Ep 127: Death, Endings & New Beginnings

Stepping into the potentially unwelcome territory of endings can feel like a plunge into the unknown. Could this be a portal to profound growth and spiritual deepening? Join us as we journey through our personal narratives to uncover the profound wisdom embedded within endings. From the heart-wrenching experience of bereavement to the subtler moments of letting go, we delve into the raw and often unexplored terrains of our life transitions. We entertain the idea of mortality, challenging our common illusions of immortality that often keep us from living in the present.

In this episode we acknowledge the beauty of endings and the importance of a 'neutral zone'.   This episode will guide you in embracing the end of a chapter, and how acknowledging the loss can actually catalyse your spiritual growth and decision-making for future beginnings.  

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Truth and Transcendence brought to you by being Space with Katherine Llewellyn. Truth and Transcendence, episode 127. This is the final episode of Truth and Transcendence this year and it felt timely to talk about one of my favourite themes, which is death and endings. I had a sad introduction to the importance of this because at the age of 10, my mother passed away, and at that point this was in the 1960s.

Speaker 1: 0:45

In the UK it wasn't considered proper or correct for young children to go to a funeral of a parent. What we were told at the time was that this was because it would be too upsetting for us, possibly traumatising for us, and so forth. That's just the few people who decided to, in whispered voice, give us a reason. Most people just refused to give us a reason and change the subject when we asked why we were not going to be allowed to be there. I remember at the time feeling this didn't feel right. There was a feeling of loss. Of course, there was the deep feeling of loss of my mother, but also not being committed to go to the funeral and pay my respects and grieve in the company of others who also loved her. This just felt wrong. I was only 10, what did I know, but it wasn't until years later that I realised that not being allowed or permitted to experience that particular the word celebration is the one I want to use, and people don't often use that in regard to a funeral the celebration of her life and of the love that she gave me and that she gave birth to me and all the things that she bequeathed to me through her presence and who she was, as well, of course, as genetically. It wasn't until years later that I was able to realise that not being able to go to that funeral was much more significant than I'd recognised at the time. And in fact I was working with a practitioner supervisor at the time who was a very talented person and had a very strong relationship with the celebration of endings, letting go, grieving fully, and we did a reenactment of the funeral and I must have been in my 30s by this time and it felt incredibly vivid and important and powerful. And I realised at that point that I actually had a deep respect and appreciation for the importance of recognising and fully experiencing endings, honouring endings, honouring our experience of the ending and of the loss, because after reenacting that funeral, all sorts of things shifted for me irrevocably and permanently in my life, and I realised that that was just one of a whole series of experiences in my life that assisted me to be somebody who actually understands and welcomes endings and even death.

Speaker 1: 3:25

So over here in the Western world, we're not allowed to say that we celebrate death. Because we're so progress oriented, we're so results oriented. Everything's always got to be growing forever.

Speaker 1: 3:40

In the business world, there's the illusion, or the myth, that the purpose is to keep your business growing and growing and growing and growing, and with the idea and the hope that it will exist forever. Well, as one of my clients told me when I interviewed him for my e-book about Chairman, this man was in his, I think, late 70s, early 80s at this point, and he said every organisation comes to an end, every single one. And I thought are you being a bit dramatic? You know, do they, though? And then he reeled off a whole series of what had been household names. My favourite example is a shop called Woolworths, which, in the UK, it was like part of the landscape. The idea of a world without Woolworths was completely inconceivable, and then one day it was gone, and the next day, metaphorically, everyone had forgotten all about it. It had never existed ever.

Speaker 1: 4:41

Now that's in the UK I'm sure there are examples as well in the US and wherever you may happen to be at the moment but we have this kind of illusion that everything is supposed to keep going forever and that even mentioning the possibility that it won't is wrong, disloyal, betraying something. Now I'm speaking very, very generally here. So if you're sitting there thinking, well, I don't feel that way, I think that way Then please bear with me, because what I'm talking about is an archetype. I'm talking about an aspect of the human condition, which is the aspect which is closely bonded to the ego self, which says I'm here, I'm going to be here forever, I am immortal and I have to believe that. I have to believe that because if I don't believe that, I'm opening myself up for all sorts of pain, all sorts of difficult experiences, all sorts of acknowledgments of vulnerability. So this illusion of immortality really gets in the way for us. I was thinking earlier about a very simple example.

Speaker 1: 5:55

We talk a lot about being present in the present moment. The thing about being present in the present moment and I think we all know why that's a wonderful thing to be is you cannot be present in the present moment. If you are trying to be in the previous moment, if you're trying to hang on to the previous moment, by definition you can't. You have to let go of the death of the previous moment in order to be fully in the current moment. The same applies in relationships. You have to let go of the death of one friendship, one partnership, one love relationship, one colleague relationship, whatever it might be. You have to let go of the ending of that before you can be fully present in the one that you're in in that moment. Actually, even if, let's say, you're in a wonderful relationship and you're 20 years in and you're going to be another 20 years in and it's really authentic and alive and it's wonderful, even in that case, if you're then in a room with someone else altogether, or another group of people, you have to actually let go of that existing love relationship in that moment in order to fully be with the people that you're with.

Speaker 1: 7:16

This is something I've noticed in the podcasting world which I'm delighted me, absolutely delighted me which is podcast hosts who can be completely and utterly present, authentically present with a guest, as if they haven't already interviewed multiple other guests and don't have multiple others keyed up for next week to interview again, and each guest shows up and is present and authentic, with a new host right off the bat. Now, of course, we all have different capacities for that kind of presence, but one of the ingredients that really supports it is the capacity and willingness and the courage really to let go of the old, let go of the past, let go of the previous connection, which, of course, lives on permanently in your heart and in your body. It will never go away, but in terms of your consciousness we have to let go of it. So what is the benefit? What are the other benefits of being able to let go, being able to recognize endings, being able to fully experience a death, fully being with it in the moment, when it's current and when it's happening, and, shortly after for the grieving period, being fully with the grieving and then letting go of that. What's the benefit? Well, the first benefit is that when we fully experience any kind of ending, whether it's a death or some other much simpler, more perhaps less significant or less emotional ending, we are fully embracing and receiving the experience of our life in that moment. And being in that utterly receptive space is incredibly nourishing to the spirit and to the soul. It also allows in all of the data that's being offered us and allows us deep, wonderful learning.

Speaker 1: 9:20

I had various clients who were. There were a lot of situations where people were having to downsize large organizations and let go of people, or people were as mergers happening and people being shuffled from one executive role to another, and so there were a lot of endings going on people leaving, teams forming different team structures, team leaders moving on, directors moving on to a different site, different location, whatever it might be. And some of these clients said to me Catherine, I feel like this whole experience tends to be very awkward, tends to be something I'd rather avoid, tends to be something that everyone would rather avoid because it's just too depressing. But I've got this feeling that avoiding it is not a good idea and, of course, I would say I think you're absolutely right. If you're avoiding it, you're avoiding and denying an aspect of the life fully experienced.

Speaker 1: 10:19

So we had conversations and we decided to actually celebrate and sort of dive deep into the experience of the ending. So I helped them to facilitate discussions, group discussions with teams that they were leaving, individual discussions with particular people where they talked about the ending, they discussed the experience of it. They celebrated what had brought them to that place. They celebrated the beauty and the performance and the inventiveness and the creativity and everything else that they'd created together. And then they celebrated the fact that they were all going to go off from there and take with them all of that knowledge, all of that personal expansion, all of those enhanced capacities into whatever they did next. And the results were absolutely transformative and extraordinary. The people who moved to somewhere different were able to move into the new experience much more powerfully than they'd ever been able to before, because they fully experienced and metabolized that ending. The people they were leaving behind had no resentment, they didn't feel abandoned, they felt enriched by the whole process and they were able to rise up from that into a better place Absolutely wonderful outcomes, which, of course, were expressed on the bottom line in ways that my clients told me were tangible. So I thought that's absolutely wonderful.

Speaker 1: 11:55

Another really important aspect of endings and deaths is that sometimes we need what some people call a neutral zone after the ending, and what I mean by that is a period of time where you are not yet moving straight into the new beginning. It's a period of time where you are metabolizing and integrating and grieving whatever it is you need to do, whether it's by yourself or with other people. So this is not the same as the facilitated discussions about the ending. This is after that, after the divorce, after the breakup, after selling the business, after the merger, after whatever it is. That's when you need time very often to integrate and ground that experience and experience the loss and accept the loss and celebrate the experience of loss as well, because when we experience loss, that is a manifestation of how much we actually cared and loved whatever it was that's gone. So the experience of loss is actually a beautiful thing because of that connection. When we have no experience of loss, it either means we're cutting off from our experience, or it means that the thing we've lost doesn't really matter to us, or that we are pretending it doesn't really matter to us. So when we go through that neutral zone, that also expands us, deepens our perception, turns us into bigger people, more sensitive, more empathetic, more compassionate, more courageous, stronger on the inside, and that then enables us to move into our new beginning much, much more powerfully, and very often it makes it easier for us to make the right choices about our new beginning.

Speaker 1: 13:51

People talk about people that you know. In relationships, there are people who have a pattern of starting a new relationship before they've even ended the previous relationship, and this is common. It's not great. It's not great for anybody, and I've had conversations with people and I've actually been one of these people when I was much younger who were terrified of not being in a relationship and who felt if they were not in a relationship, they were not valid people in some way. And for people like that, actually having a period of time by themselves which would count as a neutral zone in this context is just incredibly empowering, because it then meant when they went back into the next relationship, they were not doing it for reasons of avoiding solitude, they were doing it for reasons of celebrating and loving in that new relationship.

Speaker 1: 14:48

And the same applies in work situations. I actually have a bit of a history of leaving one thing in a work sense before I've got any idea where I'm going, and one of the effects of this is I've been able to experience multiple neutral zones and really consider where I'm going, and generally it's really elevated me in terms of my own growth and my own spiritual expansion as well. So for me that's really, really worked. For a lot of people, that would just be madness and a crazy thing to do. However, there are, I think, for all of us, opportunities to pay more attention to endings, to acknowledge the power and the wonderfulness and beauty of endings and I'm including deaths in that and there are opportunities for all of us to embrace the neutral zone and take our time with the new ending and really practice incorporating, integrating and grounding all of the experiences around endings, deaths, loss and all of that. So, as we come to the end of 2023, I hope you've had a wonderful year.

Speaker 1: 16:05

Thank you so much for supporting Truth and Transcendence. Every single download, every single review, every single message I receive from listeners makes all the difference, and I'm just delighted and thrilled that you're all out there. I'm on a buzz sprout which shows me maps of where in the world people are listening, and every now and again, someone pops up in a country or a state that I've never heard of. I think you're fantastic. Who is that person? I've no idea. Bless them, and I hope they enjoyed the episode. Oh, they do not. It doesn't go down to. You know your street and your house number or name. It's just your country. So you are not being surveilled. So thank you again, have a wonderful holiday period and I look forward to seeing you in the new year. Thank you.