The Share-Out #4: Start Death-Cleaning Your Mind

I don’t know if it is Good Friday approaching or anything else, but I just felt I wanted to share something about death.

“Isn’t that a bit sinister and existential?” you may ask. “You are a coach, aren’t you supposed to be pep-talking and cheering people up?”

No, not at all. I believe in the power of real conversations. And I think this is one we should have more often.

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You see, recently I had this realization, that life is all about death.

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From a biological point of view, everything we do as humans has to do with avoiding death. All our basic instincts are hardwired for the three F:s – Fighting, Fleeing and Mating. We are only able to understand all human behavior once we see them through the eyes of evolution.

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Even through the thin veil of language, and the way we rationalize our behaviors afterwards, it all boils down to those basic themes that help us survive, e.g. Belonging (being part of a flock, because alone we are doomed), Status (because of our built-in urge to proliferate), or Power (because we need to be able to take a fight with someone trying to eat us).

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This also becomes very apparent when I listen to people’s inner conversations and narratives, as they show up in coaching dialogues or when I observe people collaborating.

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Death is always there. “In the midst of life we are in death”, as it says in an old Gregorian chant. Still, we would go insane if we were constantly thinking about ourselves dying. In order to feel we are able to live our lives, we become very good at blocking it away and not thinking about the alternative.

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All our major religions basically have one purpose: Making us feel okay with the uncomfortable truth that we will all eventually die – or at least that what we perceive as our “ego”, “self” or “consciousness” will no longer be there to experience the world the way we do right now.

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And to stretch this line of thought further, I think all limiting beliefs we carry are related to death.

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Limiting beliefs often stem from trauma, which in turn are situations where something inside us has felt threatened to life. They also stem from norms, cultural narratives and stuff that we have inherited as memes within us, all related to belonging and being part of the flock. And they arise as results of things we believe we lose along the way: Material, relational as well as existential losses – for individuals as well as for teams and societies.

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Through life, these losses end up as a beaded string of small deaths that show up as “truths” within us and between us. All the “I will never be able to…”, “we are incapable of…” and “we shouldn’t…”s are the results of fear of failure, exclusion and therefore of death. And since we don’t really talk about death and loss, these “truths“ get stuck in our system, undisputed.

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So, what can we do about it? In my perspective there are two things:

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One is to embrace death as part of life. Not try to hide it away or talk about it in euphemisms. Just let it be there with us.

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The other is to death-clean our minds - our inner space. Both as individuals and in the relationships between us; to bring up these losses that we carry around in our backpacks and have a look at them. Ask ourselves “do I really need this old limiting belief anymore?” or “should this old idea of how things were supposed to be continue stopping us from seeing how things really are?”. “Am I ready to let go of this old belief – opening up for something new?” And then, put all these believes to rest and let the past be in the past.

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To me, doing that inner death cleaning and being okay with my own forthcoming death has opened up the opportunity to live my life at its fullest. I consider every day as a gift. I don’t carry any grudges, because they are of no use to me here and now. I am not trying to use my life to compensate for losses in the past.

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And if I were to die tomorrow, I would know I have lived a wonderful life.

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Thanks for hearing me out. Now I’ll let this rest in peace and hope to hear your perspectives. Please share! ?

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(And per usual, please DM me if you don’t want to write publicly. Of course it's a limiting belief, but that's okay).