Are We Dying, or Waking Up?
A dream in my twenties showed me a dead man’s face. It was mine at the age I am right now. Then last year I got a terminal diagnosis.
**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.
The man on the floor
Last year I ended up on the floor of my home for about 45 minutes, unable to stand, fairly sure I was having a stroke.
The paramedics came. They took my blood pressure, which was way up, looked me over, and told me I was not in immediate danger. They asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I am a clinician, and I did the thing clinicians do, which is the thing I would tell a patient never to do. I said no.
The next morning there was foam in my urine. If you are not a doctor that means nothing to you. If you are, it means protein where protein should not be, and it means the kidney. Over the following weeks I started spilling protein for real. We spent about six months hunting for the cause, and then, roughly six months ago, I was sitting across from a specialist being told I had amyloidosis.... a disease that for most of its history was a death sentence, and for many people still is.
I want to tell you what it is like to hear that word about your own body, but I mostly can’t, because the mind does something strange with it. It goes very quiet and very loud at the same time. I made the calls you make. I got staged. I got ready for what amounted to cancer treatment. And then, in one of those turns that only real life is allowed to write because a novelist would be embarrassed by it, they told me they were wrong. What I actually have is a rare hereditary form, a mostly benign one, the kind that usually leaves people alone. The tiny deposits in my kidney might not even be the thing that put me on the floor.
So I got to keep my life. Except my protein never came down. There is still an immense amount of it spilling into my urine, which means my kidneys could get into real trouble at any time. And every so often my body still does the thing. It clamps down. The nervous system slams into fight or flight for no reason I can point to. My blood pressure rockets. I twitch all over, uncontrollably, and there is a feeling of electricity running through me, and a wave of doom so total that every cell is convinced this is the end. A body-wide panic attack that I did not invite and cannot argue with.
This is not a story I’m telling you from the safe side of. It’s happening now. My kidneys are still spilling. The episodes still come. Every single time one hits, I think I am dying.
And here is the strange part, the part I have needed most of this year to be able to say out loud. Somewhere inside those episodes, which I would not wish on my worst enemy, I have started to catch a second thing happening underneath the terror. A glimpse. A question I can’t shake.
What if I’m not dying? What if I’m waking up?
The dream I’ve carried for thirty years
I have to go back to my twenties for this to make sense.
Back then I used to fool around with lucid dreaming. I was chasing out-of-body experiences, the whole thing, half science experiment and half something I didn’t have language for yet. It never quite “worked” the way the books promised. It was always dreamlike, hazy, more like slipping sideways into a state than cleanly stepping out of my body. I had a lot of those. But one of them landed differently, and it has never left me.
In that one I rose up and found myself looking down at a person on a bed, and I did not recognize him. An overweight, puffy, older guy. Puffy face. Scruffy beard. And in the dream I understood, the way you understand things without being told, that he was dead.
Then I understood the second thing. It was me.
I woke up. I was a lean kid in my early twenties. The dead man on the bed looked nothing like me, and honestly I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. I filed it under “weird dream” and went on with my life.
Except I couldn’t quite file it, because it happened around the same season as another dream, one I’ve written about before. In that one my late grandmother came to me, and I woke up in Seattle at six in the morning and called my sister in New York to joke that she hadn’t told me she was pregnant. She said she wasn’t, she was on the pill, there were no plans. Two weeks later she called back. She was pregnant. That child carries my name to this day.
I am not telling you those dreams predicted anything, exactly. I genuinely don’t know what they were, and one strange dream proves nothing.... people dream vividly every night and only remember the few that land. I functional medicine doc working on a PhD, and my whole professional life is built on not overselling a claim. But one of those dreams came true in the world, with a name attached to it. And the other one.... the dead man.... I am 52 years old now, and when I look in the mirror lately, older and heavier through the face than that lean kid, a beard going gray, I have to laugh a little, because I have quietly become the puffy older guy I couldn’t recognize on the bed. My grandfather on my mother’s side died at 52. I am 52. And my body, this year, keeps rehearsing what feels exactly like dying.
So you can see why I’ve been thinking about death. Not as a philosophy. As a houseguest.
What I want to actually explore with you
Here is the question this whole piece is built on, and I am going to hold it honestly the entire way through, because I don’t have the answer and don’t want to pretend I do.
Is my body failing.... or is my body transforming? Am I learning to die, or am I learning to wake up? And what if, and stay with me here, those are not two different questions?
But before I take you one single step into kundalini and awakening and any of the rest of it, I have to say the blunt thing out loud, because if I don’t, everything that follows reads like a man talking himself out of his own diagnosis. So here it is, plainly. I might actually be dying. Not in the poetic, ego-death, isn’t-that-beautiful sense. In the literal one. My kidneys are spilling protein they should not be spilling, that can be the leading edge of real decline, and people die where that road ends. I am in medicine. I know exactly what the bad version of this looks like, and I am not pretending it isn’t on the table.
So understand me clearly: I am not reaching for the spiritual reading because I am in denial about the medical one. I am holding both at the same time, with my eyes fully open, and I am going to keep holding both the whole way through this. If at any point I sound like I have traded the real story for the pretty one, please call me out. I would rather be real and honest with myself and you.
Because the more I sit inside these episodes instead of running from them, the more I notice that what my body is doing lines up almost exactly with something the world’s contemplative traditions have described for thousands of years. They didn’t describe awakening as a warm bath of light. That’s the Instagram version. The people who actually went through it described something that looks disturbingly like what happens to me on my worst nights.
We are told enlightenment is beautiful, peaceful, gentle. And the destination may well be. But almost nobody tells you that the passage can feel like an ordeal. That the shedding of old patterns, the unwinding of a self you spent fifty years building, can move through the body as heat and shaking and electricity and raw, animal fear.
I want to walk you through what I found. Then I want to give you the framework I’m actually using to live inside this, because a story without a usable model is just me talking about myself, and that has never been the point of what I do.
The map I didn’t expect to find
Start with the tradition that mapped the body side of this most precisely.
Kundalini shows up in the tantric texts from around the 10th century onward. The image is specific: a coiled serpent of dormant energy resting at the base of the spine, in the root center the tradition calls Muladhara. Awakened through practice, it’s said to rise up through the body’s energy channels, activating each center in turn until it reaches the crown, opening into expanded states of consciousness. In that lineage kundalini is the individual expression of Shakti, the universal principle of creative power. Shakti is cosmic. Kundalini is your own share of that same creative force, coiled and asleep at the base of you.
Even the strict non-dual traditions made room for it. Advaita Vedanta, Shankara’s non-dualism, isn’t primarily a kundalini path.... it points straight at direct knowledge of Brahman as the only reality. But later teachers in that line, Ramakrishna among them, folded kundalini in as valid experience inside the non-dual frame. The phenomena are real. They’re just ultimately understood as movements of consciousness itself, not something separate from it.
You do not have to believe one literal word of the serpent for what comes next to matter. Hold it as a map, not a photograph. What matters is what the tradition says the rising feels like. The phenomena even have a name, kriyas, and when I read the classical list for the first time I had to put the book down. Shaking and involuntary twitching. Sensations of heat or electrical current moving through the body. Waves of old emotion surfacing from nowhere. Breath going strange. And underneath a lot of it, fear. The list reads like the intake notes from my own worst nights, written by someone who never met me, a very long time ago.
Then it got more interesting, because this is not just old scripture. A psychiatrist named Bruce Greyson, at the University of Virginia, built an actual research instrument called the Physio-Kundalini Syndrome Index.... a questionnaire used to tell the difference between a spiritual crisis and a mental illness. The items include spontaneous body movements, tingling and vibration, sensations of intense heat or cold moving through the body, and internally felt energy and light.
And here is the finding that stopped me cold, given the dream I’ve carried since my twenties. Greyson found that people who had been through a near-death experience reported roughly twice as many of these symptoms as people who had never come close to death. The people whose bodies had brushed up against dying were the ones lighting up this energy scale afterward.
I have not clinically died. But I have spent this year with a body that keeps convincing itself it’s about to. And I keep scoring, in my own life, on a scale built to describe exactly that overlap.... the place where dying and awakening turn out to use the same road.
Fear lives in the root. And so do the kidneys.
This is the part that genuinely undid me, because it connected the spiritual map to the exact organ that put me on the floor.
In the traditional chakra psychology, the emotion that lives at the root center, Muladhara, is fear. Fear of survival. Fear of instability. Fear of abandonment. Fear of death. The root is the ground floor of the self, the place that answers the oldest question a nervous system ever asks: am I safe, am I going to make it. And in that same map, the kidneys and the adrenal system.... your body’s literal survival and stress machinery.... are tied to that root center.
Now watch what that lens does to my story. When you live in chronic fear at the root level, the whole system contracts. The pelvic floor tightens. Energy stops flowing freely through the base of you. And your kidneys, in that map, are sitting inside a body held in a permanent low-grade survival clench. Then kundalini stirs, and it has to move up through the root first, which means the very first thing it does is force a reckoning with all the fear stored there. It surfaces it. It moves the stuck charge. And here is the cruel, honest catch: in the moving, the fear can spike hard before it clears. You have to feel it on the way out.
Line that up against my life. My symptom is in the kidney. My episodes are pure survival terror, fight or flight with no predator in the room, blood pressure surging out of the exact adrenal system the tradition ties to the root. It is as if something is moving up through the most fear-contracted floor of me, and my body is reading the movement as an emergency.
And my fear had a real address. About a year and a half before I ever hit the floor, my whole business collapsed. The thing I had built came apart, and I was terrified.... not a passing worry, a deep, nightly, bottom-of-the-stomach terror about my future, my work, my home, my reputation, whether I was going to be okay. That fear didn’t announce itself as a kidney problem. It just moved in and lived at the base of me for a year and a half, quiet and constant, in the exact place the old map says survival fear pools. And then my body started spilling protein. I am not telling you the fear caused the disease. I don’t know that, and I won’t claim it. I am telling you the fear was there first, in the right location, for a long time, and I would be a dishonest observer if I pretended those two facts had nothing to say to each other.
Do I know that’s what’s happening? No. I’m holding a traditional map over a medical condition and noticing that the shapes match, and that noticing is not the same as proving. But the shapes match so cleanly that I can no longer un-see it. The fear, the kidney, the adrenal surge, the root. Same floor. Same fire.
Fear was almost never called fear
Here is something I had to learn the hard way, and it reorganized how I work with every hard feeling I have. Fear almost never shows up wearing a name tag that says fear. It comes dressed as something else, something that feels more acceptable, more justified, more like a problem out there than a terror in here.
Over the years I started noticing something in my practice. People’s difficult emotions… that I had seen as distinct and seperate…. all seemed to converge on the same thing underneath. And when I lined them up, they spelled the word out for me…. AFRAID. This is my model, and it is simple on purpose, because you need something you can actually remember while it’s happening.
The faces of fear spell AFRAID:
Anger.... fear that has gone on the offensive.
Frustration.... fear that it isn’t working and never will.
Resistance.... fear of taking action.
Anxiety.... fear of making a choice, not having a choice or not being able to own a choice.
Insecurity.... fear that we are not good enough, worthy enough.
Depression.... fear that there is no hope and everything is empty and meaningless.
Six masks. One face. I stopped asking “why are people so angry, so stuck, so anxious” and started asking “what are they so afraid of underneath that they have forgetten.” You cannot release a feeling you have misnamed. Half the reason my fear was running me is that I didn’t recognize it as fear and kept calling it other things.
So what do you do once you’ve named it? You don’t white-knuckle it into silence. Fear is a contraction, a clenching, a pulling-in.... and you don’t beat a contraction by squeezing harder. You meet it with its opposite. Not courage in the tough-guy sense. Flow. Expansion. The state I’ve come to call elevated flow, and it has a shape I can hold too, even mid-episode.
ELEVATED FLOW: Enjoyment, Love, Excitement, Vitality, Appreciation, Trust, Engagement, Delight, Fun, Laughter, Openness, Wonder.
That is not a mood I sit around waiting to feel. It is a direction I deliberately try to tune into, even while I’m shaking. I can’t always get there, and I’m not pretending I can. But I’ve learned that fear and this loving flow are two ends of one dial, and that I have more hand on that dial than I ever believed. Appreciation is available even when I’m scared. So is wonder. So is trust.... which is exactly why trust is the third move in the framework I’m about to give you. Meeting AFRAID with ELEVATED FLOW is not pretending the fear isn’t there. It’s refusing to let the fear be the only thing in the room.
“Die before you die”
The overlap between dying and awakening is not new information to the traditions. It’s the whole teaching.
There is a saying that runs through Sufism, Islamic mysticism, and it is blunt: die before you die. The Sufis called the ego’s dissolution fana, annihilation, and the state on the other side of it baqa, an abiding. The point was never physical death. The point was to let the conditioned self.... the desires, the attachments, the whole story of “me”.... die while you are still alive to watch it go, so that you are free before your body ever gets the memo.
It is not only the Sufis. Plato has Socrates describe philosophy itself as a practice of dying. In the Tibetan tradition there is a practice, Chöd, where the practitioner meditatively offers up the body and self entirely. Different centuries, different languages, no contact between them, and the same instruction: the way to be fully alive is to rehearse letting go of the self before you’re forced to.
Read that as a clinician facing his own mortality and something reorganizes. What if the episodes are not only my kidneys, or only my nervous system misfiring? What if my body, for reasons I did not choose, has been drafted into the oldest curriculum there is? What if I am being made to practice dying.... and the practice is doing to me exactly what the mystics said it would?
Because here is the part I can’t explain away, and it’s the reason I’m writing this instead of just white-knuckling my way through the next episode.
My life keeps getting better while my body falls apart
By every reasonable expectation, a year like the one I’ve had should have wrecked me. A terminal diagnosis, then a reprieve, then a body that keeps staging its own death. That should produce a smaller, more frightened, more bitter man.
It has produced the opposite.
I am more compassionate than I have ever been. I am more loving. I have cried more. I have connected more. I have asked for help more and given it more. I love what I do with an intensity that almost embarrasses me. I feel connected to life in a way I simply was not five years ago.... like insights and understandings arrive on their own, downloaded unbidden, and I’m just there to receive them. My love of self, humanity and life has gotten better and better and better while my inner alarm system has been screaming that I’m ending.
I did not make that up as a coping story. When I went looking, I found that it has a research signature, and the signature is not from a wellness blog. It’s from the near-death literature.
The most robust finding in the study of near-death experiences is what happens to people afterward. Not during. After. Bruce Greyson and other researchers have documented, across decades and hundreds of cases, a consistent cluster of aftereffects: a greatly reduced fear of death, a sharp increase in compassion, a rise in sense of purpose and appreciation for life, a turn toward the spiritual, and a falling away of interest in status and material gain. And these changes don’t fade. They hold steady twenty years later.
Read that list again, because I did, several times, sitting very still. Reduced fear of death. More compassion. More purpose. Deeper spirituality. Less concern with status. That is not a description of a study population to me. That is a description of the last five years of my life… especially the last one.
And it lines up with the other work I’ve been doing, the part some people will roll their eyes at and I’ll name anyway. Alongside years of deep-diving the energetics of the body and personal transformation, I’ve done careful psychedelic work. The research there points the same direction: the degree to which people experience what the scientists call “ego dissolution”.... the temporary, terrifying, liberating loss of the sense of a separate self.... predicts lasting improvements in wellbeing afterward. The death of the small self, it turns out, is measurably good for the person who survives it.
So I’m left holding two facts that refuse to separate. My body keeps rehearsing death. And my soul, for lack of a less loaded word, keeps expanding. I have stopped assuming those are unrelated.
The morning I cried like a child
Let me tell you what happened a few days ago, because it’s the closest I’ve come to watching the mechanism work in real time.
The fear came up strong. One of the bad ones. And instead of clamping down on it the way instinct screams at you to, I did the thing I’ve been slowly learning: I let it move. I stopped bracing. I let the wave have me.
And it turned into crying. Not a few tears. The kind of crying I genuinely have not done since I was a child. It came up from somewhere underneath everything and it shook me, and I let it, and when it finally passed I was different. Something had cleared. My mind was quieter. I was more accepting, less afraid of the whole situation than I’d been in months. I hadn’t reasoned my way there. I had cried my way there. The best way I can describe the whole thing, honestly, is a bad psychedelic trip.... the same destabilizing, surfacing, reorganizing work, running without the medicine.
Here is the reframe I want to hand you from that morning, and I want you to consider it, because it changed how I understand every hard emotion now.
Crying is not weakness leaving the body. Crying is stored fear leaving the body.
That is what the tears were. Not just catharsis, not just feeling sad. My nervous system was discharging fear charge that had been locked in the tissue.... in the root, in the kidney, in the oldest floor of me.... for decades. The tears literally seemed to be carrying the neurochemistry of that fear state out of me. And the acceptance on the other side wasn’t me deciding to be more accepting. It was my system recalibrating to a deeper setting of safety, because the charge that had been holding the old fear in place was finally gone.
This is where anger fits, and it’s worth understanding, because anger was near the top of that AFRAID list for a reason for a lot of my younger life. Anger is the bodyguard. Grief and fear are who it’s guarding. Anger sits on top, a protective layer that keeps you from having to feel the helplessness underneath. When you let it really move, through the body, through your voice, through motion, it’s also charge leaving. But it’s the outer layer. Follow it honestly and anger almost always gives way to crying, because underneath the heat is the fear it was protecting. Don’t stop at the anger. The real clearing is in the grief and the fear beneath it.
This is why the instruction, in the traditions and in my own room at 3am, is always the same word. Don’t fight it. Trust, surrender, let go…. allow it to move through. What I have found, over and over, is that when I stop resisting, it resolves. When I resist, it rules me. The clearing never comes in the fighting. It seems to always arrive in the surrender.
Now the honest part, because I would never let a patient skip it
I need to stop here and do the thing that separates real teaching from spiritual bypass, because if I don’t, I’ve failed you and I’ve failed myself.
None of what I just wrote cancels the medicine. It sits alongside it.
I still have proteinuria, and a lot of it. My kidneys could, in fact, be beginning a slow decline, and one honest version of my future is end-stage renal disease and dialysis and a death that is nothing more mystical than an organ wearing out. I hold that possibility with open eyes. The episodes themselves have plain medical names in the differential.... there is a well-described condition where blood pressure surges violently with a feeling of doom and no tumor to blame, and it lives right at the border of the nervous system and the mind. My symptoms need to be watched by people with lab tests, not just witnessed by me on a meditation cushion. I get worked up. I stay in care. I have not once used the word “awakening” as a reason to skip a nephrology appointment, and if you take one practical thing from this article, let it be that one.
People in this world love to talk about spontaneous healing, so let me be a clinician about that too. The traditions do describe it.... chronic conditions resolving during or after deep activation.... but they describe it as rare, unpredictable, and never guaranteed. There is no good clinical data showing this kind of energy work cures disease at scale. What there is, is anecdote, usually from lifelong practitioners, and a quiet selection problem, because the person who heals tells the story and the person for whom nothing changed stays silent. Could this deep somatic and nervous-system work support my healing.... through stress reduction, through the body coming out of a decades-long clench? Genuinely, possibly. Is it a replacement for monitoring my kidneys? Absolutely not. It’s a complement. Hold both.
This is what I mean when I say I try to live in the extreme middle. A frightening physical symptom is a physical symptom until proven otherwise, and it gets a physical workup, every time. There are hard red lines.... if you are having thoughts of harming yourself, if you genuinely cannot function, if the body is in real danger, that is not a passage to interpret, it’s an emergency to treat, and you go get help and you feel no shame about it. In every wisdom tradition worth its salt, the sick were cared for, not lectured.
And.... both things at once.... the meaning I make of a passage that has already been medically respected is also real, and it is mine to make, and it can transform the whole experience of it. The physiology is real. The meaning is real. Neither one gets to eat the other. That both/and is not me hedging. It is the most honest position I know how to hold. It is also the most useful orientation to adopt even if I am dying. Either way I am training to trust the transition. Death, whether physical or psychological seems to want to teach me.
What I think is actually happening
Here is how I’ve come to understand it. Let me be honest about what this next part is: it’s my read, my extension of the science and the traditions, not a settled finding.
First, an on-ramp, because I never want language to lock anyone out. Physicists call it the quantum field. Atheists call it the nervous system. Religious people call it God. Call it what you want. The mechanic I’m about to describe works in every one of those languages.
The self you walk around as.... your personality, your fears, the whole “I” with your name on it.... is not a fixed thing you were born with. It’s a structure that got built, mostly when you were young, mostly without your consent. A story about who you are and what the world is, repeated until it hardened, with old emotion running through it like steel rebar through cement. The story is the cement. The emotion is the rebar. Together they set into the thing you’ve been calling “me.” And in the yogic language, that hardened conditioning has a name too.... the samskaras, the grooves and imprints left in you by everything you lived through.
That structure is not just in your head. This is the ground my entire body of work stands on. Identity runs downstream into the body. The nervous system spends decades performing the self you decided you were.... the braced shoulders, the high idle it holds you at, the hormonal tone, the immune tone. I say it this way: the body doesn’t just keep the score. It plays it. Consciousness to cell, top down, every time.
Now follow the logic to my situation. What happens when that structure finally starts to move? When a business collapse, a diagnosis, a mortality scare, years of inner work, and psychedelic medicine all conspire to loosen a self that has been load-bearing for fifty years?
The body notices. Of course it notices. A nervous system that has performed one identity for five decades registers the dissolving of that identity the way it registers any structural threat.... with full alarm. Heat. Twitching. A pounding heart. Electricity. And the precise, total, cellular certainty that I am dying. Because something is dying. Not me. The structure. The frightened, defended, smaller self I built to survive a world I met as a child.
Read my episodes through that lens and they stop being only a malfunction and start being, at least in part, a demolition. The twitching is what a body does when a decades-old brace finally lets go. The surfacing terror is the rebar coming out of old cement. The morning of crying was a whole slab of it discharging at once. And the glimpses I catch underneath the fear.... the moments where I realize I’m still here, watching, and I am not the panic.... those are the moments I’ve stepped far enough back from the structure to see it isn’t the whole of me.
Is that the entire explanation? I doubt it. My kidneys are real, and the dying might be too. The mystics clearly believed something more was moving than nervous-system bracing, and I hold genuine respect for the possibility that they were right about more than we can currently measure. I’m not going to claim certainty I don’t have, in either direction.
The framework I’m actually using: Accept. Release. Trust.
A model is useless if you can’t hold it while you’re twitching on the floor at 3am convinced it’s over. So here is what I actually do, the three moves I’ve been practicing my way into, in order. I offer them as what has worked for me, not as a prescription.
Accept. The first move is to stop fighting the wave, because fighting it is throwing gasoline on it. When the alarm hits, the whole body wants to brace against the sensation, and the bracing is itself read by the nervous system as more threat, which makes more sensation, which makes more fear. The oldest loop there is. Acceptance breaks the first link. Not “I like this.” Not “this is fine.” Just: this is happening, and I am going to stop adding a second war on top of it. I say to myself, out loud sometimes, this is the passage, others have crossed it, my only job right now is to watch and realize it just is.
Release. The second move is to let it move through me instead of damming it up. This is where the crying lives. Underneath every episode is a fist clenched around make it end. Release is opening the fist and letting whatever wants to move, move.... the shaking, the electricity, and yes, the tears. It’s here that “die before you die” stops being a nice quote and becomes a technology. I let the frightened self do its dying. I don’t rescue it. Every tradition that mapped this landed on the same unglamorous word.... surrender.... and I used to think surrender was weakness. It is the single hardest and strongest thing I do all week. And what I’ve learned in my own body is the plain mechanism underneath it: what you let move, moves out. What you fight, stays and runs you.
Trust. The third move is the one I can only sometimes reach, and it changes everything when I do. This is where I reach for the elevated states.... trust most of all. When the fear rises, I ask the old question the yogis asked: to whom is this happening? And I try to rest as the one who is aware of the panic rather than the panic itself. The heat is there, the twitching is there, the doom is there.... and there is something watching all three that is none of them, and that something is not afraid. Trust is betting my weight on that watcher. Trusting that whether this ends in more life or in actual death, the awareness underneath the structure is not the thing that’s dissolving. I lose this footing constantly. The practice is not never falling in. It’s noticing I fell in, and stepping back out. That’s the rep.
And then, always, I ground it, because I am a clinician and not a romantic. I eat. I sleep. I walk outside slowly. I stay close to the people who love the ordinary me. I keep my appointments. I don’t let my stress and fear contaminate others… i let it remind me to love others and myself. The energy is only worth anything if it gets integrated into an actual human life, and integration looks embarrassingly like Tuesday.
Learning to die is how I am learning to live
So which is it? Am I dying, or am I awakening?
I told you I wouldn’t pretend to know, and I don’t. It’s entirely possible my body is beginning to fail and these are the early tremors of the end. That is a real branch of this, not a figure of speech. And if that’s what’s happening, then I am being given something almost no one gets.... a long, conscious, repeated rehearsal of the one passage we all have to make. A training round for my own death. I have decided that is not a curse. It is a privilege most people would give anything for and almost no one is offered.
It’s also possible that this is an opening. That the same energy the old traditions called kundalini is moving old, hardened structure out of a body that spent fifty years clenched, starting with the fear pooled at the very root of me, and that what feels like dying is a self I no longer need finally letting go. That I am not being broken. I am being unbuilt, so that something truer can be built in its place.
Here is what I’ve landed on, and it’s the whole reason I wanted to write this here instead of keeping it in my journal. I have stopped needing it to be one or the other. Because whether this is a physical death I’m rehearsing or a psychological death I’m undergoing, the work is identical. Accept. Release. Trust. Let the fear move. Let the tears come. Meet the AFRAID with something elevated. Let the frightened self die, and rest as the awareness that doesn’t. And whatever happens next, I will have practiced meeting it awake instead of clenched.
I have spent my career telling people that pain is the path to purpose, that our suffering is our greatest source of meaning, that our hurt becomes our way to help. It’s easy to teach when the pain is behind you and safely turned into a lesson. It is another thing entirely to teach it from inside the wave, not knowing how the story ends. I genuinely don’t know how mine ends. I might be here in thirty years, and I might not.
So I’ll say it from in here, twitching and unsure and more alive and in love than I’ve ever been: I don’t know if I’m dying or waking up. But I know the man in that dream thirty years ago was real… because he is dying now… whether it is physical or psychological he is no longer me.
Maybe that’s all awakening ever was. Not the arrival of something beautiful. The letting-go of everything that was never really you.... which, on the way out, feels exactly like dying, and on the other side, feels exactly like coming home.
PS.... I built something for the people walking their own version of awakening.... It’s called The Human Game, and it’s the whole method I use to work with exactly this: the frightened self, the awakened self, and what gets built on the other side. If any of this landed, that’s where I’d point you next: The Human Game. And if it didn’t land today, that’s alright too. Maybe this will be something to reach for when it is time.