Conscious Choice: A Little Death: Just What the Doctor Ordered

October 2004 | Body & Mind Health

A Little Death: Just What the Doctor Ordered

by Julia Mossbridge

You are about to read the phrase I have used to explain my erratic behavior over the past few weeks. It’s true, but it’s also a lie: “I’m going through a transition right now.” I use it often. When not-too-close friends or family see my twisted expressions and compassionately ask, “How are you doing?” I offer this understatement.

In reality, I feel like I am being stretched into a thin sheet of flesh, all my bones melting into my internal organs one by one, each cell reshaping itself according to rules that I don’t know or understand .... Once stretched, I am cast out to sea again and again, thrummed through the water like a fishing net, and opened further until there is almost nothing of me that I recognize. Then I don’t even catch any fish.

What’s going on? I used to tell people all the little details that have conspired to create a major shift in my sense of who I am. But after a while, I realized it doesn’t really matter. The actual events are not the point. The point is that, well, I am going through a transition right now.

I asked my therapist to help me figure out a more accurate answer to my “what’s going on with me” question. He suggested that I am going through a “little death.” Earlier in therapy, I had likened my soul to a bowl of marbles. When he heard this, he had said, “Good! Our job is to break the bowl.” I was excited then ... I thought: “Yeah! Finally — a shift! I’ve been stuck for so long ... let’s smash that bowl!” I thought that smashing the bowl would be like removing any constrictions around my soul, letting those beautiful marbles find the places they liked best.

My therapist, on the other hand, knew full well that smashing the bowl would lead to this little-death experience. Sure, the marbles would get to find their happiest places, and my life would eventually be transformed for the better, but only after everything that held them together had been shattered. I had somehow not anticipated the shattering part.

Not yet at the end of this experience, I miss the warm safety of a stable life on dry land, my marbles nestled in that comfortable bowl. I miss it so much that I have tried to fold myself back into some approximation of myself. The problem was that I couldn’t find my old shape. It had been lost. At first, discovering I couldn’t go back made me furious. But now I am starting, just a little, to see the wisdom in my condition.

This little death is so painful that once you are in its throes, you better not be able to go back. Like birth, it is distinctly unidirectional for a very good reason. If you could go back, you would ... and then you’d have to do it all over again.

The phrase “little death” stuck with me after my therapist used it, so to enlighten myself I did some exhaustive (Google) research.

The first hit was about sleep — in Islam, sleep is referred to as “the little death,” because we lose ourselves as we slumber. My experience does not strike me as an unconscious one ... it’s more like an experience of becoming painfully conscious of myself. The next hit was the French phrase for orgasm, “la petit mort.” The French feel that, because during orgasm you are emptied of your seed, it is reminiscent of emptying your ego at death. But this phrase only works for men. For women, orgasm feels very much linked to being full of life, creativity, joy...definitely not emptying or death. Finally, I came across the Tibetans. Leave it to a group of folks who have been meditating for thousands of years; they’ll spell things out clearly.

Beloved Buddhist monk and teacher Sogyal Rinpoche, in his adapted version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 1992, HarperSanFrancisco), writes that little deaths happen every day ... in the form of both simple and profound changes. “Life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change.” Reflecting on these changes can give you a sense of renunciation, which seems to be a euphemism for the flesh-stretching, no-fish-catching, bowl-shattering experience. Sogyal Rinpoche points out that the Tibetan phrase for renunciation, “ngé jung,” means “to definitely or actually emerge or be born.”

So the next time someone asks what’s going on with me, I think I have discovered a more accurate reply: “I’m going through a little death. And, actually, I’m being born.”

Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is a mother, cognitive neuroscientist, and author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work (New World Library) www.unfolding.org.

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