When this happens, we are living what the Diamond Approach calls a “selfless life", a life free of the influence of ego. When we live in this way, we notice that there is a dynamic flow to life and within this flow, we notice divine qualities arising in response to what we are experiencing, essential qualities like compassion, joy, love, truth, strength, grace, resilience, support, power, wonder, curiosity etc. Our soul loves this place of selflessness, a place where we experience peace, total acceptance, and unconditional love. As adults, we find that there are two parts to our soul, the spacious part of our soul and the egoic structured part of our soul. The secret to living this selfless life more often is learning to die spiritually, that is, dying to our ego and no longer following the control patterns of our egoic self. But how does one do this, die spiritually? It means to do the very opposite to what our ego wants. Instead of joining our ego in managing our life, we seek to surrender to the present moment and allow ourselves to join the flow of life, and experience the qualities of Essence or God’s spirt that emerge in that flow of life. Every time we practice surrender to the present moment, we are dying to the pulls of our ego and living a selfless life. As you can well imagine, our ego is hugely resistant to letting go of its role of managing our life. This is why it is so important to see clearly the pain that our ego creates in our life. Only then will we be motivated to begin the process of spiritually dying, that is, separating slowly from our attachment to joining our egoic self through the process of surrendering to the flow of the present moment. One key reason why our ego creates so much psychic pain is because it resists continually the transitory nature of life. The reality of death forces us to see that life is always changing, always going through the dynamics of birth, life, and death. We see this pattern in nature with the seasons, the life cycle of plants and animals, and everywhere in human experience. There are beginnings and endings. Growth happens. Aging occurs. Decisions occur. Nothing in life stays the same. However, our ego fights this truth at every turn for it wants life to be static. This is why our ego seeks to create attachments; it is trying to block the flowing nature of reality so it no longer flows. It seeks to manage and control our life so nothing changes. We become attached to our loved ones; we become attached to our possessions; we become attached to our youth and good health; we become attached to our friends; we become attached to our self images; we become attached to our jobs; we become attached to behaviors. The list of attachments are endless. And these attachments are not just positive; they can also be negative. We can become attached to negative self images, negative feelings, negative experiences in life, even negative people. Our ego seeks stability, not what is good for us. Of course, all these attachments don’t change the reality of the transitoriness of life. Just as death is inevitable, so all forms of change or little deaths are inevitable too. But every time a form of dying happens, our ego fights that change for it is attached to that person or thing or experience never changing. In many ways, that emotional attachment is part of the structure of our egoic self. When that structure falls apart, our ego feels like it is literally dying. No wonder we experience so much emotional distress around change and in particular around death for the process of dying involves many changes. The greater the emotional attachment, the greater the resistance from our ego, and the greater the emotional pain when this attachment collapses. When we understand our ego in this way, we can begin to understand why it is so helpful for people to practice spiritual dying before their physical death. We can also perceive what spiritual dying looks like. The process of spiritual dying involves dying to those egoic attachments before the realities of life force us to release them in the final act of death. It is important to realize that spiritual dying does not mean we can’t enjoy our loved ones or enjoy our job or enjoy our friends or enjoy our health or enjoy our youth. No, when we surrender to the present moment, we enjoy these moments fully. However, we enjoy them knowing that someday that they will no longer be possible. Someday, these experiences in our life will end, will die. But that fact of dying, in whatever form it takes, helps us cherish these moments now even moreso. Accepting the reality of death helps us treasure life more. In mid-October, 2020, I participated in a webinar on Medical Assistance in Death (MAiD) and Bereavement. One of the speakers was Dr. Gary Rodin, chief researcher at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. He highlighted that people choose MAiD not because of physical pain but mainly because of non-physical pain. This non-physical pain is caused primarily by all the attachments our ego possesses in life. He stressed the importance of helping people process this non-physical pain long before the last few weeks of their life. If not, by then their nonphysical pain is so intense that MAiD seems like the only option available to help them deal with their pain. This is why Dr. Rodin developed CALM (Cancer And Living Meaningful) therapy, a form of counselling that helps people process their nonphysical pain. In many ways, CALM is about helping people start working at spiritual dying before they face the immediate reality of death. The journey of spiritually dying is not a journey that we can complete in a week-long retreat or even over a year. It is a process of developing the practice of prayerfully surrendering to the present moment, as much as one is able, rather than managing one’s life experience. Many of the spiritual practices like prayer, meditation, contemplation, and rituals within Christianity and other religions involve this surrendering process, letting go of managing our life and allowing God’s spirit to minister to us in the present moment. In the video series, The Meaning of Life and Death, Almaas highlights that when people work at this path of spiritual dying intentionally, they will eventually encounter moments when they enter what he calls a “death space”. For those of us who are meditators, there are times during meditation when we enter this death space briefly for a few moments. This occurs when, during meditation, all activity in our mind stops and then, we hear our meditation bell chimed, and we cannot believe our meditation time is over. Where did the time go? At first, I believed that I fell asleep during meditation, but when I examined closely this experience, I eventually realized that this was not always true. There were times when there was no drowsiness before I lost awareness, and no tiredness afterwards. In fact, I was alert, often felt refreshed, more enlivened afterwards. This timeless space that we can touch into briefly during meditation or centering prayer is the beginning of what Almaas calls the death space. As we work at dying to our ego more and more, our experiences of this death space will deepen. When we enter fully into this death space, Almaas teaches that all our images of self eventually disappear. Since our mind believes these self images are real, it actually feels like we are physically dying, but it is only an emotional experience. Not only do our self-images disappear, but so do our images of others which is the basis of many of our relationships. When this happens, Almaas notes that it feels internally like people are leaving us, and we feel are all alone. If we allow our experiences of this death space to deepen even further, we will eventually enter what Almaas calls an annihilation space. It is here that all suffering begins to cease for in this space, our sense of self awareness or consciousness disappears. All our experiences of self stop. If we allow this annihilation space to develop fully, Almaas teaches that we will notice that the experience of life all around us stops. In this place, Almaas claims we merge with the Absolute. As Christians, we might say we merge with and become one with God, the Alpha and Omega. We are dead spiritually, do not exist experientially, for a moment in time. Then, Almaas highlights that we are spiritually reborn from this place of Unmanifested Reality. As Christians, we might called it the Unmanifested God or the Void as it is described in Gen. 1:1. Our consciousness re-emerges along with all aspects of our egoic self that we are still attached to, aspects that we still need to work at understanding more so that we can release more of these attachments in the future. What I have outlined very briefly is how I understand Almaas explaining the spiritual dying process of the human soul at the deepest levels happening within the living experience of human life. Using this as a framework, he sees the process of spiritual death occurring in a similar way when we physically die. The only difference is that spiritual death is forced upon us due to the physical dying of our body. People, as they are physically dying, will eventually go through the spiritual dying process. All of the attachments within our ego are confronted by the reality of our death. And, we have no choice but to release these emotional attachments. The deeper these attachments are, the more fear and pain our ego will cause us to experience, and the longer we hold onto them until finally physical death forces their release. Eventually we will enter the death space, where all these attachments are gone. Then, we will enter the annihilation space where our sense of consciousness disappears. We are no longer able to experience anything, not even our existence. It is at this point when our soul disconnects from our physical body. Almaas notes that this can happen a little before physical death, at the point of physical death, or a little after physical death. I remember being present when my brother Jamie died in 1992 and how my experience of him shifted about 15 minutes before he died. One minute I experienced him as a person dying in bed. The next moment that vibrant person was gone, and I was watching a cold impersonal biological engine chugging away in the bed. I watched as that breathing machine chugged along, then sputtered, then finally gave its last gasp before it stopped. Based on what Almaas teaches, that would be an example of when the soul leaves the physical body before death. While we can’t know for sure, Almaas believes that our human soul is reborn again in the afterlife, similar to what happens when we experience spiritual death and rebirth in the spiritual dying process in this earthly life. While Almaas does not believe that God plays judge over our lives and determines what our afterlife experience is like, he does theorize that our experience of the afterlife is shaped by the attachments we choose to hang onto when our consciousness re-emerges in the afterlife…just like what happens when our consciousness is reborn after experiences of spiritual dying occur in our earthly life. If that is so, then the different theories and understandings found in the major religious traditions about what happens in the afterlife (heaven, hell, reincarnation, purgatory, etc.) may provide a glimpse into what the afterlife may be like.
Questions to ponder:
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What dig-deep button do you push? When you find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, having too much to do, push to your limits, etc., what dig-deep button do you hit? Brené Brown, well-known research psychologist, claims there are two buttons we can push. The first dig-deep button is one that most people push, one that involves us just striving harder and harder but the treadmill we find ourselves on often never stops, at least not for long before we find ourselves on it again. However, Brown says there is a second dig-deep button we can push, one that takes us to a very different place. In this blog, I plan to explore what it means to push this other dig-deep button. At the promotional session of the group on Wholehearted Living that I, along with 4 other spiritual directors and psychospiritual therapists, facilitated last week, we explored these dig-deep buttons based on Brené Brown’s book, “The Gifts of Imperfection” (2010). Brown describes the dig-deep button as “a secret level of pushing through when we’re exhausted and overwhelmed, and when there’s too much to do and too little time for self-care” (Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 3). To get a sense what it looks like and feels like to push this dig-deep button, we entered a group process where we shared, popcorn style, the signs that we are using this button. Everyone participated in this process including the five facilitators. Here is the list of what was shared:
Can you relate to that list? Most people can. In this list, we see quite plainly the down-side of always pushing this dig-deep button, but it makes you wonder. Why do we push this dig-deep button if it is so hard on us? We ask ourselves, as a group, a question similar to this, “Why is it so easy to push this dig-deep button?” Here are the responses we shared:
The other thing we noted was the many cultural beliefs and values that promote pushing this dig-deep button. As a group, we noted the following cultural messages:
Wow! You can begin to see why it is so easy to push our “dig deep” button. No wonder we do it so often. This begs a question. Does it have to be this way? Is there another way than pushing this “dig-deep” button? Brené Brown claims there is. From her research, she found that people who lived from a place of wholehearted living also dig deep…but they dig deep differently. Brown discovered that when these people dug deep, they connected to something beyond themselves. Brown developed the acrostic DIG to capture this way of digging deep. D -- Deliberate in their thoughts and behaviors through prayer, meditation, or simply setting their intentions. I -- through this practice of contemplation and becoming connected to Being, they were inspired to make new and different choices G -- Going – this inspiration led them to take action, to live into these choices. (Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 4) So, what is different about this way of digging deep compared to the previous way? Here, we again turned to the group process to flush out what this means. Here is what we came up with:
Let me go a little beyond what we, as a group, unpack that night. For us to push this other dig-deep button, we have to first become aware of our compulsion to push our own dig-deep button. This is why the pause is so important for it begins to break the compulsion. Once we pause, it then becomes possible for us to become aware of the powerful impulse within us to push this dig-deep button. This new way of digging deeper involves us bringing as much prayerful awareness and presence to this impulse dynamic as we are able. As we bring awareness and presence to this impulse, we will eventually come to realize that there is “me” and there is this impulse within me to push this dig-deep button. This sense of me is often called the "witnessing I" or observing self within certain psychological frameworks. If we allow ourselves to experience this sense of me in all of its fullness, we become aware of our field of consciousness, what is often called the human soul. When we begin see this impulse to push the dig-deep button as not me, we come to see it as an egoic structure within our spacious soul. Every ego structure contains many beliefs, feelings, memories, roles, coping patterns, etc. that keep this psychic structure intact and active in your life. It is very easy for us to become attach to, identify with, and believe this psychic structure is us. This identification is why it is so easy to believe that we have no control or power over using this dig-deep button. In this new way of digging deep, we first practice the pause and bring awareness and presence to our impulse to dig-deep. This prayerful awareness will eventually cause us to separate ourselves from the egoic structure of our dig-deep button. When space in our soul opens up between our witnessing I and our dig-deep button, we are now in a place where God’s spirit can minister to us. We are in a place where we can listen to God and watch how God’s spirit interacts with this dig-deep button and with our life. Due to this space that has opened up, we are more free to set our intentions, to discern more clearly what to do, to reach out to others to help us with our tasks, etc. We are also now in a more open, spacious place where God’s spirit can minister to the various components our dig-deep ego structure. As we inquire into the beliefs of our deep-deep button, God’s spirit reveals new truths to us. As we explore the often-painful memories connected to our button in a prayerful way, these memories slowly transform. As we hold the often-painful emotions connected to our button, God’s spirit brings forth compassion and grace, and these feelings settle. As we inquire into our compulsive patterns, we slowly regain our freedom from the impulse to push our dig-deep button. This added psychospiritual context provides a better sense of what it means to push this other dig-deep button, and how this dig-deep button is so different from the compulsive dig-deep button. Brené Brown, in her book, The Gifts of Imperfections, outlines ten guideposts to whole-hearted living. Each of these guideposts are built on the reasons why we impulsively push our dig-deep button which are listed in the visual above.
In looking at each of these trigger points, Brown provides a guidepost or spiritual practice, one could say, that helps people pause and touch into the more life-giving way of digging deeper. This is what we will be exploring and practicing in the Wholehearted Living group this coming year. The Wholehearted group has its second meeting on Tues evening, October 13 at 7 pm on Zoom. That night we will explore the primary emotion that Brené Brown claims causes us to compulsively push our dig-deep button, namely the experience of shame. We will investigate how shame is so different than all the experiences that cause us to possess fullness of life. Then, in each the following sessions we will explore and practice one of Brown’s guideposts and discover how it helps us push that different dig-deep button which leads to wholehearted living. Questions to Ponder: 1. What does it look and feel like when you are pushing your impulsive dig-deep button? 2. What makes it so easy to push your dig-deep button? 3. What cultural messages did you learn that causes you to push your dig-deep button? 4. Brene Brown describes a second dig-deep button, one that is very different than our impulsive dig-deep button. When you have connected to this other way of digging deeply? What made this possible? How was that experience different from pushing your impulsive deep-dig button? The Wholehearted Living Group on Zoom is still open for new participants. To learn more, please click here and go to our web-page where you can register for the group. |