Episode 25: Navigating The Cosmic Death

Alchemical healing requires going through death. But it’s not an actual physical death. I call it “The Cosmic Death’ because it’s a death that affects you across the board of the mental, emotional and spiritual but leaves the physical intact. And that’s why, in my own opinion, it’s much more difficult to experience The Cosmic Death because it’s like being wide awake for your own heart and brain surgery. Or your own internal destruction. But you also get to be awake for your internal rebirth which is the reward for going through this extremely profound and life-changing experience. But how to navigate it? That’s the question. In today’s episode, I discuss the lead up to The Cosmic Death, the necessary Surrender, the brokenness one feels, followed by awareness and enLIGHTenment and rebirth into the “new.” This show is especially important if you are going through this difficult experience right now in your healing journey or if you feel you are about to surrender to it. 

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Transcript

            Welcome to Episode 25: “Navigating The Cosmic Death.”

            I’ve been putting together today’s show for over one year because the subject matter is such an integral part of alchemical healing that I could write an entire book on the subject. It’s, in fact, the biggest requirement of what alchemical transformation will demand of you. And that requirement is going through a death. But it’s not an actual physical death. I decided to call it “The Cosmic Death’ only because it’s a death that affects you across the board of the mental, emotional and spiritual but leaves the physical intact, meaning the Silver Cord isn’t cut and you stay put in this life. And that’s why in my own opinion, it’s much more difficult to experience The Cosmic Death because it’s like being wide awake for your own heart and brain surgery. Or your own internal destruction. But you also get to be awake for your internal rebirth which is the reward for going through this extremely profound and life-changing experience. But how to navigate it? That’s the question. How to, and I’m not going to say ‘gracefully’ go through it because while there’s grace within The Cosmic Death, you won’t gracefully enter into it or walk through it. You’ll fight it and you’ll question everything and you’ll think you’re going insane until you submit to it. 

            The way I view The Cosmic Death from my own perspective and from the perspective of those I’ve witnessed go through it, there are distinct stages to it. There is the lead up to it which is where the resistance to it goes into overdrive. This can go on for years if you allow it. Then there is the eventual surrender to it. That is where the break in your armor finally is allowed and the light shines in. There’s no going back from that point. Then there is the full physical, mental, emotional and spiritual experience of it. And finally, the release and the eventual rebirth, regeneration and renewal of your body, mind and spirit. You essentially become actualized in an entirely different life that you created for yourself after the death of all that no longer served your highest and greatest good. That all sounds very neat and tidy and I’ve simplified it just to give you an idea of where it leads. Because the sentence “Then there is the experience of it,” is a period that could last two solid years, depending on how committed you are to whatever you are healing as well as how willing you are to dive in, be brave and tread in some very dark waters. I’ve mentioned the term “The Dark Night of the Soul” in past episodes and I’m putting together an episode dedicated to what that is but part of what I refer to as The Cosmic Death contains within it The Dark Night of the Soul. The Dark Night could be looked on as the center or seed within the sphere of The Cosmic Death because you must go through that dense center seed and because it’s dense, it’s difficult to walk through but that seed holds within it the information that you’ll require to create or be reborn into the new or truer version of yourself. So agreeing to dive into that center seed of the Cosmic Death and coming out the other side is an absolute requirement of true alchemical transformative healing. Without the death, there is no rebirth. You can’t drag all the old shit from your past that made you sick and contributed to your undoing into this healthy future you claim to desire. A lot of that must die and you must be willing to not just say goodbye to it, but to dig the grave yourself and bury it. 

            The lead up to The Cosmic Death takes years and possibly decades to foment. And during that time, you’ve played the games, you’ve agreed to do things and allowed things you never believed you would do, you’ve stayed quiet to keep the peace, you possibly warped yourself into a person you don’t recognize anymore and you’ve been pounding square pegs into round holes and wondering why nothing is working. You find yourself staring off to the side a lot in a daze, locked and hovering and occasionally people may ask if you’re okay. You’ve had moments in the past when you’ve taken a few breaks and then bounced right back into the chaos that is now eating you alive. You’ve fantasized for years about packing a bag and driving away, leaving a note on the dining room table. It’s all a fantasy though. Until now. Now you feel bricked in and there’s no way out except through creating some kind of massive upending that will most likely shatter everything you’ve come to know as “your life.” But the feverish need to “I have to make some serious changes” is now a raging inferno in your mind’s eye. It’s all you think about. It keeps you awake at night. “I can’t do this anymore” becomes your daily mantra. You read a few books on personal transformation, and you can see yourself in those pages. You seek out podcasts that address this uncomfortable feeling you’re living with in an attempt to clutch onto some relevance or feel validated that you’re not going batshit crazy. Because that’s how you feel since nothing makes sense anymore. All the things that used to give you pleasure or fill in the dead space do nothing for you now. You listen to your friends talk or the people at work or your family and you feel completely disconnected from all of it. You put on your favorite music to shift your mood and it doesn’t deliver the same impact on you. You schedule a short getaway to “clear your head” but you can’t relax on the trip. There’s a dark energy that shadows you there. You drink a little more. Try a new antidepressant. That does nothing or makes you feel even worse. Nothing ‘out there’ can fix what feels completely broken inside you. All you desire is peace but all you feel on a daily basis is chaos and detachment from everything around you that used to fuel what you knew as ‘your life.’ And this can literally go on for years until….something happens. 

As I said in last week’s episode, nobody chooses the road less traveled which is the pathway of alchemical healing and body, mind, spirit transformation. That pathway always chooses you. And with that choice, your destruction comes to you and that is normally the driving force that creates the opportunity or the doorway forward for what will become your Cosmic Death and eventual rebirth. That destruction always shows up as a life event that cannot be ignored, pushed under the rug or minimized. It stares you right in the face and demands to be acknowledged. It can be the death of a cherished loved one. It can be the loss of a marriage or a career that you were closely identified with. It is often a diagnosis of some type of illness that may be undiagnosable or vague as to how it presents itself. It can be a severe depression that knocks you out of your life. No matter what the catalyzing agent is, that life event stops you dead in your tracks and now it cannot be ignored any longer. But even though it’s staring right at you and taunting you, you will still fight it. Because somewhere deep inside you, you can feel the magnitude of whatever this mysterious terrifying thing is that you can’t ignore any longer. And part of your terror is that you sense that death is approaching you. And you’re right! And that really puts you into a tailspin. 

Death? Oh, no no no. We gotta fight that. And you do fight it. That’s the resistance that rears up before the surrender to The Cosmic Death. And I’ve found, and I think I mentioned this before, that the depth and intensity of the resistance to the process of the surrender and the death of what needs to die within you, is equal or greater to whatever must die. So think about that for a second. If you have a lot of suppressed trauma and you can’t mentally remember a lot of it, that trauma is still running your background programming. But because this is all on a subconscious level, and you have not been able to attach connections to whatever you are sensing, you just carry around this sense that whatever that thing is, you’re not going there. It’s too much. 

But I will tell you as someone who obviously went through it, that the greater and longer you resist, the more time you are wasting jumping off the cliff and into that dark pool that feels like an endless pit of your own de-construction. And it feels like that because that is exactly what it is!  Oh, I remember it well. Standing near the edge of the metaphorical cliff and the wall behind me pushing me closer as I attempt to negotiate a compromise. You pray to God and say I’ll do anything. Just make this stop! And you hear loud and clear, “Surrender!” and you say “No, no, no! Anything but that. Anything but surrender!” And you get pushed a little bit closer and you keep negotiating but not agreeing to surrender. Then you cop an attitude. I know I did. And you might wave your weak little fist in the air at God and say, “Why are you putting me through this?!” But nobody is doing it to you. You are choosing to put yourself through the absolute hellscape known as RESISTANCE. All that terror and fear of the unknown and the sense of your impending death that you can’t articulate is consuming you and nobody is doing it to you. NOBODY! The only way through to the other side of where you are is through it. You can’t go around it or slide next to it or perch on top of it. It’s through it. And when you finally stop resisting and fall into your Cosmic Death, you will say what everybody else says. WHY didn’t I surrender sooner? Why did I resist so fiercely? Because what lies on the other side of all that stored trauma is peace and tranquility and an awareness that changes you on all levels.

I’ve thought for a long time about why the surrender is so hard to do when it comes to this type of intense healing work. Obviously, there’s a lot of fear. That goes without saying. Fear of the unknown can be enough to keep you stuck in a destructive lifestyle. But what is so curious is that I’ve noticed that once you do the hard work and you heal, when the unknown comes up in your future healed life, it’s not experienced as terrifying. It’s experienced as an adventure you’re curious to take. That’s why I say that curiosity is what moves you forward when you start to heal. Curiosity overrides fear. You can feel the fear, but the curiosity dominates. So it’s, “Yes, I’m afraid of what’s around that corner but I’m more curious than afraid and I’m going to check it out.” That’s the vibe. 

The other reason I think people resist surrender is that they mischaracterize surrender as giving up. Or giving in. Or not fighting anymore. And that is a real big and very important thing to bring up. They have been led to believe that you have to fight, fight, fight for everything. Fight, fight, fight to the death. And as long as you stay in fight, fight, fight, you won’t look over there or over here. Just keep fighting. Right? This perspective is so common especially for people who have spent years holding onto a lot of trauma or maybe they aren’t even aware of what happened to them because they blocked it out. But now that buried trauma is rising to the surface because it wants to be seen, acknowledged, and released. But you’re going to fight, fight, fight that one because that is overwhelming so you go straight into denial. “No, that’s not possible. I can’t surrender to that. I can’t. I won’t. She would never do that. He would never let that happen. No, no, nope, not going to entertain what is starting to make more sense the more I take a deep hard look at it.” And damn, that moment right there is where you have tipped the bucket just enough that you can’t go back and you have to agree to dig where you may not want to dig and you have to be willing to realize that what you may have been told was normal was nowhere near normal. Or maybe, it didn’t make sense the way the story had always been told. There was always that part that didn’t add up and you agreed to set it to the side as if ignoring it would somehow make it make sense. But that when you agreed to look deeper at the tale that had twisted through at least three generations you knew about, it became clear to you that nothing was what it seemed anymore. That a gate had been blown open and the water of awareness and shock blew through that gate and drowned you in a reality check you weren’t expecting to get. 

So once you do surrender, there is a palpable moment when you hover in a sheltered silence that probably looks to someone observing you as either a profound blissful moment or a focused fixation on nothing in particular as tears stream down your face. The vessel cracked. And through that crack, the light pierces within. Now the work can truly begin. Because once you allow that crack in your etheric armor, the light of awareness and some say God, stream in and you cannot put that Genie back in the bottle. This symbology of the crack in the vessel and the light streaming through is often used in transformative workshops because from an esoteric point of view, the force required to produce the crack was the instigating event or energy that produced the fuel that will produce en-LIGHT-enment. Light. And Light equals new awareness and insight that is gathered and taken in and dissected to ascertain how that awareness and insight can be used to stoke the fires that keep moving you forward and so on. When you have your initiation, so to speak, into this first surrender, it can be so overwhelming and all-encompassing that you can hover in that place for an hour or more. And you feel like, ah, I stepped over the threshold. I did it. And then with that understanding, a disorientation begins to take hold. This is brand new territory you are in and suddenly you are faced with the massive work that must be done. 

You are now living and experiencing your life and point of view from within the Sphere of The Cosmic Death. And this will be where you reside and gestate for three, four or more years. It takes time to approach and focus intentionally and with integrity on all the aspects that need to die. You can’t knock them down like bowling pins one after the other because these aspects have been tightly woven into your psyche and personality and aren’t easily extricated and allowed to die and be released. You can’t fake it in order to ‘move faster.’ It’ll take as long as it takes. I used to hear that a lot when I’d ask a shamanic healer or therapist how much longer this hellscape was going to continue. “It’ll take as long as it takes.”

What’s inside that sphere of cosmic death? Lots of things. You’re dying to the parts of yourself that you constructed or were built for you by your psyche that needed to protect itself or use personality or behaviors that might have been very necessary to survive or just interact in society or within your own family. But these traits, behaviors, etc. have reached their expiration date. The milk has soured and it has to be tossed out so to speak. But as you go through this type of death of the personality, it truly feels like a big part of you is actually dying. It’s interpreted or experienced in the state you are put into as a gut-wrenching death that feels so personal yet also feels so elusive. It’s a real dichotomy. That’s why it’s impossible to talk to anyone about this Cosmic Death because first off, Cosmic Death. What the hell is that? And second, you’re in mourning for the death of your personality that has reached an expiration date? You see what I mean? You can’t and you shouldn’t talk about this to anyone who doesn’t understand this extremely difficult process of alchemical healing. 

Other aspects that must be examined inside the Cosmic Death sphere are belief systems that have to die. Belief systems that have to be addressed and seen as to whether you actually believe them or you’re just parroting someone else blindly. Personality traits that need to be examined. Fears have to die. Lots of fears that have to faced and moved through. Relationships have to die. Which ones comfort, challenge you in a good way and give your life meaning? Which ones drag you under, make you question your sanity or inject chaos into your life that is contributing or causing your healing crisis? Jobs. Is it sucking the life out of you? What did you want to be that you put to the side in order to be practical? Could that make you money and bring you the passion that you haven’t felt in forever? Die to who you thought you were because someone who loved you or who you valued told you so. Maybe you’re not a piece of shit after all. Maybe you’re not an idiot. Maybe you’re not worthless. Maybe it’s good you WERE born. Maybe your value extends beyond what you can give someone else. Maybe what you produce is not meant to be a measurement for how much you are loved or not loved. Maybe the person you’ve been taught was the monster isn’t the monster after all? Maybe is the real monster is the person who manipulated you into believing a lie? The possibilities for what lie inside the sphere of your Cosmic Death are endless and depend solely on your own life experiences and how those experiences shaped, framed and distorted your true self. 

As each aspect comes up, it needs to be addressed, explored and released through the various energetic bodies. The physical, the mental body, the emotional body and the spiritual body. 

Let’s start with the physical body. I’m a big believer in working with someone who is trained in detoxes and cleanses because your mind and emotions can’t flow when your body is stuck. What your body can’t process, your mind can’t process. So I did a lot of detoxes. Colon, parasites, heavy metal cleanse. I also did fresh, raw juice cleanses for a period of time. The more toxic you are, the more debilitating the cleanses will be because when that toxic load is dislodged, it’s releasing a lot of bacteria, and byproducts such as ammonia. So be aware that when you work with someone to do a proper detox, you’re going to be more tired during that time and you’ll more sleep as your body needs time to rebuild. 

There are specific connections between how the body’s elimination process and the organs involved reflect back to a specific emotion. This is the foundation for mind/body healing. For example, if your colon is backed up, it imparts a reflective emotional inability to release ‘old stuff,’ either actually things that are weighing you down or old emotions that are stuck. If your liver is unable to process or eliminate toxic waste because it has built up toxins that can’t filter through the detox pathways, you are going to be re-experiencing trapped emotions on subtle levels. I read about someone who had liver detox issues due to poor methylation and she had metabolites of morphine from a surgery she’d had six eight months before detected in a hair sample. Normally, morphine can be detected up to ninety days in a hair sample. General Anesthesia can take up to six months or longer to transit the liver if the liver is congested. I know someone who dealt with that issue too. It made him feel as though he was living in dream or a nightmare and it prevented him from having any ability to process what was happening in his life. These things are real and do happen but I’m not sure they are discussed enough. So if you’ve had two or three surgeries in one year where you were under general anesthesia each time, you can see how that could create brain fog and a general malaise or disorientation. The older you get, the more difficult it is to detoxify or release it unless you are focused on that goal. 

I mentioned the term methylation and it’s absolutely vital to learn more about this process. I had to learn a lot early on in my healing journey about methylation and how to improve Phase 1 and 2 detox pathways in my liver because I learned I had the MTHFR gene mutation that around 70% of the world has and most don’t know it. I was blown away but it also answered a lot of questions as to why it always seemed I could feel certain drugs or food ingredients a lot longer than others. I found out I have a long list of drugs and substances that my body has a very hard time detoxing due to poor methylation so I started taking targeted supplements and liver detoxifiers and tonics such as ingesting actual liver organ in supplement form and utilizing supplements like methyl folate, methylated B vitamins, TMG and NAC, and I noticed a profound calming of my nervous system and a gradual down regulation of my hyper reactive nature. It took a few months of consistent use and I still use these supplements daily to maintain the detox pathways. I also got my hormones balanced using bioidentical hormone therapy and that was a godsend. I did a lot more than this but these were foundational elements that made a difference. 

Still focused on the physical body, you might decide to try something called Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) that encourages you to hold a specific pose and then release it and ‘shake it out’ which gives the sympathetic nervous system a chance to release a lot of trapped energy that never got a chance to express itself. You would certainly be advised to incorporate some type of deep bodywork like myofascial massage or any type of targeted body work like Somatic Release Therapy. This therapy helps to move trapped emotional energy release and is very effective. I would also address the physical side of this with supportive adaptogenic herbs or medicinal mushrooms. I’d look at anything that lowers inflammation and balances the stress hormone cortisol. So definitely Turmeric extract and I look for the patented BCM-95 extract in the ingredient label as it really jacks up the benefits of turmeric root thanks to the addition of black pepper as a potentiating agent. I would also take Reishi mushroom extract to modulate the nervous system which really helps to stabilize the nerves as you uncover different things in your healing. I also strongly endorse Gynostemma tea. I drank three cups of Gynostemma tea every day for at least four years straight and it was great plant ally for me and many others I’ve turned onto it say the same thing. To address the nerves, I’d also strongly suggest Lithium Orotate. This is a mineral salt, NOT the pharmaceutical. Lithium Orotate in doses of 5 mg. to 15 mg. depending on how it works with your brain, is an incredibly valuable neuroprotector that, in my opinion, was a game changer for me during the toughest parts of my own Cosmic Death. And when I say a game changer, I don’t mean that I could have just taken Lithium Orotate and nothing else. But adding it to my regimen when I did definitely increased my capacity for dealing with the emotional and mental hurdles I was faced with. I personally feel it provided a clarity that I didn’t have before starting it. I’d be remiss if I didn’t add Lion’s Mane to this list. I’ve taken it in tincture and tea form for years and it really is a neuroprotectant and eliminates brain fog. It’s one of the medicinal mushrooms I never want to be without. 

For the mental body, you have to make an agreement and have an understanding that you are going to be uncomfortable and you are going to have to remind yourself a lot that it’s okay to be uncomfortable and keep moving forth. Maybe write it out on a piece of paper and tape it to your dashboard or by the side of your bed. “It’s OK to be uncomfortable.” Learn meditation. Learn HeartMath breathing. I’ve talked about that before on this show so I don’t want to repeat the process but I encourage you to check it out. HeartMath breathing technique. Very powerful and works immediately if you do it right. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the HeartMath website with the breathing exercise explained in detail. 

For the emotional body, it’s all about feeling. And through feeling, the releasing. And for some people that’s easy and for a lot of people who are shut down, it’s the hardest part of this journey. But screaming and crying are not optional. Eventually, you’re going to have to do it and do it a lot. I did not cry a lot growing up. Stuffed a lot inside. And I was not a teenager who cried and certainly not a 20-something or 30-something who cried, except around 38 when I was going through a pre-awakening that I tamped down because I wasn’t ready for the big event yet. So because I had all those tears backed up inside me, I was like a streaming fountain of tears for one solid year, every day, then off and on the following year and then for three to four years after that, every single day to some extent. Sometimes I would stand at the sink washing dishes and tears would just flow down my face but I wasn’t focused on anything particular which I thought was interesting. I think by that point, I had conditioned myself to be okay with the release of tears and I didn’t try to connect it to any specific memory or event. And as someone who was not brought up to be emotional and who was deeply sensitive and very much rejected by my peers growing up, I can endorse any type of therapy that allows for a steady release of tears and sobbing and whatever it takes to get it out. Because eventually you will be able to find the last few tears. It may take seven or more years. And eventually, it dries up and then a few months later, you feel a swell and you release it and if it’s ugly it’s ugly but so what. By this time you’re a pro at it and it doesn’t set you back one bit. You’ll feel the grief rising up right around your breastbone or sternum. Sometimes when I’d be going through the release, I would touch that point and it was supremely tender to the touch and when I released the grief, it was reduced in tenderness by more than 75%. 

The spiritual body and the Cosmic Death is typically addressed with sacred drum circles, shamanic meditation ceremonies with heart-opening herbs and plant substances such as blue lotus tea or ceremonial cacao, various rituals and of course, the potential for exploring your spiritual body and mind via sacred psychedelic plant medicines. When you are addressing your spiritual body within the sphere of your Cosmic Death, I personally think it’s a time period when you need to pull away from a lot of social obligations and spend a lot more time alone and in reflection. Being in nature is a great choice during this time for sure. You’re going to need and probably want to feel somewhat monastic and protective of your experience and your space. This is when you can create an actual space on a small table or desk with a piece of quartz or your favorite rock, maybe some incense and a candle. Throw in a bell if you want to tap it as part of your ritual and have this place as a comforting respite or place to release your pain. I did this and it truly became my little enclave where I added extra gemstone crystals and some table chimes that replaced the bell eventually. Now is the time to go within and face the darkness and give yourself as much grace as you can while you do something you’ve never done before. There’s nothing easy about it. If it were easy, everybody would do it and we’d live in a world of self-actualized people. The Cosmic Death is a relentless dive into the abyss of whatever you have suppressed because you either had no choice or you did so because of a trauma response. So I found that during the times I was working to release and tapping into my spiritual body, I would incorporate burning rituals which I’ve touched on in past shows. I’d either burn old photos, love letters, furniture that held some type of significant energy I wanted to incinerate metaphorically, or I’d write what I wanted to release and burn up on a piece of paper and toss it into a bonfire or metal can in the sink. And obviously I have to add here be safe when you’re burning anything. These rituals work because of the intention that is put into them. It’s not magic or voodoo. It’s desire, emotional attention, focused intention and that all adds up to an energy within you that has the potential to create the change you are looking for. It may not happen the first or second or third time you burn something up. But eventually, it will be actualized in your life as you feel the weight of past burdens released from your energy field. 

            Another popular ritual within the spiritual or shamanic bodies are burial ceremonies where you give back to the person whatever burden you are carrying for them that does not belong to you. Different shamanic practitioners will have their own techniques and I don’t want to say that there is any right way to do this ceremony. Some use actual rocks along a trail where you walk along and each rock formation represents a person or life event where you leave something or throw something into a hole and continue on to the next rock formation on the trail and so on. Other burial rituals could involve writing out the burden you are returning to an ancestor or family member you personally knew or know and safely burning up the piece of paper before burying the ashes in a hole. If you know or sense there is a burden you are carrying for someone else that doesn’t belong to you, but you don’t exactly know what it is, you could just write something like “The burden I am carrying for you that does not belong to me,” and burn and then bury the ashes of that.   

I found that there was a lot of “A ha!” moments and cosmic synchronicities when I worked on my spiritual body. Part of that stemmed from a renewed connection I was forming with my spiritual life that was strong but never as strong as when I began doing the hard transformational work. I began to see the obvious (at least obvious to me) synchronicities that were happening every day in my life. The signs I would get that were nothing short of magical at times. Truly making you stop in mid-step because of the profound nature of what just happened. I also felt a growing awareness that I was being tested on a conscious level and not from a place of victimhood. Or poor me. And I understood that I needed to step to the plate more and trust the process and fall into that void and trust that the hand of God would catch me. And that was one of the biggest tests of trust I had to go through. But once I did it a lot of times, I trusted the process and it became second nature to me. In other words, I didn’t have to consciously arrange my thinking to engage that trust, I just did it because it was now part of my hardwiring. 

Diving into the spiritual realm in this type of deep healing work can involve the use of psychedelic plant medicines. And as I’ve mentioned, I’ll be doing a four-part series soon on entheogens and empathogens that are commonly used to travel into the outer worlds and inner worlds. However, learning how to surrender and how to release when you are totally sober is a vital prerequisite in my opinion because you will need to know how to surrender if you choose to use sacred plant medicine in a clinical or ceremonial setting. There is a lot of understandable disorientation when you use various psychedelics or other plant medicines that take you into alternate realms of consciousness. And when you are fully entrenched in your Cosmic Death, eventually using a psychedelic to penetrate your consciousness can speed up or facilitate your awakening process. You hear a lot about the ‘death of the ego’ or going into ‘no mind’ or ‘no thing’ when you use sacred plant medicine and that is all very accurate. HOWEVER, if you are not able to surrender to the often-disorienting experience due to fear or not having the support you need from people who can help guide you on the journey, you will not be able to fully inhabit and experience what could be a profound, life-changing experience. That’s what happened to me and it took me a lot of focused intent and bravery to keep going back to each session and not resist wherever I was taken. Psychedelics certainly facilitate a cosmic death within you if you can handle the process. It’s certainly not a requirement of alchemical healing to use these substances but it’s certainly becoming much more common for people from all walks of life to choose this course of therapy. 

So throughout the years you are working within the sphere of your Cosmic Death, as you dissolve old belief systems, patterns of behavior, patterns of thought and so much more, you will gradually begin to feel what you interpret as ‘being broken.’ I say ‘what you interpret’ as being broken because you’re not really broken even though you would put your hand on a Bible and swear you are broken! The experience of dissolving old parts of you feels like a brokenness. And I really want you to hear this because if you’re in this space right now or you’re going in this space soon, it’s important that you can get a visualization of what is really is going on. This is only my interpretation based on my personal experience but I’ve had enough time and space between that period and now that I can articulate a visual for you that I hope allows for a little less freaking out or fear that the broken feeling will never go away. 

As you dissolve and release all the old stuff, in the physical, mental and emotional realm, visualize an ice cream scoop coming in and carving out a hole here and a hole there and removing whatever no longer serves your highest and greatest good. Now visualize yourself walking around with an etheric energy field (meaning the field that operates just outside your physical body) that resembles Swiss cheese. It’s a vulnerable feeling to wake up each day and move through your day feeling like chunks of yourself are exposed and seemingly waiting for something to happen. And you are waiting for something to happen. And that something is as you continue to do the work and bring forth new awareness, new ways of perceiving your life and integrating all of this with new experiences and so on, these etheric holes or chunks slowly get filled in with all that new energy. You are essentially creating the building blocks for the new you. That takes time and you are going to have to have patience and grace for yourself during that time. You also need a lot of trust and that’s why I’ve always maintained how important it is to have a spiritual connection no matter what that looks like to you. During the period where you are walking around with these etheric gaping holes, you keep doing the work and little by little, those holes will be filled in with new energy that renews you and brings you that much closer to the reflection of your soul’s highest intent. For me, that process of filling in those holes took six months and it was the greatest exercise in learning cosmic trust, patience and letting go I’ve ever experienced. 

Believe me when I tell you that birth of the new you can be as painful as death of the old you. And there will be a lot of baby steps that feel like nothing is changing but it is. So stay the course. You are after awareness on all levels. And experience creates awareness. It may just be a nudge of awareness. It may just be a few inches further than where you’re standing right now. But that few inches further alters something within or outside you and it may be so imperceptible that you miss it. But stack a few of those experiences on top of one another, and you will feel and act differently. Stack another ten or fifty and your internal awareness will broaden and ripen to the point where it will eventually be noticed by others and you’ll hear something like “You seem different now than you used to be” or “You aren’t reacting in the same way you used to”. Or you’ll have a reaction to someone or something and say to yourself, “Wow, the old me wouldn’t have done or said that!” That statement means you have done some incredible work within yourself and are on the road to actualizing your fullest potential. 

Eventually, all those cavernous holes will fill in and you will be fully operating inside of a different vessel that moves differently, thinks differently, deals with their problems differently, articulates their viewpoints differently and truly inhabits their space vastly differently than they used to. That is one of the biggest rewards you will earn from surrendering to The Cosmic Death and allowing it to transform you on all levels, body, mind and spirit. 

Another way to look at this experience is that your body, mind and spirit make up your ‘house.’ Inside that house, you have many rooms that contain the memories, experiences, traumas, and more that have been creating a false persona or a belief system that need to be gutted in order for the more aware, more awake version of you to come forth. Let’s say one of the issues in your life is you’ve always attracted a partner that is abusive or manipulating and because of that, your life has fallen into constant chaos. So the metaphorical rooms inside your energy field that need to be gutted or scooped out are the rooms that contain lack of self-worth, lack of self-love, lack of self-respect and of course there will be a room that holds all the self-destructive energy that fuels your bad decision making. You decorated these rooms with all this chaos because someone you spent a lot of time around as a child and perhaps into adulthood gave you the impression that you were either a ‘bad’ person, or not lovable or not worthy of life itself. So when somebody shows up in your life who does have self-love, self-respect, knows their self-worth and so on you either reject them because your energy field doesn’t feel compatible with any of that or they are not attracted to you. Like attracts like. And they are not into how you’ve decorated your rooms. So you decide to do the hardest work you’ve ever done and that means you have to gut all those rooms inside of your energy field that are not conducive to attracting not just a healthy partner but a healthy life in general. Over time, you release your lack of self-love, self-worth and so on and now you are walking around with a lot of empty rooms that need to be redecorated and transformed with a better motif that reflects the individual you strive to become. You learn that you are worthy of love and so much more. You begin to respect yourself. And so much more! And little by little, those rooms are redesigned and radiate a magnetic pulse that begins to attract experiences, people and life changing events into your reality that match the healthier version of yourself. So you begin to attract potential partners and friendships that are not self-destructive or require chaos to fuel them. 

One thing about alchemical transformation of body, mind and spirit is that you get very used to the internal and external cycle of death and rebirth. It becomes so second nature that you don’t even think about it anymore. It becomes as acceptable as breathing so you stop resisting it because once you experience The Cosmic Death and eventual rebirth, you understand that it’s a requirement of life and to resist it is to resist life itself. And I will tell you this. Once you traverse the initiation of the sphere of The Cosmic Death and are released from that part of the alchemical healing process, you don’t fear death and you don’t resist what needs to continually die in your life as you move forward. Because this process doesn’t end after your initiation into The Cosmic Death. It continues for the rest of your life but it does NOT carry with it the same pain or suffering that the initiation did. I can tell you from my own point of view that after you successfully go through The Cosmic Death and rebirth, you can see a death of something or someone in your life coming a mile away and not freeze or run from it. Sometimes you meet people and you know it’s only going to be a short connection and that it will have an expiration date and you’re okay with that too. Because by the time you get to this point, you’ve stopped having expectations of anything and anyone. You’ve stopped trying to control your narrative to fit some predetermined reality you think you’re supposed to live in. You let your story flow wherever it’s going to flow and you adjust to that flow as you go along. And after awhile, it’s not like felt or held like a death anymore but more like an experience that ran its course and needed to move into the background to make room for the next experience you need to have.  

Not one person is going to go through the identical steps in the same order that either lead up to The Cosmic Death or the many months or years that take up the energy and space of this often excruciating dark period of time in the alchemical journey of body, mind, spirit healing. And you can’t compare your experience with someone else’s in an attempt to understand it or perceive some type of hierarchy between your experience and someone else’s. Death is death is death. Don’t get entangled in the perception of that death and attempt to create equivalents between your experience of The Cosmic Death and someone else’s in an attempt to quantify your psychic undoing as more extreme than someone else’s. That’s why comparing your stories with others who have gone through this is ill advised because one can hear about the suffering hell that another went through and think, “That was nothing. I could have dealt with that. Try dealing with what I went through!” As I said, death is death is death. Someone else’s cosmic death experience and your Cosmic Death experience were equallyexperienced and perceived with the same energy of internal devastation that were unique to each person. It’s not about how much you suffered as much as where did that experience take you and how did it powerfully transform you? And if you are still trying to one up someone else and gain some kind of warped ego foothold, you haven’t left the sphere of The Cosmic Death yet. Because that type of behavior is what needs to die inside that sphere. 

The goal of entering and moving through and then being released from the initiation of The Cosmic Death is the re-establishment of your innate personal power and the cultivation of sovereignty of your mind, body and spirit. It’s the antithesis of an ego trip because it demands continual accountability on your part and the eventual ability to truly put yourself in the shoes of other people and recognize that we’re all walking the same path but at different times and experiencing different scenarios but that the ultimate goal for all of us on that path is to walk it with as much integrity, awareness, true compassion for oneself and others and understand that while it is a collective journey, your experience will be unique to you while also having many similarities to the collective. And death and rebirth are something we will all go through. And I hope this particular episode has given you a better understanding of how to navigate that death and how to welcome the rebirth with open arms and an open heart. 

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. Keep sending me all those great emails with your questions for the upcoming show I’m putting together. My email is in the show notes. Share this podcast with others and follow me. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll see the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. On all the show notes, I’ve included the companies I support and have helped me greatly in my healing process, so check that and look for the coupon codes. Looking forward to you joining me next week when we’ll talk about why you need to stop identifying with your illness. New episodes drop every Saturday. Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”