Coffee With Hilary and Les from State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre
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Coffee With Hilary and Les from State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre
The Peace That Comes When We Look Death in the Eye
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Death – the ultimate taboo that most of us spend our lives avoiding. Yet what if confronting our mortality could be the key to living more fully? In this thought-provoking conversation, we explore the complex relationship humans have with death and why finding peace with it matters.
We begin by examining where our beliefs about death originate. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why you believe what you believe about death? Chances are, those thoughts aren't entirely your own but rather inherited from family, religion, culture, and countless external sources. This programmed thinking often goes unexamined, leaving us with perspectives we've never truly chosen for ourselves.
The mind processes death on multiple levels. At the foundation is what we call the "body-mind" – that reflexive, survival-oriented part that instinctively avoids danger and trigger fears when threatened. This explains our immediate aversion to death. But beyond this lies our conscious thinking and higher awareness, each offering different relationships with mortality. What's fascinating is how the physical body naturally prepares for death, releasing chemicals like adenosine and melatonin to facilitate the process when death approaches naturally. The body knows how to die, even when our minds resist.
Finding peace with death doesn't require having all the answers. It simply requires an open mind and willingness to explore. Like building a muscle, thinking about death becomes easier with practice and can lead to profound shifts in how we live. Whether you find comfort in returning to the earth or continuing in some spiritual form, what matters most is developing comfort with the inevitable. As we share in this episode, "I think the more you think about death, actually, the more peace you receive from it."
Join us for our next episode where we'll share our personal journeys and research that has shaped our perspectives on death. Our goal isn't to convince anyone of a particular viewpoint but to offer alternative ways of thinking that might bring greater peace. After all, approaching our final moments with serenity may be one of life's greatest achievements.
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Well, it's easy to dismiss those conversations because people will say, well, you can't know. And I don't really agree with that myself, but that's my opinion.
Speaker 3:What if you could know a little bit right? What if you could know or feel like you knew a little bit, I think. And who knows what I'll be like on the day, in the hour, in the minute? You know, I can sit here and say I'll be peaceful, but maybe I won't. I really hope for my case that I would have an element of peace, and I think the more you think about death, actually, the more peace you receive from it. This is Coffee with Hilary and Les a podcast about the mind. Join us by the lake as we sip our coffee and talk about the mind and how to change it.
Speaker 3:Together, we explore how to break free of the past and open up a whole new future. Okay, we are on the line.
Speaker 2:On the line on a cloudy morning in the spring. Just notice that the apple tree is covered in blossoms, and those blossoms will probably last three days. That's the kind of look on that tree that you would love to have it there all the time. Yeah. Yeah, but it only lasts a few days. Yeah, things die.
Speaker 3:But an apple comes from it.
Speaker 2:right, there you go I wonder if the blossom knows it will become an apple or just knows that it's doing its part, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:so we're on our third installment, installment of death of oh my god uh, thoughts about death and and the first one we sort of talked about a little bit about. You know why we were talking about it? Because it was been such a present theme in my life for a while. And and just focusing on, where do these thoughts come from? You know, where does our understanding of death come from? And is it a program, is it another kind of thing that hypnosis can help us with?
Speaker 2:And then we went on and we talked a little bit about how we interpret it and what our experience of it is, because everybody has a different experience of death. Yeah, because it's just something that comes into our lives, right, and a lot of times we don't notice it. Like you know, the blossoms on the tree wouldn't think of it, with the blossoms and the petals falling on the ground as a form of death. But it is a an ending for those petals, it's an ending for the flower that will become, you know, within nature's reach, within nature's way, it will become an apple yeah, yeah um, and you know, that can be in and of itself just a lovely little reframe, another way to think about endings and death.
Speaker 2:But then we started talking about now. How can we uh, we were talking this morning how can we now offer a podcast where we help people with the way they think about death? What could we offer as another understanding of death?
Speaker 3:We're pretty confident that we have our own right where, at least, I was really struggling with wanting to offer something for people to, you know, chew on in their mind but not allowing my. You know well, I called it bias. You said that maybe wasn't the right word, but you know, that idea, that understanding of my own, that everybody has right, their own sort of understanding or thoughts of what it might be, um, and I didn't want that to get muddled into the podcast, right, um it's hard not to it's hard not to.
Speaker 3:It really is.
Speaker 2:It really is hard not to I don't think there's anybody out there who doesn't have some opinion about what death is and where it leads and where it doesn't lead, and things like that. I don't think it's possible to be alive in the world today and not have been both exposed to a whole bunch of opinions and not not settled on one for yourself yeah, yeah and I don't know if that's again, I don't know if that's a bias, because the question really becomes you know, can you know?
Speaker 2:right? That's what. That's the challenge. How do you know? How can you know? Yeah right. What is death? How can you know until you've gone through it and then you're not here to talk about it? Exactly, yeah yeah, yeah um, and so you have had a set of experiences that have led you to an opinion, an understanding. I have a set of experiences that have led me to an opinion or an understanding, and we use the word opinion, I suppose, to buffer against or juxtapose the idea of truth or fact.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and I was saying earlier, there are truths in this world, absolutely, that we've come to, but I think a lot of the things we put out there as truths are still opinions for the time being. Right, think about science. Hopefully, it's constantly changing and learning and updating, but we tend to put it forward as this is the truth. This is the facts, right, yeah, for this 20 years, until we do it again and find something new.
Speaker 2:And science itself is a form of bias. Right, yeah, for this 20 years until we do it again and find something new. And science itself is a form of bias. Right, it's a method. It's a method that says we formulate a theory, we try to control for factors and test for other factors. And we try to determine if the data supports the theory. Yeah, right, and that is a great method of trying to distinguish. You know, I don't know what to say, other than you know to distinguish truth from falsity, right, and it has become our fallback position in our society right.
Speaker 2:It is we call ourselves evidence-based and we fall back to. You know, can science prove this? But science is a method and it's only one method, and the question is more about what is the appropriate method to use to determine an understanding of non-physical experiences, non-physical experiences, non-physical truth. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So methodologies are in themselves a form of bias and it's not always a good idea to trap yourself in one method, because some methods are really good at Some things. We become really good at the double-blind study, right, the double-blind study where we're testing the efficacy of a drug as it relates certain and impacts an illness, and we get two groups of people and and we get two groups of people and some get a placebo and some get the drug and nobody knows who's getting what?
Speaker 2:the experiment administrators don't know. And then the data points to determine whether or not this study was reliable. What we found is the larger the sample, the more reliable the study, and this is a really powerful method for answering certain questions mm-hmm but it doesn't answer questions. Like you know, is death real? Mm-hmm well.
Speaker 3:So it's very. It's a qualitative issue. Issue Right, you can't put numbers to it. Really it's subjective to the experiencer.
Speaker 2:Well, it's just really hard to measure what's on the other side of it right. Yeah, yeah. And so, on the one hand, there are those who are quick to dismiss anything and there are others that are very excited about finding other ways of looking at it, with other forms of experiment. I think, in the end, you know what we're really talking about. What we're most concerned with is we don't want to sound like smart alecks who think they know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Although I'm very confident in what I've come to see as my understanding of it. At the same time, everybody's experience is going to guide them elsewhere, and I think that was really why I wanted people to think about their own experience. I wanted people to just spend the time and ask themselves you know, what do I think about death, where do those thoughts come from, and and what is my experience of death?
Speaker 3:mm-hmm, because I believe that the most reliable source of data is yourself yeah and maybe just asking yourself, like you said, about what you think about death and then asking the next question is if you're not there already, you know what would it mean to be peaceful about death?
Speaker 2:right that's why we're here, right? Yeah, the whole idea of us and our work and this podcast is to try to help. Try to help others and ourselves find more peaceful ways to look at the normal things of life, the stuff we're all going to bump into, to understand where we get our opinions from right and to, in many respects, soften our stance on what we might insist is truth.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Truth, yeah, and I think you know, is the insisting of truth uh, laden with fear or anger. Because I can totally understand how, over the generations, over the millennia, how fear and anger can be a driving force to uh, you know, say um, that nothing happens after.
Speaker 2:I think it's important to see fear as this enormous predisposition let's use that word. This is a crazy world. We're looking outside and the wind's starting to blow and the clouds are coming. My thoughts go immediately to is the yard protected? Do I need to bring things in? How bad is this storm going to get? And I automatically really am going to interpretations of my environment and determining whether or not I should be afraid of them and what level of fear I should have. I think when we meet new people, we can be very, very open and very excited. Won't it be great to meet new people? And others are. Oh my goodness, I'm going to be really afraid. I don't know these people. These people might not like me, these people might attack me. These people might have views and thoughts and practices that cause me upset. You know, I think that there's this enormous predisposition to think that we need to be protecting ourselves all the time to think that we need to be protecting ourselves all the time.
Speaker 2:And when we think about the mind, when we talk about the mind, I think about body-mind. I think about body-mind in simple forms, like reflexes how our body will flinch, it will pull back, it will react, it will block, it will protect, it does these things reflexively. There isn't a cognitive thought behind it. It is the body protecting itself. And then the body, I think, also has a cognitive ability to evaluate circumstances around it and avoid and plan and do the simplest things. I think of the body-mind as a really kind of deep, automatic protection mechanism that's inside us. I don't think that it needs to be developed, I don't think it needs to be enhanced, I think it's sort of automatically there.
Speaker 2:And so I always think about the body. I try to separate the mind, the higher mind, the cognitive mind, the programmed mind. I try to separate those a little bit from the body mind, which is about survival, it's about protection. And then I take it up a layer and I realize that I can. I can develop the body mind, I can train it, I can develop body memory, right, Like I think of that when I play the guitar. Often I'll play a song that I have played so many times that if I stop and think about it, I'm going to mess it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if I just let my body memory go through it. It's going to come out just fine.
Speaker 2:Or at least it's going to come out exactly like it did last time, right. And this body memory again, I think, is the kind of thing I can develop and I can enhance and I can use to my advantage and I can develop habits that really promote my safety, promote my health. And these kinds of things can take place without a lot of cognitive thought, without a lot of deliberate intention. And then, you know, I think that there's a part of the body, mind, that thinks of death and is averse to it. And early in life, no big deal, it's not really relevant to me. I'm young, only old people die.
Speaker 2:That's a program. That's a program that goes deep inside of us. Only old people should die. That's a program that can go deep inside of us and that can become sort of a habitual reaction to death. And I think that there's this body-mind aspect to us, that is, you know, people will think of the sympathetic nervous system, people will think about the reflex nervous system. These are parts of us that are very reactive and can from time to time be wrong and result in an inappropriate response. And then there's the programmed part of us and then there's the higher part of us, the part of us that reflects the part of us that seeks meaning, the part of us that sees meaning in everything, even when it doesn't have meaning, and each of those aspects of our mind is going to have its own reaction to death yeah yeah, and they're all sort of battling for first place.
Speaker 3:You know, there it's just a constant. It's its own um contrast within each other. You know, if you think of each as a what do they call venn diagram or something, they're all sort of trying to be the one that's at the forefront. But the higher mind I think there's a an allowing that needs to happen there, because the higher mind will sit back, I believe right, it'll sit back and not force you to do anything. But I think there's always that part that you think of, those times where people fall and fall and fall and then they hit rock bottom, right, the body-mind, those things that we grasp onto, and then the higher mind, if you allow it, you know, can can sometimes bring you out of that well, that body mind and that trained body mind comes forward fast and first when fear hits yeah right whenever the circumstances around you are interpreted very quickly without a lot of processing.
Speaker 2:When they kick in fear, the body's systems move into a whole other mode and they, they jump ahead. They don't give you a chance really to reflect, and so it's really normal for people to go out in the yard and you know they see something dead on the ground to immediately have an aversion to it. Yeah, right.
Speaker 2:You know, millennia of evolution, as some might say, causes us to have that aversion because it could carry disease, or it could be the beginning of a problem, or it could be, yeah heck, it could be just bait for somebody trying to get you. I mean the point is is that when it comes to death, I think there are body-mind issues?
Speaker 3:that cause us to have an aversion to it. But I find it amazing as I learn more and more about death, and I'd like to look it up, maybe while we're talking here. But if you know, god willing, we all have an easy death right, which we know isn't going to happen exactly for everybody, but the body, the body knows. It's like this amazing natural process that happens you start sleeping more. That, I learned, is a certain. I think it's like calcium or something. Something goes up in your blood system to make you sleep more, right, and that's what I'd like to look up. But there's all these processes that begin to happen to allow the body to shut down, which is incredible really. And of course, in our Western system, we do everything and anything to try to not make that happen. But we already went over that. But just this natural process.
Speaker 3:I interviewed somebody who felt, who died briefly, of not having dehydration. He had had surgery and just was dehydrated, didn't realize, and so he started to notice the body shutting down and each organ shutting down. You can feel it, it's fascinating. And then the moment of well, wait a minute, my body's shut down. How am I still thinking? Moment of well, wait a minute my body's shut down, how am I still thinking right? How am I still processing?
Speaker 2:so anyway, um just these natural processes that take place yeah, the body can really facilitate its own demise when it knows that the demise is imminent and can make changes. I mean, we watched that with my father. We watched him physically shift and change. And science, you know science in terms of medical studies, observing and noting symptoms, noting phenomena that causes them to see patterns. And yeah, science sees the patterns and notes its repetitive nature, that it happens across different kinds of people in different kinds of places.
Speaker 2:And science says, hey, there is an actual when the body knows that it's on the verge of demise, it goes through a series of steps and the mind goes through a series of steps. That's we talked earlier about, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. And you know, when people are told that they're going to die, they go through a series of emotional steps, a series of emotional thresholds. Really, again, I'm not sure how much of that is learned or how much that is just body-mind and how most of us, with our body awareness, go through these same emotional steps. Are you looking at a list of those steps?
Speaker 3:No, I was looking up the thing. I wanted to look up about what gets released into the body more. I wanted to look up about what gets released into the body more and it talks about stuff adenosine and melatonin and inflammatory chemicals.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, just those things start to rise in the body, um, and it has its own process, right? Yeah, so chemically the body shifts, mentally the body shifts. You know the kubler-ross stages of denial and anger and bargaining and depression and acceptance, and how for some people those steps take a long time because for some people being told they're going to die in the near future, they go through those steps in a slower way. And then others might go through it very, very quickly when they don't have a lot of time and they discover that they're going to go. And of course there are all those people who go by accident, right, something that wasn't anticipated, something that wasn't of time, and they discover that they're going to go. And of course there are all those people who go by accident, right, something that wasn't anticipated, something that wasn't an illness, something that wasn't gradual. Yeah, and I think that these kinds of things are are.
Speaker 2:Again, I turn to the body-mind. There's so much that the body takes care of without any thought, and it's amazing how we react to it. You know that unconscious mind that's keeping the heart beating, keeping digestion happening, keeping healing going on, immunity, going on stuff you never think about or yet need to think about. The body just takes care of it, and very much. When we interact with that part of the mind because we can you know, we've done biofeedback studies we can trigger people into seeing you something that is intimidating or threatening and, as a result, their body immediately responds into the sympathetic nervous system and then the adrenal glands kick in, the cortisol pumps and the pupils dilate, right.
Speaker 2:You know, all these things happen physically, on an unconscious level, through a somewhat aware attention that the mind puts on it, and so there's that whole world there. I think that we can't ignore and that that will impact the way we think about death, will impact the way we think about death. Those kinds of experiences of aversion to death, those kinds of experiences of physical fear of death, I think those are going to be part of what comes up in our mind as we consider the topic. But setting all of those aside and looking to the programming part, you ask somebody what happens when you die. I don't think there's anybody who doesn't have an opinion. I don't know that anybody's opinion is necessarily 100% accurate, but I think we have assembled inside ourselves, through our life experience and the degree to which we've examined the question, we have answers to that.
Speaker 2:We have what you might call an opinion. Yeah, what you might call an opinion? Yeah. So this is where we sit as we decide to move on and talk about death. And what is it that we can do in our own minds to make death less threatening, to make the idea of death more natural, to make the acceptance of death more natural, to make the acceptance of death of others, of ourselves?
Speaker 3:Palatable.
Speaker 2:Palatable, just less judged, I guess, is what I'm driving at. Right, that's very human. This is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong. It's very easy to say when a three-year-old dies, that's wrong. And it's very easy to say that when a 91-year-old dies, oh, that's good, that's natural. But that's just our programming that thinks that death and age should be associated, should, meaning there's a right and there's a wrong to it. We even think that way about how people die. That's a bad death.
Speaker 2:That's a good death. That's a way to die. That's not a way to die. We program our soldiers to accept death in a different way than the average person would. We program our heroes, our warriors, our police, our firefighters, our EMTs? They go into dangerous situations. There's an element of what they do that they're trained to experience death, to face death, to deal with death, to protect themselves from their own death. There's another whole world of programming that takes place in certain groups of people.
Speaker 3:Yes, a hero's death.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Hillary and Les offer both in-person and online hypnosis services for clients around the world. If that interests you, visit our website psalmhypnosiscom and sign up for a free consultation, or send us an email at info at psalmhypnosiscom. An email at info at psalmhypnosiscom.
Speaker 2:With all of that said, you know, everybody has opinions and everybody. Some people have strong opinions, Some people have non-negotiable opinions. For some people, this whole conversation is something they would avoid. Yeah. For some people they've made up their mind. They really don't want to discuss it because they really don't want to change their mind, because they've found a peaceful place within themselves. But I think that that's rare. I think for most people they avoid. They just I don't want to talk about it, I don't want to think about it.
Speaker 3:It's like politics, or you, you know it's on that level well it's.
Speaker 2:It's easy to dismiss those conversations because people will say, well, you can't know. And I don't really agree with that myself, but that's my opinion what if you could know a little bit?
Speaker 3:What if you could know a little bit right? What if you could know or feel like you knew a little bit? I think, and who knows, what I'll be like on the day, in the hour, in the minute. I can sit here and say I'll be peaceful, but maybe I won't. I really hope for my case that I would have an element of peace and I think the more you think about death, actually, the more peace you receive from it.
Speaker 3:I know people think I'm insane for thinking about death this often and talking about it and for you know that's a whole other podcast, but I think it does bring. I think it's a habit, it's like a muscle that you need to sort of work is the thought about death and, you know, finding peace with it at some level, whatever that peace is. Some people might find peace just going into the ground and becoming part of the earth and nourishing the earth, and that's their peace the ground and becoming part of the earth and nourishing the earth, and that's their peace. And some people find peace and light and and whatever they think of as God, creator, creation, and that's their peace. And I but I think no matter what you do in life, I think that it's important to have a peaceful mind at death as much as you can.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's our goal with this podcast and we should really sort of pause this podcast here and pick up again with those next steps, those next thoughts. I think the reason we really broke this in half, the reason I wanted to break it in half was that I don't want to attack anybody's thoughts. I don't want anybody feeling like our opinions or our views or our experiences or our research should be rammed down their throat. And so if you're one of those people that has really strong feelings about death, you've already got a strong opinion about it. You already know what you know. You don't want to think about it anymore. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:My only suggestion is, you know, always ask yourself good critical thinking, right, if I think this, where did I get that from? Because the truth is, there are very, very few thoughts in your mind that you haven't received from somebody else. There are very, very few opinions and perspectives that are in your mind that you haven't received from somebody else. We are all, in many respects, the collection of other people's thoughts and opinions, and often people that we really respect and really really like their opinions end up in our opinions quickly and easily. So if you can examine yourself and say you know, what do I think of death, what's my experience with death, what do I think of death? And you can say to yourself you know, I'm not really sure that I think that's a great open-minded approach to what might come in our next podcast.
Speaker 2:If you're one of those who says no, no, no, I've already made up my mind, according to my family, according to my religion, according to my view. You know, this is the way it is. My only suggestion to you is just ask yourself the question says who told you that? Whose opinion is that really? Because maybe it isn't yours. Maybe your opinion can change, maybe your opinion can expand.
Speaker 2:Maybe there's a whole lot of information out there that has been ignored because this is just a really taboo topic. Maybe there's a lot of information out there that you might want to explore because you're afraid. So in many respects, I offer all of my respect to everyone. You have your mind, you have your comfort level. It is not my goal in life to tell people the way it is. It is my goal in life to be helpful, and I have found for myself the combination of my experience and my research and my personal exploration has completely and dramatically changed my view of death and I would like to share that in the podcast that comes next. And if you're really solid and really rigid, then skip that one, that one, because I think, as you started to say, hillary, you have put a lot of time, a lot of emotion, into figuring out where you stand with death and I feel like I've sort of done the same.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the next podcast will be just sharing our experiences and our thoughts on it, and it doesn't mean that they're the right thoughts. It just means that it's our sort of opinions based on our experiences.
Speaker 2:And maybe in there there's some things you might want to explore for your own benefit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's some really interesting things in there. There's some things you might want to explore for your own benefit. Yeah, there's some really interesting things in there.
Speaker 2:And it's not that I necessarily want to promote my opinion, but I think that I'm really grateful for the calmness that I have around it, especially having just gone through what my father went through, so it brings me a lot of peace.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So stop this one there, and then we'll pick it up again. Yep, see you later, thank you.
