Step 1:
Stages of Resistance
One who is free of fear knows that at the deepest level
of realization there is no suffering, no birth, no death.
—Roshi Joan Halifax
Sogyal Rinpoche, in his book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, describes that “two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to.” 6 As the physical aspects of your dying body commence, there is a psychological dynamic that comes to the forefront of your experience.
The dying stage you begin to enter is called resistance. Resistance brings disorder, confusion, and unpredictability as you enter the dying process. The irony is that resistance is needed to break up the identity that must dissolve in order for you to pass through this threshold of death. Resistance emerges in the death process as the ego, which many call the false self and I describe as the constricted self, begins to break down. The false self or constricted self and the contrasting true self or what I term the expanded self are less psychological terms than spiritual descriptions.
Thomas Merton was one gateway for many Western searchers confronting the truth of these two aspects of our lives and an announcer of these terms of false self and true self as part of our spiritual and psychological makeup. From his writings, particularly on Zen Buddhism and Taoism,7 it is clear that he was influenced deeply by Eastern spiritual traditions. Merton was Catholic, a Trappist monk, and a mystic who wrote more than seventy books. He was friends with the Dalai Lama, D. T. Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh, and many other Buddhist spiritual leaders. His writings have influenced legions of spiritual seekers from many traditions all over the world.
These two terms, false self and true self, have influenced both my understanding and my direct experience on my inner journey. However, I have changed the labels of false self and true self to constricted self and expanded self because “false” and “true” give the connotation of the self being either bad or good. The expanded self can be defined as the holistic self. It is the body, heart, and mind in a state of balance and integration that functions at a high level of energy and awareness. The constricted self is fragmented and, in Western culture, mainly focused on fear and anxiety and lacking contact with emotional awareness of the feelings in one’s heart.
The reality for most of us is that we live unconsciously in the constricted self until, through therapeutic work, spiritual exercises, or other physical or emotional shocks to our system, we confront our individual suffering and begin moving toward experiencing our expanded self. Dominated by the constricted self, we experience our protective ego identity, but when our identity starts to break apart, it is possible to begin to discover the core nature of our expanded self. Various religious, spiritual, and psychological traditions indicate that at this point of breaking apart our self-created identity, a journey of healing and awakening begins.
One aspect of opening to the expanded self is that we don’t create a new identity or personality. The expanded self is the energy, expression, or manifestation of the identity with which we came into this life. When self-presence (toward which our expanded self is evolving) awakens consciously in us, we embody this energy of life flowing directly through us and we feel that we’ve been reborn.
In the second half of the book, we will explore more thoroughly the relationship between the constricted self and the expanded self in the awakening process of your life. Let me focus a bit here on the constricted self, as that is the part of us that resists our dying. At this point in our discussion, the constricted self and what is psychologically termed “the ego” have similar characteristics.
You know from your own experience what your constricted self is like. The constricted self is full of fear that manifests as anger, loneliness, shame, control, judgment, and so on. This constricted self separates you from loving and trusting the hidden vulnerable nature of what you truly are. In long periods of meditation practice and as I studied the process of my ego’s demise, I was amazed at how real I thought my constricted self was in my life. The thoughts kept returning, “How could I live without it? Wasn’t my ego my emotions, my body, my accomplishments, my power, my true identity?” Over years of psychological work and meditation, I struggled with the ego personality—the constricted self—I had constructed, with all its thoughts, feelings, and sensations. As many of you have learned and experienced, facing your constricted self is deeply challenging.
Death affects your fragile constricted self in dramatic ways. This constricted self that created your personality structure has lived in a world of its own creation. It has been able to negotiate and navigate your suffering. I say the constricted self is fragile because we get physically weaker, whether by accident, disease, or old age, as we progress toward death, and this weaker, more fragile physical state creates the feeling that life has become uncertain and out of control and often moves us into an emotional chaotic reaction as the time of death approaches. At death, this chaotic emotional reaction is the holding on of the constricted self. This ego, this constricted self, is what you must let go of and leave behind. For some of us, it is a battle, as we hold on; for others, it is a gentle release.
In this chapter, we will explore how resistance is really a gift as we face our death and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s research more than fifty years ago of her five reactions or “resistances” to dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. With each of these reaction patterns, you will have the opportunity to explore them with an exercise for each one.
The Gift of Resistance
The stage of resistance actually provides a hidden gift as we approach our death. Resistance is part of the transpersonal journey each of us will experience as we go through our dying process. Resistance is an emotional state and its movement is unpredictable, disorganized, and confused because the constricted self is beginning to lose control. Most of all, in the stage of resistance, your physical as well as your emotional life is breaking apart. Resistance occurs when there is a holding on or “clinging” to your constricted self. We resist who we think we are and don’t want to let go of our identity as a person.
Your identity naturally shifts when you age as well as when you have a disease or an accident. In these events, as in the dying process, the constricted self begins to be dismantled. The constricted self does not know anything about death; it only knows it is fearful of it and it must hold on to its existence. Thus you are in a struggle, feel out of control, are unable to do your normal life, and seem to become emotionally unbalanced. The constricted self becomes resistant to this state because of fear of loss, wanting safety, and needing to give up control to the forces of caretakers, doctors, drugs, or immobility. The entire reality that has made up your life and who you are in the world begins to disappear. This growing disappearance of your constricted self can create more chaos and a downward spiral into anxiety, uncertainty, and fear.
As you begin to die, resistance is primarily marked by emotional turbulence and reaction. Chaotic fear erupts in your life because you are no longer feeling connected to others or to your environment. There is a sense that you are cast adrift and alone. This chaotic eruption of emotions at this stage is driven by and connected to your past. The erupting fear you may experience is psychologically connected to when you were born.
At birth, you and I were disconnected from the safety of our mother’s womb. That experience set the drive and underlying fear of whether we could ever feel safe again, both psychologically and practically. The result of that trauma of separation creates a driving pattern throughout your life. One aspect of that pattern is you will try to connect and stay connected to others in your own unique way. Your tendency will be to hold on to people, things, ideas, and experiences so that you won’t feel separated or alone. This struggle originally occurred psychologically at the time of our birth, during what is called the primal catastrophe.
Don Riso, in his work with and writings about the Enneagram,8 asserts that the primal catastrophe is activated when we realize we are alone and separate from the world. The Enneagram’s overarching message is that how we individually develop our personalities, the constricted self, is a method of compensation to overcome this fear of separation and aloneness. Learning to release our unique compensation pattern heals the separation and leads us to inner freedom and a more expanded life. The Enneagram is an ancient system of personality typing and release practices that we will use in Part II of this book.
Roshi Joan Halifax, an American Zen teacher and a teacher of the dying process, describes catastrophe as “the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth.” 9 I will explore more fully the compensation pattern of the personality/constricted self versus the development of the expanded self in the second half of this book.
In spiritual terms, as well as in your psychological experience at birth, you were separated from your true expanded self. This is the capital “S” Self, the essence that breathes you, that keeps your body alive, and that keeps you healthy and balanced emotionally. Religious and spiritual traditions give many names to the expanded self presence, such as God, Source, or Light. Through meditation and other spiritual practices, you can learn that the inside energetic force that runs you has been disconnected consciously by the deep unconscious separation we’ve all experienced.
Even with constant practice, most of us take an entire lifetime to become conscious of this existential separation and attempt to learn how to reconnect to the Self. If this reconnection to the Self is not your conscious journey, you will try to fill the emptiness and loneliness of your inner separation through all kinds of external means in the material world. You know the story. Emptiness gets filled through some form of pleasure that is based on wanting the newest, best, youngest, and so on. This emptiness, pleasure seeking, and wanting is what the Buddha called suffering. As you get closer to your death, the chaos of this suffering often gets stronger. It is the “wanting” to escape your life and your death.
Resistance manifests differently in everyone. For some, resistance is experienced psychologically in anxiety, alienation, despair, dread of engulfment, loneliness, neediness, despondency, losing control, feeling unloved, and guilt, among other states. The constricted self rushes into these states by bringing to the forefront of your mind past regrets, guilt, or future longings to escape the present moment of your inner pain. You and I attempt to avoid the present because it is only in the present (space and time) that we can confront thoughts of death. Anytime you face some form of loss, you are at the edge of facing a form of your own death.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her classic book On Death and Dying,10 describes the stages of dying that she observed in her research at the University of Chicago medical school. Interviewing patients and doctors and sitting with dying patients, she observed the reactions of these individuals as they were told that they had a limited time to live. Kübler-Ross noted that the reaction to dying typically generated some form of resistance and turmoil in the patient’s life. In the resistance and turmoil of a person dying, she observed five basic reactions. She noted that these five didn’t necessarily occur in sequence, nor did all five always occur in every individual. Depending on the physical and emotional state of the dying process, all five reactions, some of them, or none of them would be present. Almost everyone she observed, however, had all or some of these emotional reactions.
Kübler-Ross indicated that the main component that drives any of these reactions is the resistance of fear. Fear, she described, is what fuels the reactions of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Kübler-Ross understood that with any of these reactions, a person couldn’t let go, accept, and surrender into the beauty of their own death until the fear of dying was confronted.
Exercise: The Mask You Wear Regarding Your Death
At this time in your life, what are the emotions, beliefs, and behaviors you have about death? On a page of your notebook draw a large outline of a mask in the shape of a face with a mouth and two eyes and on the back side of the page draw another similar mask. If you are working with a group, be prepared to share your masks.
• Write on the front of the mask a list of beliefs/behaviors/emotions that you present to the world in regard to your inevitable death.
• Write on the back of your mask the beliefs/behaviors/emotions that you do not present to the world in regard to considering your death.
Consider from your own life experience the first four reaction patterns to death that Kübler-Ross observed in dying patients. As you read about these patterns in the following pages, notice your own emotional reactions to them. In your notebook or journal or on your computer, make notes on what you received from each of the following reflections.
Denial
According to Kübler-Ross, people first deny that they are ill or that their physical issue is fatal. Denial is a mask for fear. It is pushing away the thought of losing your identity. Your personality, your constricted self, does not know or believe in death. Denial serves as a type of emotional anesthesia that clings to resistance. The fear of losing the security of who you think you are is a shock, and with the shock you tell yourself you can’t or won’t deal with what is happening. The constricted self does not know how to face mortality. It is in conflict between knowing that the body is not immortal and wanting to believe that it is. The power of denial is operational when the constricted self closes off the present moment and focuses only on maintaining a future that asserts you will somehow always be here, however irrational that appears.
Exercise: Reflection on Denial
Let your body relax in a sitting position. Close your eyes. Breathe slowly for a few breaths. As you take your next inhalation, repeat this phrase: “Death is inevitable; I will die sooner or later.”
As you exhale, let your denial be released with your breath and say: “It is gone.”
Repeat these two phrases five or six times and then sit quietly and notice how you feel emotionally, the thoughts you have, and any body sensations. Write this reflection in your notebook.
Anger
Anger is experienced when you realize that your independent boundaries are being broken and you must live as an impotent victim. Anger also arises from fear. As fear becomes more intense, the anger of the constricted self enters into rage, envy, resentment, and violence. The possibility of death blocks your wants and desires, and anger is how you resist loss of control. You can become terrified because you don’t know where you are going or what death is like or what it is like after death. Anger becomes one of your defenses against your terror about dying.
Let your body relax in a sitting position. Close your eyes. Breathe slowly for a few breaths. As you take your next inhalation, repeat this phrase: “Death comes whether I am prepared or not.”
On the exhalation, repeat: “My anger is released as I am present in this moment.”
Repeat these two phrases five or six times and then sit quietly and notice how you feel emotionally, the thoughts you have, and any body sensations. Write your reflection in your notebook.
Bargaining
Bargaining is laced with fear. Bargaining occurs when you dampen your anger and try to become rational and positive. The reality of your condition will ultimately break through the anger. One type of bargaining is to hope for a miracle by pleading with God. It is also a hope that the medical community will have a miracle drug, procedure, or process that will return you to health.
Bargaining is similar to what a person would do to make a plea before a court of law. The plea is: “If you let me live, I will …” When the bargaining starts, it is the beginning of letting go of the constricted self. When you begin to bargain, there is a realization that there may be something bigger than you that is in control. There is a bit more honesty and a bit more willingness to face the truth of your death at this stage.
Exercise: Reflection on Bargaining
Let your body relax in a sitting position. Close your eyes. Breathe slowly for a few breaths. As you take the next inhalation, repeat the phrase: “My life span is not fixed at a certain age.”
On the next exhalation, let the fear be released, repeating the phrase: “Death can be on any day, at any moment.”
Repeat these two phrases five or six times and then sit quietly and notice how you feel emotionally, the thoughts you have, and any body sensations. Write your reflection in your notebook.
Depression
Depression arises when you face the powerlessness and aloneness of your coming death. After the plea-bargaining insight that you are really dying sets in, the psychological energy may turn from resistance and effort to powerlessness and feeling depressed. Often what you will experience is the absolute knowledge that death is inevitable. There is no hope of escape. “Death has come for me.” The psychological and metaphysical awareness can bring a deep sense of disillusionment. It is the realization that your identity is an illusion and it is beginning to fall apart. You begin to perceive that your life is now something different from what you believed it really was. Your life is still something real to you, but in many other ways, it also feels false and meaningless. The anticipation of loss and separation from being alive brings grief and heralds the mental acceptance of immanent mortality. When depression hits your consciousness, the realization occurs that you are losing all hope and the situation will not improve. The struggle to let go to your dying may seem to get darker and darker, accompanied by uncertainty and a growing fear of no control over your life.
Exercise: Reflection on Depression
Let your body relax in a sitting position. Close your eyes. Breathe slowly for a few breaths. As you take the next inhalation, repeat the phrase: “My body, my friends, and my family can no longer help me.”
On the next exhalation, repeat the phrase: “I let go of holding on to this life.”
Repeat these two phrases five or six times and then sit quietly and notice how you feel emotionally, the thoughts you have, and any body sensations you feel. Write your reflection in your notebook.
Despair
To these first four reaction patterns to dying that Kübler-Ross described, I want to add the reaction of despair. We will consider her fifth one later on. Despair can come silently and unsuspectingly when you reach the end of your physical and emotional rope. This happens when there is nothing more you can hold on to in order to save your life. All medical treatment has run out or completely stopped, hospice has arrived and is giving palliative care, and doctors, nurses, friends, and family have given up hope that you can survive. As you approach death, you may feel increasingly powerless and pessimistic about your life. You may lose heart, abandon any hope of recovery, and become despondent toward family and friends. Many people know in their hearts they are dying but are not accustomed to facing that thought because it is too terrifying for them. It is truly difficult to grasp in your mind that you are dying. Despair is related to the recognition that nothing can be done to save your life.
All the hope of physical recovery or of a drug to extend your life a little longer or anything else healers can do for you cannot happen now. This conviction can move you to passivity and withdrawal. This state of despair envelops you in a feeling of no meaning, emptiness, and apathy. As the magic of the expectation of your desire to continue to live fails, it is difficult to accept the thought of your dying, even though in the depths of your heart you know death is inevitable.
Exercise: Reflection on Despair
Let your body relax in a sitting position. Close your eyes. Breathe slowly for a few breaths. As you take the next inhalation, repeat the phrase: “My body is fragile, I am vulnerable, and my life is almost over.”
On the next exhalation, repeat the phrase: “I let go, and I accept what is happening to me.”
Repeat these two phrases five or six times, and then sit quietly and notice how you feel emotionally, the thoughts you have, and any body sensations you feel. Write your reflection in your notebook.
6. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), 120.
7. Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1973).
8. Don Riso and Russ Hudson, The Wisdom of the Enneagram (New York: Bantam Books, 1999).
9. Joan Halifax, Being with Dying (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), 197.
10. Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying.