Episode 4: A Conversation On Death & Loss

In this sensitive epiosde I talk about a subject that I feel is still pretty taboo in our western culture. With or without the framework of religion, many people in our society are afraid to talk about death and will go out of their way to avoid it. Whilst other cultures around the world openly accept death as an integral part of lifes miraculous cycle, and in so doing create more community and support for those that are dying and grieving. I talk all around this issues and expplore how our yoga practice can help us grieve, create community and perhaps begin to shift our perpectives of life and death and the material world versus the spiritual world.

In this episode I mentioned this amazing Ram Dass Podcast-you can listen here:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6xzDDgZapWfakKIHW4vXMV

I alos spoke about the Bhakti Yogi and Death Doula Matt, you can find him here on Instagram: 

https://www.instagram.com/madhumatt/ 

He also does his own podcast on death which is beautiful-you can find this on his profile.

If you have any comments, questions or anything you would like to hear about related to this podcast, I'd love to hear from you.

Please feel free to message me on Instagram or email me here: info@shraddhayayoga.co.uk

You can follow me on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/shraddhaya_yoga/

Or why not find out how we can work together with Yoga & meditation classes, courses and 1:1 coaching here: https://www.shraddhayayoga.co.uk/

With love and light,

Helen xxx

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:23

Hi everyone and welcome, welcome to this week's episode, and today we are talking all about death and loss, and it's an interesting conversation. I hope you enjoy it. It can be a really sensitive, difficult topic. Um, and I was actually called to record this episode because so many of my clients and myself have experienced tremendous loss this year. It happens to us all, and I am on a little bit of a mission to talk about it more openly and really dispel this culture of fear of death as much as possible. We also talk about, of course, how our yoga practice can help us through grief, loss, and not just loss in terms of mourning and death, but loss of relationships, any kind of loss. So I hope you enjoy this episode. I hope it gives you a fresh perspective, something to think about maybe, and um I'll see you on the other side. Hi everyone, and welcome. Welcome to episode four of season two. And today I'm gonna be so honest with you. To just about 15 minutes ago, I went into full-on imp imposter syndrome, and I I sat here, I've just had my lunch, and I was writing some notes and preparing to do this, and I just thought, who am I? Who am I to sit here and talk about death, loss, and dying, life after death? You know, this is a huge, huge topic. Who am I? And then a little voice in my head popped up and said, Well, who are you? And what are your experiences? And I realized that death touches all of us, death and loss in all its forms. Loss and grieving comes in the forms of the ends of relationships, of the ends of ways of being, of shifts in our lives, ending of careers. Loss isn't just about death and dying in the in the corporeal, you know, the body, the form of the body. Death and dying is something that we can all relate to, we'll all have experienced in some form or another. So quite quickly, my imposter system, imposter syndrome rather, disappeared because one thing that I one reason why I'm talking about this today is because it's a huge part of, can be a huge part of our sadhana, our spiritual practice, the acceptance of death and the role that death plays, but also because I'm on a little bit of a mission to change our culture of death in the West. Because I don't think it's healthy, and we really are stuck in this kind of here in the UK, especially in this kind of Victorian stiff upper lip, don't talk about it, hide it away, really quite clinical, cold sometimes. Um attitude and culture. We're stuck in this culture around death. It is starting to change. I do feel that, but we've got quite a long, long way to go. It's really interesting because, as you know, I'm a massive fan of Ramdas, and I listened to his um Here and Now podcast, which I'll link in the show notes. It's a collection of all of his um many lectures that he gave over the decades, and it's just a wealth. I've re-listened and re-listened and re-listened. It he really was an incredible soul. Um, and I I learned so much from each listening. And he was saying the other day, and this particular lecture I think he gave in the 90s, um, and he was talking about attitudes towards birth and death, and he was saying how far we've come in the West in our attitudes towards women and how important the mother role is, and how um men are now allowed in the hospital room and actively encouraged to take part in the birth and really support um women that are giving birth, and it's just way more open and midwifery is um you know a fantastic career, and it's more supported, um, still not well enough, but we've come a long, long way from uh the medieval times where midwives and uh women were deemed to be witches because of their midwifing skills. And then he talked about death, and he was saying we need to come as far as we have done from medieval era to modern era with with birth and our culture around birth. We need to keep shifting forward with with our attitudes in the West around death, and this is something that I totally agree with. Um different cultures around the world integrate death so beautifully, viscerally, shockingly sometimes to us in the West because we're not used to it, they but they weave it so beautifully into everyday life. For example, in India and Hinduism, the once someone has died, the body is paraded around in an open cart which is decorated with flowers and um garlands, and there are loud instruments, there are drums, people are crying and sobbing and chanting, and and the body is paraded through the streets. And when I was in India in 2020, I was lucky enough actually to see this. I was uh in a little minibus with my fellow yogis, and we were like, what's going on? What's going on? And there he was, this young man with an ashen face lying in the cart for all to see. And it was really interesting to watch my fellow yogis' reactions. Everyone had a different reaction. Some people immediately became quite distressed at seeing the body. Other people like me were really quite in awe and fascinated by it and drawn to it. Some people just retreated completely and didn't want to look, didn't want to know. And of course, this is a really sensitive subject, and I want this episode to be sensitive as much as possible to everybody, and I want to really acknowledge the fact that I have been incredibly blessed in that my experiences of death have all been really quite gentle and really beautiful. Now that's partly to do with the way that I look at it, and that's partly to do because of my life circumstances and what I've experienced. Now, for someone who perhaps grew up in a war zone, their attitudes and perspectives on death and reactions to death may or may not be entirely different, and I know that um it is a sensitive one, but I do feel we need to talk about it, and I feel that sometimes this when we have this sense of oh, that person, how are they reacting? Are they okay? Especially in our culture, there is this kind of I don't know what to say, I don't know what to do, I don't know what to say, which actually ends up with a lot of people saying nothing and doing nothing because they feel so uncomfortable, because there isn't this culture of we do this, you know, um support and ritual. Um so quite often it can get put under the carpet, and and the person that's grieving or the person that has lost is left alone, which is just not right. So there's lots there's lots here to talk about around community, ritual, religion, it's a huge subject, um social conditioning, attitudes, lots and lots and lots. One thing I do want to want to really say is that I'd love it to change in that I'd love our culture to change so that it becomes more embracing and more supportive and more open, whatever that looks like. Now, a couple of years ago um I found someone on social media who I just thought was absolutely fascinating, and I'd love to have him on the podcast at some point, um, if he if he agrees. His name is Matt, and he is what he calls a death doula. Now, you may or may not heard have heard of the term doula, but a doula is someone traditionally who helps they're mainly female, as far as I know, they are female, who helps you through birth from all stages of birth. So you will engage or hire a doula, and she will help you in the lead up through the pregnancy, in the lead up to the birth, she will help you through the birth, and then afterwards, it's like amazing, amazing support, advice for both the person that's giving birth and uh their partner. I think that's beautiful, it's beautiful, and that is very much needed again in our society. So, with that in mind, Matt called himself or calls himself a death doer. And I ended up speaking to him because he was at one point, he lives in America, he was at one point running courses on how to do it, and I was very, very seriously looking at doing the training. It didn't work out because I was then going through a divorce and life happened. But it is something I would be interested in looking at again because I just thought this is so needed, this is so needed in our culture. I think, particularly in the West, where we do live in a softly Christian society, but most majority of people are non-religious. Um, there's a big, big gap. Most religions have a beautiful framework of ritual, um, including prayers and mourning periods and um services and pujas and all of these things are in place to help the person that it or the people that are grieving. There's structure, there's framework, there's there's this little framework. So, for example, if you're Jewish and someone dies, you have a whole week of prayers. You're you're not required to go to work, you're not required to do any of the normal everyday stuff. Everyone, the whole community comes around you, supports you, helps you, and all you need to do is go to temple and be with your community and be supported and pray. Now, for me, when my dad died, there was nothing. There was nothing. I have my my community, my family, and my community of friends, but I actually ended up making my own little framework of ritual and prayer to help through it. I think that's so, so important. So important. So coming back to death, the death doula role. Matt had spent a lot of time in um Calcutta in India. He just felt called to work with the dying. So he spent a lot of time at hospitals and hospices there, um, basically holding people's hands as they were dying. And he said it was the most transformative experience of his life. Sometimes people would want to talk, sometimes they cried, sometimes they laughed. He told me that sometimes people were terrified, and other times they were really calm. So he saw the many faces of death and he held people through it. He held space for them. He said that often there was no need to say anything, that just to be there with someone at the end of their life was the biggest honour he could ever have. And as I say that I feel quite emotional because, as many of you know, my dad died in January, and it was with Matt where we had a discussion once about words around death, and he said that he liked to use death and dying instead of passed on, passed away, lost, because although some people find the words death and dying kind of brutal, that's really what it is. And he said, I don't use those words to shock people or to be brutal, but to really name what's happening. That person has not been lost, they have died, and we had this really interesting conversation because I'd never thought about the language around dying. Now I'm not here to tell you to change your language, it's just interesting, isn't it? It's really interesting to talk to talk in this way because we just don't in our culture. Now, as I said earlier, I'm quite lucky in my life. You know, my first experiences of death were probably my hamsters and my cat Bumble, who uh got had we had to put to sleep when I was, I think I was about nine. Various hamsters, beautiful little hamsters that I adored, who never quite made it past three years old, and then got buried in always in tampax boxes. I think that was my mum's uh go-to. It was always a tampax box, it was the right size for a little hamster, just to give you a bit of humour there. Um, always got buried in the garden with a little bit of ritual. Now, interestingly, um after that, it was it wasn't until I was older that I really experienced the death of a close member of my family when my grandma died, and she was nearly a hundred. She was in a lovely old people's home. Um, she'd given up, she'd stopped eating and drinking, and she'd always been a very independent, strong, feisty woman, and she just didn't want to be here anymore. You could literally see her retreat and retreat and retreat, and she mum and I were there when they called us to say that her breathing had changed, but she was asleep, and it was one of the most profound and beautiful things I had experienced at that time, and the sun came out, there was a skylight above her bed, a little tiny little single bed, and she looked so small, and it was a cloudy, rainy day, and the sun came out, and I feel her with me now. And I was so when my mum said you can stay here in the car, I said, No, I'm coming with you. I had such a strong compulsion to be there, not just to support my mum, but to be there at my grandma's death, and when my dad died, I felt the same. I have never felt this need to run away, in fact, more of a need to run towards. The first time I saw a dead body, I was walking along. I grew up in Dorset, and I was walking along, I think it was one of the beaches in Pool, and it was a beautiful, crisp, sunny day, you know, kind of middle of winter, but bright sun, no clouds in the sky, and there was this little old man in a suit with his flat cap on, sitting in a little fold-up canvas chair on the end of the promenade. And as we walked along the sand, we could see people attending to him, and we were really quite close. And I looked as we slowly walked past around the fuss, and I knew he was dead. His eyes were closed, and he was sitting in the sun. And by the colour of his skin and just his whole aura and energy, I knew he had died. And I if I hadn't been with anyone else, I would have stopped and of course offered to help, but I would have stopped and stared for a really long time. When my dad died, I wanted to be there. I was there as much as I could be. Not the moment of his death, but many have told me they believe that he waited like lots of people do, waited for me to go home. Death is is a strange fixture in our lives, but it really is an integral part. Many spiritual leaders have said that you know, from the day we're born, we are dying. And just think about that for a moment. From the day we're born, we're dying, and many Eastern cultures frame death in such a light that allows you to really embrace it so it's not terrifying, so it's not this hidden, not talked about, scary, dark thing that yes, it's not easy, it's not pretty. You know, death of the body is is visceral and messy, it can be ugly, it can be brutal, but it is a guarantee, and it is something that all of us will face at some moment, many moments in our lives. For me, my spiritual practice has massively shifted or added to this curiosity about death that I think I've always had, and my beliefs around death, I think have allowed me to move and through grief more easily in many ways, and to be much more accepting. So, big question here: how can yoga, how can our yoga practice help us with death and loss? So, in a practical sense, let's talk first of all about our practical practice. Let's talk about asana, pranayama meditation. So the physical practices of yoga, asana and pranayama, as we know, they do lots of things physically but also emotionally and mentally. And in a nutshell, we know that when we come on the yoga mat, we practice full acceptance of where we are and what we're experiencing in and of our bodies in that moment. Yes, this is a practice, we don't just sit there and do that, it's something that we need to work at over the lifetime, over many lifetimes, if you believe in reincarnation. But it really is a sacred space where we can sit down, tune in to our where we're at in our body, tune into where we are mentally, tune into where we are emotionally, energetically, and notice. Be still and notice. That's why I've called this podcast Be Still and Notice, because it will come up time and time again. So we can really sit there and be in our state of being. The practice comes when we work on accepting it and not fighting it, and when we can do that, we can allow our emotions to flow through us much more freely. Now, as we all know, a lot of us can suppress our emotions, it's a natural coping mechanism because maybe there's not the time or the space, it's not the right time, I'm scared of it, to process that emotion. Or, or, and this is a big one in terms of this conversation, or it's not socially acceptable to be in the queue at Marks and Spencer's and sob your heart out because your husband's just died. Which, by the way, I think it should be. Um, so our yoga mat really is a sacred space for us to be, whatever that looks like, sad, happy, uncomfortable, stuck, frustrated, angry, grieving, terrified, whatever the emotion is, whatever the state of being is, it allows us to be there and to experience it in the fullness of our human expression. Not change it, experience it and allow it to flow through us. From my experience, that allows you to process your emotions much more quickly, it really does. And when you embody that, when you move the body somatically, it moves it even quicker, it comes out through your movement, especially when you have your own yoga practice at home, and it's very uh intuitive, it's an integral part of expressing your emotion. Really, really important. Um, that's a whole episode on its own, by the way, somatic practice, um, emotional expression. So that's one really, really big way. It also allows us to regulate our nervous system. So, with practices like pranayama, where we're literally almost biohacking the body, excuse me, and biohacking our nervous system and telling ourselves that we're safe, we can transform our state of being. So we work on accepting it as it is, and then we can work on gently, really, really gently and over time regulating our nervous system so we don't get stuck in fight or flight mode, we don't get stuck in any um cycles or states of being that are really negative and detrimental to our health, our emotional and mental stability. So we really, really can help over time with practice. None of this is instant, as you know. This is why it's called a practice. So they're really, really big things when it comes to grieving, massive, massive things. Grieving, from my experience, is incredibly visceral. Grief is a really embodied emotion, like it that I mean, they all are, but I think particularly grief, and it's it's a full spectrum emotion, like it's it's grief can contain guilt, anger, fear, sadness, desolation, loneliness, um joy, even love. It is it literally contains a full spectrum of everything, and it can change moment to moment to moment. Um there's this really beautiful Instagram post that I saw come up, um, and it was an artistic expression of grief, and it's this um this kind of uh stairs set into space, it's performance artistry. So this flight of stairs with no rails or anything, just set in space quite high, and to the side of the set of stairs is uh a trampoline, and this gentleman in a black coat is walking up the steps, and then he falls to the side and bounces off the trampoline. Back onto the steps. Then he climbs up again, then he falls off the side. And as the performance carries on, he's going back down the stairs, off the side, right to the top of the side, slower, quicker, slower, quicker, round around in all different directions. And this was representing how grief can look like. Now, of course, talking therapy is incredible, and alongside our yoga practices like that can be fantastic. Now, esoterically, oh, before we move into the esoterics, I just want to say one other thing. Sangham. So our Sangha, which is yoga community, it basically means meeting of like minds. That's not its literal translation. Um, but it literally means a group of people that are on the same wavelength. So in yoga, that's people that practice yoga and that have um are walking the same or similar spiritual paths. This community can be incredibly, incredibly helpful, like I've mentioned earlier about community and can provide support, you know, cooking you meals when when you just can't, or popping around for a cup of tea, or you know, supporting you when you are crying on the mat, you know, whatever commute that kind of community is also present within yoga. So, how about esoterically? I've spoken a little bit about my spiritual beliefs. So let's dive into what death means when you look at yoga philosophy. So in yoga, really, there is no death, there's only the dropping of the body, and as Ram Das like to say, moving from form to formless. When gurus die with bunny rabbit ears, and when I say that, I've got my two fingers. If you haven't ever heard that term before, I've doing my two fingers like to um can't think of the words, grammatically, so they're in speech quotes, bunny rabbit ears, speech quotes. Moving from form to formless. So, gurus, when they die, they are talked of not in terms of dying, but in terms of dropping their body, moving from form, the physical body, back to formless, which is where they came from. There is a merging back into the sea of consciousness from which we were all born. So if you look at death in that way, it's much less final. In fact, there isn't a finality, there is just a shift, a transition, another stage. It's another another part of life, but it's into unseen, not necessarily unknown but unseen realms of consciousness. Partner with this in yogic philosophy, the concept of karma and reincarnation, which very basically means that each of us has a soul and we each have our own dharma, our own path that we need to walk. And depending on our karma, we have certain things that we need to fulfill within a lifetime, or within many, many lifetimes. So, in the concept of reincarnation, a soul is born and will live a lifetime, and if its karmic duties were not fulfilled in that lifetime, the soul will be reincarnated again and again and again in many different forms until those duties are fulfilled, and then the soul is free, is liberated, and can merge again back with the sea of ultimate consciousness, Brahman. It's a big one, it's a really big one. But can you see how these concepts and ideas, realities, depending on your perspective, really they don't allow for that sense of cold, brutal marble slab finality that we have in our Western culture. The deeper and more you move into your spiritual journey, the easier it is to understand, and the more your consciousness shifts to be able to see beyond just the material. Now, even this morning, I was listening to Ramdas in the bath, favorite thing I like to do, one of his podcasts, and he was talking about not about being open to the great mystery. So we live in an age of materialism, and I don't mean material goods, it's um a term that talks about our science, our scientific attitudes. Materialism basically means if I can see it, if I can test it, if I can taste it, if I can feel it, then it's true. So, in order for anything to be real, it has to be verified by our five senses in a scientific context. So it doesn't allow for different dimensions, spirituality, other realms. And this again is although the Victorians did like their uh spooky stories and uh Ouija boards and things like that, it it I do think it harks from earlier times. But I'm asking if you are quite a scientific person and you're not spiritual, I invite you to do as Ramdas says and just open to the great mystery. Allow yourself to be open to these ideas and concepts because why not? Just because they can't be disproved doesn't mean they're not true. There are many, many things over the years, hundreds of years, you know, they used to think that the earth was flat until they found out it was round. And just because something hasn't been what's the word proved by science does not mean it's not a reality. So going back to our own individual spiritual journeys, the deeper and our practice, the deeper you go into meditation, the deeper you you go into your own sadhana in your own practice. Certainly, from my experiences, you begin to go deeper into your own consciousness and you begin to experience different planes, different realities, and this can be really small, it could be like the little synchronicities that happen that align that are little signs that show you to move in the right direction. It could be as happened to my one of my lovely clients just on Friday, whose dad had died the Friday before. He told me that a flower, a bulb that his dad had given him years before, which had never bloomed, chose to bloom the day he died. If you look for them, there are lots of synchronicities and things that happen. If you're open to them, there are all these beautiful things that can happen, and if you can see beyond the materialist, there is so much more there. Some people have this naturally, you know, this ability to see beyond and into deeper levels of consciousness and different ways of being, and some of us have to work harder at it, sometimes it happens spontaneously, and I think what's really interesting is when people have near-death experiences, they can be totally transformed by that experience and totally shift their ideas about life and so esoterically, yoga also gives us a framework. Remember, it's not a religion, but it was massively great comfort to me that when my dad died, it proved that's the wrong word. It showed me that everything I believed to be true about death was true, and to describe that to you is going to be difficult. When I saw his dead body, I literally looked up and out up to the ceiling to see if he was hanging around there because the body was no longer my nothing, that wasn't my dad. It definitely wasn't my dad, it was his body, but it wasn't him, and I felt him. This is another story, but I felt him with me so so much in the coming days, weeks, months, and he's still with me now. There's no separateness, there is no separateness, and this is again the big, big discussion around yogic philosophy and thought and the esoterics of it are dualism and non-dualism, and how the more we believe that we are all separate entities, the more suffering there is. One of the things that Matt said is that you know, I contacted him when a very dear friend of mine who I used to work with when I was makeup artist, he was a makeup artist, he uh used to work in theatre, and he was just this lovely, lovely, very sweet gay man. And his husband died out of the blue. He lived in Bali, and his husband died very suddenly, and he couldn't cope. Um, we never spoke on the phone, but we would message each other, and he just said, I can't live without him. And I spoke to um Matt, and actually, Matt ended up helping Chris for a while, um being his death dealer, and Chris was so appreciative, he said it really, really helped him. Sadly, Chris died probably only a year after that, and I felt his loss because I felt guilt not being in contact again for many months, but not long after I had a reading with a lovely psychic friend of mine, and he made an appearance, let's put it that way, and I had many dreams, and I he I felt his happiness and I felt his joy. And you could be listening to this and just think, oh well Helen, that's just you making it up in your mind, but it was real, it was very, very real, and there are there are so many there are so many ways that we can as a community and as a society help each other through this transition, and it is a transition, and it's difficult, it's messy, and it's complicated, and there's all the other things that come with the death of a loved one, such as all the financial stuff, the wills, that all of that is a great, can be a massive headache. Family dynamics when they go wrong, can be incredibly stressful. Um, but yoga can really help us individually and as and as a collective, it helps us to process, helps us to move through, it can help us with community. If you have yoga community, it can be absolutely beautiful, and it can help us move beyond this idea that death is all there is, that there is nothing else. It can help expand our hearts and minds into a different way of thinking about our existence and about consciousness. I'm going to be talking more about this at some point, and uh it's something that's very close to my heart, and weirdly, this year has been a lot about death. One of my lovely friends' mums died not long before mine, a few months before my dad died. And so I'll never forget what she said to me. And if you're listening, thank you. You're incredible, and I love you, and you know who you are. Um she's helped me so much because we walked the path in similar time frames. She said when she saw her mum die, it was absolutely miraculous, and one of the most beautiful things she's ever experienced. And when my dad died, I knew exactly what she meant. Yes, it's not pretty for the body to slow down and stop all its functions, but to see someone transition into the next stage. Oh amazing, absolutely incredible. So I'm gonna leave you with that different perspective, and uh, I'll speak to you again very soon. Thank you so much for listening to the Be Still and Notice podcast. I really hope you enjoyed this episode and perhaps it even added something to your life. If you know someone that might benefit, please share this episode with them, and of course, a review would be so much appreciated. Please find all the information relating to this episode, including relevant links, in the show notes, and until next time, sending you so much love and light on your path to yoga.