Le Petit Mort
on learning to do as Rumi did, and die before you die
The french philosopher George Bataille and I had a brief love affair back in 2016. It lasted a few years, he wasn’t really my type, perhaps it wasn’t really my time, we just drifted—apart.
But what I really wanna share is what brought us together, the unexpected, similarities this philosopher and I bare.
Bataille and I
saw eye to eye
on some things that’s certain
Trading critical thought for a more poetic ponder, this man eventually set aside the articulation of rationale for an intuitive musing into the specifics of sonder
He spoke of our separateness, of you and me, and what lies beyond it…
in the moment of climax
in that divine intermingling
in that exhale that brings us to our KNEES
in the small gentle utterance of our yes please!
a unified mind
bodies merging across time
soul’s transcending, yes he spoke of transcendence and the yoking, the union, the break in that illusion
he DID!
He mused, we can transcend what we think we are. We extend beyond definition, beyond categorization, that the truth of our experience potential is ecstatic, and that that kind of ecstasy is waiting for us, in death and in the erotic.
In our ECSTASY
ok hold up hold up hold up…why am I getting all poetic on you?
Because I am here to get free and I know you are too.
One thing philosophers, wisdom traditions across the ages, mystics, poets, professors, psychonauts, and scientists have explored that I am particularly hooked on lately because I think it has more potential to bring a sense of significance into our lives when we do than most other things, is the one thing that is promised for all of us, the one thing that’s certain.
Our death.
But death makes folks squeamish. People in the West would rather….not.
Many of us just don’t go there.
It’s a topic that’s on my mind because I am someone who is dedicated to understanding suffering in order to help people understand their own.
I have looked at mine from every angle, my fears, my shame, the ways I judge myself, others, the way I try to control my life and what happens when it all goes belly up.
And what I continue to find at the center of it all, for me and the folks I work with, is a gripping fear of death itself.
And so I’m going to stay with this topic for the next few editions of Teeny Tremor, there’s much to explore here, and when we look to the cultures who DO contemplate death we find something interesting, perhaps unexpected.
That meditating on death itself, is a way to really start living, because in our awareness of what’s coming for us all, we stop taking for granted, the miracle of each day we’re given.
We are on borrowed time, and we forget it. But we begin to remember when we learn to die before we die.
What parts of yourself have you let die? What parts of your identity have you set down? What did you resist? What did you invite? I’m curious. How’s death been 4 u?
What are you getting at here Zoë, when you say die before you die?
Well, it’s living in a sustained sort of surrender, to what unfolds. Setting aside our agenda when life shows up with different plans to be with what’s available.
Present.
Attuned.
Awake.
This is about getting free. Not giving up.
If we are to get free we must consider our need for control, because control in many ways, is anti life, control gets in our way.
A lot.
Control offers us comfort.
In making extensive plans for the future, in filling our schedule so there’s always something to do, in claiming who we are by how we choose to identify, what we choose to identify with, in accumulating stuff and busying ourselves with managing it, in needing our makeup, our skin care, our AG1, our cold plunges in order to be ok, valuable, worthy. We cling and grasp and seek because it helps us make sense of things.
It helps us make sense of the nonsensical, the things we don’t expect that happen to us, the sudden losses, the moments our worlds get turned upside down, the moments in history corruption reveals itself, institutions crumble, people are displaced, massacred—you get the picture.
Our sense of control helps us make sense of our suffering and it gives us a sense of purpose over it, that perhaps we can prevent the next one, avoid it all together.
Our fear of death in many ways ensures our survival.
But living a life rooted in fear is no way to live.
There is another way through, one of surrender, of faith. One where we move with the current, one where we embrace our suffering as an opportunity to purify our karma and transform. Where we use our suffering as opportunities to learn. To adapt. To evolve. To become something else. Something more.
Let’s get back to Bataille…
“Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism — to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality
Bataille and eye see it a little differently.
We aren’t alone in this inquiry.
To see Death as an invitation to live.
To see death’s contemplation as an initiation into the infinite.
Let’s explore…
le petit mort: a tiny death
he’s really referring to orgasm 👅
Here at the Teeny Tremor I love Bataille’s idea of a
tiny death (sex)
in which I find divine union
isn’t that how it’s supposed to feel?
Haiku excerpt: book design and binding by Zoe Galle. Printed in an edition of 25 at Woodside Press in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, 2017. Haikus by a fellow lover of Bataille, Nicolas Protopappas. Text handset and letterpress printed in Cloister Bold and Cloister Old Style.
The tiny death is one we invite when we let ourselves surrender, let go of the death grip that resists it, fall back into the vastness of all that is yet to be known.
If we could only trust it.
The tiny death is the one we slip into post-coital, where our ego dissolves, our consciousness slips away, and we find ourselves in that yummy in-between space, blurred out and falling into the other.
It is the death of separation itself.
How holy.
Bataille wasn’t the only guy talking about the promise of life in death.
Mohammad spoke of something similar, The Taoists, the Buddhists, the Hindus too.
The Bhutanese contemplate death 5 times a day.
RUMI the Sufi mystic reminds us to “die before you die”, of what you find when you do…
“I died as a mineral and became a plant.
I died as a plant and rose to animal.
I died as an animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?”
— Rumi
We can die a thousand tiny deaths while we’re still breathing, if we choose.
The bravest, the curious, die before they die. The know there is a necessary death that makes room for the next.
The SEEKERS know, DEATH is a part of every change cycle.
Remember, consciousness is an opt in—no guarantee, so it you’re committed to your own ‘gettin’ free’ …
learn how to die often and well.
You’re living on borrowed time, and if you’re here to get free, if you’re here to remember, offer yourself as the grist to the mill of your own evolution.
Dabrowski called it POSITIVE DISINTEGRATION. The caterpillar liquifying in it’s chrysalis to become … this.
I had a client recently say to me, ‘isn’t that a bit dramatic?’
I mean, YEAH. It is.
Just pause here for a moment, and think about it.
A caterpillar, with 6 legs, 4ish prolegs (depending on the species) that turn into organs (yes organs), a miraculous display of colorful markings, undulating movement patterns, these insects are complex!
Or covered in fur?! Look at this flannel caterpillar…
These creatures DISSOLVE INTO GOO. And then by some other greater miracle, by some force of nature far more mysterious than we can account for, put themselves back together again.
But not as they were before.
This time, rearranged.
Just consider this for a moment.
And tell me that isn’t a MIRACLE.
with this in mind I told her,
“ it depends how you look at it.
You’ve died, over and over and over again, because you’ve changed.
You once loved apple juice, now you like orange.
You once loved capris, now you rock bell bottoms.
You once loved the color purple, now you paint your nails black.
You’ve been a ballerina, an astronaut, nervous around the cool kids at school, confident with the theater chaps in college, you’ve worn your hair short, grown it long, spent long nights out on the town meeting as many people as possible, traded them for the preferable quiet of a night spent at home, alone.
You’ve changed.
You’ve shed identities, left friend groups, been dragged around by the relentless voice of ego, connected to a deeper, stronger, more substantial YOU. You’ve withdrawn in the face of your fear voice, and then learned to sit with it, accepted it, befriended it, stayed.
You’ve stifled tears, called crying weak, your anxious friends needy, you’ve laughed at all that and sat with the grief, turned toward the small abandoned kid beneath.
You’ve apologized quietly under your breath, felt the snag of your guilt sting in your rushed judgement of the thing in her you can’t be with in yourself, and generously extended your hand to the forgotten ones who really need it.
You can and DO hard things and the truth is, you feel better for it. Maybe not immediately but eventually.
You do.
You've shed your conditioning and grown closer to the truer you.
You’ve integrated the parts once rejected by the bullies, reclaimed them as yours, retold their stories.
That’s how we rewrite the histories of banishment known by out bodies, the records kept by our minds of our own Great Story of Suffering.
You do it so that you can remember your wholeness, rather than stay stuck at the mercy of the suffering part.
It was never something that you lost, only lost sight of.
Never something truly broken, only cast off in isolation.
You’ve placed your bets on returning to an impossibly perfect idealized before, and moved on to a grounded, realistic hopeful hereafter. “
I explained this to her.
And she said ‘you’re right. I am different. I don’t recognize the woman I was a year ago let alone 2, 3 or 10.’
She smiled.
And we talked about what’s next.
Contemplate this:
You begin as one cell.
Then quickly turn into 7 trillion by the time you’re ready to pop out the womb, all of THAT cellular division happens while being suspended in your mothers’ amniotic fluid inside her uterus.
.
Inside her body.
A body that holds nearly 4 billion years of evolutionary wisdom.
A body that replaces 1% or 330 billion of those cells every day, mostly your blood and gut, and roughly 30 trillion every 80 to 100 days which is the equivalent of an entire YOU. ( Read more in the Scientific American fellow nerds. )
Our bodies are home to another 38 trillion bacteria.
We can’t fathom those numbers.
But it is nothing short of a miracle.
Artwork by Alex Grey
YOU, soul landing in body. One becoming 7 Trillion.
Light landing in matter.
That’s what you are. ENERGY. A F*CK ton of it.
Which is GOOD NEWS.
It means there is more room for what we thought impossible. I mean get a hold of those numbers!!
It means more healing than we think probable when our pain grips us, our sorrow tethers us to what we’ve lost and our ego flexes its determination to reinforce itself, clinging to what is knows.
Our trauma keeps us stuck out of the need to never again experience the horrors we once knew. Out of a need to survive.
There isn’t anything more detrimental to our well being, feeding the cycles of dis-ease leading to cancerous symptoms of a deeper root cause, than the emotional burden of our trauma, the topic of next week’s newsletter, on how to INTEGRATE our deaths (stay tuned for part II )
But there is HOPE! And it is in the resolution of those incomplete cycles.
There is resolution in death.
You can die before you die, which means shedding the thinking, beliefs, and ways of being keeping you small, keeping you living as if your fear rules all.
So how do we do it?
We plant a belief system that isn’t rooted in fear but in faith. Faith in the intelligence and miracle of life.
Hate to break it to you sweat heart but your ego is not smarter than the billion years of evolution you contain. No single part is greater than the whole.
“Love is the whole thing.
We are only pieces.”
— Rumi
Our fear keeps us thinking we are flawed, broken, beyond mending. Which is ironic because it speeds up our death.
It is the fact we forget we are a part of nature, that instead we see our bodies as “failing us” that undercuts out well being, keeps us unwell, sick, dis-eased. From this perspective we do not trust there is no illness nature herself does not have an answer for. Because we are so resistant to our own unavoidable death we fail to see the gift of change and how it can serve to make us feel more alive while we’re here, breathing and kicking and screaming.
Sometimes death is the resolution. Why invite it more quickly if it promised to come eventually?
We forget what we are when I cling to who I am.
Why live in fear of the inevitable if it’s going to happen one way or another?
Some things to Remember:
[I’ll leave you with 3 tips]
Your suffering will lessen when you take these 3 simple steps to REMEMBER:
REMEMBER the trick is learning to die before you die. Not to prolong death at all costs. Even our well intentioned efforts to take care of ourselves can be rooted in a sneaky fear of the thing waiting around the final corner for us all.
The answer lies in the fear of the thing itself. Master that thing and you master your fear. Lean INTO the resistance. Live to discover a thousand versions of you.
INSIDER’S TIP: don’t wait to NOT feel the fear before you go for gold, it is your action that displaces your fear and reinforces your self-trust in the face of it. Not your planning, not your intellectualizing, not your attempt to account for all possibilities before you make the first move. It is your DOING, the action that you take that makes all the difference.
REMEMBER you are no better or worse than the others, no more broken, no more special. Stay discerning, while remembering people are more like you than they are different, they understand more than you give them credit for. Try that on for size. What becomes available to you when you do?
Commit to remembering WHAT you are and WHERE you come from. An expression and extension of nature in physical form entangled with a divine and infinite soul, bound together for the totality of, and symbiotically navigating this wild ride that you cannot separate yourself from no matter how hard you try.
;)
Not on this planet. Not in this lifetime. Learn to trust in the gargantuan wisdom of the natural world from which you spring baby.
I’ll leave you with a poem…
i am defiant
i slip in and out of your gaze like a torpedo
just like her voice memo
sitting there, carved by her stare as she lowered me soberly
to her own beckon call
the knees that broke her fall
inspire me
tire me
take me where no person has been able to take me before
i promise it wont annihilate me and if it does
then so be it
better die on a hill for love
or fall on a blade for a lover
rather pierce my tender innards my bright heart that super wattage super charged
that smile don’t come for free
but the ladies they can HAVE it
it’s for them
because it is she that makes me fall
to my knees and throw up my hands in prayer or lower myself slowly
slowly
slowly forehead to top of knee
skin to marrow
salt in the ever-expanding, exalted sea, briney and timely
she brings me
brings me
brings me to each knee
each bare skin’s edge barely there at all
the veil is thin between these walls, between her nail bed and her cuticle
god broke the mold when he made her beautiful
throw back your hair
and stare
as i practicing letting myself be seen
the scary bits
all things in between
because life lived revealed means you’ve got skin in the game and without it you’re not living
barely breathing
barely awake at all
xx
z