July 2, 2025 • 28 mins
What if death isn’t the opposite of life, but just one degree away? In this deeply personal and spiritual episode, Nathalie Brewer, founder of This One Day, explores her intimate reckoning with mortality after a decade of living with metastatic cancer.
Drawing from A Course in Miracles, Marianne Williamson, Eckhart Tolle, Anita Moorjani (Dying to Be Me), she reflects on how meditation, grief, and near-death experiences have transformed her understanding of death — not as an end, but as a doorway to presence, peace, and eternal connection.
Nathalie shares stories of her father’s passing, her own brushes with palliative care, and how love and loss live side by side. This episode offers a heart-opening lens on the eternal self, the ego’s fear of death, and the quiet miracle of living fully in the shadow of impermanence.
This episode ends with a 5 minute guided mediation to help you cultivate a deep sense of peace and connection by bridging your physical self with your eternal, timeless nature. It’s perfect for easing anxiety around life and death, grounding you in presence, and nurturing your inner wisdom and love, anytime, anywhere.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:06):
Hello and welcome to this One day. I'm your host,
Natalie Brewer, and this podcast has been born from ten
years of living with multiple metastases of three different types
and varieties of cancer bowel, breast and skin. I've drawn
myself back from the brink of palliative care twice in
(00:27):
the past four years, and I'm happy to say that
right now I'm living in a cancer free body. I'm
also living with the awareness that I am not just
my body, and this life is not eternal. We are
here to live and to die, and we only get
one shot at it. And here we are, somewhere in between.
I'm so glad you can join me right now in
(00:47):
this one day.
In my first episode, I talked about the build up
in my life before cancer, world travel, artistic exploration, and
single parenthood.
I know we're still getting to know each other, so
I thought I'd jump in and go deep. I want
to talk about one of the most untalked about topics
on the planet, and that is the topic of death.
(01:10):
I used to believe that death and life were 180
degrees away from each other, and that was my experience
in the first five years of my cancer journey. Death
was chasing me down, and I was looking at it
and attempting to turn 180 degrees and run towards life,
and it was fuel. And I have to say, it
was exhilarating.
(01:31):
I know it sounds scary, and of course it was
at some points, many points and terrifying, but it was
only because of the threat of having my life taken
away that I turned 180 degrees and ran towards life,
and I wanted to learn how to live that fully.
And there are still places for that, and I still
talk about that as though life and death are polar opposites.
(01:56):
But in this episode, I want to talk about the
idea that what if death and life were not polar opposites.
What if there were only one degree away from each other?
What if the only thing that separated life and death
was a veil of perception between them? And what if
they were born of the same stuff? I'd like to
(02:17):
start with how death is explained by A Course in Miracles.
This is one of the courses in my life that
have delivered me into greater, bigger belief structures around how
to live a life where we return to love every
day as a muscle that we build. And if you
haven't heard of A Course in Miracles, I would encourage
(02:39):
you to read A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson.
She is my most favorite teacher of the course. The
course describes a miracle as any time we shift our
perception from a fear based thought into a love based thought.
And there in lies a miracle. And there in lies
a way to change. Not only our whole world, but
(03:02):
the entire world for everybody and everything that lives in it.
So, of course, in Miracles or describe death as not
a real event, but actually a misperception of reality. So
in this context, it's understood as a thought that takes
various forms, such as the meaning that we attach to it,
which usually involves fear, sadness, anxiety. But ultimately, A Course
(03:26):
in Miracles talks about how our true identity is one
that is eternal. It is an identity that is in
union with life. It cannot die. So therefore, there needs
not be this accompaniment with those type of emotions that
we usually associate with death.
(03:46):
But it's easier said than done, right? To not think
about death and feel feelings like fear, sadness, or anxiety.
Because we live in this course physical world where our
bodies do perish and things really do seem to end.
And the grief that we experience from these endings can
take a lifetime to fully understand.
A few years ago, my father died of cancer bowel cancer,
(04:09):
which was the first type of cancer that I experienced
back in 2017. I watched him go through many years
of reckoning with death quite peacefully, actually. He always knew
where he was going because he was a religious man,
whereas I'm less religious, but definitely spiritual. I watched him
just go through the motions of it all and put
(04:31):
a lot of thought into my relationship with him, and
had a lot of conversations with him that I'm so
grateful to have had whilst he was alive.
And as a side note, I would say that that
is one of the gifts of cancer. Not many people
die of cancer in a day. You usually have days, weeks, months,
maybe years to really juice the rest out of your
(04:53):
life before cancer will take you. And that also gives
an opportunity for others to have a long goodbye. I
lots of things get to have an ending that we
choose when there's a cancer diagnosis, but nothing could have
prepared me with my father for the final reckoning that
(05:13):
actually happened when he did pass away. And that is
when he died. It was like I could feel a tug,
like a vacuum that pulled him away from the physical
world into the I will never see him again world
into that unseen aspect. And that's where the sadness lay.
(05:34):
I spoke briefly at his funeral, and I could barely
get the words out, because tears and grief just kept
on waving through me. And what I acknowledged that to
be was that tug of knowing and acknowledging that my
father was just no longer here, that I would no
longer ever get to talk to him again, to ask
(05:56):
how his day was, to say I love you at
the end of a conversation.
So when he went into the unseen, when he was
no longer here, that tug, that's when I got to
feel the edges to which I had loved him. And
that's where I had never known the space to which
he had occupied in my life. And that's when I
(06:18):
actually got to see the eternal relationship that we have
with a person. The part that you can never see
necessarily when they're alive. I'm not saying we can't. I'm
just saying it's more difficult because it's more ephemeral. It's
not really based in the time that we had with them.
It's more realized when the time ends and that tug
(06:42):
on the edges of the unseen aspect of how we
love them tells us just how much space they had.
And using words like space and time and ephemeral, we're
talking about soul. We're talking about the ways we've loved
and the ways that we've known a person in their
non-physical form. And so I understood that there is a
(07:03):
relationship that I had with my father that has nothing
to do with physical life. And I was grateful for
seeing the eternal aspect of his soul and what was
left at its edges when he receded into the eternal life.
And that that is what stays with me. That is
(07:27):
what is timeless. That is what will never disappear.
So I guess that touches into this idea of one
degree of separation between life and death, because I thought
I fully knew how I loved my father in the
living life. But when he died, it was just one
little perception, one little movement that changed how I perceived
(07:52):
his presence in my life and my relationship with that
man and the way I loved him and still love him.
You know, Eckhart Tolle talks about time, where you can
see time as something that you experience with a hundred
thousand steps or 100,000 goals that you have to set.
(08:14):
You know, this horizontal distance of time and experience. But
what if the way that we can experience time and
life is not actually horizontal based? What if it's vertical based?
What if we can just make one step into the
present moment, one step into more of an eternal understanding?
(08:36):
Yeah, and I guess that was the difference that I
would never have gotten to experience unless I experienced my
father passing, unless I experience death. My perception was altered
into this vertical nature of reality. And there there is
the veil which disintegrates. There is the one degree.
(08:58):
And for me, the discussion about death continues with the
fear that I used to have about my own death.
Because I saw my own death as this thing I
had to run away from. I had a fear around
it that I never even knew was there, because before
getting the cancer diagnosis in 2017, I hadn't even really
thought about death. I know some people are motivated by
(09:19):
it and think about it often, but I just never
really considered it. I was one of those eternal teenagers
who just thought, nah, death will happen to me sometime
in the future.
I was 38 years old when I first had the
diagnosis of cancer. Then it just brought it so much closer.
(09:39):
And I will talk about what I did in that time,
because there are so many valid things that I had
to do, and I had to change along the way.
But in this episode of this one day, I want
to talk about what happened toward the end of that journey,
when I finally reached a palliative diagnosis of a stage
(09:59):
four metastases at the breast cancer had metastasized into my spine,
my lungs, my lymphs, and the likelihood of surviving that
for more than 12 to 24 months was low. And
so I had to face death rather than run away
from it. I had to turn toward it. And when
(10:23):
I turned toward it, I hesitated because I didn't know
how to talk about it. I didn't know how to
be okay with it. I didn't even know an entry
point in how to think about it. All I knew
up until that point in my life was that it
was the great ending, and that it would cause other
people around me, especially my daughter, great pain. That's the
(10:46):
only narrative I had about it.
I also knew from my deep meditations from when I
was very Buddhist in my early 20s, and I came
from a Catholic upbringing in my early years as well.
I knew spiritually that there was something potentially incredibly expansive
and beautiful about death, but I had never really fully
(11:09):
explored it. But now I had to. And so I
did a few things.
One of the first things I did was to meditate.
That's always my first go to. That's why a lot
of these podcast episodes end in a short meditation, because
I honestly believe that's where we can pierce the veil
between our seen and our unseen. So in meditation, I
(11:33):
went deep and I kept on going deeper. I kept
on asking my true self and the creator, what is death?
What does it mean? What does it feel like? What
does it look like? What is its nature? And every
time I got a visual or something that appeared to
be something that sprung from my imagination, I would just
(11:53):
stay with it and just simply ask the question, what
is beneath this? and then something else would come up
in the meditation, and then I would pause, breathe, and
simply ask, and what is beneath this? And I did
this until I kind of was delivered into an expanded state,
(12:14):
where all of a sudden I couldn't feel my body.
It felt completely weightless, and I felt like I was
everything and everywhere, all at once. And all I could
sort of see in my mind's eye was light. All
different shades of coral, light like that, peachy ready, orangey
(12:42):
white light everywhere. And it went right through everything. And
I was all of it, if that's what death was,
I remember feeling. It's already here, isn't it? That's what
I remember thinking. This state that I'm in. If this
is death, it isn't somewhere else. It isn't out there.
(13:04):
And it isn't just in my imagination in this meditation
that I was having, because once I kind of felt it,
I got this sense that there was a familiarity in there.
At the end of meditation, when I open my eyes,
I realized I could still feel that space. It didn't
really go anywhere. It's kind of always been there. It's
(13:27):
just that I hadn't really turned toward it. And so
that's when I started to understand that the unseen aspect
of ourself eternally lives in what we might call a
state of death. But another way of describing it is
a state of absolute expansiveness in union with creation. And
(13:48):
it's only ever one degree away.
And then I read a book, Dying to Be Me
by Anita Moorjani, and she explained something quite similar near-death experiences.
Whilst I didn't have to get that close to death
to experience that, I did experience years and years of
(14:09):
lots of treatment and lots of reckoning with death, and
then finally into a meditation which took me to that place.
There is this common thread that so many people have
when they talk about near-death experiences. This everywhere, everything all
at once. Light feeling of expansiveness. You know, that's a
thread that is common.
(14:31):
And so what changed for me after that time is
that I no longer ran towards life and ran away
from death. It's more like every step that I took,
every moment that I was in, both were actually existing
together and both were beautiful. And then after that, when
(14:52):
I experienced the death of my father, it took away
the fear that my daughter would be in a lifelong
state of pain. If I wasn't here, because I then
knew that she, too, would experience a pulling and a
tugging of the absence, the physical absence of me in
her life, and that she too would know the edges
(15:14):
and the space to which I occupied her life. And
she would know deeply how much she loved me, and
how much she gave of herself to the connection and
the relationship, and how that never goes away. I could
place my trust in that, as well as this eternal,
expansive experience I had in the place that I was
(15:37):
going just one degree away.
I know not everybody experiences death like this. This is
one woman's perspective and one woman's reckoning with death and life.
And it's my attempt to encourage you to wonder and
to become curious about the relationship between life and death,
(15:59):
rather than seeing them as polar opposites. I believe that
what I experienced was my eternal self, and it's hard
to realize the eternal part of ourself, isn't it, when
we're still alive, because we exist in this physical, coarse body,
which is probably why it is such a beautiful and
(16:19):
big and vast mystery that so many of us turn
our attention to at some points in our life. It
could be the reason why we become spiritual or religious,
because we all sense that there is only one degree
of separation between what we're experiencing in this physical reality,
(16:39):
in the seen aspects of this reality, and what is
in the ephemeral and the unseen aspects of reality.
Many spiritual teachers on the planet talk about capital R
of reality, and that the eternal aspect of our reality
is really the real reality. Whereas the reality that we're in,
(17:00):
in this physical course world is our reality with a
small R. I know Marianne Williamson talks about that all
the time, that in this world that we live, there
are so many illusions, there are so many stories that
we've created in order for us to be in this
physical world, and that when we really want to experience
the eternal self, there is a bit of work to
(17:20):
do to dismantle the illusions that we've created. Eckhart Tolle
talks about how their fear of death is an obstacle.
He suggests that the fear of death is often rooted
in the ego's attachment to its perceived identity. Let me
say that again fear of death is rooted in the
ego's attachment to its perceived identity. So in order to
(17:46):
have this next discussion, we going to have to talk
about what does Eckhart Tolle mean by ego? The ego
is the aspect of ourself that seeks to keep us separate.
I always wondered, why is it that we carry around
something within our human experience that seeks to keep us separate? Well,
I guess for me the answer to that is we
(18:07):
do live in a world where everything is separate. So
of course we create something in ourself. And for me
that's called the ego. And the ego is is this
lifelong aspect of ourself almost like an aspect of our
identity that we grow from the moment we had a
singular thought as a child, when we're born, we're born
into a place of ultimate beauty and union, and we
(18:29):
still think that we're a part of our mother. And
it's not until we experience pain for the first time,
or we didn't get milk that we wanted, or we
we experienced a bright light in the shopping center and
it hurt our small, tender eyes. We experienced affliction. And
then we split into this idea that there are good
things about this reality and bad things. I want this,
I don't want that. This hurts me, this makes me happy.
(18:52):
And then we start to form stories, pains, patterns, preferences.
And all of this is an accumulation, like a small
snowball rolling and rolling and rolling along in the trajectory
of our life, becoming a mountain of this aspect of
our identity that governs and tells us the things that
we shouldn't do and should do and and want and
(19:14):
don't want and hate and don't hate. And then how
we project upon those things upon others, and judge others
according to those sets of beliefs and stories.
And that's what makes us completely and utterly unique. All
of the stories that we tell ourselves, always influencing our
next thought and our next move. Some of them desirable,
some of them not so desirable. But Eckhart Tolle talks
(19:38):
about the fact that our ego creates suffering and prevents
us from fully embracing life.
And this is one of the common threads that Eckhart
Tolle has with the Course of Miracles, and what Marianne
Williamson talks about. They have a shared belief that our
ego's main function is to keep us invested in the
idea that we're separate. Why? Because when we accumulate beliefs
(20:05):
long enough and we and we grow that snowball big enough,
and then we start to identify with that snowball. Well,
that snowball, the ego also has an agenda. It wants
to keep itself alive as well. And of course, how
does it keep itself alive? Well, it exists in a
world of story, in a world of illusion, in a
world of happenings, in a world of beliefs that we've
(20:27):
given it and and power that we've given it. So
it wants to form its own mortality, it wants to
keep itself alive, and it wants to hang on to
its own identity. It's the part of us that wants
things to stay the same, so it will keep on
feeding to us all of the habits that we've gotten
into in the past in order for that snowball to
(20:47):
keep on rolling. But when we enter the eternal aspect
of the self, none of that is there.
Remember this light that I talked about, or any other
experience that you yourself have had. Feeling of deep connection
and peace with all of life. Think to the last
time that you experienced peace. Was it full of any
(21:12):
of the things and stories that your ego has told you?
Was it full of any attachments that you had to
an aspect of yourself and an identity that you've created?
My guess is the answer to that question is no.
And that when you have experienced peace at some point
in your life, it's because you just felt nothing but
connection with a lightness and a simplicity where none of
those things were your eternal self. And in your connection
(21:37):
with your eternal self, you probably felt a sense that
it is connected to everything else, all of life. And
that's the beauty of the eternal self, is that when
we come closer to it, we also come closer to
everything and everybody all at once. And there's the veil.
There's that 1% when it's gone. There is this feeling
(21:58):
of just connection and union with no preferences, no identities,
no hang ups, no stories. But here's the best part.
We can actually learn and train ourselves to enter into
that and pierce that veil every day of our lives.
We don't actually have to choose to stay on the
(22:22):
treadmill of the false identity that we are building and snowballing,
and all it takes is presence and a bit of
effort and a bit of consciousness to look through that
veil and see that our eternal self is always here.
That death is always here, sitting right beside life, and
(22:43):
life is always here, sitting right beside death. And sometimes
all it takes is a breath, a hand on your heart.
A close of the eyes, a smell of a flower.
Feel of the sun on your skin. A connection with nature.
A hug of a child. It's always just one degree away.
(23:09):
And so now I'd like to end this podcast with
a five minute meditation. This meditation is designed to do anywhere.
You don't have to close your eyes for this, but
you might want to soften your gaze.
You can be fully alert and in the world and
also fully in contact with your eternal self. But if
(23:31):
you feel more comfortable, you can find a quiet space.
But it begins with a connection with your heart center core.
In the center of your heart is a doorway that's
always open. So start by just feeling the love that's
in your heart center. And as you feel the love
(23:58):
that's in your heart center, expand into that love. Let
it grow you. Let the edges of your body melt away.
Extend your awareness beyond your body into the space around you.
(24:22):
And know that whatever that space touches is connected to
you and all of life. The air that you breathe
now in through your nose and out through your nose.
Imagine it to be love itself. Breathing in love. Breathing
(24:44):
out love. Breathing in union. Breathing out into union. Breathing
in light. Breathing out and expanding into light. Feel for
(25:07):
the presence of your eternal self. The unseen part of
you that is connected to all things. And know that
you can make a direct request with your eternal self.
Repeating in your mind's eye these words after me. Eternal self.
(25:34):
Allow me to have union with you. After you have
spoken these words, you might feel an expansiveness. Effectiveness. We
(25:58):
may feel a very, very slight warming sensation. You can
return to this request anytime you need to throughout any
moment of your day. All you need to do is
to feel into the center of your heart. Feel for
the presence of love and then expand that feeling into
(26:21):
the presence of your eternal self. And then once you've
made contact with that, even if it just seems imaginary,
you simply make the request eternal self. Allow me to
have union with you. And in this one degree, allowing
(26:42):
it to melt away life death up, down. Right. Wrong.
All of it melting away until you're in union with
the part of you that is ultimately wise and connected
to everything on the planet. One movement, one breath. And
(27:05):
for the last few moments of this meditation, we allow
that one movement and one breath to breathe through us.
Each inhale, each exhale. One movement. One breath with all
of life. Breathing in. Breathing out. On your next exhalation.
(27:40):
Bringing that outbreath and that awareness of your extended, expanded
eternal self with you fully into the physical reality that
you are currently in. Thinning the veil between that awareness
and this awareness. exhaling into the present moment, opening the
(28:01):
eyes wider than they were before. And then taking the
deepest breath that you've taken today and exhaling your full
awareness into this present moment. Let your whole face be
awash and aglow with your eternal self that is constantly
(28:22):
trying to communicate with you, constantly trying to bring you
home to this one day. I hope the rest of
your day presents you with unlimited opportunities to speak, act, dance, play,
create from your eternal self.
(28:44):
I'll see you next time.
Hello and welcome to this One day. I'm your host,
Natalie Brewer, and this podcast has been born from ten
years of living with multiple metastases of three different types
and varieties of cancer bowel, breast and skin. I've drawn
myself back from the brink of palliative care twice in
(00:27):
the past four years, and I'm happy to say that
right now I'm living in a cancer free body. I'm
also living with the awareness that I am not just
my body, and this life is not eternal. We are
here to live and to die, and we only get
one shot at it. And here we are, somewhere in between.
I'm so glad you can join me right now in
(00:47):
this one day.
In my first episode, I talked about the build up
in my life before cancer, world travel, artistic exploration, and
single parenthood.
I know we're still getting to know each other, so
I thought I'd jump in and go deep. I want
to talk about one of the most untalked about topics
on the planet, and that is the topic of death.
(01:10):
I used to believe that death and life were 180
degrees away from each other, and that was my experience
in the first five years of my cancer journey. Death
was chasing me down, and I was looking at it
and attempting to turn 180 degrees and run towards life,
and it was fuel. And I have to say, it
was exhilarating.
(01:31):
I know it sounds scary, and of course it was
at some points, many points and terrifying, but it was
only because of the threat of having my life taken
away that I turned 180 degrees and ran towards life,
and I wanted to learn how to live that fully.
And there are still places for that, and I still
talk about that as though life and death are polar opposites.
(01:56):
But in this episode, I want to talk about the
idea that what if death and life were not polar opposites.
What if there were only one degree away from each other?
What if the only thing that separated life and death
was a veil of perception between them? And what if
they were born of the same stuff? I'd like to
(02:17):
start with how death is explained by A Course in Miracles.
This is one of the courses in my life that
have delivered me into greater, bigger belief structures around how
to live a life where we return to love every
day as a muscle that we build. And if you
haven't heard of A Course in Miracles, I would encourage
(02:39):
you to read A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson.
She is my most favorite teacher of the course. The
course describes a miracle as any time we shift our
perception from a fear based thought into a love based thought.
And there in lies a miracle. And there in lies
a way to change. Not only our whole world, but
(03:02):
the entire world for everybody and everything that lives in it.
So, of course, in Miracles or describe death as not
a real event, but actually a misperception of reality. So
in this context, it's understood as a thought that takes
various forms, such as the meaning that we attach to it,
which usually involves fear, sadness, anxiety. But ultimately, A Course
(03:26):
in Miracles talks about how our true identity is one
that is eternal. It is an identity that is in
union with life. It cannot die. So therefore, there needs
not be this accompaniment with those type of emotions that
we usually associate with death.
(03:46):
But it's easier said than done, right? To not think
about death and feel feelings like fear, sadness, or anxiety.
Because we live in this course physical world where our
bodies do perish and things really do seem to end.
And the grief that we experience from these endings can
take a lifetime to fully understand.
A few years ago, my father died of cancer bowel cancer,
(04:09):
which was the first type of cancer that I experienced
back in 2017. I watched him go through many years
of reckoning with death quite peacefully, actually. He always knew
where he was going because he was a religious man,
whereas I'm less religious, but definitely spiritual. I watched him
just go through the motions of it all and put
(04:31):
a lot of thought into my relationship with him, and
had a lot of conversations with him that I'm so
grateful to have had whilst he was alive.
And as a side note, I would say that that
is one of the gifts of cancer. Not many people
die of cancer in a day. You usually have days, weeks, months,
maybe years to really juice the rest out of your
(04:53):
life before cancer will take you. And that also gives
an opportunity for others to have a long goodbye. I
lots of things get to have an ending that we
choose when there's a cancer diagnosis, but nothing could have
prepared me with my father for the final reckoning that
(05:13):
actually happened when he did pass away. And that is
when he died. It was like I could feel a tug,
like a vacuum that pulled him away from the physical
world into the I will never see him again world
into that unseen aspect. And that's where the sadness lay.
(05:34):
I spoke briefly at his funeral, and I could barely
get the words out, because tears and grief just kept
on waving through me. And what I acknowledged that to
be was that tug of knowing and acknowledging that my
father was just no longer here, that I would no
longer ever get to talk to him again, to ask
(05:56):
how his day was, to say I love you at
the end of a conversation.
So when he went into the unseen, when he was
no longer here, that tug, that's when I got to
feel the edges to which I had loved him. And
that's where I had never known the space to which
he had occupied in my life. And that's when I
(06:18):
actually got to see the eternal relationship that we have
with a person. The part that you can never see
necessarily when they're alive. I'm not saying we can't. I'm
just saying it's more difficult because it's more ephemeral. It's
not really based in the time that we had with them.
It's more realized when the time ends and that tug
(06:42):
on the edges of the unseen aspect of how we
love them tells us just how much space they had.
And using words like space and time and ephemeral, we're
talking about soul. We're talking about the ways we've loved
and the ways that we've known a person in their
non-physical form. And so I understood that there is a
(07:03):
relationship that I had with my father that has nothing
to do with physical life. And I was grateful for
seeing the eternal aspect of his soul and what was
left at its edges when he receded into the eternal life.
And that that is what stays with me. That is
(07:27):
what is timeless. That is what will never disappear.
So I guess that touches into this idea of one
degree of separation between life and death, because I thought
I fully knew how I loved my father in the
living life. But when he died, it was just one
little perception, one little movement that changed how I perceived
(07:52):
his presence in my life and my relationship with that
man and the way I loved him and still love him.
You know, Eckhart Tolle talks about time, where you can
see time as something that you experience with a hundred
thousand steps or 100,000 goals that you have to set.
(08:14):
You know, this horizontal distance of time and experience. But
what if the way that we can experience time and
life is not actually horizontal based? What if it's vertical based?
What if we can just make one step into the
present moment, one step into more of an eternal understanding?
(08:36):
Yeah, and I guess that was the difference that I
would never have gotten to experience unless I experienced my
father passing, unless I experience death. My perception was altered
into this vertical nature of reality. And there there is
the veil which disintegrates. There is the one degree.
(08:58):
And for me, the discussion about death continues with the
fear that I used to have about my own death.
Because I saw my own death as this thing I
had to run away from. I had a fear around
it that I never even knew was there, because before
getting the cancer diagnosis in 2017, I hadn't even really
thought about death. I know some people are motivated by
(09:19):
it and think about it often, but I just never
really considered it. I was one of those eternal teenagers
who just thought, nah, death will happen to me sometime
in the future.
I was 38 years old when I first had the
diagnosis of cancer. Then it just brought it so much closer.
(09:39):
And I will talk about what I did in that time,
because there are so many valid things that I had
to do, and I had to change along the way.
But in this episode of this one day, I want
to talk about what happened toward the end of that journey,
when I finally reached a palliative diagnosis of a stage
(09:59):
four metastases at the breast cancer had metastasized into my spine,
my lungs, my lymphs, and the likelihood of surviving that
for more than 12 to 24 months was low. And
so I had to face death rather than run away
from it. I had to turn toward it. And when
(10:23):
I turned toward it, I hesitated because I didn't know
how to talk about it. I didn't know how to
be okay with it. I didn't even know an entry
point in how to think about it. All I knew
up until that point in my life was that it
was the great ending, and that it would cause other
people around me, especially my daughter, great pain. That's the
(10:46):
only narrative I had about it.
I also knew from my deep meditations from when I
was very Buddhist in my early 20s, and I came
from a Catholic upbringing in my early years as well.
I knew spiritually that there was something potentially incredibly expansive
and beautiful about death, but I had never really fully
(11:09):
explored it. But now I had to. And so I
did a few things.
One of the first things I did was to meditate.
That's always my first go to. That's why a lot
of these podcast episodes end in a short meditation, because
I honestly believe that's where we can pierce the veil
between our seen and our unseen. So in meditation, I
(11:33):
went deep and I kept on going deeper. I kept
on asking my true self and the creator, what is death?
What does it mean? What does it feel like? What
does it look like? What is its nature? And every
time I got a visual or something that appeared to
be something that sprung from my imagination, I would just
(11:53):
stay with it and just simply ask the question, what
is beneath this? and then something else would come up
in the meditation, and then I would pause, breathe, and
simply ask, and what is beneath this? And I did
this until I kind of was delivered into an expanded state,
(12:14):
where all of a sudden I couldn't feel my body.
It felt completely weightless, and I felt like I was
everything and everywhere, all at once. And all I could
sort of see in my mind's eye was light. All
different shades of coral, light like that, peachy ready, orangey
(12:42):
white light everywhere. And it went right through everything. And
I was all of it, if that's what death was,
I remember feeling. It's already here, isn't it? That's what
I remember thinking. This state that I'm in. If this
is death, it isn't somewhere else. It isn't out there.
(13:04):
And it isn't just in my imagination in this meditation
that I was having, because once I kind of felt it,
I got this sense that there was a familiarity in there.
At the end of meditation, when I open my eyes,
I realized I could still feel that space. It didn't
really go anywhere. It's kind of always been there. It's
(13:27):
just that I hadn't really turned toward it. And so
that's when I started to understand that the unseen aspect
of ourself eternally lives in what we might call a
state of death. But another way of describing it is
a state of absolute expansiveness in union with creation. And
(13:48):
it's only ever one degree away.
And then I read a book, Dying to Be Me
by Anita Moorjani, and she explained something quite similar near-death experiences.
Whilst I didn't have to get that close to death
to experience that, I did experience years and years of
(14:09):
lots of treatment and lots of reckoning with death, and
then finally into a meditation which took me to that place.
There is this common thread that so many people have
when they talk about near-death experiences. This everywhere, everything all
at once. Light feeling of expansiveness. You know, that's a
thread that is common.
(14:31):
And so what changed for me after that time is
that I no longer ran towards life and ran away
from death. It's more like every step that I took,
every moment that I was in, both were actually existing
together and both were beautiful. And then after that, when
(14:52):
I experienced the death of my father, it took away
the fear that my daughter would be in a lifelong
state of pain. If I wasn't here, because I then
knew that she, too, would experience a pulling and a
tugging of the absence, the physical absence of me in
her life, and that she too would know the edges
(15:14):
and the space to which I occupied her life. And
she would know deeply how much she loved me, and
how much she gave of herself to the connection and
the relationship, and how that never goes away. I could
place my trust in that, as well as this eternal,
expansive experience I had in the place that I was
(15:37):
going just one degree away.
I know not everybody experiences death like this. This is
one woman's perspective and one woman's reckoning with death and life.
And it's my attempt to encourage you to wonder and
to become curious about the relationship between life and death,
(15:59):
rather than seeing them as polar opposites. I believe that
what I experienced was my eternal self, and it's hard
to realize the eternal part of ourself, isn't it, when
we're still alive, because we exist in this physical, coarse body,
which is probably why it is such a beautiful and
(16:19):
big and vast mystery that so many of us turn
our attention to at some points in our life. It
could be the reason why we become spiritual or religious,
because we all sense that there is only one degree
of separation between what we're experiencing in this physical reality,
(16:39):
in the seen aspects of this reality, and what is
in the ephemeral and the unseen aspects of reality.
Many spiritual teachers on the planet talk about capital R
of reality, and that the eternal aspect of our reality
is really the real reality. Whereas the reality that we're in,
(17:00):
in this physical course world is our reality with a
small R. I know Marianne Williamson talks about that all
the time, that in this world that we live, there
are so many illusions, there are so many stories that
we've created in order for us to be in this
physical world, and that when we really want to experience
the eternal self, there is a bit of work to
(17:20):
do to dismantle the illusions that we've created. Eckhart Tolle
talks about how their fear of death is an obstacle.
He suggests that the fear of death is often rooted
in the ego's attachment to its perceived identity. Let me
say that again fear of death is rooted in the
ego's attachment to its perceived identity. So in order to
(17:46):
have this next discussion, we going to have to talk
about what does Eckhart Tolle mean by ego? The ego
is the aspect of ourself that seeks to keep us separate.
I always wondered, why is it that we carry around
something within our human experience that seeks to keep us separate? Well,
I guess for me the answer to that is we
(18:07):
do live in a world where everything is separate. So
of course we create something in ourself. And for me
that's called the ego. And the ego is is this
lifelong aspect of ourself almost like an aspect of our
identity that we grow from the moment we had a
singular thought as a child, when we're born, we're born
into a place of ultimate beauty and union, and we
(18:29):
still think that we're a part of our mother. And
it's not until we experience pain for the first time,
or we didn't get milk that we wanted, or we
we experienced a bright light in the shopping center and
it hurt our small, tender eyes. We experienced affliction. And
then we split into this idea that there are good
things about this reality and bad things. I want this,
I don't want that. This hurts me, this makes me happy.
(18:52):
And then we start to form stories, pains, patterns, preferences.
And all of this is an accumulation, like a small
snowball rolling and rolling and rolling along in the trajectory
of our life, becoming a mountain of this aspect of
our identity that governs and tells us the things that
we shouldn't do and should do and and want and
(19:14):
don't want and hate and don't hate. And then how
we project upon those things upon others, and judge others
according to those sets of beliefs and stories.
And that's what makes us completely and utterly unique. All
of the stories that we tell ourselves, always influencing our
next thought and our next move. Some of them desirable,
some of them not so desirable. But Eckhart Tolle talks
(19:38):
about the fact that our ego creates suffering and prevents
us from fully embracing life.
And this is one of the common threads that Eckhart
Tolle has with the Course of Miracles, and what Marianne
Williamson talks about. They have a shared belief that our
ego's main function is to keep us invested in the
idea that we're separate. Why? Because when we accumulate beliefs
(20:05):
long enough and we and we grow that snowball big enough,
and then we start to identify with that snowball. Well,
that snowball, the ego also has an agenda. It wants
to keep itself alive as well. And of course, how
does it keep itself alive? Well, it exists in a
world of story, in a world of illusion, in a
world of happenings, in a world of beliefs that we've
(20:27):
given it and and power that we've given it. So
it wants to form its own mortality, it wants to
keep itself alive, and it wants to hang on to
its own identity. It's the part of us that wants
things to stay the same, so it will keep on
feeding to us all of the habits that we've gotten
into in the past in order for that snowball to
(20:47):
keep on rolling. But when we enter the eternal aspect
of the self, none of that is there.
Remember this light that I talked about, or any other
experience that you yourself have had. Feeling of deep connection
and peace with all of life. Think to the last
time that you experienced peace. Was it full of any
(21:12):
of the things and stories that your ego has told you?
Was it full of any attachments that you had to
an aspect of yourself and an identity that you've created?
My guess is the answer to that question is no.
And that when you have experienced peace at some point
in your life, it's because you just felt nothing but
connection with a lightness and a simplicity where none of
those things were your eternal self. And in your connection
(21:37):
with your eternal self, you probably felt a sense that
it is connected to everything else, all of life. And
that's the beauty of the eternal self, is that when
we come closer to it, we also come closer to
everything and everybody all at once. And there's the veil.
There's that 1% when it's gone. There is this feeling
(21:58):
of just connection and union with no preferences, no identities,
no hang ups, no stories. But here's the best part.
We can actually learn and train ourselves to enter into
that and pierce that veil every day of our lives.
We don't actually have to choose to stay on the
(22:22):
treadmill of the false identity that we are building and snowballing,
and all it takes is presence and a bit of
effort and a bit of consciousness to look through that
veil and see that our eternal self is always here.
That death is always here, sitting right beside life, and
(22:43):
life is always here, sitting right beside death. And sometimes
all it takes is a breath, a hand on your heart.
A close of the eyes, a smell of a flower.
Feel of the sun on your skin. A connection with nature.
A hug of a child. It's always just one degree away.
(23:09):
And so now I'd like to end this podcast with
a five minute meditation. This meditation is designed to do anywhere.
You don't have to close your eyes for this, but
you might want to soften your gaze.
You can be fully alert and in the world and
also fully in contact with your eternal self. But if
(23:31):
you feel more comfortable, you can find a quiet space.
But it begins with a connection with your heart center core.
In the center of your heart is a doorway that's
always open. So start by just feeling the love that's
in your heart center. And as you feel the love
(23:58):
that's in your heart center, expand into that love. Let
it grow you. Let the edges of your body melt away.
Extend your awareness beyond your body into the space around you.
(24:22):
And know that whatever that space touches is connected to
you and all of life. The air that you breathe
now in through your nose and out through your nose.
Imagine it to be love itself. Breathing in love. Breathing
(24:44):
out love. Breathing in union. Breathing out into union. Breathing
in light. Breathing out and expanding into light. Feel for
(25:07):
the presence of your eternal self. The unseen part of
you that is connected to all things. And know that
you can make a direct request with your eternal self.
Repeating in your mind's eye these words after me. Eternal self.
(25:34):
Allow me to have union with you. After you have
spoken these words, you might feel an expansiveness. Effectiveness. We
(25:58):
may feel a very, very slight warming sensation. You can
return to this request anytime you need to throughout any
moment of your day. All you need to do is
to feel into the center of your heart. Feel for
the presence of love and then expand that feeling into
(26:21):
the presence of your eternal self. And then once you've
made contact with that, even if it just seems imaginary,
you simply make the request eternal self. Allow me to
have union with you. And in this one degree, allowing
(26:42):
it to melt away life death up, down. Right. Wrong.
All of it melting away until you're in union with
the part of you that is ultimately wise and connected
to everything on the planet. One movement, one breath. And
(27:05):
for the last few moments of this meditation, we allow
that one movement and one breath to breathe through us.
Each inhale, each exhale. One movement. One breath with all
of life. Breathing in. Breathing out. On your next exhalation.
(27:40):
Bringing that outbreath and that awareness of your extended, expanded
eternal self with you fully into the physical reality that
you are currently in. Thinning the veil between that awareness
and this awareness. exhaling into the present moment, opening the
(28:01):
eyes wider than they were before. And then taking the
deepest breath that you've taken today and exhaling your full
awareness into this present moment. Let your whole face be
awash and aglow with your eternal self that is constantly
(28:22):
trying to communicate with you, constantly trying to bring you
home to this one day. I hope the rest of
your day presents you with unlimited opportunities to speak, act, dance, play,
create from your eternal self.
(28:44):
I'll see you next time.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Betrayal: Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a brand new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack. And make sure to check out Seasons 1-4 of Betrayal, along with Betrayal Weekly Season 1.