Rosa Lewis

Whereas if it's something that is included and says, this is going to come up, it's going to be intense.

And one of the reasons it comes up is as an alchemical opportunity to transmute something or a chance to deepen your wisdom into greater equanimity or a chance to

then people have more of a sense of resilience around it because they can see that even though it's hard, it can be a good thing that it's coming up and it has a meaning, it has a purpose.

There's good things to come from the experience, even if the experience itself is hard.

Yeah.

The first step is to think about how you relate to death.

And specifically, it's not that you need to take on relating to death in any specific way, but from a modern individualist perspective,

capitalist rationalist world a lot of people are really really scared of death and it's not that you don't have to be scared but there are other ways that you can relate to death spending some time feeling that there might be something kind of nice about it also like a returning home or a release or a

these sorts of qualities might be in death.

So the exercise starts by sort of just bringing in some of those possibilities and then spending a bit of time being with the imaginal qualities of death.

Lots of people have a hard time understanding what the imaginal is, but death is actually one of the best ways to think about it because we don't have any, there's no way of actually knowing what is on the other side of death.

Everything we think about as death is inherently imaginal.

because it doesn't have a logical concrete thing in our world and so there's like some questions to connect people to this imaginal experience and so it's sort of feeling into like ah what do you imagine is there on the other side of death what's the vibe of it even if it's just like a void that you think is death is a void is it like a black void is it a white void is it a transparent void are there sort of like these imaginal if you believe in god and a

higher intelligence what does that intelligence know like where are you going where is it compared to this universe and just sort of like feeling through some of this not to get the answer obviously because there's no way of validating but just to feel it in your system imaginably how do i relate to death and kind of build it out a bit and get a bit of a more of a sort of emotional

resonance going where it's not just this is a scary bad thing that I don't ever want to happen it's more like oh this is a experience that I'm going to go through one day and how do I relate to it how does it show up in my experience and what is it and then once that's sort of a bit more alive you can use that to essentially bring in some bits of experience that you want to be different how they are and just imagine them

getting absorbed by that death and seeing if that changes how you relate to it in the experience and if it changes what's showing up at all.

Yeah, exactly.

It also sort of folds in on itself where if you're comfortable with that, one of the things that keeps you away from the challenging stuff and in a more is this sense of

I need to be in control.

I need to keep experience together in a very specific way, keep the bad stuff out.