Yesterday, one of my kittens was killed outside of the safety of our fence by some dogs…probably dogs that I love and care for. My neighbor’s dogs regularly come to the fence for food and they escort Lydi and I downtown with baby Maya each day on our walks. Buttercup licks my hand in greeting and Big Dog is a fixture who has provided us with companionship during some of the darkest days of our lives. Our own dogs, Fluppy and Little Dog (Big Dog’s son) stay behind inside our fence. It was one of them or a group of them who killed the kitten, a little orange daredevil we’d named “Georgie”.
John found Georgie just shortly after he was killed and scooped his body up in a shovel to bring him inside the fence. I didn’t want to see the body but felt compelled to go anyway, before burying the body, because I know from experience how hard it is for the mind to grasp death unless the eyes see the one who died and the discarnate body left behind. So I followed John with the shovel with the limp little orange kitten paws hanging off the side of it, to our pet cemetery where other beloved animals are buried. John set the shovel down and I looked closely at Georgie for a moment.
I could see wounds on his body…but though they were relatively deep (not mortal wounds though) they hadn’t bled much. I noted this with much pain in my heart because I loved this little kitten. He was wild, but I saw him daily as I would feed the wild babies (as we call them) to try to tame them down bit by bit. My mind urged me to look away, conditioned by years of being immersed in religion and a medical system that looks away from death as a 2-dimensional, flat and scary place that’s either the darkest of blacks or the whitest of whites. The medical system that has colonized the world, the system that involves doctors and hospitals, does not work with or negotiate with Death. To this system, Death is the enemy and life is the only state of our existence that might be good or okay.
Yet, as I gently pulled Georgie’s body off the shovel to put my hands on it and feel him (as I’d only ever held him once in his life when he got caught by me, daredevil-ing in our tool shed) I noted how his body was still warm, though his eyes were still and open, the white lids closing in over pupils that were yet constricted. His fur was soft and downy and I felt how healthy his body had been. There was something in the feel of his body and in the appearance, nothing quantitatively or scientifically objectifiable, yet perceptible still with my human eyes, that made me feel like he might yet come back to life. My logical mind dismissed it and made fun of such nonsense…nonsense. What was thinking?…that this cat would suddenly take a breath and re-embody his body just because I willed him to. Such craziness…
…and yet, his body remained warm when I took my hands away from it. John went to get a box and I was left alone with Georgie. I noticed that his incisors were broken off on the top and bottom of his mouth. His tongue hung limply, with blood, out to the side of his mouth. His lower jaw was swollen. One of his legs was stiff…but his other legs were still loose with life. And despite my sadness as I sat over him, I thought of other animals that I’d watched in my life that were on the brink of death…animals that had gone stiff with lifelessness who were loved and stroked and who decided (on a soul level) to come back. I couldn’t quite talk myself through it though. Other thoughts that I’ve been conditioned to have by the culture within which I live now and within which I lived as a child challenged any hope that I nurtured that this kitten might yet come back to life. A quiet acknowledgement crept into my being about how the loss of Georgie’s teeth, a primary form of defense against other animals, even friendly ones, would change the trajectory of his life should he decide to live…and the fear he’d certainly feel if his soul was still there, inside his body, if we buried him, or even if we didn’t bury him – because he was a wild cat. Wild cats don’t appreciate comfort or medicine. They live in a different world than the house-cats that we’ve adopted. So I considered these things and remembered Babylonia…my precious white kitty who threatened to die, but then didn’t. I had wept over her at a veterinarian’s clinic as she struggled to stand in what appeared to be (but wasn’t) a final goodbye. And Arlene, a tiny baby kitten who got stiff and who seemed all but dead…seriously dead in a similar, albeit slightly less beat-up way than Georgie, who came back to life because John held her all night on his chest, reluctant to let her soul pass on while she was lying alone in a box.
There were others like this…Garfield, the cat who went on a hunger strike and who ended up in a state of total inertia and unresponsiveness at the vet while we were away in Africa. The vet gave him a 10% chance of surviving and as we hit the road on our way home (it took 3 days to get back to Nebraska from South Africa), we bet on that 10% and had the vet put in a feeding tube. Garfield survived and lived another 9 years, in fact. We had to put him to sleep, his life force was so tenacious in holding in despite his body’s deterioration.
I was kneeling on the ground, my hands on Georgie when John came with the box and he sat down with me. I told him that I wasn’t sure if this kitten was totally “dead”. John is an open-minded man and he listens to me so he and I took turns putting our hands on Georgie’s body to discuss the “warmth” of it. By this time, I had noticed that Georgie had suffered no mortal wound. I had palpated the whole of his little form and nothing seemed so far amiss as to warrant death, yet still he was stiff and totally unconscious. Both of us took turns looking at him in a particular way…we gave each other pause for examination with our human eyes, or perhaps with some other kind of sight…and neither of us could confirm that Georgie was dead. He didn’t move yet there seemed to still be life in him. A part of me acknowledged though, that for Georgie, coming back to this life on earth might not be the best thing. Should he decide (in that other place where a soul goes upon death) to return (as some souls do), he would be in a lot of pain and he would certainly feel prolonged terror at being cast into a world and a reality that was totally and completely unfamiliar to him (the world of people, veterinarians, medicine, and indoor houses). Still, it made me sad to let him go. But it would have made me sad to watch him writhe in pain at broken off teeth and the gouges in his skin (none of which were deep, yet certainly painful).
John and I eventually resolved to move poor Georgie into the box and then into a building overnight because neither of us could confirm that his body was dead and neither of us wanted to bury him alive. So we put him inside a box for warmth (should he live) or as a coffin (should he die), to a building on our property where we knew his body would be safe overnight. His body did seem to cool a bit after we moved him and eventually, John and I went inside the house because it seemed so improbable (was it?)…that he might wake. Both of us, at different times throughout the evening, went to check on him, to see if he had started breathing again.
Inside the house, John and I turned into ordinary humans with the ordinary platitudes that are typical of people who are trying to make sense out of something as extraordinarily meaningful and complex as death.
“We should’ve gotten him fixed.” John lamented. Why hadn’t he trapped the kittens to take them into a vet to get fixed?
“But his personality was so strong…” I said, “He was a daredevil even when he was a tiny kitten, John. He still would’ve wandered outside the fence.”
“I’m not going to feed the neighbor’s dogs anymore.” John said at one point, in anger. “If they’re going to kill our kittens, then they can starve.”
I thought about this for a few minutes, but then realized the folly of it. “Fluppy was a starving pup herself, John. And you’d watched her sibling get run over by a van before she followed Lydi and I home that day. And I’m grateful that she survived.”
We fell silent again, searching for some spoken words that might soothe us.
We went through a long and arduous list of things we could’ve done to have prevented this tragedy that resulted in Georgie’s death. It was exhausting and unproductive. We both knew that the talk was leading us nowhere, yet it passed time. The sun went down and we settled into our respective chairs for the night to watch the funeral episode of Young Sheldon where the father, George, dies suddenly of a heart attack (spoiler alert). The night before, we’d watched the episode about his sudden death from a heart attack. I wanted to avoid the topic on this night what with the current heartbreak, but we decided that it was far too obvious of a sign from the Guides that we were at this specific place in the series when Georgie died. Both of us bawled and sniffled through the whole episode and felt heavy and wounded the rest of the night despite trying some comedy shows.
I went to bed with a headache, in fact, but had a short blip of a dream early in the night where a very dark black moth alighted on one of my medicine cupboards. This scared me as moths represent Death…especially Death as an Ally that can help you or take your soul to other realms. The moth was Death as a Friend, but still, I woke from this dream with fear and resistance. Every time I’d tried to work on the idea of death (as a state, as a passage, or a as anything besides something terrifying), I couldn’t quite get to it, even with the sacred medicines. It was too scary. I was too scared. I’d inch toward it, but never submit to it enough to gain any kind of true insight that could come anywhere close an approximation of Death as a Being Who Is a Friend.
The headache worsened and I found myself in a sleepy state, navigating the way from the bed to the bathroom with some dizziness and a sense of heartbreak and foreboding throughout the night. I woke myself more thoroughly, at one point, to do some self-care, in the hopes that the headache would at least go away. I had little hope that the heartbreak would remit though. But I ended up in a state between full wakefulness and sleep that was conducive to a more open kind of thinking, yet still resistant to Death. I propped myself up on some pillows and fell into a light asleep and then woke into fitful states of lucid open-mindedness that lasted for hours.
That weekend, I had been studying a particular system of the body that I had avoided for many years, the cholinergic system. Lydian has had chronic pain for months now as a result of trauma. She and I know that the pain is rooted in emotional trauma that she suffered as a result of her husband leaving her when she was 7 months pregnant. He left her to go back to his family of origin in Myanmar, a country in the midst of civil war. It was an act that we couldn’t understand at the time, but 3 months after Maya was born, I opened a little band-aid shaped canister of mushrooms that I’d been saving for years from San Jose del Pacifico, for her to take, in the hopes that it would release her (at that time) from the grips of pain, both emotional and physical, that she was experiencing as a result of her husband being gone and in perpetual danger.
This was a truly horrific time in our lives. The agony that Lydian felt and that John and I experienced as a result of her husband, Naing Naing leaving, was beyond words. But the mushrooms helped her cry. She took a low dose at first, but after months of being paralyzed and numb, she finally cried. She took more of them and did additional trips and they told her that Naing Naing would return. In those beginning stages of this psilocybin dieta, the idea of Naing Naing returning was something incomprehensible. We’d have to make peace with it because we were so angry with him. So angry. There was a block and we couldn’t comprehend what we even wanted in terms of Naing Naing until the anger was released. We stood our own way in a frustrating labyrinth of recursive loops that always led us right back to pain.
But we got a hold of more mushrooms and we all did microdosing and full trips twice a week. We straddled two realities and reported back to each other on “what the shrooms said”. We dutifully went over each and every dream with each other that we were able to recall and record. Naing Naing communicated with Lydian rarely, but instead of shrooms, he was regularly feverish in bed, undergoing a similar type of painful healing on the other side of the globe. We didn’t know this at the time. We knew only what we could see through our dreams and slowly, day-by-day, we entered into non-ordinary time – a present-tense type of time in which “today is today and time beyond today does not exist”. As long as we stayed in this present tense state to meditate on dreams and mushroom trips, we could feel the forward movement of the situation. But whenever we lapsed into a planning mode that was too far into the future and that usually involved, nay…required us to speak out about anger, fear, or hopelessness…we entered into the consensus reality where things actually were hopeless.
It took months for us all to submit to the present-tense. On one mushroom trip, my Guide showed himself to me in his full glory. He’s an Asian man, an ancestor who had always shown himself to me as The Blue Guide in Burmese regalia. In the early days of meeting him in a more direct way, I thought that he was Naing Naing’s Guide.
On this psilocybin trip though, The Blue Guide (who I still believed at that time to be Naing Naing’s Guide) slowly stripped down until he was naked to show me that he wasn’t necessarily Burmese. He’d only dressed in Burmese clothes so that I would recognize that his counsel was specific for Naing Naing at the time when I saw him. He had been really clear to me in Ecuador when Lydian and Naing Naing first arrived there in the earliest days of their relationship. I’d wake up at night and this Guide would tell me about Naing Naing and counsel me regarding what Naing Naing needed to hear from me. Naing Naing was very secretive and tight-lipped at that time, but the Guide was persistent. He wouldn’t stop talking to me unless I would sit in bed to write down the words he was giving me. Sometimes, I was awake for hours working with this Guide. I was chided by The Blue Guide to rehearse the words each night to know the exact way in which to present certain concepts to Naing Naing because Naing Naing was not a native speaker of English. He had been raised under Theravada Buddhism too, which is rather different in many respects from Christianity, my religion of origin. So I needed to say things in the right way so that Naing Naing would be able to hear me.
I doubted this guide a lot. I felt crazy a lot. I typically felt, during these marathon training sessions with my Guide, that I was imagining the whole thing. Yet, time and again, the conversations that I had rehearsed would be opened in front of me the next day, without my trying to initiate them. And I knew the words of what I needed to say, having rehearsed them over and over again the night before. So I learned to trust my Guide.
On this particular psilocybin trip, which took place on a beautiful, warm and sunny day in January, shortly after Naing Naing had refused, once again, to come back to Mexico, the Guide took me across our little forest asking me time and again if I had “created myself”. I doubted him. I doubted myself. I doubted the mushrooms. So he’d look down at me and ask again, “Did you create yourself (you arrogant human)?” And then, he started taking off his clothes to show me that he was not, in fact, Burmese, but still Asian. And I began to slowly understand, under the influence of the psilocybin, that he was MY Guide. And not only was he my Guide, but he was an ancestor…my ancestor who had worked centuries ago as a healer and as some kind of advisor to a king somewhere in Asia. It didn’t matter where he was from. His descendants became my Jewish ancestors who predated my younger Catholic ancestors (some of this information was, in fact, later confirmed by Lydian’s feverish genealogical work).
I resisted, resisted, resisted. I cried and cried and cried as I realized how I had rejected this Guide by thinking of him as Naing Naing’s Guide rather than my Guide and the idea that this Asian Guide could be mine because I was Caucasian…white. I thought of myself as “white” in some ultimate, deeply toxic way that would’ve made it hard for me later to fully love and connect to my Asian grandbaby and to Naing Naing without making this realization. That was devastating to me. I felt so ashamed of myself. I wept into the grass as I sat on the ground until the poison of all of it went back into the earth where it belongs. And then the trip shifted. The minor key and the foreboding tone of the song my Guide had been singing to me changed then and he told me that we shared a lineage, me and Naing Naing, and that our connection (mine and his, as well as the connection between Lydian and Naing Naing, and also John and Naing Naing) was a lot stronger than I was able to feel or understand yet. The Guide told me, in no uncertain terms, that Naing Naing would come home because he’d be compelled to once he’d fully released his own poisons back into the earth. The trip ended with the idea that “I don’t know everything and I don’t understand everything” and that to NOT know and to NOT understand everything is its own gift.
As the psilocybin wore off, I felt reluctant to fully believe this kind of craziness. But when I first arrived back in the house, as the sun was setting, I was still slightly trippy and related, with hope…even excitement the “felt sense” that yes, Naing Naing would eventually return to Lydian and the baby.
And he did. But not until we had all released our own most relevant issues that blocked him from being fully and unconditionally accepted by us and until he had released his own most relevant issues (through fevers that he had weekly) that blocked him from being able to accept us and our love for him.
So, getting back to the original thread, over a year later, Lydian is still releasing actual physical pain in her body from this trauma that she suffered as a result of Naing Naing leaving. She hasn’t labeled the pain, but knows it to be a physical reaction to an emotion that wasn’t subtle enough to simply pass through her. She and I have worked with a number of medicines, but recently, we had a health coaching client who was a big advocate for the Amanita muscaria mushroom. This mushroom thus came under our radar and I felt compelled to look more closely at it after we were able to acquire some here in Mexico. Lydian noticed an immediate improvement in her pain when she began taking it, but the pain still needed some work. And through a serendipitous connection that I made between histamine and tobacco, I realized that a plant medicine from the Amazon called Rapeh / Rápe could maybe help her through their action on nicotinic receptors.
So here I was again, faced with the cholinergic system of the body and its various difficulties, namely the fact that science only understands this system in terms of how drugs affect it. There’s no go-to model for how it actually works or what it actually does. On the one hand, the cholinergic system includes muscarinic receptors that, when activated, can produce a range of effects from relaxation and pain relief to a total evacuation of the soul. Total evacuation looks like death where the body dramatically poops and pees itself, the eyes water, and mucus prolifically flows from every orifice. Severe allergies (with itchy watering eyes, and mucus-y coughing) as well as flus and colds fall along the continuum of muscarinic effects that viruses have on the body when they dock into the muscarinic receptors. On the other hand though, are the nicotinic receptors that, when fully occupied by a poison, for example curare, blocking acetylcholine’s natural effects, will cause something called “Totally Locked-In Syndrome”. In Totally Locked-In Syndrome, the body will become completely still and inert and though the soul occupying the body is still fully present and aware of painful stimuli, no movement is possible. Even eye movements and breathing aren’t possible and the body appears dead. The classic tale of Romeo and Juliet references a poison that Juliet takes to make her appear dead for a short period of time. Indeed, there are many herbs that can produce powerfully muscarinic (complete evacuation of poop, pee, and body fluids) or powerfully nicotinic effects (Totally Locked-In Syndrome). Some of these, like Datura, are sacred medicines. Some are the so-called “flying herbs” that produce a mildly hypnotic state conducive to shamanic journeying.
The doctors of antiquity in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt knew about and regularly worked with plants like Deadly Nightshade / Atropa belladonna, Henbane / Hyoscamine albus, and more that could produce death, but also bring a person back from a state that looks like death…a state in which the soul is either locked in, or locked out of the body. Jesus was certainly schooled in the use of these herbs, for example, as was Hippocrates and the doctors at the Aesclepion.
So when I sat over Georgie’s body, the question of whether his body was truly lifeless or totally “dead” was relevant and not stupid or crazy at all. As I lay awake with a headache later that night with the kind of headache that I often get when I have resistance to a thought that I can, as yet only feel in my body, as the pain of a throbbing skull, I considered each of the animals I’d seen in my life that had been close to death or dead (according to definitions of “death” that I once knew) as well as humans that I’d cared for in nursing homes who had suddenly gone from relatively vibrant and active to a twilight state involving the barest signs of life, toes falling off due to a lack of proper nutrition. I considered the idea that life involves many deaths and many reincarnations before a final end and that we observe each of them without fanfare or even recognition because we busily distract ourselves with material things to avoid the challenge of it. Life and life-ful-ness as well as death and life-less-ness exists along a spectrum. Life and death are not binary. Death is the midwife that births us into this world and that births us into other realms of our existence.
A person who is sick might travel to the very precipice of death before deciding (on a soul level), to return to the Land of the Living. People do this all the time. There is no disease that’s incurable, only beliefs that rigidly resist the idea that a disease can be cured. Every person alive on earth is here to heal something as a part of their life path.
I remembered as I lay with my pounding headache that I once had a tropical bird, a parakeet named Frepal, that I taught to speak. This bird lived an unnaturally long life of 5 years and ended up going with me to college. I loved Frepal and enjoyed his subtle mumblings in the corner of my apartment. One October night though, some friends came to my house for a bit before we all headed out to a party. I neglected to shut my windows and Frepal got cold before I arrived back home around 1:00 AM.
I had realized the problem immediately when I opened my door and walked into my apartment and I was devastated. I went to Frepal’s cage and he was lying on his belly on the cage floor, still alive, but barely. I picked him up with care and held him in my hands, still alive…and then, just moments later, he died cradled in my hands. I couldn’t believe it. His little body was alive and waiting for me and then…suddenly, I was holding a corpse…a lifeless object. He had waited for me and I felt honored by that and cried dramatically over his little green and yellow body. At that time, I felt terrible and it didn’t occur to me that I might literally be able to warm Frepal up and save his life. He was, to be fair, an old bird. To save his life at that time in my life, would’ve been meaningless and frivolous. Also, I had no model for how such a thing might happen – to bring a bird back to life – and I would’ve certainly trivialized it. But now, I think back and it reminds me fluently of when my grandpa died in the field one gray day when I was 6 years old. My parents knelt over him that day, with grandma standing behind them, trying to breathe life back into his lifeless body as my brother and I watched helplessly from the car. Grandpa didn’t come back to life, but he could have, in theory. If I wish to participate in healing a person who is at the precipice of death, or a person who has died in the technical sense, then my best bet is to work closely with Death as an Ally and not as The Adversary. The best-case-scenario for every one of us has to take into account, not just what we might leave behind on earth, the level of pain and difficulty involved in having a very broken body (perhaps), as well as the idea that this person may have very real, very wonderful and enticing opportunities that they are being born into in other dimensions of their existence.
In real life, we negotiate with Death all the time and sometimes, Death relents and gives us what we ask for…in this case, life on earth. But Death, at other times, mediates on behalf of the soul that has left the body to protect the sacred decision to not return to a broken body or a life that’s hopeless and utterly painful. There are, after all, other realms with other loved ones waiting for us to join them. To die here on this planet, is to be born to another realm of existence where we know and love other people and pets.
Georgie didn’t survive. He decided to pass to the other realms and to be honest, my body hurts today because of it. I feel my heart like I got punched in the chest and I know that’s how my body feels as this little kitten tore away spiritually from me and this dimension to pass to another. But my mind is more balanced today as I recognize the amazing way in which my Guide(s) managed to put this material in front of me in the hopes that this time, I wouldn’t resist it. I can see today how a broken body does not mean the soul is too broken to return to try to heal. But how sometimes, even a broken tooth is enough to stop a beating heart. When we work with medicine, it’s so important to acknowledge the midwife, Death, as the one who ultimately mediates and negotiates with the ones who provide the medicine.
I can’t bring the dead back to life without the consent of the wayward soul to do so and Death’s blessing. But if there’s room for negotiation with Death, it’s vital that I know Death as a friend and not as the enemy. This is medicine. This is what medicine was always meant to be – a negotiation with Death to continue to exist here on earth. While I try to work miracles here on earth with a system of medicine that’s uniquely my own to heal a patient or a cat, there may be doctors or shamans or healers on other planes of reality trying to bring the life of that creature into that other dimension. That’s a hopeful thought that makes me feel a sense of peace – that little Georgie went on to a place with medicine and beings that love him just as much there as we did here. Death is not a condition that any of us will likely ever experience. Sleep and rest are, perhaps the closest rendition of such a thing, but even rest and sleep are characterized by “other lives” that we live when our eyes are closed and our cholinergic system activates certain nicotinic and muscarinic codes.
I can know these thoughts with my mind, but they’re meaningless until the plants and the animals and the other teachers in Nature teach me directly to feel with the “felt sense” of knowing, what I think that I believe. Jesus, after all, was able to bring the dead back to life through inspired maneuvers with Death. He was so good at healing that he was able to bring his own dead body back to life at the proper time on cue. If only doctors would deign to work that kind of magic in today’s hospitals instead of acting as agents for Big Pharma.
If you’re reading this article because someone you love has passed on to another dimension or because you’re squaring up with Death yourself, submit. Death is birth. Birth is death. Life is a series of small deaths and often, we can bring the soul parts that “die” (read: that go to another realm for a time) back to this world using the sacred medicines and the present tense. Sometimes there’s no negotiation, but often, negotiation is possible and, in fact, a usual though unacknowledged part of “doctoring”.