The Great Inevitable

I just returned from a yoga/meditation retreat in Mexico. It coincided with the Dia de los Muertos festivities or Day of the Dead, and in keeping with the holiday, the topic of the retreat was death and dying. 

It’s the second yoga/death workshop in which I’ve participated. It’s not that I have a fascination with morbidity, it’s that I follow a couple of brilliant teachers who are sure to open doors and catapult my awakening no matter what they’re teaching about. (I told Sally Kempton once she could lecture on toast and I’d be captivated.) When they teach, I sign up.

Hareesh Wallis was the instructor in Mexico. With talks, poetry, music, mantra, and movement we opened the crypt that concealed the forbidden topic of modern times. We let our small, scared minds die for a little while.

I learned some things about myself. I’m realized I’m glad to have grown up with certain norms that probably aren’t the experience of most these days. These experiences helped me come to the retreat with a healthier embracement of death than some might. 

I’m Catholic, and from childhood, am perfectly used to the life-size, mostly naked, dead, bloody Jesus hanging over Mass every Sunday. In the catechism of my youth we’d often walk through the Signs of the Cross—a grizzly, detailed retelling of the torture and murder of the one person I thought most shouldn’t have been treated that way. 

The church didn’t let us forget about death for a minute. Mass includes remembrances of the recent dead, and of all the dead gone before. The afterlife is an expected frequent topic, and is so ingrained in my consciousness that I am still puzzled by those who think we end with our bodies.

I was raised around ranchers, and spent much time playing and working on them. No walk of life offers a more brilliant and real exposure to the cycle of life. Ranchers see crops and animals perish with the regularity that the rest of us start up a car.  Of course the loss equates with impairment of livelihood, so I know stress is  involved. But ranchers know the unavoidability of death in their bones. Grieving is a short and quiet affair. 

When I was eight, my friend Scott was raising a beautiful calf for the State Fair. We played with it and stroked on it. I remember its sweet, shining eyes. The next time I came to the ranch I said, Where’s your calf? He excitedly and with a smile said, Come see. He took me behind the barn where his calf was laying, dead and filled with a maggot pile the size of a welcome mat. 

I remember him giggling about fooling me while I worked to overcome my gag reflex. My next thought was not, Were you sad? but, What are you going to do about the Fair? 

My dad and grampa were hunters, and each year brought home their limit of deer, elk and trout. Jack rabbit, too, once in a while. I’ve seen the animals killed, gutted, skinned, and I’ve eaten them. We even processed meat in our kitchen which consisted of a family assembly line that started with a whole deer hanging in the corner and ended on the other side of the room with a freezer full of white packages of burger, sausage, and steaks of all types, our winter food store.

Our pets met their end the way of Old Yeller. Or they wandered off into the woods, a natural and dignified departing. Few if any tears were shed. We’d miss our little buddies, and reminisce about them, but I never remember it being terribly sad because it was so common, inevitable, and in our face.

Exposure to bodily death (or the idea of it) was a part of the flow of normal life to me, and these memories came back during the retreat, as we were offered ample invitations to come to terms with our mortality. We also, of course, focused on the death of our perceptions of life. 

Ending our attachment to our self-image or personality is a common emphasis of the spiritual path. Our Mexico retreat was no exception, although both body and mind were lumped together more than you might find elsewhere. The emphasis was more on what we are without our body-mind. 

We practiced accessing what is eternal in all of us, the ground of our being, or consciousness. Through a brilliant variety of meditations and other means of cultivating awareness, we stayed as much as possible in the realm where bodies and minds are merely emanations of a greater self. 

Any one of the practices (including a few powerful, non-stop OM meditations that lasted 15 minutes) would have been enough to vibrate us into a higher state, but when the four days of back-to back yogic focus ended, I left reverberating with euphoria, liberated from typical troubles. 

Coming home with a bliss-buzz may be common after yoga retreats, but re-entry is not always a graceful affair. The best part is experiencing everything from a new vantage point. The hard part is seeing everything from a new vantage point.

In my case, it deepened my moment-to-moment connection with life (not a small thing) and inspired me to pay more attention to some mundane areas of life I’ve neglected. At first I recognized a little ego-driven attitude about being too elevated to deal with stuff, but a couple of hours into that and I had to laugh at myself. The bills don’t get paid by saying Om. Well, not directly, at least.

I notice death daily. My ideas and opinions about who I am and what I believe don’t hold up when I live and breath in the moment. Judgements and expectations fall away the more I practice residing in the place where everything is a welcome part of reality. It’s not that difficult things don’t happen. It’s that they do, and like the bloody Jesus and the maggoty calf, they are natural, inevitable companions.

I recommend reading or talking about death more—death of body and of old ideas. As has been said, Life has a 100% mortality rate. The more I face it, the less I feel it lurking.

It’s as natural and inevitable as toast.