In recent years, an entire industry has emerged around personal growth and happiness. We are taught to think positively, raise our vibration, repeat affirmations, visualize our desired future, and focus on what is good. Many practitioners promise freedom from pain, rapid transformation, inner harmony, and a life without limitations. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. The problem begins when people are offered only one half of reality.

As if it were possible to experience love without loss, joy without grief, intimacy without separation, birth without death. As if wholeness could be achieved by excluding half of human experience. After years of working with people, I have become increasingly convinced that this does not work. Life never arrives in halves. If there is love, there will also be loss. If there is order, there will also be chaos. If there is hope, there will also be disappointment. We live in a world of polarity, and true maturity begins not when we choose one side and declare it right, but when we learn to hold both at the same time.

True freedom does not begin when we achieve permanent happiness. It begins when we stop running from the fullness of our experience. When we are able to hold beauty and pain within the same space. When we can feel gratitude while moving through loss. When we are capable of loving life without demanding guarantees of safety and comfort. Real freedom is the ability to live fully while understanding that life itself is finite.

In the same way, freedom is not born from becoming a perfect person. It arises when we stop dividing ourselves into good parts and bad parts. When we stop loving only our light and waging war against our darkness. It is impossible to embrace your holiness while rejecting the sinner within - you must become a sinner first in order to be a real Saint. It is impossible to recognize your beauty if you refuse to face your envy, shame, jealousy, greed, helplessness, or fear. The paradox is that the more deeply a person accepts their imperfections, the closer they come to their authentic nature. Only the one who has seen their darkness completely is capable of seeing their holiness completely. 

This is why I work through shadow, through crisis, through the dismantling of old structures, through the inner deaths that inevitably accompany any genuine transformation. It was through this doorway that death first entered my life.

I often think about how I came to the subject of death not through philosophy and not through personal tragedy. Rather, death came to me... through the work I was already doing. For many years, I studied shadow work, psychological crisis states, and processes of deep inner transformation. Later, I trained in supporting people through altered and liminal states of consciousness: those spaces where a person encounters repressed parts of themselves, deep fears, old wounds, and inner fragmentation. We were trained not only for moments of insight and healing. We were trained for the reality that sometimes transformation brings people into profound existential crisis, where their familiar worldview, identity, and sense of self begin to collapse.

At the same time, we spent considerable time learning how to support people who knew they were dying. People living with terminal diagnoses. People who could already see the end of their lives ahead of them and were forced to confront what most of us spend decades avoiding. We studied not only grief and psychology, but the process of dying itself. What happens when familiar structures fall away. When plans, roles, and illusions of control can no longer protect us. When only what is truly essential remains.

The deeper I immersed myself in this subject, the more I began to notice something peculiar about the modern world.

We have almost completely removed death from everyday life.

There was a time when people were born at home, lived among multiple generations of family, and often died there as well, surrounded by those they loved. Death was woven into the fabric of ordinary life. It was not romanticized, but neither was it hidden. It existed alongside life as a constant reminder of its impermanence.

Today, death has become sterile. We die behind hospital doors. Bodies are quickly taken away by professionals. The funeral industry does everything possible to soften the reality of death, removing visible signs of aging, decay, and finality. We apply makeup to the faces of the dead so they appear more alive. We try to disguise the fact that a body is no longer the body of a living person. Even the act of saying goodbye is often transformed into an attempt to make reality less disturbing for those who remain.

I do not think this is only about comfort. Somewhere along the way, we turned death into something that feels wrong. Something to avoid. Something not to look at, not to discuss, not to feel too deeply. We behave as though turning away from death somehow protects us from it. But death has never left. It remains present in every moment of life.

Ancient cultures understood this far better than we do. They lived within cycles. They watched forests fade in autumn, fields sleep through winter, and life return again in spring. They knew that every birth already contains death within it, and every death becomes part of a new beginning. We live within those same cycles. We have simply forgotten how to see them. Every relationship will one day end. Every project will one day be completed. Every role will eventually become too small. Every body will age. Every life will come to its conclusion.

This is why every true beginning requires us to release our attachment to the outcome. If we look deeply enough, an Old Hag is already standing at the end of every path we walk. She waits patiently not only for us, but for our achievements, our victories, our failures, our possessions, our stories, and even our most cherished lessons... One day she will take all of it... 

And strangely, that is precisely what makes life so precious! Perhaps that is why I felt called to study death more deeply... So I feel alive! 

Later, I consciously chose to train as a Death Doula. I wanted to understand this process on a deeper level and learn how to support people and their families through one of the most profound transitions of human life. What happened, however, was something I never expected.  I came to study the deaths of others and ended up encountering my own. Not physically, of course.... Rather, I realized something incredibly simple:

• I am dying too.
• Right now.
• Every day.
• I simply do not know the date.

That realization became one of the most liberating experiences of my life.

Until then, death had always existed somewhere in the future. As an abstraction. As something that happened to other people. To the elderly... To the sick... To the unfortunate... But one day the illusion of separation disappeared. What remained was the understanding that I am living and dying at the same time. Just like everyone else... 

And that was when my own process of dying before death began.

Many ancient traditions understood this long before modern psychology. Sufis taught, "Die before you die." Buddhist monks practiced contemplation of mortality. Stoics kept skulls on their desks not because they were morbid, because they understood that remembering death helps us remember life.

From that moment on, I began noticing something I had never fully seen before: how much of human life is organized around avoiding this knowledge. Modern psychology calls this Terror Management Theory: the idea that much of human behavior is motivated by our attempts to avoid confronting our mortality. Really! We stay busy... We build... We achieve... We prove ourselves... We pursue status, recognition, and control. Yet often these pursuits are not movements toward life itself. They are distractions from death. As long as I am busy, I can pretend I am not dying? As long as I AM important, death can wait? As long as I do not look in that direction, perhaps it is not there. But it is... Always... 

When this knowledge moves from the mind into the body, something remarkable begins to happen. Things that once seemed incredibly important start falling away. I began noticing how much energy I had spent on battles that ultimately meant very little. Convincing people to agree with me. Proving that I was right. Creating the right impression. Avoiding judgment. Trying to be liked. Attempting to control what can never truly be controlled.

Against the backdrop of death, these concerns suddenly appear very small.

Not because people stop mattering. Not because emotions disappear. But because perspective emerges. Scale emerges. We begin to see how much of our precious life force is invested in things that were never truly important. 

Death has an extraordinary ability to clarify priorities. It asks a simple question: 

• If you had less time than you think, would you still be doing this?
• Would you still postpone the important conversation?
• Would you still live according to someone else's expectations?
• Would you still wait for approval?
• Would you continue betraying yourself in order to keep others comfortable?

The answers are often painfully honest. 

This is why working with death gradually became inseparable from my work with shadow. Every deep transformation is a form of death. Old identities die, beliefs die, roles die, protective strategies die... The stories we tell about who we are begin to die.

Most people want change. Very few are willing to acknowledge that real change always requires loss. We cannot become someone new without allowing something old to die. This is why shadow work so often resembles a journey through death itself. We release the image of ourselves we spent years constructing. We let go of identities we have clung to. We stop defending what has long ceased to be alive. Only then does space open for something new.

Over years of supporting people through transformation, I have noticed the same pattern again and again. People rarely fear death itself.  More often, they fear life. They fear speaking the truth. They fear taking their place. They fear loving. They fear creating. They fear choosing themselves. They fear leaving what no longer serves them. They fear being seen. They fear being real.

Death becomes a mirror in which all of this becomes impossible to ignore. Because in the presence of mortality, pretending loses its power. We cannot postpone life forever. We cannot endlessly wait for permission. We cannot spend decades hoping that one day the perfect moment will arrive.

Death reminds us of one simple truth:

• There is only ever one moment.
• This one.
• Now.

The most surprising thing is that becoming intimate with death does not make life darker. It makes life brighter. You begin to taste your morning coffee more fully. You notice sunlight through the trees. You hold your loved ones longer. You speak important words more often. You laugh more. You postpone less. You wait less. You spend less of your life living in an imagined future. 

I no longer see death as the enemy of life.

If anything, I see it as one of life's most honest teachers. Death does not allow us to lie to ourselves forever. It reminds us of the value of time. It shows us the difference between what is essential and what is trivial. It returns us to the present moment.

Today, I work not only with shadow. I work in the space where shadow, transformation, and death meet. Because every time a person becomes more authentic, something inside them must die. And every time something false dies, life gains a little more room to enter.

Perhaps this is why so many ancient traditions, across cultures and centuries, arrived at the same teaching:

Die before you die.

And only then will you truly begin to live.