Sacred Terminus - By Sandra Ollsin

A vital part of my work centers around the terminus of the lives of others. My roles as soul midwife and guide, funeral celebrant/consultant, death researcher/writer/educator and workshop leader are no facile undertakings.  They represent sacred service at its core.

Being with people who are blown apart, fragile-hearted from grief, means meeting and companioning them wherever they are at.  It involves acknowledging mystery and anticipating liminal states of consciousness.  States and processes that must be skillfully navigated and supported during our most humanly vulnerable times.  It is an art that is learned, practiced and refined over time. Reading subtle signals and secondary cues, in order to assist people in navigating the many changing relationships in relation to death. Knowing what the Void feels like definitely helps, having been there so often; having had to familiarize myself with and live within the in-between realms for much of my existence.

Being comfortable and experienced within a vast array of altered states of being is imperative to the work: visiting fear, panic, confusion, deep sorrow, rage, melancholy, conflict, depression, family system disarray, the not-knowing, these are the tenets of the unseen realms in all their glory and messiness.

Ah, the blessed sacredness --- the inherent comfort, knowledge and sometimes sheer terror of the unseen world. These are my allies, my informers, my sources of intuition, love, compassion that allow me the ability to hold the container for others, to sit with people in their hard feelings, raw emotions and painful realities and situations.

The shape-shifting shaman who lives on the edge of town, the wise woman healer who communes with Nature and her gifts --- these are my contemporaries, the stalwarts of my heart center in the storm.

Assisting someone in their final phase on the earthly plane is such privilege.  So many tender mercies and moments of immense beauty shared.  If riches are borne of deep, soulful experiences with people in their suffering and also their reverie, then I am surely wealthy beyond measure.

The terminus of this life, I believe, is but another station we must dissolve into on our way back into the unseen world.  Part of the emergent, effulgent tapestry of life continually being threaded and remade from births, deaths, living, dying, rebirth and renewal. The veil between worlds so thin, some of us venture to see, sense and communicate beyond and through it. 

Don't be afraid.  Find whatever assistance you need while living to ensure a smoother passage through death when the time comes.  It's not too unlike how we plan for travel well beforehand, so that we might acquaint ourselves with, and so better anticipate, the journey.

Fear is the thing that we must come to some kind of an arrangement with.  What we believe affects the quality of what happens next --- so choose your philosophy, metaphors to live by, and messages that you tell yourself, carefully.  Preferably, before you must embark upon what the mystics call, "the flight of the alone to the alone"---to join the fine company of all those who have already traversed the subtle divide.