We are impermanent!
We are impermanent.
We are not here forever.
One day we will die.
This is perhaps the greatest lesson I have learned from my meanderings into the world of sorcery, which has fascinated me for much of this year.
As a whole, our society lives as if we humans are permanent, as if our lives will never end. We put off today for tomorrow, and we struggle to let go of the past because there will be time to deal with that in the future…if it ever comes.
There’s this wonderful section in Carlos Castaneda’s book, The Active Side of Infinity, in which Don Juan, the sorcerer is trying to each Carlos, the apprentice, about impermanence:
“We beings are on our way to dying”, he said [don Juan]. “We are not immortal, but we behave as if we were. This is the flaw that brings us down as individuals and will bring us down as a species someday”.
Don Juan started that sorcerers’ advantage over their average fellow man is that sorcerers know that they are beings on their way to dying and that they don’t let themselves deviate from that knowledge. He emphasised that an enormous effort must be employed in order to elicit and maintain knowledge as a total certainty.
“Why is it so hard for us to admit something that is so truthful?”, I asked, bewildered by the magnitude of our internal contradiction.
“It’s really not man’s fault”, he said in a conciliatory tone. “Someday, I’ll tell you more about the forces that drive a man to act like an ass”.
As a note, Carlos is an anthropologist and he has placed an anthropology lecturer, Professor Lorca, on a pedestal. We all know how easy this is to do, the yoga world is rife with examples of people who have placed themselves on pedestals in the form of the (false) guru and of those who place others on that pedestal, be it their teacher or someone they have never met, imagining them far more evolved than themselves.
But it isn’t always helpful in our lives, because we are sometimes blinded to their truth and to acknowledging our own power. Don Juan’s advice to Carlos has been to get to know the professor, “don’t admire people from afar”, he said, “This is the surest way to to create mythological beings. Get close to our professor, talk to him, see what he’s like as a man. Test him. If your professor’s behaviour is the result of his conviction that he is a being who is is going to die, then everything he does, no matter how strange, must be premeditated and final. If what he says turns out to be just words, he’s not worth a hoot”.
I would say the same to anyone wanting to study with a yoga teacher, get to know them, make sure that they are walking their truth, and conscious of their impermanence and place in this world.
“It’s no great feat for me to assess your professor at a distance”, don Juan went on. “He is an immortal scientist. He is never going to die. And when it comes to concerns about dying, I am sure he has taken care of them already. He has a plot to be buried in, and a hefty life insurance policy that will take care of his family. Having fulfilled those two mandates, he doesn’t think about death anymore. He thinks only about his work”.
“Professor Lorca makes sense when he talks”, don Juan continued, “because he is prepared to use words accurately. But he’s not prepared to take himself seriously as a man who is going to die. Being immortal, he wouldn’t know how to do that. It makes no difference what complex machines scientists can build. The machines can in no way help anyone face the unavoidable appointment; the appointment with infinity”.
“Sorcerers…do have the upper hand; as beings on their way to dying, they have someone whispering in their ear that everything is ephermal. The whisperer is death, the infallible advisor, the only one who won’t ever tell you a lie”.
This is a concept I have embraced in my life and with my clients at times too, using death as one’s advisor - if you knew you were to die tomorrow, what would you do differently?
Using death as a an advisor is very helpful. It stops us putting off for tomorrow what we could change today. It helps us realise that everything we do in this moment has an impact on our future being.
“Svarasavahi-Vidusah-Api-Tatha-Arudhah-Abhinivesah”, II.9 in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras tells us that the desire to live is deeply ingrained, even in the wise. This, from a simple worry to complete panic, these forms of anxiety are only expressions of fear. The consequence of ‘abhiniveśah’ is an inflated instinct of self preservation, a very deep seated attachment to the body, which makes us want to survive at any cost. However, this doesn’t mean that we always act in a way that assumes we want to preserve our life.
We don’t always look after ourselves as we might if we realised our impermanence. We sometimes live as if we are invincible. It is only when we get sick that we may begin to take greater responsibility for our health and wellbeing. From an Ayurvedic perspective, there are six stages of disease, which i find fascinating. It’s a reminder of the importance of trying to maintain balance so that any imbalances do not progress into disease:
1. Initial stage
Imbalance is situated in the gastrointestinal tract and is best treated with diet. This stage is relatively minor and often the body’s own wisdom (if we allow it) corrects the imbalance.
2. Build-up stage
If balance is not restored, toxicity (ama) spreads into the circulatory system. Symptoms at this stage are a sense of being mildly uncomfortable. Most of us ignore these symptoms or suppress them with over-the-counter medications.
3. Spreading stage
Toxins journey through the main circulatory systems of the body causing additional symptoms. These symptoms often become chronic.
4. Accumulation stage
This is when toxins, after moving through the circulatory system, find a weak spot and settle. According to Ayurveda this is the beginning of actual disease. This is when most people finally visit the doctor hoping for a quick cure.
5. Manifestation Stage
At this stage western medicine will likely give a patient a clinical diagnosis. The actual structure of the tissues begins to break down making it difficult to reverse the progression of the disease. This is when most people finally visit the doctor hoping for a quick cure.
6. Complications Stage
The tissue is severely damaged and may begin to affect the surrounding tissues resulting in additional complications.
This is also another reminder to get to know thyself, to understand our mind and body and to be aware when we are living out of baiance to the extent that our health begins to suffer. We have to appreciate that just because society encourages us to live a certain way - or friends, family and our culture for that matter - this doesn’t mean that this will work for us individually. There is neurosis about being different, yet to me, we should be celebrating these differences. Many of us are neurodiverse and sensitive and are not meant to be living the mainstream way.
However, many reject ourselves because of not “fitting in”. which is often the greatest harming we can do to ourselves. It is an insidious within our society to not love or accept ourselves - this is the main issue facing my clients. They feel that they are not good enough because they don’t live up to the expectations of others, or indeed our idea of ‘success’ in society. They are down on themselves, loathing their body because it doesn’t resemble the idea of ‘beauty’ per social media and the latest fashion within society. They reject parts of themselves that they consider are ‘bad’ without realising that such concepts do not exist, at least from a soulful level.
At times we can be our greatest tyrant, harming ourselves with our internal noisy self depreciating and negative voice. Of course there are other factors. We live in an increasingly busy world, it is very difficult to find peace, we have to fight for it, to have time away from the demands of others, even if those are friends and family, to contain our energy. Our society is currently set up to distract us from knowing ourselves on a deeper level, the phone is one of our greatest enemies in that regard, not least because of the frequency it emits, but because of its constant distraction, which keeps us locked into the material and superficial world of comparison and ‘not enough’ mentality.
Furthermore, from an environmental perspective, life is noisy. We are surrounded by 4 and 5G, we have wires running throughout our houses, under our roads, over our heads, planes frequently filling the skies, some involved in cloud seeding, creating the ‘chem trails’, pesticides, vaccines, we are bombarded by all sorts of pollutants that have become normalised and yet all play a role in impacting our health and wellbeing. We have to fight to protect ourselves in this regard, to breathe fresh air, drink clean water and eat foods which have not been tainted by chemicals and poor soil conditions. Tight finances means that we struggle to shelter ourselves, to provide for our most basic needs. Life has lost its balance and mainly because of our ongoing separation from nature.
Furthermore, we may keep making the same mistakes and therefore receiving the same lessons over and over again. We may over eat or under eat, we may laze around or not be able to stop, we may keep falling for the same destructive relationships, or shy away from them entirely, there are many ways we deceive ourselves, ignore our truth, keep on doing what we have done previously and yet hoping for a different result. It is very easy to numb ourselves from our reality and hope for the best, put it off for tomorrow - the “I’ll get to it at retirement” mentality, without appreciating that there is no guarantee we will actually make it to retirement.
This is where yoga and Reiki can help us enormously. They help to shine the light into our shadows, so we can see more clearly the lessons and learn from them so we don’t keep repeating them. These practices help us to come to know ourselves - to understand the workings of our mind, to appreciate our body as a vehicle for this lifetime, to connect with our soul, to find a way to be in this world where we celebrate our differences, are kinder to ourself, see more of the bigger picture and step away from the slave mentality that permeates our world - it’s an interesting enquiry - what are we a slave to in our life?
Ultimately though, we begin to realise our impermanence and we orientate towards an increasingly moment to moment existence. We may begin to look after ourselves better, taking responsibility for our health and wellbeing, not believing all that we are told by politicians, scientists and media, finding our own truth and living authentically in the process, making decisions which will help us to thrive and allow us to live well.
We might stop caring so much what others think, so that we don’t expand huge amounts of energy masking and trying to be someone we are not and never will be. We stop trying to live like others because that is how we are told we should live. We stop people pleasing. We stop trying to be all things. We let go of the false conditioning that has been put upon us by our society, our culture, our family, our teachers, our friends, our religion, our traditions. We let go and become more of who we are, beyond what we have been told.
Ultimately though we begin to recognise our impermanence and we live increasingly in the present, healing our past and not putting off today for tomorrow. We learn to increasingly let go of all we thought, so we can realise more of who we are at essence.
Yet there is still fear about dying. Fear because we literally have to let go of all that we have cared about - our body, our world possessions, our loved ones. Our whole construct around money, power, prestige and status becomes irrelevant. A generation later and we will be forgotten, a name on a gravestone, someone now resting in peace. Or so we hope. The idea of losing our identity is terrifying and hence why Patanjali calls fear of death an affliction, one of the Kleshas then.
Yoga helps us to strip back the false layers of identify, until we can access Purusha, our eternal self, the part of us that lives beyond time and space, that is not subject to the kleshas or the gunas, that is an all pervading presence that continues from one lifetime to the next. Essentially yoga - and Reiki - helps us to let go and to let go and to let go. And let’s face not, the ultimate letting go is one of death, so the more comfortable we are with letting go in life, the more comfortable we will be in letting go at the end.
But really it isn’t an end. Death may cause an end to our body, to our connection with loved ones, to our worldly possessions, but it does not kill the soul. It is this connection that it eternal. Yet so many live with a complete disconnect to this part of themselves.
Many are awakening to their greater potential however. Realising that we are more than just our body and our mind. More are beginning to realise that we have the potential to know ourselves better than anyone else can ever know us.
My yoga teacher always says that our yoga practice is preparing us for a good death - because death is the ultimate letting go, so we let go during our practice increasingly so, it is familiar to us, this notion, and the easier we let go, the gentler our passing will be.
Increasing numbers of my students are considering this passing. There is an interest in becoming a death doula. I am asked about this because one of my friend’s already works in this capacity, is a death doula, albeit not in name. She has been gifted with an ability to help others pass peacefully. There are increasing numbers of courses available for people to train to be a death doula, to bring more light to dying and release some of the fear. if you are interested then read this link.
Which brings me to death itself. One of my friends sent me this link to an article about two people who died and came back to life again. The message is quite clear - Are you doing something that matters with your life?'
Are you doing something that matters with your life?
If not, why not?
What gets in your way? What are your obstacles?
More often than not we are up against our own mind and its limitations. We don’t feel we have the strength to make changes. We struggle to take responsibility. We worry too much about the notion of failing. We let imposter syndrome take over. Our ego can be ever so debilitating if we let it. Sometimes we have to feel our fear and do it anyway. We have to keep walking our path despite that little voice telling us we are not good enough.
At some point we have to elevate the perspective. To step away from our small self and realise more of the greater Self, that voice that knows that all is OK, that we each have gifts to bring forth into this world, to help and make a difference, to do something with our lives that truly matters, beyond our need for external validation. At some point we have to turn inwards.
Which brings me back to don Juan and his teachings:
“I left don Juan’s house more confused than ever. There was a voice inside me that virtually demanded that I end all endeavours with Professor Lorca. I understood how right don Juan was when he said to me once that the practicalities that scientists were interested in were conducive to building more and more complex machines. They were not the practicalities that changed an individual’s life course from within. They were not geared to reaching the vastness of the universe as a personal, experiential affair. The stupendous machines in existence, or those in the making, were cultural affairs, the attainment of which had to be enjoyed vicariously, even by the creators of those machines themselves. The only reared for them was monetary”.
This to me is a fabulous reminder of the way in which science and technology is merely a distraction from us going deeper inside ourselves and recognising our impermanence and living therefore with greater meaning in our everyday existence - being grateful for each day and the life that it gifts us.
We are impermanent.
Our greatest gift to ourself is to truly realise this.
Love Emma x