For centuries, cultures around the world have engaged in practices that prepare individuals to face death with acceptance and understanding. From ritualized ceremonies to meditative traditions, these practices emphasize death as a natural and sacred part of life. In today’s death-denying and death-phobic societies, we lack such frameworks, leaving many unprepared for the realities of mortality. Cultivating a personal relationship with death is an essential step toward reclaiming this wisdom. To live fully and authentically, we must explore our own fears, questions, and beliefs surrounding death. Befriending death—embracing its inevitability, mystery, and transformative power—offers us this opportunity.
By exploring mortality with curiosity, we challenge the pervasive norms of avoidance and fear, replacing them with emotional awareness and a deeper understanding of life’s purpose and interconnectedness. Below, we share intentional, creative practices for building a conscious relationship with death and understanding its role in our lives.
Image: Capela dos Ossos (Chapel of Bones), Évora, Portugal
Why Befriending Death Matters
To Build Emotional Awareness
Consciously confronting our own mortality allows us to cultivate emotional mindfulness and sensitivity. By facing our fears and exploring death, we develop the inner calm and strength needed to navigate life’s most challenging transitions and all the "little deaths" that can be found in our daily lives.
To Cultivate Authentic Presence
When we have explored our own relationship with death, we can show up fully and without pretense. This allows us to hold space with authenticity and vulnerability, fostering trust and deeper connections with others. In effect, our peace with mortality encourages openness and acceptance in those around us.
To Normalize Discussions About Mortality
When we are comfortable with death, we counter societal death-phobia and naturally create space for others to discuss it without fear or shame. This can help us have important conversations about end-of-life decisions, legacy work, and the profound act of letting go.
To Embrace Death’s Sacred Role in Life
Death is not the enemy; it is an integral and sacred aspect of existence. Befriending death allows us to recognize it as a teacher of profound truths with opportunities for growth, connection, and transformation.
Creative Practices for Befriending Death
Are you curious what befriending death can look like in daily life? The following practices provide thoughtful opportunities to explore mortality with intention and reverence:
Yoga Nidra: Releasing the Body with Gratitude
Yoga Nidra, or yogic sleep, is a powerful guided meditation that gently reflects the process of dying by guiding us to release awareness of the physical body with gratitude and ease. In this practice:
- Although any restorative pose can be utilized, Savasana (corpse pose) seems quite fitting for this practice.
- Systematically bring awareness to each part of your body.
- With deep gratitude, release attachment to each part, acknowledging its role in supporting your life.
This practice of surrender deepens our capacity to accept the process of death as a natural, peaceful transition.
Death Education
Fear often stems from the unknown. By learning about the practical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of death, we replace uncertainty with understanding. Death education can include:
- Exploring end-of-life care options, including hospice, palliative care, and green burial practices.
- Studying the physical process of dying and the body’s natural progression toward death.
- Investigating cultural, spiritual, and historical perspectives on death and dying.
- Training to be a death doula within a community of like-minded, curious human beings.
Knowledge empowers us to approach mortality with confidence, countering the societal tendencies to deny and fear death.
Befriending the Breath
The breath is both the essence of life and the final act we release as we die. By deepening our connection to the breath, we practice the art of letting go:
- Engage in breath awareness meditation, observing the rise and fall of the inhale and exhale without judgment.
- Recognize the exhale as a micro-practice of surrender—a "small death" that prepares us for the ultimate letting go.
- Use breathwork to cultivate acceptance, trust, and peace with impermanence.
Service: Volunteering and Sitting Vigil
One of the most impactful ways to befriend death is through service in the community. Volunteering with hospice organizations or sitting vigil with those nearing the end of life offers a direct, compassionate experience of mortality. By being present for others during their transition, we gain precious insights into death's realities and deepen our sense of connection and purpose.
- Hospice Volunteering: Providing companionship or support to those in hospice care fosters empathy and understanding.
- Vigil Sitting: Bearing witness to the dying process teaches us about presence, patience, and the sacred nature of life’s final moments.
Sacred Plant and Animal Wisdom Medicine
Plant and animal medicines have been used for millennia to expand human consciousness and connect us to the metaphysical realms. For example, indigenous cultures have long incorporated sacred plants like ayahuasca and peyote in ceremonial practices to foster spiritual insights and confront mortality. Similarly, animals such as the toad (through its secretions) have provided consciousness-expanding experiences that offer glimpses into life beyond the physical realm. When approached with care, support, and reverence, these medicines can reveal how fragile and miraculous this life is.
- Deep Spiritual Journeys: Some plant medicines (such as ayahuasca or psilocybin) invite us into transformative experiences that reshape our understanding of reality, mortality, and the continuum of life.
- Gentle Subtle Exploration: Other plant allies offer softer, more gradual awakenings, helping us ease into a relationship with mortality over time.
For those who prefer non-substance-based exploration, shamanic journeying through practices like drumming, Holotropic breath work, and intention-setting provides a powerful means of accessing spiritual insights. These methods allow individuals to symbolically explore the afterlife and gain comfort with the unknown.
Death and Dreaming
Dreams can serve as a bridge between the conscious mind and the mysteries of death. By exploring your dreams with curiosity, you may uncover symbolic insights about transformation and the afterlife. Practices for death-dream exploration include:
- Keeping a dream journal to track recurring themes of endings, rebirth, or encounters with deceased loved ones.
- Reflecting on dream imagery that mirrors loss, transitions, or acceptance.
This dream work fosters a sense of curiosity about the mysteries that lie beyond physical life.
Walking Alongside Death
Befriending death is not a single event but a lifelong journey.
Through intentional practices like Yoga Nidra, plant medicine, breathwork, death education, and community service, we foster reverence for life's impermanence, cultivate emotional awareness, and deepen our understanding of death as an integral part of the human experience. In doing so, we learn that death is not merely an end but a teacher—a companion that invites us to live and love authentically.
Are you ready to take the first steps toward befriending death? Breathe. Reflect. Embrace the practices that speak to you, and trust the wisdom that death offers.
Image: A Woman Divided into Two, Representing Life and Death - Austria, Germany, Switzerland, or North Italy; 1790-1820 Oil on Canvas.
ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH
by Rebecca Elson
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
