Death. The final initiation. Seriously? We think of death like the final rite of passage for our lives. It’s sort of the exit plan, right? We don’t usually talk about what happens between lives. But we do know that death is the final frontier, that we think about as humans. But really, death is not a one time deal. You’ve died a number of times, just in this lifetime, right?

I mean, you’ve had stuff hit the fan so hard that it shifted your whole identity. You’ve had experiences that took you to your knees and seemed to strip you to the bones of everything you’d known before, changing your entire outlook and your entire reality. You’ve had losses that changed you intrinsically. These were all death rites. These were all initiations into death for you.

Because death is not just when you stop breathing. Death is when you are taken down so hard that you know you just have to surrender into the big change. Surrendering into the darkness. Into the unknown. Letting go. I bet you’ve had a time in your life where something happened and it sent you into a dark period. A period where you felt like you weren’t even on the planet with everybody else anymore.

Do you know what I mean? I call these times sitting in death’s cave, because it really seems like you are sitting next to a cackling old woman called death by her fire, watching the world go by. Feeling disconnected from it all. Feeling deeper than you should. Feeling quiet. Feeling maybe. Lost or introverted. Confused. But those words aren’t enough to describe what you feel when you’re sitting in death’s cave.

I just wanted to speak this into the room, because I want you to understand that death is not just the moment you quit breathing and leave the planet. Death is also a cyclical initiation. Those of us who have strong intuitive abilities and awarenesses, many of us had something happen in our lives that shook us so hard that it shook away a bunch of the logical stuff that used to keep us from seeing the invisible stuff.

Some people refer to this as a shamanic death. Some people get more psychic after being in a car accident or having a strong injury, and some people get really psychic after having a near-death experience or have, you know, dying for like ten minutes. So just know.

All of these are deaths. All of these are initiations. And you don’t have to wait until you’re dead to face your intrinsic fears. I just got through, actually leading a retreat here on my land with my Apache teacher, mama. Mentor Maria Yates Peru. And we took a group of 15 people through an ancient ceremony with. It included spending the night in your grave out on the land, looking into the stars and facing your deepest fears, while being safely held by guardians and spirit and ceremony and sacred land that all protected them and held them through it in a beautiful way.

You can do your own sort of facing fear ceremony just by calling around you what you call wholly, and then relating directly with nature, and especially in the darkness, and asking yourself, who am I? What am I? And what’s holding me back? You don’t have to wait for death to die in a good way. You don’t have to wait until you’re horribly ill with the last breaths in order to surrender into the great unknown.

And most of all, I want you to know that these times when you’ve died, these times when you’ve faced your fears, these times when you’ve walked through the darkness, when you’ve sat in death’s cave. Don’t regret them. Don’t fight them. Don’t be ashamed of them. These are the times when you faced your greatest initiation and you survived it.

It made you wiser. It made you more mature. And layer by layer, it’s prepared you to have a good death. When that time finally comes.