Letting Go of the Birthing Bias, and Dying to Live
Image courtesy of Coppersmith Photography
I typically feel it at the end of the day as a deep exhale or inner shavasana, a homecoming into silence. Sometimes, I even feel it in the early afternoon, as the morning’s activities recede like a lowering tide. For several years starting in my late twenties and into my early thirties, I felt it much more dramatically and acutely as a series of surprise punches that forced me into bewildering, liminal spaces of uncertainty: Saturn had returned for the first time since my birth, and when she departed again for another 30 years, she took with her my naiveté, my mother, my marriage, and my legal career. But, the feeling’s appearance is not always so oscar-worthy. Sometimes, quite mundanely, it arises as a lull in conversation; or a rooted feminine settledness at the end of a woman’s cycle; or a contented peacefulness, resting in the delight of having just put poetry, prose, or paint to paper, and having nothing more to express. And still other times, the feeling is none other than a simple, painful knowing, that an old friend, a stage of life, or even a geographical place is now somehow askew to one’s trajectory, and is slowly parting. In a million and one ways this feeling arises: it is the deep intuitive knowing that something is dying.
If you’re anything like me, you’re not always good at letting things die. It’s so much easier to place our attention on what is forming and tangible, or to talk about what exciting new developments are emerging on the horizon. Think about the last time you reconnected with someone, and they asked you how you are: did you jump to a description of your recent activities? Even the question “what’s new with you?” invites a specific segment of your life experience: that which has arisen, or has been birthed, or is currently unfolding. Aside from those times when we are in the company of our closest friends, most of the time, we don’t eagerly feel into and describe that which is breaking apart, dissolving, or that which has just died.
And who can blame us? Many of us were not raised in a particularly death-conscious society. What’s “hot” is what’s new and shiny. Sadly, sometimes it feels like the closest our consumer culture ever gets to death consciousness is the planned obsolescence of a product. Is there not a palpable aversion to discussing the unique beauty and potential agony involved in the dying process (whether it be the dissolution of a stage of life, a season, a moment, a relationship, a person, or a whole culture or community?) To me, it increasingly feels like this bias we have on focusing on newness, birth, growth, increase, being “on top of it,” making more, being more, or however we want to speak about the “manifesting” stages of life, is causing us to live a half-life, and ironically, creating a kind of inner deadness. In other words, our birthing bias (our focus on what is arising and flowering), and our conscious or unconscious aversion to what is dissolving and dying, creates a kind of “maha” [great, overarching] bias that slowly cuts us off from the fullness of life’s creative cycles.
This bias is observe-able in ourselves and others. It can look like over-activity, which may be an unconscious effort to evade or “fill in” the experience of any one thing coming to an end. It can look like an inability to rest with difficulty or uncertainty (yours or another’s), or a compulsion to constantly highlight “the bright side.” It can look like stuckness or lack of inspiration, because the muse of creativity was never given a chance to rest and regenerate. It can look like nitpicking at our partner, or blaming an otherwise healthy relationship for all our struggles, not being willing to accept that the relationship is going into a new phase - one in which bubbly new infatuation is dying to make room for love’s deeper, more inclusive, and less conditional forms.
I am inspired to write about this because I am re-reading Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ masterpiece, Women Who Run With The Wolves. (As an aside: if you identify as a woman, look into this book sister! It is a feminist Jungian initiation back into your wild dynamism by way of myth and prose.) Most poignantly, Estés points out what we all know but perhaps rarely ponder: there is a life/death/life cycle constantly unfolding. Things are birthed; they increase to their fullness; and then they start to fall apart and die. You can see this at both subtle and gross levels: sensations, emotions, and thoughts arise, peak, and dissolve; as do whole stages of life, ways of being, seasons, and solar systems. Creation is not simply a kinetic coalescing process; it is also the dissolution of “what is” back into formlessness.
Here’s the thing, my friends: when we ignore the dissolution process that naturally (and inevitably) takes place in our experience, and force-feed ourselves increasingly kinetic ways of being, not only do we risk repressing our pain in unhealthy ways, we also miss out on the transformative potential that dissolution and death make possible. Death’s promise is this: if we can abide in the dissolution of any aspect of our lives with awareness, we will discover something we didn’t know before (Estés 98), and we will regenerate into new (wiser) beings. In the rot of our endings, our new beginnings are slowly being fertilized in the nutrient-rich soil of past experience. To anxiously ignore moments of dissolution is to forego the chrysalis wherein life-giving enzymes promise to break us apart and reconfigure us into something transformative and beautiful. Otherwise, we are a caterpillar refusing to undergo change: we insist on only eating, climbing, and eating some more - until we are so full, we have no choice other than to deaden and numb-out, unable to muster the strength to engage in the sacred art of transformation. Allowing the death part of the life/death/cycle is precisely the opposite of that. To die is to live - and live better. It is our natural existential rhythm.
But just because dissolution and death are natural, doesn’t mean these experiences are easy. They can be absolutely terrifying. Death’s sisters are uncertainty, groundlessness, and bewilderment. When the old is gone, and the new is not yet revealed, the sisters announce themselves, and they can be downright knee-wobbling if we aren’t used to inviting them in for tea. Why do we shake in our boots? The root of our fear is that death means finality. When someone or something in our life dies, we worry we will be in the unknown forever; that we will be scared forever; that we will be alone forever; that we won’t know which way to turn forever. But death’s nature is just a subset of the life/death/life paradigm, and her promise is ever-present. She whispers, “abide here and I will show you something spectacular - something fresh!”
This promise is hard to trust. Indeed, how challenging it is, I find, to remember this promise when we are in the misty liminal places — the places where it is so foggy with uncertainty, we can barely see our own fingertips! How difficult it is, when we are in the rotting soil of what was, and the weight of the emotional landscape feels like it will burry us alive! It’s hard in these moments to trust that what is brewing is actually newfound wisdom that will soon be ready for us to ride into our next stage of being. When my mother died, I remember a persistent background terror that lingered for at least a couple years. My fear was that I would feel the depths of sadness forever, like a well with no exit. And yet, sure enough, time revealed the fullness of the life/death/life cycle. What dies must live. Just as my relationship with my mother continued, so did the dynamism of my emotional experience: sadness lifted and what grew in its place I would have never previously imagined. Dissolution is never finality. It is simply that which ensures that there is no finality.
Various components of our lives are at different stages of the life/death/life cycle. For example, though your romantic partnership may be dissolving, your writing life may be robust and flourishing. Because different parts of our life are on different sides of the circle, we can slowly become intimately acquainted with their various rhythms. And yet, sometimes, there are periods when it feels like almost every aspect of our life seems to be in a dissolution state. This is my definition of a “descent,” which some people call “the dark night of the soul.” A true descent is not just a bad day or year, it is when the ground in virtually all corners of our life is shifting and dissolving so dramatically, that there is a total self-emptying of what was once known. It is not easy to abide in such a fluctuating landscape. New fault lines are opening and crumbling so fast, we doubt our steady footing. Such a descent necessarily entails suffering. It is the nature of the landscape. Yet even within this multi-vector dissolution experience, we can repeatedly endeavor to receive the transformative promise that dying inevitably entails. For Sylvia Perrera, another feminist Jungian psychologist, this is not a passive enterprise. Rather, the practice is a rigorous and repeated “active willingness to receive.” To receive what? The deconstruction that leads to life-giving reconfiguration and newfound wisdom.
But we need not do this alone. In my own experience of descent, one of my main lifelines was surrounding myself with people who continually reminded me of the life/death/life cycle (in so many words), and that nothing is permanent. These sweet beings weren’t afraid of the depths of my descent, and their steadiness helped me to trust that, perhaps they might well be right: maybe this is not all bad news. Soon too, personal experience came to the fore as the greatest teacher. I could feel that my perception was changing, and that I was transforming. My heart was getting softer, my ear more empathetic, my creativity more fluid. Music and poetry started trickling in, as did tears from simple experiences like watching the sunlight hit the leaves just so. I slowly transformed into someone who was a bit more embedded in the fabric of things, and it felt good to feel — even when everything was falling apart.
Now, I see that it wasn’t necessary to wait for such a dramatic conference of dissolution events. I could have started small. There is an opportunity, therefore, to simply explore one small life/death/life cycle at a time. Perhaps, we could just start with the arch of our day, and see when energy arises and dissipates within us. Women who experience menstrual cycles have a unique opportunity to explore the life/death/life cycle that happens within that time frame. We can also notice our patterns of extroversion and solitude: when does the socialite within recede? Even exploring a single inhale-and-exhale cycle can teach us plenty about the fullness of life/death/life.
Contemplations with guided questions can also be helpful. For example, consider the following questions with regards to where you are right now in your life:
Is anything dying in your experience right in this moment? Sensations? Emotions? Thoughts?
What, in your life, needs to be allowed to die? Are there any relationships or rigid notions that need to be loosened?
What is your “birthing bias strategy,” that is, what is the way you tend to avoid the natural dissolution that is part of the life/death/life cycle? In what ways does this thwart growth and transformation? In what ways does it harm you?
What might support you in letting go? Friends? Rituals to honor what has just ended? Literature that reminds you that nothing is final? A counselor? A sage?
What are you afraid will happen if you don’t fill in this moment when things need to recede?
What does it look like to “actively receive” death as a natural part of life?
Without making room for the death parts of the life/death/life cycle, we choose only more activity, more coalescing, more consumption, until we are frenzied, stuffed, exhausted, and sadly, barricaded from life. Our light dims when this happens. The franticness of trying to get closer to life by constantly birthing new ideas, projects, and activities, ironically attenuates us from the very thing we seek. As my partner, Dave, reminded me on a walk recently: when fruit trees aren’t pruned before the winter, they won’t yield as many fruit the following spring. By cutting them back, transformation happens from root to tip, and the harvest is once again plentiful. We allow dying so we can live; we seep in the rot of endings so we can flower vigorously. When the whole process is infused with awareness, our life ever-deepens.
Dissolution is nutrient-rich with wisdom. And so, how robust and precious it is, my friends, to not only know the fruit, but to also be intimately familiar with the rot from which it came. It takes courage and heart, but it is on the ground floor that we sometimes see the true nature of things.
