On death and the ancestors

I've started to feel outside of my body lately.

Psychologists might call this dissociation, but we two are well acquainted and it isn’t quite that.

For most of my life, I have had a pathological fear of death, dying and mortality, and while that hasn't lessened completely in my 43 years on this planet, lately I've started to feel a shift in my fervent attachments to this body. Almost an acceptance that I know it's not meant to last forever.

Recently, I have felt myself peering out through my eyes as one would through a viewfinder or inside of a robot suit.

This enhanced perception that there is something inside of me that isn't just my body, that is here for a brief time to see through these eyes, to feel through these hands, but that that thing is not the thing that contains it.

The idea of non-attachment is ancient, but I have always thoroughly poo pooed the notion.

I am attached.

I am attached AF. I cling fiercely to this life, to my family, to my cell phone, to my to-do list.

And while I intend that I have double-time still left here on this rock, I'm so grateful to start to feel this shift in my body that I am more than just my body.

Perhaps this shift in attachment came out of so much fear of death and dying, so much witnessing it live-streamed the last 2 years. This constant mindfulness that this hug of my child could be the last.

But somehow, that has opened up, expanded, softened, giving me the capacity to seek out mindful experiences without so much fear in my periphery.

I don't know what I believe in fully. I don't know for sure what happens when we're done here.

I know what I hope, and I know that I feel more confident in the notion that this is just a brief experiment, like a trip to an amusement park for the soul or whatever that is.

Perhaps it's delusion.

Perhaps my fear has finally created a container of belief and now I just can't shake the feeling that I am more than just this thing experiencing things.

That I am more than just fingers and toes and pancreas and stomach acid (as miraculous as those things are). I'm a visitor in this body, on this planet, in this time, and that longing that I've always felt for connection to something bigger than myself, I think that's the thing that calls us home.

So how does this relate in any way to ancestor work or astrology or healing?

I think it's because of my ancestors that I've been able to soften into this shift of perspective.

It's because I've offered up to them my fears and my uncertainty that I'm able to crack open a little bit more to the possibility that I'm more than just this moment.

I feel certain that my ancestors, in all of their anxiety, shared these same fears. I like to believe that they're still here with me, which makes room for the hope that I can still be here in some way with my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, inshallah.

May we each remember why we are here. May we each discover our purpose.

May we each feel the call of home, our people, in one another.