I’ve felt drawn to share something publicly that I’ve not spoken about before.
Nearly 25 years ago, after a severe accident, I had a near-death experience – one that came to shape my understanding of loss, healing, and rebirth.
During that experience, I saw what I understood to be a soul contract I had created before my birth. In that moment, I realised I had not yet finished what I had come here to do in this “Earth school”, so I came back. What followed became a profound journey of rebirth and transformation.
The Many Smaller Deaths That Followed
Since that near-death experience, I have also lived through many smaller deaths and rebirths.
I have known the loss of relationships and friendships, the loss of my career and, with it, my sense of identity, purpose, and meaning. I have also faced the loss of loved ones, my health, hope, and joy.
And yet, not despite those losses but because of them, I have gained so much.
Over time, I gained a deeper authenticity and the realisation that I am allowed to have boundaries. I also gained a stronger sense of self-worth. As a result, I now hold unapologetic clarity around what I will and won’t tolerate in friendships and relationships. I no longer measure my worth by how much I sacrifice myself in the service of others.
That clarity has brought freedom. More specifically, it has freed me from relational dynamics that once reflected my own fear-driven attachments, rooted in self-rejection and self-abandonment. I no longer seek belonging or acceptance from others when it requires me to disappear in the process. Quite simply, I have lost all interest in those kinds of interactions.
What Loss Has Taught Me
The loss of my long-standing practice of 20 years was not a small thing. For a long time, I stayed silent around those losses in ways that asked me to set aside my own truth. I no longer feel willing to do that. Naming what has been painful is part of honouring my own experience, my own truth, and my own self-worth.
My worth does not live purely in my capacity to hold space for others. I’ve discovered that my value is intrinsic. It does not depend solely on what I offer, produce, or give.
If anything, those experiences have deepened my capacity to support others – but now that offering comes from wholeness, not from a need to find my value there.
At the same time, life also pulled the rug out from underneath me on multiple levels. That experience brought me to the knees of my own existence. There, however, I rediscovered identity, purpose, and meaning in the simple fact of being alive.
Death Is Always Followed by Rebirth
Some would describe this kind of passage through loss, fragmentation, and renewal as a form of initiation — a theme David Kopacz explores in Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, a book about transformation through suffering and the journey into a living spiritual experience.
From this place, I can say with absolute certainty – and with the kind of authority that only lived experience can bring – that death is always followed by rebirth.
It is fundamental in nature.
Spring comes after winter. Day comes after night. Joy returns after sorrow. Likewise, new beginnings are born from endings.
These are not shallow platitudes. Rather, these words come from the raw, excruciating desolation of living through those harrowing minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years.
And yet, it was there I discovered renewed vitality. I felt the weightlessness of letting go of my own attachments. There, I also found a new childlike energy and excitement. I discovered a solid certainty of self and, finally, a deeper sense of ease.
For Those Moving Through Their Own Season of Loss
I share these words for those who are currently experiencing your own version of “death” in this cyclical journey we all share.
New life emerges after death. Indeed, this is nature at its finest.
If life has reduced your flame to a glowing ember, I trust in your innate capacity to rekindle it. Sometimes, it is in the dark night of the soul that we discover our life force is in fact, our own light.
A Gentle Invitation
If your own light has grown dim through the territory you are currently traversing, and you would like some company and support, feel free to message me for a complimentary chat or to book a session.