Yesterday, I turned 40. I had a client come for a healing session and she knew it was my birthday. She was reflecting on this big transition into a new decade and said, "Wow. You are in your midlife. You are half-way through your life." I looked at her as I simultaneously became aware of a 29-year-old community member who recently died. I replied, "Well, that is generous to think I would have 40 more years."
She replied, "I heard this time of transition may also be a time of your mid-life crisis?" I laughed and said, "Well if that is the time when your life and your well thought out plans for the future get completely dismantled and you are thrown into your depths, then I just spent the last five years of my 30s doing this."
She laughed and we began to share for a minute about how the culturally conditioned way of responding to loss or crisis often lead us scrambling to stay in the light in an attempt to escape the great call from our depths. A call that I believe beacons us to develop a deeper intimacy with death.
When this is avoided, mid-life crisis can become something in which we grasp for the new and the shiny as if it could offer some sort of anti-aging cream. Yet, in restoring the true rites of these passage through a journey into our depths, we can be given a profound opportunity to bring the truth of our mortality a little closer. Through this, we can reevaluate our lives and ultimately restore the passion of what truly matters in our lives.
My journey took me down a dark yet fertile path to embrace the trail of my forgotten tears. Walking down this road, I had to first encounter my deep struggles with loss and grief. My relationship to loss wasn't a really a relationship to loss. I began to realize that I knew very little of the actual experience of that. I was in a relational battle with all the invisible and tightly wound belief systems of everything that I thought loss meant. Loss was failure. My escape hatch from loss' embrace always carried with it an unconscious dream: a hope of bigger, brighter, better and more gain, specialness and status than I could ever imagine. Loss and death were predators and demons, stoned gnarly gargoyles that blocked my path to ever expanding heights.
I had spent most of my life demonizing loss and these mini deaths which were guiding me to a realization of the ultimate destination of death. My un-intimate relationship with loss, showed up primarily in my life through the nagging voice of my inner critic: my comparing mind. My stoned relationship to loss and death kept me in a perpetual quest for gain. This voice is all about what I didn't have and what I think I needed to have. It compares itself with what others have but I don't. This voice can also show up as what I had but lost. I began to realize this voice essentially rings out in a very familiar tone throughout my circumstances, "Loss and death are not okay." Yet, these strange visitors and voices hold many secret gems of wisdom when I have been willing to turn and face them. As if de-thawing their frozen and stoned existence, so the true life and light can be revealed behind their condemned masks.
My dark road of loss wasn't in vain when I began to face it more intimately and listen to what wanted to course through my veins. As if each step down this dark road was calling me to the center of my life, to reside more intimately in love's fiery and passionate core. Here, the passion of life is revealed through my mortality and the pulse of my fleeting heartbeat. This passion offers me an ongoing and deepening invitation to the real, the sangreal, and the exquisite wonder, magic and royalty of life.
This royalty cares nothing of status, worth or composure. It only yearns to run with a wild intimacy that comes in these moments when I touch upon the delicacy of my human existence.
It seeks to know itself more and more intimately through deep belly laughter with friends, in the glistening of teardrops, through the rays of a gentle sun and the extending of a hand to help another. This sacredness of life is life itself. It is the gift of having one more day to live in the beauty of life in all of its losses and all of its gains, in all of it's colors and all of it's rays.
To find out more about Courtney, to learn more about her work and to shed the layers that keep us from living in the wild royality of life's intimacy, please visit www.courtneydukelow.com.