How Does It End?
Q: How Does It End?
A: I recently found out that my cousin lost her life to addiction. Lost her life. What is more precious than our very breath? Perhaps that which is beyond the breath, that which is greater than this physical existence...maybe, yet isn’t our life the most beautiful gift we could ever receive? And now she is gone and there are no more breaths. I am sitting here in deep reflection.
Today is a new moon in Cancer. It is a moon of emotions with a sensitivity that is so potent it vibrates telepathically. What will this moon show you? It could bring up the ancient past as Cancer is the historian, the nostalgic time-keeper of what has been. While the crab carries its home, grudges, and responsibilities on its back, it seeks the waters to provide a fluid type of support. Bathing, swimming, basking, diving, crying, aligning, remembering, and dying to the past - and finally releasing some of that ‘holding it togetherness’.
This week has been one of many tears. Before receiving this news I had been in a state of profound grieving. Sometimes this occurs for me; I will feel a deep emotion arise from somewhere buried underneath the many layers of my spectrum of awareness. While I succumb to the moment, I well up with a sadness that doesn’t relate to the present. And then later I learn that those tears were pouring out from my future pain.
AN OLD VERSION OF ME
I once pre-grieved my life dissolving before my eyes. Six months before I lost my ‘husband’, livelihood, homes, community, perceived purpose, and everything I thought was important to me, my lungs filled with liquid and I grieved...hard. I was in Machu Picchu, cloistered in a small room on the jungle river as many of my dearest friends forged into the mountains. They were on a journey I had taken many times and this time my journey was purely within. This was just over five years ago and yet the suffering and anxiousness of not being able to breathe those very long days and nights still haunts me.
Months later when an internal choice was presented to me as to whether to continue to suffer or not to suffer, I had no more tears to shed. It was go-time. I chose not to suffer and my life fell apart, the irony. And from that moment on, a new life began; new life, new breath, new Ciela.
HOPE AND PRAYER
As I sit here in the candlelight and pray for my dear cousin's transition into a new form, I can’t help but feel the pain, and the sorrow, she endured and consistently attempted to escape from through her addiction. Somewhere inside of me, I know what this feels like. Not because I have lived it in this life, but from the human connection of deep knowing that I am in my heart. I have ached this week, and these pangs span across the tides of time, that which has gone and for that which shall be.
There is a part of me that feels hopeful that some of her suffering is now complete. She was too young to die and deeply challenged by this world and her relationship with it. And yet in my threads of memories of being, Life itself is so vast, so complex and miraculous, that to think that this one chapter of her existence is “complete” in some way feels quite mistaken. For now, I pray for her to receive understanding, resolve in her spirit heart, and blessings for an auspicious rebirth.
And this is a Tibetan Dying Prayer for those of us with the remaining gift of our breath. May we approach each day as the preciousness that it is and contemplate these prayers now before death as a practice of appreciating life...
Through your blessing, grace, and guidance, through the power of the light that streams from you:
May all my negative karma, destructive emotions, obscurations, and blockages be purified and removed,
May I know myself forgiven for all the harm I may have thought and done,
May I accomplish this profound practice of phowa, and die a good and peaceful death,
And through the triumph of my death, may I be able to benefit all other beings, living or dead.
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