Using Death to open fully to Life: A Hunter's perspective

Every life you encounter is precious, whether it be an animal or a human.

In your life if your diet includes any meat that came from a living animal; be conscious of what that animal may have gone through to provide nourishment for you and your family. If you are with an animal during its last moments, send it love and compassion as you would a dying friend. Allow the animal to become a mirror to your own life; reflecting back where there is fear, pain and suffering and how it is manifesting in our lives right now. Open to this, put yourself in the animal’s place and feel what it is like to be truly dying in that moment.

If you take an animal’s life, treat it with respect and reverence. This will help the animal spirit fully release from its body knowing that its purpose to provide food and continued life for other beings is complete. Death is not pretty, glorious or glamorous. That is not its purpose. Buddha once said that Death is his greatest teacher. Death is the motivation to seek the deathless aspects of ourselves, that part of us which cannot die. We can all live a fuller, richer life with the acceptance of our limited time on this earth, the acceptance that one day we are all going to be worm food just like an animal dying in front of you.

Whether you are hunting, fishing, slaughtering a farm animal or choosing a live lobster from a tank in a fancy restaurant, open to the suffering and pain of that animal, watch as the life force ebbs from its eyes and its heart beats slower and slower until it stops.

Why?

Not for some morbid reason or fascination of killing but to be conscious of how the cycle of life ends, to reflect on how we all will be in that exact same spot one day, drawing our last breath. Embrace your own mortality as it will be the key to living a freer life, knowing that all is taken care of and death is merely a doorway opening to the next stage of your journey.

Live your life full of love, openness and compassion for all things big and small. Open your heart to those creatures dying and allow whatever emotions that arise to just be as they are, without judgment, criticism or denial. It Is what it Is, Death is as part of life as being born. Look at these opportunities where Death enters your life to learn more about yourself, what closes you off, what aspects of your life are you in denial of?

These realizations came about in my life over the past few years, when faced with the death of my father. During that time I chose to remain open and practiced sending him love and compassion with all my heart. I opened to his sickness and to his death as a learning experience of how I can live my life with more openness and more love. Instead of denial, I accepted this was part of his journey and watched without judgment as Death brought out the best and the worst in him and the people around him, including myself. We are all these things, in his passing he became my teacher.

A couple of years ago on a hunting trip, after a wild emotional rollercoaster ride of a day, I shot a deer with my bow. As the deer was dying I knelt in front of it and poured my heart out with love and compassion while gently touching its forehead. I felt its struggle to live, to survive at all costs, Death was imminent and the fear it had became real for me in that moment.

One of my teachers calls this shape-shifting, a shamanic practice of placing your consciousness on another object, animal or being until you become that which you seek, feeling everything it does.

In that moment I had a realization of how I want to be treated at the time of my death. With that came the understanding I need to give to all beings what I am looking for; which is respect, love and compassion. I stayed there transfixed as if time stood still and felt this beautiful animal surrender completely to the inevitable, felt the release of spirit from the body like a wave being sucked back into the ocean. The wave being no more apart from the ocean than when it started, always it was one, a temporary expression of self that dissolves back into the whole from where it came. Stillness prevailed as I came back to my own awareness, staring at a once vibrant, alive being now simply an offering of nourishment and continued life for others. Again with this animal’s passing it became my teacher.

We are guaranteed very few things in life, we are all born into this world, we will have experiences of both pleasure and pain and we will all certainly die one day.

The question we need to ask ourselves is how can we truly live in the unknown time we've got left?