The Urge to Die
Apr 24, 2023
You see, there is a perspective that I feel called to bring awareness to because there have been moments throughout my life where I will hear a voice within me, begging to die.
Yet, I know that this is not a true voice.
I don't want to die.
My body doesn't want to die.
I know now that this is the voice of a false part of me that is no longer serving me...it's begging to be seen, understood, thanked and set free...by ME.
How do I know this?
Because this is the voice I hear in my darkest, rock bottom moments...the breakdown point. When I am on my knees, sobbing, naked in unarmored vulnerability begging for the excruciating pain in my heart to just stop.
I feel like I'm dying.
And, more recently, I will wonder - what if, in that indescribable moment of peace before I fainted, I had chosen differently during my car accident...if I had chosen to die instead of live?
Yet, I did die. And I have been consciously and intentionally dying every day since then.
Why? So that I may finally LIVE the most real and authentic life I choose to create.
This means continuously shedding the layers of false protection that helped me survive but now limit me to the point of unbearable suffering.
It's the ultimate paradox.
I chose to die and live in that moment.
Maybe that's what truly living necessitates...a full surrender to and embracing of the paradox in order to understand the symbolic "urge to die" as a necessity to live.
Jeff Foster so eloquently describes this below:
The urge to die is the urge to disappear as a separate self, to vanish into the vastness of Being, to rest deeply, as we have never rested before.
The urge to die is the wave’s urge to return to the ocean... forgetting that it was never divided from the ocean in the first place.
The urge to die is not negative, sick, dark or sinful, but a deeply, deeply misunderstood aspect of our being. We ignore this urge, push it away, hide it, medicate it, keep it a secret, try to numb ourselves to it or even philosophize it away. But when acknowledged, honoured, brought out of the darkness and into the light, even the “suicidal” urge, the urge to shed our false skin, contains infinite intelligence. All feelings do.
(I’m not talking about acting it out. I’m talking about facing it, understanding it, hearing its deeper call of transformation.)
The urge to die is the urge to awaken, to come alive again, to restart life, to stop identifying as a separate body-mind, to remember our original nature, vast and free.
It is the urge to shed the false 'me' (ego, self, persona, mask), to stop pretending to be something we are not, to let go of all that is second-hand and inauthentic, and to live, to really live, fearless and free, as consciousness itself, full of life and potential and cosmic creativity!
The urge to die is not our enemy - it is not to be annihilated and not to be feared. It contains a profound message of awakening and change. It says, shouts, screams, "You are not limited to what you think you are! You are a child of the Universe, remember, deserving of all its riches! Only the false can die, and you cannot be false!"
Can we hear its deeper call? Can we listen, really listen to what’s underneath?
The wave cannot return to the ocean, cannot get Home. It was never divided from its Home in the first place. You are already Oceanic, you see, and the true “suicide” is not the stopping of the body-mind but the remembrance of your original and unblemished nature, here and now, beyond the ravages of time, beyond what the world wants you to be.
LIVE! LIVE! LIVE!
NOTHING TO LOSE!
- Jeff Foster
