How We Heal Through the Initiations of Life, Death, and Rebirth

We will die many deaths in one single lifetime, and learning how to expand through this process is essential if we are to truly live.

Despite what many of us have been conditioned to believe, life is not a linear path and we will cycle and spiral through death and rebirth many times within this single lifetime. Understanding this process, embracing it, and becoming masterful in how we integrate the depth of the underworld and the heights of the upperworld here on Earth is a huge invitation in the human journey. Few of us have been educated on the true ways of nature, of deterioration and regeneration, and the grief and rage that we will face in the process of alchemizing our wounds into more light.

All ancient shamanic cultures and womb religions across the world understood this cyclical process of death and rebirth and it was central to their way of life. Following the rhythms of nature, they witnessed the waxes and wanes of the moon, the shedding and regenerating of the menstrual blood, the cold dark winters blooming again into Spring. They supported and prepared young people through their initiations and rites of passage and vision quests to deeply embrace and understand their own natural cycles.

As our collective is preparing itself for a catastrophic rebirth, where we will literally create a New Earth through the rise of feminine consciousness, many of us are learning how to reattune ourselves to the rhythms of nature… beginning with the dark night of the soul.

Ancient cultures understood that every ascent begins with a descent and they encoded this message in our ancient stories and mythologies.

In modern culture today where many have become obsessed with one directional ascension, be it through constant achievement and progress in the material world or the denial of the shadow and the darkness in the spiritual world, it’s no wonder we may feel lost, afraid, broken, unworthy, unlovable, and even insane when we enter the initiation of descent. But the secret and the magic and mystery is that our very light, our very treasure, our very gifts live in this dark underworld that requires we get very intimate with our deepest pain.

Our ascension does not happen through denying the darkness or our intense emotions. It happens through meeting the darkness and apprenticing ourselves through our emotions. Through loving the most fragmented, broken, shattered pieces of ourselves back into wholeness so that they can reveal their true nature and hidden light. Power lives in the darkness, in the depths, in the underworld, and if we wish to empower our light, we have to meet it in its densest most demonized form and become the love that heals all in its embrace.

This process of dying through the dark night of the soul and emerging with more light is timeless.

My Welsh ancestors called it “Awen” the light of truth and immortality that emerges from the darkness like the sliver of the crescent moon births herself out of the black night sky. In Ancient Mesopotamia, Sumeria, and Egypt it was witnessed through the descent and ascent of the planet Venus and depicted in the stories of Inanna (who I wrote about more here: Inanna’s Descent: How We Integrate the Shadow and Embrace Our Wholeness), Isis, Ishtar, Aphrodite of Greece, Mary Magdalene and many others.

In a world that has for a very long time focused on “heart-centered consciousness” to descend is to return to the womb and to meet with all of her pain, trauma, grief, and rage, as well as her pleasure, passion, vitality, fertility, and power. Menstruation is always a time of descent. In fact, it is believed that the crucifixion of Jesus is an allegory for a woman’s moon time, as it is the offering of the blood that redeems all sin. For the ancients, when a woman shed her menstrual blood, she was stripping and shedding away the wounds of humanity through the power of her womb to rebirth all things in love.

Remembering and embodying this wisdom is crucial at a time when we are all being asked, more than ever, to rise in service and humble leadership with our gifts. On this feminine shamanic path, we become our own midwives through these dark initiations, learning how to source greater wells and resources of our own medicine, honey, and nectar for ourselves and for the world.

When we enter our own descent, be it a small one every menstrual cycle or a huge one at various times in our lives when life as we know it shatters or dissolves, we do not need fixing, judging, nor lightwashing.

The wisdom of how to navigate this dark terrain between life and death lives in our bodies, and that is the most profound invitation within it all: let your body become your teacher, your guru, and your guide.

As the depths of Hell bring us closer to our suffering, and eventually bursts open into the light of our immortality, at times the most challenging aspect of this process is integration. Being fully human in the world once we have realized the quintessential light of the soul that never dies can be hugely overwhelming and confusing when we do not have the outer resources or guidance to navigate it.

Fortunately our shamanic cultures, particularly those that have managed to maintain their traditions, offer us tremendous wisdom in weaving ourselves whole through integrating our immortality with our humanity. I have personally found the shamanic medicine wheel, central for every ancient culture that exists, to be a profoundly supportive ally on this path.

The wheel maps the natural cycles of life and death through the elements of earth, air, fire, and water as the elemental seasons of life within and around us.

On a physical level, we see how these elementals allow our bodies and all matter to regenerate. The dense material of Earth that nourishes and feeds us and grounds us here and now, the breath of life that animates us into being and infuses our bodies with spirit, the fire of heat and sunlight that energizes and awakens us to sexuality, and the cooling cleansing nectar of water that clears, revitalizes, and soothes.

When we navigate the cycles of life, death, and rebirth, we are simultaneously grounding the spiritual world while evolving the physical world. This is the process of alchemy, where our spirit and matter fuse together and we transform into a whole integrated divine human being. This happens not only on the physical level described above, but perhaps most poignantly on the emotional level. Elementals are not only physical, they are also spiritual and when we are bridging the gap between the two worlds, we experience the elements through our emotions. Energy in motion experienced through the body.

To truly heal, we must feel, and as long as we continue to allow all of our emotions to move through us cleanly, learning to embrace ourselves with ever deepening levels of radical love, we will experience a Rebirth. Just as the wheel spirals us through summer, autumn, winter, and spring, again and again and again, while the frequencies of underworld and upperworld anchor the axis at the center, we too spin and spiral through fire as rage, water as grief, earth as fear, and air as joy as we dive deeper into the depths of our karma (underworld) and dharma (upperworld).

Knowing how to consciously work with these energies, to spin and to weave all of the elementals through our physical bodies and through our emotions, is a true path of mastery.

Ultimately, as we see in the stories of the crucifixion of Jesus, the sexual initiation rites of Isis, the descent and ascent of Inanna, and the awakened heart womb of Mary Magdalene, rebirth is truly about wholeness. About meeting all aspects of ourselves and fiercely loving whatever arises. In this sense, we see the elementals as archetypes for all that we are, that meets us in various frequencies of shadow and light.

Let’s explore now each of the elements on the emotional level to receive the insights that they came to awaken within us. Embracing the full spectrum of underworld and upperworld, let’s open to both the rage and the passion that live in our fire, the grief and the forgiveness that live in our water, the fear and the truth that live in our earth, and the joy and the celebration that live in our air.

This process is in no way all inclusive nor singular. It is one way of navigating the dance of life and death, and ultimately our own descent journey will teach us our way. However, it can be deeply healing and helpful to also receive the illuminating wisdom of others. My words come with that intention. So let’s journey together and see what sheds, releases, regenerates, and blooms…

Fire as the Emotion of Rage Bestowing Us With the Gift of Passion

When we awaken to the wounds and suffering of humanity through the dark night of the soul, we meet the inner dragon that speaks to us through rage. This is the solar power and energy within us depicted as Tiamat, the dragon who birthed the world through lava, and perhaps most commonly as Durga Ma in the Hindu tradition who arrives at the palace of the demons and violently severs heads to restore order.

This rage is good. It is healthy. It is important. AND it will eventually destroy us and turn us to stone if we do not learn how to consciously work with it rather than constantly unleashing and projecting it onto others. The truth is… there is MUCH to be angry about in this world. There is tremendous injustice. There is unbelievable suffering. Feeling this rage is an important step in opening our hearts fully to life. However, rage is an emotion and not to be confused with truth. Rage is energy in motion, meant to refine, to purify, and to teach us something about truth. Rage is not truth, but rage can bring us closer to truth if we allow it.

We can work with rage through the fire in our bodies and in our bellies. We can call upon our rage to burn down, purify, and transmute anything that does not align with love. We can ask this rage to teach us how to be better advocates for the innocence within ourselves and within our world. We can summon this rage to help us set healthy boundaries, to claim our YES and our NO, and to be fueled with the PASSION that sets the world on fire with love. (For more on this work I really recommend the iconic book Women Who Run With the Wolves by psychotherapist Clarissa Pinkola Estes and her chapter on rage and forgiveness.)

Water as the Emotion of Grief Bestowing Us With the Gift of Forgiveness

Often what we discover beneath the erupting lava of rage is the oceanic depths of grief. Once the rage has been allowed to unleash, there is typically a moment of freedom and exhilaration followed by a purging of deep grief. As an embodiment facilitator I intentionally create space for huge summoning and release of rage through physical movement, so that deeper emotions can then be felt. Through my own personal journeying and through what I witness as a facilitator, there is typically laughter and a burst of freedom that occurs at some point within the release of rage, followed by a stillness due to the discharge in energy that then allows the watery depths to be felt and grieved.

To meet with our grief, we have to slow down. Often this grief is what we are so afraid to feel, that keeps us looping constantly in avoidance of our own underworld journeys and ego deaths, unable to evolve more fully into our potential. Slowing down and getting still will bring us into contact and communion with suffering. However, this grief is actually the water of life. It is the churning ocean and flooding rivers that have been polluted and stagnated in a world that does not know how to hold loving space for deep emotions.

When we grieve, we allow our own waters to run clear and clean once again. We purify ourselves through gentleness, tenderness, and the nectars of compassion that redeem all things in love. This is the essence of forgiveness and what grief is here to bless us with. Have a good cry and notice how much more relaxed and relieved you feel. This process becomes one thousand times more important when we have suffered huge loss, particularly of loved ones or our identity. Conscious grieving has been my own greatest healer in my death and rebirth process, bathing me in the amrita (nectar of immortality) of the Mother herself.

Earth as the Emotion of Fear Bestowing Us With the Gift of Truth

Grief brings us back to Earth. Out of our heads and into our bodies where we come into contact with the emotion that often rests beneath it all: fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of death. Fear of the void. This fear resides at the root of our bodies, at the perineum, the place that began as a little knot within our mother’s womb that eventually blossomed forth our entire body. Essentially, it is the fear of being human and of being mortal. Paradoxically, our avoidance of this fear is what keeps us from directly experiencing our own immortality.

When we directly meet and face the fears that hide in the shadows, amazingly we often meet and face God. The fear of our own tininess in the vastness of cosmic creation. Our tremendous vulnerability in the great web of life that we still believe ourselves to be separate from. Fully realizing our power means looking into the eyes of death and our greatest fears that there is something “out there” that can destroy us, and being willing to die to no longer be a victim of our own repressed fears.

This process is nothing short of mystical. It is what happens for many in extended meditation retreats or during fasting, where everything is stripped away and we return to the dark womb of stillness where all potential resides. Here is the space that we arrive at the Crone, the wise woman, witch, or sage within us, as the gatekeeper to the truth that dwells within the womb. It is our trust in what we cannot see within our deepest fears that brings us into communion with the truth of life and death.

I speak to this in more detail from my own personal journey here: How I Survived the Death of Myself and Rebirthed Once Again.

Air as the Emotion of Joy Bestowing Us With the Gift of Celebration

It is a mind blowing paradox that on the other side of death we discover the freshness of new life. Many mystics call the time we are in now the great “cosmic menstruation” where all that is out of resonance with the love vibration we are anchoring must be rebirthed by the wisdom of the womb. If you have ever reached resolution on the other side of a very dark night of the soul, you have directly experienced what prophets anticipate is coming for us as a humanity.

The element of air blesses us with new beginnings, the fresh blossoms of Spring after the cold winter, and the sunrise that is guaranteed after a long dark night. Our experience of the joy of this innocence on the other side of death is worlds apart from the joy that has never met death. There is a depth to this joy that emanates as gratitude for life itself. Not a feigned gratitude, an eruption of gratitude that one feels upon seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The key is that we breathe, dance, sing, create, write, and dream. Whatever brings us in touch with the childlike self and allows us to incarnate more fully into the physical body through breathing fresh life from the inspiration of the dark night of the soul.

This joy brings us close to perhaps the greatest gift of our humanity: celebration. Celebration of the dance of life. Celebration of everything that we have survived and have yet to survive. Celebration of the preciousness of this very fleeting moment, aware of how quickly anything can turn to ash. This celebration teaches us to inherently trust the cycles of nature, knowing in our bones that death is not what we think it is and that darkness always gives way to more light.

The key to allowing these natural cycles to unfold and transform us into even more of who we are… is feeling.

Remaining alive, juicy, flowing, and dynamic as life continues to refine us through the thresholds of life, death, and life once again, becoming the immortal presence of love that never leaves.

Wherever you are on your personal path, may you continue to feel. Feel it all. Feel everything. May your courage in facing your emotional depths and loving yourself in ways you once believed impossible be the very nectar that inspires and heals our world.

Now, more than ever, we need brave souls willing to truly live to remind one another of the preciousness of this life.