The Death Part
There is a part of my story I rarely talk about because it can be difficult to explain and who wants to talk about death in our culture of denial. My experiences that were once labeled bipolar have also been, for much of my life, a kind of meditation on death.
One of the most overwhelming aspects of my first experience as a teenager was not simply the intensity itself, but the sudden awareness of impermanence that arrived alongside it. This was not an intellectual understanding or philosophical curiosity. It was not something I could politely acknowledge before returning to school, friends, homework, and the ordinary distractions that most of us use to avoid thinking about such things. It arrived instead as something total: mind, body, spirit. Suddenly I could feel, in my body, that I would die, that everyone I loved would die, and that everything I had assumed to be solid and permanent was temporary.
At sixteen years old, without language, guidance, or anyone around me who understood what was happening, this awareness became terrifying. Something enormous had entered my life and nobody around me seemed to be talking about it. Combined with isolation and confusion, I slowly learned to split myself apart.
There became the version of me attempting to function in the world and another version carrying these deeper experiences mostly alone. Because nothing around me seemed capable of holding these parts, I learned to bury them. Questions about death, impermanence, spirituality, sensitivity, and the strange intensity of my inner world slowly moved underground.
I think part of what made these experiences so difficult was not simply the experiences themselves but the isolation surrounding them. Much of my healing over the years has involved slowly bringing these hidden places back into relationship, finding language where there once was none, and discovering communities where these conversations could finally happen safely.
Looking back now, I can see that awareness of death and impermanence has accompanied every experience since. Part of what made these experiences so difficult was believing that terror was the destination rather than the doorway. I could not yet imagine another way of being with them or understand that just beyond the fear there was often an inner death and transformation waiting to be seen and worked with.
Each experience in some way seems to dismantle my sense of self. Assumptions collapse, certainties disappear, and the story I have built about who I believe myself to be suddenly becomes unstable. Earlier in life this felt catastrophic because I believed survival depended upon holding together the version of myself that was dissolving.
What I understand now is that perhaps what frightened me most was not death itself, but discovering that parts of me would have to die many times while I was still alive.
I understand these experiences differently now. I no longer believe I am a broken person just figuring out how to survive. The upheaval when it comes feels like something attempting to force growth, and growth rarely asks politely. It often requires endings before something new can emerge. This does not mean I wish for these experiences or romanticize them. They have been painful, disruptive, frightening, and costly. But experience itself has changed my relationship to them. There is comfort now in recognizing the terrain. There is more peace in understanding that something may be falling apart because something else may be trying to emerge.
Years later, during my time sitting in ayahuasca ceremonies, I remember being struck by something unexpected. Despite how different the circumstances were, parts of the terrain felt strangely familiar. There were moments of ego dissolution, encounters with impermanence, overwhelming emotional intensity, and the feeling of being pushed beyond the comfortable boundaries of who I believed myself to be.
What surprised me most was not the unfamiliarity of these spaces but the recognition.
In many ways, ayahuasca did not introduce me to this terrain. It brought me back to places I had already visited many times before, only now there were guides, rituals, preparation, community, and language surrounding the experience. Instead of believing I was simply falling apart, there existed the possibility that something meaningful could also be unfolding.
I do not mean to suggest these experiences were the same. They were not. But they helped me recognize something important: perhaps some of what had frightened me throughout my life was not simply the experiences themselves, but how alone I had been inside them.
Perhaps this too changed my relationship with death. Because once you begin returning to these spaces consciously, repeatedly discovering that parts of you can dissolve and something new can still emerge, death itself slowly begins to feel less foreign.
Part of the relative peace I feel now also comes from no longer feeling so attached to a fixed understanding of who I am. I also believe this is partly why I can now have long stretches without upheaval and when it does come it manifests in a completely different way. Instead of waiting for things to build quietly beneath the surface until they eventually burst through, I am trying to consciously attend to these deeper places as they arise.
Earlier in life I spent enormous energy trying to stabilize myself, define myself, and protect whatever version of myself existed at the time. Each experience that threatened this stability felt catastrophic because I believed survival depended upon holding everything together.
These days I feel more curious about becoming than I do about arriving. Less interested in defending an identity. More interested in paying attention to what is unfolding.
Perhaps this too is preparation for death. Because if life itself continually asks us to release old versions of ourselves, then maybe learning how to loosen our grip while we are alive is part of the practice.
These days hardly a day passes where I am not contemplating death in some way. Not in the fearful way I once did, but more as a quiet companion walking beside me as a wise teacher. Entering my sixties seems like a natural season to begin preparing more consciously for this reality. Living in the same community for half my life means I have watched many friends, neighbors, parents, teachers, and family members age, become sick, disappear, and die. After enough years, you realize there is no future moment when mortality suddenly arrives.
It has been here all along.
Oddly, carrying death more consciously has simplified my life. I feel less interested in complexity for complexity’s sake, less interested in proving things, less willing to postpone what matters. The strange gift of remaining aware of impermanence is that it creates a certain immediacy and simplicity. Life feels shorter, but also more precious. All the non essential noise becomes just that.
And then there are the children.
I bring all of this with me into my days with them. While I carry these seemingly heavy places, I spend my days surrounded by new life exploding in every direction. Wonder, curiosity, heartbreak, creativity, conflict, laughter, tenderness, and imagination are constantly unfolding around me. Somehow, being in the presence of children over the years has acted as a counter weight, a light within the darkness, reminding how radically simple this experience of being me really is.
Every day the children are saying this is it! Let us remind you what it means to be alive. It has taken me a while to fully understand this. After thirty years, I am much more aware of who the teachers are and who the student is.
And somehow, almost without realizing it, I have created a unique place for myself to explore these deeper questions. As I have learned to be with myself more honestly and more wholly, I have learned how to be with the children. The two journeys have moved together. The more willing I have become to meet my own fear, grief, vulnerability, uncertainty, and wonder, the more capable I have become of meeting those same places in the children. My own wounded inner child has slowly integrated without me fully realizing it. I often imagine the children as a group of little trickster shamans wearing me down with love and presence.
We have a ritual at school called death dancing. Like many traditions around here, it started within a playful moment years ago and somehow never left because the children kept asking for it again and again.
Instead of announcing circle time, I begin drumming and the children immediately stop what they are doing, clean up, and gather together. I do not have to say a word. If I stop drumming, everyone dramatically falls to the ground and pretends to die, usually with lots of giggling. The drum can only bring us back to life after we all share a moment of silence together.
Lately, this moment has begun to feel so profound. For a brief moment I find myself simultaneously present with the children while also quietly awed by what I am experiencing alongside them. The children lying silently on the ground. A shared pause. Stillness. Then suddenly the drumming returns and everyone joyfully comes back to life. The cycles of life and death all contained within a preschool game.
Sometimes I wonder if this ritual is really for the children or for me.
Sometimes while we are playing, I remind the children that they do not have to die if they can keep the rhythm going because our hearts are doing the same thing all the time. The beat belongs to all of us.
That part is definitely for me because the children love the death part. And they live within the universal heartbeat. No reminders needed.
Perhaps this is part of why death feels different now than it did when I was sixteen.
Spending my days with children has placed me in a continual relationship with beginnings. Every year I watch new lives arrive full of wonder, curiosity, creativity, and an instinctive enthusiasm for being here. After thirty years, it has become difficult not to notice that endings and beginnings are constantly dancing together. One cannot exist without the other.
I didn’t understand that as a teenager.
Back then, awareness of impermanence arrived all at once and completely overwhelmed me. I thought something had gone terribly wrong because I could suddenly feel how fragile everything was. I did not understand that perhaps the problem was not the awareness itself but carrying it alone and without context. Decades later, after countless small deaths and rebirths, after witnessing people I love disappear, after spending my days surrounded by children constantly becoming themselves, and after finally finding language and community for parts of myself that once lived hidden away, I find myself making peace with what frightened me so deeply.
Life is not nearly as fixed as we pretend it is. Everything is constantly arriving and disappearing. We are always becoming and unbecoming. Perhaps this is what my experiences have been trying to teach me all along.
And maybe this is what I understand now that sixteen year old me could not yet know: that the rhythm was never disappearing. It was only asking me to learn how to hear it.
Much Love!
The Mad Preschool Teacher (He/Him)