The Sacred Veil : How Death met me after Birth

Death and birth reveal our potential in all times of existence

We place our dead in the sacred soil. The Death felt in winter teaches us that the only way to recover is to go underground, to nourish the seed that waits to be born. There is no way around it, we must sit with death, understand it, face it and experience it in some way in order to grasp the magnitude of birth. At the beginning of winter, the season of death (the winter solstice) the rest and surrender appear enticing and sweet. How are we doing with it now nearing the end of winter? Can we stay the entire experience through? I know I’ve struggled.

As a working birthkeeper, healer, friend & medicine woman, it is clear that having huge discussions, meditations and illuminations of the death portal is not often requested during pregnancy and approaching the birth threshold (unless you have your natal moon, pluto & dark moon lilith conjuct at 15* of Scorpio, the sign of death— as I do ;)

In my own postpartum after my first child was born, I spent months and months anxious over death, both mine and his. Fears of SIDS, anxiety-ridden doctor’s appointments and constant checking for breathing. Simple movements around my environment felt full of death potential.

I see this time clearly now as a begging for an inner death, one that no one had prepared me for. The death of a Maiden; the naive part of me that had not yet felt the sting of life living itself outside of me, outside of my control. The innocence lost of my accumulated fearlessness and risk taking. The maiden years were marked for me by a different kind of anxiety, of not feeling accepted, of feeling like an outsider. I responded by tempting death, and therefore feeling the fullness of life. This now replaced with the desperation to preserve mine and my baby’s life at all costs, while the truth always, always, whispers that sometime, yes, I will die.

Culturally, we have done much to destroy our normal convocations with death. Patriarchal control and monotheism have fashioned death into a fearsome threat that seeks to manipulate the behavior, beliefs and actions of the living. To the benefit of whom? Those in power, there is a pattern you see.

Death is one of the great mysteries, and yet, by way of our inner knowing, connections to nature and personal experiences, we can develop a profound relationship with death, one which surpasses illusion and manipulation. It may not be tidy, but at least, then, it is real.

Death, in the Tarot, is considered as a transition, a change. Nature, I believe, whispers the same. A flower dies, and while a sense of loss or mourning may occur, it is clear that the harvesting of that beauty, presence, and meaning has now transitioned— into something else.

In the ancient translations of Aramaic, the language of Jesus & Mary Magdalene, death is defined as ‘existing elsewhere.’ This charmed description lends itself to endless possibilities of interpretation of their teachings. Their guidance reveals how we may interact with death, without finality. And in Yoga, the great Vedic embodiment, Savasana—or corpse pose—invites us to routinely practice our own death.

Now, my near 4 year old child in the back of the car asks her big brother “awe we gonna die today?” as casual as casual can be. And I allow it. I let my children muse freely upon death, explore it from the inside out and bless me with their inspired interpretations such as “no, we won’t die today, but when we do, we will come back as trees. Everyone comes back growing as a tree.”

Personally, I think I will return next lifetime as Water. Only God knows.

And when we give birth, and matriesce—become mothers— the deepest cellular parts of us know that life beyond birth is not guaranteed. As a teacher of mine recently mused, some babies are not meant to walk this earth. It aches. Most parents with a lost child would agree— just because their baby or child has died, doesn’t mean they don’t matter. Death matters. We don’t like the pain of separation from the beings whom we love, yet we know, we know, that the separation of death is inevitable.

The mystical space of the Veil between birth and death is the closest to God we exist during our human lives. When we are born, give birth and when we die, our pineal gland secretes DMT— known as the hormone of god. We can also (maybe) access this hormone release if we are pious enough to enter the deepest states of meditation, or in other words, dying to our ego, so deeply that we experience timelessness, visions from the divine, and a blocking out of our embodied pain. Just as my maiden ego was begging to die, to be released, to transform into something new, our ego is merely dissolve on both sides of the birth-death space. As the Mother lets the Maiden within die, she receives the wisdom, empowerment and depth of consciousness that motherhood brings. We must let go, to receive. Both life and death are a surrender to our embodiment, one enters, one exits. And so we remember the grace of living, here, in a body.

Birth and death, as mystical and as mysterious as they may be, can also be traumatic. When we experience wounding potential of trauma, we are faced with a choice— to hold onto it or to heal it. So many of our cultural misfittings surrounding birth and death involve our resistance to fully witness and heal our wounds. When we avoid this process, trauma takes hold— and the addiction and obsession with trauma is real. Emotional scar tissue forms and we become a victim to life itself.

Gratefully, there are upsides to our cultural ways of being— we are obsessed with LIVING! We experience a culture that encourages us to partake in life, to avoid pain, discomfort, to go, to do, to pretend, to achieve, etc. There is a gloriousness to this. Great rewards have opened for our cultural accomplishments and, we may not necessarily desire for all of them to die (in the revolution, I mean). Still, we have sought to make birth and death tidy, controlled, pretty— aligned to the way we live. This sterilization traps us in our own misery.

Those of us who have stepped out of the cultural pressures to constantly ‘live life to its fullest’ or perhaps, ‘live, laugh, love,’ if you will— see that our resting, our inner gazing, our spaciousness to create or move in a tempo aligned to nature begins to unwind the grip onto control surrounding birth, how we live, and how we die. There is a deeper wisdom waiting for us to discover once we go inward, listen a bit, witness the truth.

Before I birthed my boy, I had countless threats against my birth choices (a homebirth, in 2018— you would’ve thought that I was summoning the devil by making this choice). Fears projected upon me of airlifted hemorrhages, of unwell babies not taking a first breath just because they were home and not within the white walls of a clinic. Thank God(dess) that I’m a rebel and I didn’t listen. I’m not saying this is the only right way to give birth, but I will say that I had to stare death threats in the face and fully remain in my power despite it. I was stronger for it.

Here’s the point: women, their partners and their families can enter the birth & postpartum portal more empowered, more centered, more wise and patient when EVERYONE has done a little healing and confrontation around death. When we trust death, we can trust birth.

My mother used to tell me, “a mother never stops grieving her lost child” and it instilled a fear in me, that one day, if I become a mother, I will NEVER be ok again if I lose a child. I know now, this is certainly untrue. Mothers do, and should grieve their lost children, and yet, we do not control who, or how, or when exactly our beloveds may die. The promise remains that though we may grieve, we also may heal.

Holding my 4 month baby boy, I finally broke one day. I accepted that he will die. I felt God in that moment. I knew that his death, whenever it may come, will be part of his own sacred journey, and it is not for me to fear. Uncomfortable? yes. Will I do my best to preserve his life? Undoubtedly. Simultaneously, I had to trust that should this sweet boy lose his mother, life would carry him forward. My own eventual death is not wrong, it is an essential aspect of my life.

I didn’t consciously know what was in store for me in that birth/death portal, but birthing in my power gave me the possibility for alchemy. And if the path I’ve walked since then is any indication of the transformation, I’d say that the magic worked. It opened my heart. I became aware of the tether of our hearts. Trust became present, something divine and invisible was illuminated, and the years unfolding have been filled with trusting my child’s journey—not pushing, controlling or coercing.

Now, we are all living in an era of Death. Countless revolutions have swirled since the late 2000’s and the casualty of ways of being, belief systems, worldviews, species and humans are real. Death has come for the illusion of certainty. When chaos reigns, we must hold our center of gravity. Neither death, nor birth are innately a crisis, and when we can sit in the uncomfortable and the unknowing— miraculously the answers can come. The Birth/Death Veil has infinite wisdom to teach us about this, and grief is our inevitable task.

But first, do nothing.

As my wise teacher, Whapio the Matrona shares the way of the Wise One:

And so, the Midwife performs her work by doing nothing.
She teaches without saying a word.
Things arise and she lets them come.
Things leave and she lets them go.
Creating, not possessing,
Working and laying no claim.
And then, when her work is done, she releases it.
She lets it go, and so it lasts forever.

- Tao de Ching

Things leave and she lets them go. Things leave and she lets them go. Things leave and she lets them go… She lets it go, and so it lasts forever.