The Death of Me
Printed from http://www.bodytalksystem.com//learn/news/article.cfm?id=1106 on Mar 29, 2024.
Oct 04, 2021
By Terryann Nikides
At 11 years old, my grandmother's brother, a tall, strong, handsome
man of only 48 years old, came to visit. I sensed something was wrong. My grandmother
and mother were not home. He left. My mother arrived to find me panicking. She
said she would see him later. I was not relieved. The moment is frozen in my
mind.
My bedroom was next to where the green rotary phone was kept. It was
ringing in the wee hours of the morning. My mother picked up the phone. She said,
"What? What happened?" I knew he was gone. I had known it all day--this feeling of
loss. Death's smell permeated the air, even before it happened. She continued,
"A car accident? He is dead!" I lay in bed crying, my chest heavy with loss. Not
only the loss of my uncle but the loss of childhood and the fleeting moment
where I might have warned him.
Not only was my mother's family impacted by the loss of my uncle,
but my father had his own story of grief to transmute. My father's father died
at 48, when my father was only 6 years old. My great uncle and father had
become dear friends. My great uncle's death was at the exact same age as my grandfather's!
I grieved for my father's loss of both men in his life.
And so, I began to prepare myself for the death of my grandparents.
We lived in the same home. At my young age, they seemed old; of course, they
were not. They had many years to live. But I was driven to prepare for their
death at the tender age of 11.
As I passed through the death of my childhood, and teen years gave
way to young adulthood, fantastical notions of life died as well. Awareness of
death made its way into my daily life, including the death of how I used my
intuition. The use of my intuition, since age 3, could be easily described as,
"If I knew something was going to happen, then I could prevent it." My
intuition and the death of my uncle rigidified the notion that "I could control
an outcome." However, life clearly demonstrated that this was not possible. This
led to great mental conflict.
In my twenties, I began meditating for eight hours a night and
practicing different methods of manipulating my intuition, such as rewiring the mind and channeling. My greatest nemesis was the mind's
contents – thoughts. The greatest suffering I experienced was in my thinking. I
mistakenly thought that I could resolve each conflict in my mind with opposing
thoughts. What resulted were further conflicting thoughts! I kept thinking, "I
need to die to the old thinking, to the old me. Then and only then will I be
free." But how?
In one of the moments where I was melodramatically pitying myself,
falling deeper and deeper into desperation, something alchemical occurred. I
saw clearly what needed to be done. I was to meditate on DEATH. Each day, I was
to awaken to, "today is my last day." My first experience was alleviation of
conflict.
At the time, I was working in the family business. It was a very
hard time. I had been inexplicably fainting for five years. It had become quite
dangerous. I had smashed my face on a steel bar, fallen under a moving bus, and
been found at an elevator with the doors opening and closing on me.
After a few years of meditating on death, I noticed that the strength
of the "me" concept was waning. One day, I awoke without the need to outperform
the previous day to please my father. I awoke without the need for security. I awoke
without the need for anything. This single day marked my resignation from the
family business, and I stopped fainting entirely.
In one fell swoop, my old life – the old notions of "me" – died and something
new was born: Adventure. Life was now unimpeded by delusions of "what if." I
continued to meditate daily on death. I lived every day as though it was my
last.
However, after years of practice, what became evident was that I had
not killed the concept of "me." The "me" concept continued to plague my mind.
In my teen years, I would dramatically tell my mother that I wanted to kill
myself. In my melodrama, I omitted telling her it was my mind's concept of
myself that I wanted to die not my Self! Ah, the drama of a Greek teenager.
What became clear eventually is that I did not like mental conflict.
It all came down to the concept of what I thought was "me" and a
massively agonizing addiction to these thoughts. Of course, at the time, I only
wanted the concept of "me" to die, but I had yet to become aware of my
identification with the contents of my mind.
Early in my career as an energy practitioner, what struck me most
was the ubiquitous focus on symptomatology, rather than the "source" of
symptoms. The mind's inability to grasp paradoxical sources of illness meant
that it only focused on what was most obvious – the symptom. However, tending to
symptoms impedes the capacity to be present to "what is" and focuses on "what
isn't." This harkens back to my
childhood thinking that "If I knew something might happen, then I could control
the outcome." Such thinking clearly omits the complexity of life. For example,
as a child, if I knew a relationship would ultimately not work out, then I
should help prevent the relationship. Such an assessment assumes that life,
death and rebirth should be eliminated. Stilted, neurotic, childish thinking cannot
bear the complexity of a relationship where children will be born to the couple,
there will be good times and bad, there will be new insights, old patterns will
die, there will be learning, exploring and adventure. There will exist an
entire journey.
Horizontal, linear thinking tries to eliminate the journey and witnesses
only the symptom or outcome, such as "the relationship will ultimately not
work." Of course, prognostication, running around like Cassandra yelling "Troy"
is burning, has rarely catalyzed transformation. Ultimately, living life
without death (or simply being unwilling to experience an undesired outcome or
symptom) is anathema to living life. I finally awakened to the journey. Death
will come to everyone and everything as it is the nature of life.
Despite my realization that the journey was all there is, I did not
like, to say the least, the part of the journey that contained mental conflict.
Then I found myself in a BreakThrough course with its founder Esther
Veltheim. Throughout the class, I grieved – not for the loss of the "me" concept,
but for a lifetime of grief caused by the "me" concept and my years of unwitting
identification with it. I quickly became a BreakThrough Instructor.
I have often described BreakThrough as the French describe an orgasm – "le
petit mort," or "the little death" in English. In each class, in each session,
the "me" concept loses some of its grip. Or as Esther Veltheim describes it, in
BreakThrough we are "breaking the spell of the mind."
It has taken many years for the spell of this mind to break. Of
course, the complexity of the human psyche and my unconscious involvement
continues to be part of my journey. It will continue until it too dies and
something new is born.
Terryann Nikides, B.A.Psych
SrBrI, BrI, ParBP, CBP,
Reiki Master, SRI, Tarot Mastery