The psychedelic drug that could explain our belief in life after death

Scientists have discovered DMT, the Class A hallucinogenic, naturally occurs in the body, and may contain a clue to what happens when we die and why people see fairies

By Caroline Christie

DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) is the most powerful hallucinogenic drug around. The class A psychedelic is so potent that under the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances its manufacture is strictly for scientific research and medical use and any international trade is very closely monitored. But it also naturally occurs in the human body. Now a Senior Psychologist at Greenwich University, Dr. David Luke, is trying to undercover a link between DMT and ‘near death experiences’ to explain elves, tunnels of light and centuries old folklore. On July 8th he’ll talk about his research at an event in conjunction with SciArt collaboration Art Necro at The Book Club in London.

Tell me about yourself

I am a psychologist at the University of Greenwich and I teach a course on the psychology on the exceptional human experience, which looks at extraordinary phenomenon of human beings. It’s all about mythical experiences, psychedelic experiences, personal paranormal experiences, mysticism, spiritual experiences, those sorts of things.

I do research on altered states of consciousness and exceptional human experiences, including psychedelics, medication, hypnosis as altered states and the experiences people have in the states such as out of body experiences, possession, telepathy, and clairvoyance – all your usual stuff.

How did you end up focusing on DMT?

I’m interested in DMT is because of my interest in psychedelics and the phenomenology of psychedelic use. DMT is of particular interest because it’s an extremely powerful psychedelic substance. But what’s more interesting than that, is that DMT naturally occurs in many plants, animals and in humans. It’s endogenous, meaning it’s made within the human body. So it’s more than just a natural plant psychedelic – it’s in us. That makes it extremely curious.

Wait – we naturally produce DMT? Why?

We don’t really know. It was first isolated as a chemical about 100 years ago in various plants. For example in ayahuasca, (a hallucinogenic brew from South America) the other chemicals that were isolated in a plant were named telepathine because users reported telepathic experiences. DMT was later found to be naturally occurring in the human body, found in large quantities in the cerebral spinal fluid. It’s thought to be produced in the lungs and in the eye. It’s also speculated, but not proven, that it’s made in the pineal gland.

What’s the pineal gland?

The pineal gland is a weird organ. During the daytime it produces serotonin, which we know keeps us happy and buoyant, and at night the serotonin gets converted into melatonin. It’s also thought that the gland produces DMT, which is converted from serotonin because they’re similar, it just an enzyme that converts it. The gland is part of the brain’s structure, situated just outside in the spinal fluid in a cavity. It’s really interesting. Why would we have an extremely strong psychedelic substance being produced in our brains? What is its ordinary function in humans? It’s not very well understood, largely because there’s not much done into it. The initial speculation thought that it was perhaps responsible for psychosis, in that people with schizophrenia may have an overproduction of DMT. There was some research conducted into it in the 1960s, but that didn’t get any consistent findings. So that idea was abandoned. Shortly after that, the research with humans stopped because psychedelics became illegal. It didn’t really stop people from taking them, but it did stop researchers from reaching the affect in humans.

Recently, research has begun again. A pioneering medical doctor in the 1990’s called Rick Strassman , started injecting people with DMT as part of a medical research project. About 50 to 60 participants were given high doses and they reported some extremely bizarre phenomena. Approximately half of the participants on a high dose reported being in other worlds and encountering sentient entities, i.e. beings of an intelligent nature which appeared to be other than themselves. The experience was so powerful that participants were convinced of the reality of experience with these other beings. It poses some very interesting questions.

What do these beings look like?

The beings themselves took on various forms. Sometimes they took on the form of little elves or imps or dwarves, sometimes they’re omniscient deities, other times they’re angelic beings. But they’re specifically not humans. Rick Strassman also speculated that the DMT experience had a lot of similarities with what we know about the near death experience.

How is being on DMT similar to having a near death experience?

The near death experience is a type of experience syndrome, whereby people perceive themselves to be near death or in danger of dying. Typical experiences include the sensation of leaving the body, entering into a tunnel of light and flashbacks of their lives. People typically meet some kind of being, sometimes a deceased relative or a powerful other, like an angelic being. The being will tell them it’s not their time to die and that they should return. Then the person who’s having the experience will return back to their body. Sometimes it coincides with them being resuscitated if they are having a genuine near death experience, like a cardiac arrest.

Research has suggested that there is an overlap between that experience and the experience people have when on DMT. In that there’s often encounters with beings, out of body experience, life changing experience, which is often said of near death experiences. But there are dissimilarities as well.

Why are these experiences particular to DMT?

That’s a five and half million dollar question. It’s not well understood. Why do people have this reoccurring theme of apparently sentient entities? It could be that it’s a hallucinatory experience, and for some reason DMT triggers the sense of encountering another being. Or perhaps it’s a misfiring of the brain’s neural network that’s reasonable for those kinds of experiences ordinary.

But it’s curious that the experience occurs in the absence of any kind of objective sentient being in the presence of the person. The other thing is that people quite adamantly testify to the reality of the experience. They say it’s more real than this world. Although we can explain it as a neurochemical misfiring, people who have the experience typically feel dissatisfied with that explanation because it feels so real. But to say it’s a hallucination isn’t satisfactory either.

Hallucination is a bit of a waste basket term for odd experiences we don’t really understand or can’t explain. It’s just a label really.

What’s even more baffling is that people seemingly independently have similar types of encounters. They may not know about other people’s experiences of little people, elves, gnomes or dwarves.

We’ve found reports of them right back to the very first DMT experiments conducted by a psychiatrist in Hungary during the 1950’s. He first tested it on himself and then gave it to his colleague.They all reported the same thing.

My colleagues and I think these experiences aren’t culturally mediated. This is when people are primed to expect something i.e. elves and dwarves and so on, because they’ve heard about it. We think people have been having these experiences on DMT naively, ever since it was first isolated and taken by humans. There’s something about DMT itself which cultivates these experiences. We’re just not sure how or why.

So why do you think DMT is present in the human body?

Rick Strassman tried to use it as a way of explaining the near death experience. He suggested that what happens when you have a near death experience is that your brain releases its store of DMT into the brain and it’s this chemical release that gives the experience.

No one has done a particularly thorough job of mapping the classic near death experience to the classic DMT experience. People have attempted crude compassions but no one has looked at it closely. When you do there are some overlaps but there are a lot of differences.

Although the DMT experience broadly contains all the elements of a near death experience, near death experiences are not like DMT ones. You have the experience of being out of the body or a tunnel of light, like you have with DMT, but there are things we find in the DMT experience that we don’t find in the near death one, such as geometric patterns and alien and bizarre experiences, whereas near death ones are typically very earthly.

What’s more Interesting is if you look at the folklore in literature around 100 years ago. People documented verbal accounts of people who had experiences with pixies. Typically in the folklore literature there were most often associated with spirits of the dead, which has some alliances with the idea of DMT being related to near death experiences. How and why that is, that’s anyone’s guess really.

Are we close to finding any answers?

Scientifically it’s somewhat tricky. I’ve been researching in this area for about 10 or 15 years. DMT struck me as being extremely curious because there’s no other psychedelic we know of that naturally occurs in the human body. I mean the human neural system has endocannabinoids which are related to cannabis THC, but there’s a big difference between that and the presence of DMT.

What’s the role of DMT in the body and why do people have such extraordinary intense and bizarre experiences when they take it? Strassman’s theory is that the purpose of DMT is to help people transition from a living state to a post-death state, whatever that might be. That’s a quite ambitious speculation from a scientific perspective. Because you can’t really know what happens after death.

Strassman’s theory is that the purpose of DMT is to help people transition from a living state to a post-death state, whatever that might be.

Current mainstream scientific thinking is that the brain dies and consciousness ceases. New research and evidence is beginning to challenge that. If you’re looking at the near death experience research that’s going on, people are reporting having experiences of conciseness and conscious awareness even when there’s no apparent brain activity. When the heart stops beating for about 20-30 seconds, all brain activity that we can detect stops because the brain is starved of oxygen.

In theatre operations when people have had their heart stopped and the blood drained from their brain have reported conscious experience throughout the whole procedure, sometimes lasting an hour or more, during which there is no brain activity that we can detect. This challenges the notion that you can have no consciousness experience without brain activity. Now we can’t be certain that they’re actually having a consciousness experience, because we can’t be sure it’s taking place at the same time as their stops working. They could just conflate the experience when they recover brain activity. Or it could be that there are some parts of the brain that we can’t detect, which still remain active. But there’s no evidence for that. So we’re in peculiar territory here, scientifically speaking.

Do you think we’ll ever be able to test for signs of consciousness after death?

We always like to think we’ll have a better understating in the future and science does tend to progress but it’s quite a tricky area. Experimentally it’s very difficult. We’re not in a position to experimentally put people into a death state and see what happens. Although we can take note of people who have surgical procedure and are put into a state of clinical death.

We don’t even know if DMT exists in the pineal glands. We have discovered it in the pineal glands of rats, which are anatomically similar to humans. So there is possibility but we have yet to discover what the pineal glands’ actually function is. It seems to be important as a neurological transmitter on certain, little understood, nerotransmitter sites in the brain. It also seems to have important indications in the immune system. But the question remains why we have an extremely potent psychedelic chemical floating around in the human body. Can this account for spontaneous mythical and spiritual experiences?

Complete Article HERE!

End-of-life care considerations for LGBTQ older adults with Carey Candrian, PhD

AMA CXO Todd Unger discusses caring for LGBTQ seniors and addressing disparities during end-of-life care with Carey Candrian, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver.

0:00 AMA Moving Medicine for June 21, 2022
1:04 What disparities affect LGBTQ older adults, specifically?
2:04 What is driving these disparities in LGBTQ older adults?
4:06 How have previous stigmas taken a toll on LGBTQ seniors mental health?
5:35 Why are LGBT older adults at particular risk for receiving inequitable end-of-life care?
8:17 How is end-of-life care different from other areas of health care where we don’t see these huge gaps?
8:43 What are the drivers of this discrimination?
9:53 What kind of data would be helpful—and how can it best be collected by care providers?
11:46 What do you mean by “breaking the script” when it comes to communication with LGBTQ older adults?
13:30 How would you like to see end-of-life care evolve and what do we need to do to get there?

Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Death

— How to talk to pediatric patients without lying

By Rebecca Morse, PhD, MA

More than ever these days, we aren’t able to hide death from children. Whether we’re addressing their fear around school shootings, natural disasters, grief from family members lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, or concerns about their own illness, it’s impossible to shield kids from bearing witness to illness and death — nor should we. So, at the very least, as healthcare professionals we need to be able to talk to them about it in the most helpful way possible, with clarity, compassion, and honesty.

Often, when we are asked to work with grieving or terminally ill children, these patients come hand in hand with caretakers who have struggled to adequately explain what has or is going to happen. And that’s not surprising — it’s not easy to know the right way to talk to kids about death. In many cultures we are relearning how to talk to adults in a post-modern medically advanced world. We use euphemisms and dysphemisms: people “pass away” after a “long illness” or “kick the bucket.” We use softening and distancing language to compartmentalize death and reduce its universality and inevitability. But death is not a four-letter word, to be whispered in hushed tones. It has five letters — and when it comes to attempting to shelter our children from these harsh realities, are we preserving innocence or ignorance?

Numerous researchers have explored death and dying from a child’s perspective: Myra Bluebond-Langner, PhD, worked with children with leukemia; Maria Nagy, PhD, and Gerald Koocher, PhD, MA, studied how children grow to understand death, and others have attempted to map a child’s death comprehension onto social-emotional and cognitive developmental stages. And while this research is important and necessary, it isn’t particularly helpful if you are sitting across from a child who is looking to you for answers, and you are torn between using adult-focused language or blurring the truth behind analogies, such as comparing death to being asleep, cancer to being like a bad cold, or telling a grieving child that their loved one died because “God needed another angel.”

Most adults would undoubtedly agree that protecting children is one of those implicit rules of caretaking. Yet, as others have recently written, when we prevent children from experiencing the world around them as amateur scientists, we also prevent them from learning key coping skills that will build resiliency during their lifetime.

Children do need reassurance. William Worden, PhD, identified key questions that children — whether they are grieving or dying — need answers to:

  • Is it my fault?
  • Is it going to happen to you?
  • Is it going to happen to me?
  • Who will take care of me?

Synopsi

Trying to understand fault is natural. An infant in a highchair quickly learns the laws of cause and effect when they drop spoons or food on the floor and the family pet eats it, or mum and dad retrieve the objects only to find the objects quickly airborne again. And again, and again. Thus, it is only natural that when something scary or bad happens, kids want to understand what came before. Therefore, being clear about what you do know is important. As a child develops death comprehension (which often comes from experience and through social learning), they also begin to understand that death can happen to anyone. Here, reassurance could look like explaining what you do know — using language at their cognitive level, without using flowery language. I liken this to how you might answer a child who asks, “Where do babies come from?” You wouldn’t (I hope!) tell a 3-year-old about insemination or a 15-year-old that “the stork brings them.” Similarly, any relevant medical technicalities about the dead/dying loved one or child should also be age-specific. Are they receiving medicine? As a shot or a pill? Will the medicine give them a tummy ache? Will their hair fall out? The last question, “Who will take care of me?” is particularly crucial; a dying child needs reassurance they aren’t alone, and that the grown-ups are going to do what they can to make sure they are comfortable. A grieving child needs to know there is a plan in place to ensure they are safe, and that someone knows how to wash and mend their favorite stuffy or will help them with their homework.

Circling back to the title, some readers may have deep nostalgia and fond childhood memories of the mythical characters that bring presents or reward lost teeth; they may recall how they gradually came to understand what was real and what wasn’t, or some horrifying slumber-party where they learned the truth from a friend’s older sibling. But unlike candy, presents, and money left behind, when we don’t share what is happening with children about death and dying as it’s happening, they lose an opportunity to observe how the adults around them might use adaptive coping techniques. They lose the chance to process the information along the way in smaller “chunks.” When we deny kids the opportunity to learn, we betray their trust and model that it’s acceptable to lie when something hurts or is uncomfortable.

If a family member (or the child) has a terminal illness or has been in an accident, explain to the child that the person is sick/injured, and we are going to try to help them get better, but that it might not work. If a treatment stops working, tell them. If death is imminent, tell them. Give the child an opportunity to say goodbye whenever possible. For younger children who might be unable to go to the hospital, you could have them draw a picture or write/dictate a letter for the person. You are helping them adapt, not stealing their childhood. One of the things we need to emphasize when working with families is that even though the child may not have an adult conceptualization of what death is, they do recognize that something is happening and that the adults around them are hiding the truth from them. In the absence of concrete knowledge of what is going on, their imaginations work overtime as they attempt to fill the gap in their understanding. Therefore, children should be given developmentally appropriate honesty. An unknown something is always scarier than a known thing.

P.S. Dying is also a five-letter word, for those of you counting.

Complete Article HERE!

Doctor Who Has Witnessed Hundreds Die Explains How It Feels For Person Dying

It’s one of life’s greatest mysteries – what happens when we die?

By Daisy Phillipson

Although science is yet to figure this out, a palliative care doctor who’s witnessed hundreds of people pass away has drawn on his experience to describe what the dying process looks like.

Answering a reader question on the subject for The Conversation, Seamus Coyle, honorary senior clinical lecturer at the University of Liverpool, said: “As an expert on palliative care, I think there is a process to dying that happens two weeks before we pass.

“During this time, people tend to become less well. They typically struggle to walk and become sleepier – managing to stay awake for shorter and shorter periods. 

“Towards the last days of life, the ability to swallow tablets or consume food and drinks eludes them.

Some people think our brains release a rush of chemicals in our final moments. Credit: Unsplash
Some people think our brains release a rush of chemicals in our final moments.

“It is around this time that we say people are ‘actively dying’, and we usually think this means they have two to three days to live.”

That being said, some people go through this process in just a day, while others continue on for nearly a week, which Coyle said is often distressing for the families.

He explained the actual moment of death is trickier to decipher, adding: “But a yet unpublished study suggests that, as people get closer to death, there is an increase in the body’s stress chemicals.

“For people with cancer, and maybe others, too, inflammatory markers go up. These are the chemicals that increase when the body is fighting an infection.”

One detail he was asked about is whether the last moments of life could be euphoric, perhaps triggered by a flood of endorphins.

Although Coyle couldn’t give a definitive answer as it hasn’t yet been explored, he did point to a 2011 study that showed the levels of the happy hormone serotonin tripled in the brains of six rats as they passed away.

“We can’t rule out the possibility that something similar could happen in humans,” he said.

As for the bit we’re all concerned about – pain – the doctor explained: “In general, it seems like people’s pain declines during the dying process.

“We don’t know why that is – it could be related to endorphins. Again, no research has yet been done on this.”

During his time in palliative care, Coyle has witnessed the full spectrum of deaths, from people who are anxious right up to the end to those who accept their fate early on.

“Ultimately, every death is different – and you can’t predict who is going to have a peaceful death,” he said.

“I think some of those I have seen die didn’t benefit from a rush of feel-good chemicals.

“I can think of a number of younger people in my care, for example, who found it difficult to accept that they were dying. They had young families and never settled during the dying process.

“Those I have seen who may have had an ecstatic experience towards the end of their lives were generally those who somehow embraced death and were at peace with the inevitability of it.”

Complete Article HERE!

Enriching the dying experience

— End-of-life doulas help those who want to personalize their journey

By Nancy Burns-Fusaro

As a master gardener, Noreen Kepple is familiar with the natural cycle of life — with birth and growth, with dying and death. Her next chapter is a natural progression.

“Human beings are part of that cycle,” Kepple said one day last week as she spoke about her work as an end-of-life doula. “I think that’s what led me to end-of-life care.”

Kepple, 70, an early childhood educator by training, spoke recently at Stonington Free Library about her new calling — accompanied by Greta McGugan and her sister-in-law, Lavina Kepple — at a presentation titled “What is an End-of-Life Doula?”

This presentation, designed to discuss a doula’s role in the dying process and share ways doulas enrich the dying experience for patients and their families in non-medical ways, was well-attended and attracted many “brand-new people” to the library, noted Karla Upland, library assistant director.

The Kepples and McGugan, all Stonington residents, completed the certificate program at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine in 2020, where they studied to become end-of-life doulas. The term, Noreen Kepple said, is becoming more and more popular as members of the baby-boom generation come of age.

Add the pandemic to the mix, she said, and the thousands of people who were forced to die alone in hospitals while separated from family members, and there’s no wonder people have been pondering their own end days and those of their loved ones.

“Most people in this country die in hospitals,” Noreen said. “I think many more of us hope to die at home. … The pandemic underscored the need for people to not die alone. People are thinking about their own deaths and of how they’d like it to be. Dying at home can be a more rewarding process.”

Dying at home, she continued, is also a process that can be guided with help from a trained doula.

The word “doula” — which comes from the Greek word meaning “woman who serves” — is often associated with birthing, babies and new mothers. In the last few years, as more and more people seek to take control of their own dying experiences, it has become also associated with the dying process.

“Birth and death are so similar,” said McGugan, 56, the mother of three adult children and the grandmother of 10 who was present at the births of her grandchildren. “They’re really the same thing.”

An “end-of-life doula,” Noreen Kepple told the 30 people gathered at the library, can also be known as a “care doula,” a “death midwife,” an “end-of-life coach,” a “transition guide,” a “soul midwife” and “many, many others.”

Whatever the name, she said during a phone interview last week, an end-of-life doula is a non-medical companion who offers emotional and sometimes spiritual support to the dying and their families.

“A doula can have many kinds of service,” Noreen Kepple said. “They can help plan a vigil, help with paperwork and legacy projects.”

If someone is a good cook, for instance, Kepple went on, a doula might help organize recipes.

“Some doulas help record oral histories,” she said. “It’s really whatever the client wants.

“It’s important to be present, to be an active listener and to be open-minded.”

“Open minds and open hearts,” said McGugan. “We meet people where they are.”

“Back in the day,” McGugan said, people would have learned about dying at home and probably would have been present at the passing of a grandmother or elder relative, and would have been “holding the hands” of the person passing.

“We weren’t as afraid of death then,” she added. “Today we live in more of a death-denying culture.”

“Our culture has a hard time with death,” said Lavina Kepple, 73, a former schoolteacher who is training to be a hospice volunteer. “Taking the course really helps you look at your attitudes about death and dying.”

One of the books the three women studied while taking the online program through the University of Vermont, Noreen Kepple said, and one she recommends to people interested in learning more about the work of a doula is “Cultivating the Doula Heart: Essentials of Compassionate Care.”

The book was written by Francesca Arnoldy, the program director and course developer at UVM’s doula certificate program.

Arnoldy, who is also a bereavement researcher with the Vermont Conversation Lab, a hospice volunteer and author of “Map of Memory Lane,” said the program has grown exponentially since its inception in 2017.

As more and more people want an “intentional” dying experience, Arnoldy said during a telephone conversation from her home in Vermont one day last week, and choose to “personalize their end of life,” it makes sense that more and more people are enrolling in the eight-week online class, which prepares participants to “meet the growing demand for end-of-life support as people live longer.”

“I just trained nine more people to be instructors,” Arnoldy said of the program, which includes topics like “Dimensions of Grief and Loss,” “Non-Judgmental Support, Acceptance, and Unconditional Positive Regard,” and “Entering Sacred Space.” “And we are already full for this year.”

It’s an intensive course, Arnoldy said, with lots of reading, writing, modules, discussion boards and plenty of support.

“We do lots of sharing,” Arnoldy continued, noting that coursework requires roughly eight to 10 hours of studying a week. “It’s deeply personal … and there’s lots of feedback … lots of support.”

The course is appropriate for all those interested in exploring end-of-life possibilities, she added.

“Everyone has a seat at our table,” Arnoldy said, “although people with fresh grief might want to take time to heal before enrolling.”

“As a doula, I trust in my clients’ inherent wisdom and strength,” Lavina Kepple told the group gathered at the library last month as she read aloud from Arnoldy’s book. “A doula knows that each person is entitled to the completeness that is his or her journey.”

“It’s important to get people aware that doulas are out there,” said Noreen Kepple, who suggested that, in addition to the program at the University of Vermont, people interested in doula work look into an organization called The National End-of-Life Doula Alliance, a nonprofit that “welcomes and supports all end-of-life doulas, trainers, and interested parties, regardless of background or level of experience.”

The three women are already planning their next talk, a training session for the staff at Seniors Helping Seniors in Mystic.

Upland, who organized the sound and livestreaming technology for the Stonington Free Library presentation, has also made it available on the library’s YouTube channel via the library website.

The doula presentation at the library was well-received, Upland said in an email. “The audience was very engaged and attendees expressed interest in either employing an end-of-life doula for a family member, or becoming trained as doulas themselves.

“Many of the questions revolved around locating and engaging local end-of-life doulas for palliative care work,” she said.

Complete Article HERE!

How Black Joy Helps Me and My People Hold Our Collective Grief

In a world where the Black experience is often marred by tragedy and hardship, finding joy is essential.

Choosing to embrace joy can be intentional — even in the face of grief.

By Nneka M. Okona

I know what it means to mourn. I know what it means to look at what was once a life full of joy and levity — only to see heaviness and despair left as the fruits of the harvest of life. Since 2017, I’ve been in a free fall, rattled by loss. In a five-year period, I’ve lost one of my dearest and closest friends from graduate school, two beloved aunts, and my dad.

In five years, I’ve watched my social circles get smaller as grieving made me shrink into a more fearful version of myself, always crouching somewhere safe within my psyche to avoid experiencing the pain of loss, especially sudden loss.

Often people say that grieving is lonely. And it is. When you grieve, whether a person, place, thing, or a state of being, you are actively calling back the love and affection you poured into that person or thing, trying to understand how to extend that care to yourself again.

That is inherently lonely, because it is your relationship that you are mourning; no one else can know the depth or realities of it. No one else can relate to your pain — your grief is yours alone. Grief requires a reordering within of everything you formerly knew about the self attached to that other entity — work that could assuredly take a lifetime.

The Importance of Harnessing Joy When Living With Grief

My grief that I have carried in this period of life, as profound, life-altering, and cataclysmic as it has been, is not unlike the grief that most other Black people have experienced. Whether it’s due to police brutality, the ills of racism in general, or watching our loved ones, friends, and community members die of COVID-19, there is so much to grieve, so much to mourn.

Black collective grief has been at the forefront of my mind in my time of mourning, as are spots and places of joy. We all will have to endure the inevitable heaviness of life; how we harness joy to keep us anchored to this world can act as our guiding light. Our guiding force. A North Star of Joyfulness.

How we harness joy to keep us anchored to this world can act as our guiding light. Our guiding force. A North Star of Joyfulness.

How we harness joy to keep us anchored to this world can act as our guiding light. Our guiding force. A North Star of Joyfulness.

The queer womanist writer and thinker Audre Lorde is known for writing beautifully about self-care and what it means for Black people to care for ourselves in a world anchored in our degradation. In her book A Burst of Light: And Other Essays, she famously writes words that are often repeated: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Self-care and Black joy are linked; one happened to pave the path for the other. Black joy is many things: Black people centering our levity and ease, cultivating and tending to the safe spaces in our lives for support when life becomes perilous, taking a break from the oppression we experience to be present in our lives in other ways, such as by spending time with loved ones and stepping away from social media when news updates are triggering. Black joy is much more than deciding to be happy and to have fun; it is a direct response to us living in this anti-Black world.

It is us saying, “Yes, the violence of white supremacy is draining and exhausting, but there is still much brilliance, vibrance, and vitality within us despite that.” Being Black is not hard — dealing with the external forces of racism is. Black joy is giving ourselves gentleness and compassion and using that to fuel community care a step further. Choosing to embrace joy is intentional, radical subversion in a world that would prefer for us to only find suffering where there can be delight.

Black joy is much more than deciding to be happy and to have fun: It is a direct response to us living in this anti-Black world.

The origin of the term “Black joy” varies depending on whom you ask. The most general assumption is that it originated as a hashtag on social media. The other prevailing thought is that the concept — and the subsequent movement it has become — are the brainchild of Kleaver Cruz, a writer in New York City who identifies as a Black queer Dominican American. In 2015, they started using the phrase online after feeling overwhelmed by the excess of Black death and pain in their sphere. From there, they have built The Black Joy Project, where they show glimpses of joyfulness in Black people online as a reminder of our joy inheritance.

Where and How I Find Joy, Even When That’s Difficult

Cultivating joyfulness for myself personally is often a challenge. When you’re in a prolonged state of mourning like I have been, giving in to that heaviness becomes instinctual. To shake up my energy, I have traveled a lot while mourning, and that has given me a place of spaciousness. Being able to literally transport myself to other places in the world to be reminded of the beauty that exists all around us has been grounding. In this way, joy has become more than just something to turn to, to search for, but a centering of sorts.

My main source of joy, though, has been connection with other Black people — notably via online grief support groups where I can talk openly and honestly about what it means to mourn as a Black person. One of these is a grief group called Black Folks Grieve, led by the grief guide Naomi Edmondson. In these special spaces designed for only Black people grieving, we share our losses, what’s coming up for us, and how we’re creating space to be buoyed in those happy moments that still come.

Sharing and Spreading Joy

Like the grief support groups that have brought me connection and contentment during a time when I felt mostly emotionally unmoored, there are many other individuals and groups creating space and holding space for others, or simply writing their way toward more joy. Of the latter, Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts wrote about joy and how we can look to it as a means of resistance in her book Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration. Released earlier this year, her lyrical essays on joy are framed as a beacon of hope and a steady reminder of what we can look to grab from this life, even when it seems out of grasp.

There are joy collectors in our midst, and joy reflectors: those who send up a smoke signal that while this life may be painful and full of things to heal from, things to grieve, we can harness something powerful. Something so pure that when the weight of the world barrages our souls, we can look at one another, and at our strength, love, and joy that are rooted in one another, and declare all to be well.

Complete Article HERE!

Why I’m planning my own funeral in my 20s

When ABC reporter Claudia Long began preparing her funeral, she realised she didn’t want a traditional burial.

By Claudia Long

As someone in their 20s, I try not to spend too much time thinking about my own death.

And when it comes to actually planning for the event, it’s somewhere on my priority list between becoming the eighth member of BTS and holidaying on Mars.

But when a friend — citing my love of gardening — sent me a link to a new funeral home that can compost your body after you die, it sent me down a rabbit hole of caskets, wills and burial fees.

There were so many options to choose from, which for an indecisive person like me is straight up more stressful than the idea of actually dying.

I figured, why not save myself some worry and plan my own funeral.

So you’re dead, now what?

There’s quite a few ways to deal with a dead body in Australia but unfortunately composting isn’t one of them just yet.

There isn’t yet a facility providing the service here, so I’d need to get my corpse sent to the US, and while I’m all for sustainability, a logistical nightmare doesn’t seem like the kindest gift to leave my family.

So what do my options look like?

A room including a mortician's slab and a clock.
Composting may not be an option in Australia but there are modern approaches to burial and cremation that are gaining in popularity.

For most Australians, cremation is the way to go, with 70 per cent of people taking the literal dust-to-dust route.

For the rest, burial is the other most popular choice.

But modern spins on these old traditions are becoming more common, according to Griffith University death studies expert Margaret Gibson.

“The possibilities are much greater than they’ve ever been before,” Dr Gibson said.

“It’s another way of marking the finality and transitioning the body into another form. Some people find it a cleaner kind of ritual and more, I guess, more finite in that sense.”

But down the body-composting clickhole I found another option: natural burial

Death, naturally

Essentially, natural burial involves placing your remains in the ground in biodegradable coverings — at a slightly shallower level than other burials to allow for better decomposition — and letting nature run its course.

There’s no embalming, headstone or fancy coffins, to minimise impact on the environment.

So minimal is that impact, that when I went to check out my potential final resting place at Gunghalin Cemetery in Canberra, I didn’t even realise we’d reached the natural burial ground until cemetery staff pointed it out.

The burial ground, with a large stone at the entrance.
Canberra’s first natural burial ground at Gungahlin Cemetery.

Dr Gibson said the natural burial ground’s ability to blend in could make it an appealing option for councils looking for more cemetery space.

“The difficulty for local governments getting approvals to have cemeteries is that there’s always that question of where are they going to be and are they going to be close to where people live,” she said.

“The thing about natural burial is that it creates kind of a multiple space environment.

“It’s much more about a green space than a death space.”

While the process isn’t quite as common as other types of burial and cremation yet, the idea itself isn’t new.

A number of religious and cultural traditions around burial call for shrouding the deceased, as is often done in natural burials, and burying the body without embalming treatments.

Putting all your eggs in one casket

Once I’d opted to be interred at the natural burial ground, it was time to rethink any plans for a big, classic coffin (what can I say, I love drama).

When it comes to what you’ll be buried in, there’s plenty to choose from: did I want a shroud? A cardboard coffin painted by my family and friends?

A cardboard funeral casket
A cardboard funeral casket

In the end, I decided to go with a simple wicker basket, with flowers on top if my family were ok with bringing some along from the garden.

I booked in for a formal planning session with a not-for-profit funeral home, thinking now that I’d decided where and how I wanted to be buried I was set! Ready to go! Totally, 100 per cent prepared!

Not. Even. Close.

Tender Funerals is currently based in the Illawarra, with plans to be operating in Canberra by the end of the year. So hopefully by the time I die they’ll have everything ready to go.

And when it comes to funerals, turns out there are details you need to have prepared.

The planning session went for almost an hour and there were plenty of questions that needed answering.

  • Indoors or outdoors? Outside.
  • Flowers? Yes, but nothing too fancy.
  • Music? Sure, I’ll prep a Spotify playlist.
  • Eyes open or shut? Eyes absolutely, 100 per cent shut (?!).

And that’s just the start.

It’s all a bit overwhelming and that’s before you chuck a sudden death into the mix rather than one that’s hopefully decades away — a good reason to write down some ideas, just in case.

While it’s not all that common to plan and handle a funeral yourself, there’s technically nothing stopping you.

“The funeral industry doesn’t want people to take control of it,” said Dr Gibson.

“You could actually authorise your family to be your own personal funeral directors if you wanted to, it’s just that no one thinks about that and it’s not part of the conversation.

“Part of what keeps the industry going is that people don’t really want to think about their own death, they don’t think ‘ooh how exciting’.”

Who needs to know?

A funeral plan isn’t very useful if discovered under a stack of papers years after you’ve died, so you should tell your nearest and dearest what you want them to do.

A coffin sits at a funeral.
A code of practice has been introduced to safeguard WA’s $170 million prepaid funeral sector.

That could be in the form of instructions in your will, putting together a plan with a funeral home like I did, or jotting down a plan for your loved ones to execute — just make sure to tell someone where you’ve left it.

Cost-wise, even choosing a natural burial, without many bells and whistles, dying is pretty expensive, particularly if you want to have a funeral.

That cost, combined with the pressure and complications of figuring out the logistics, is pushing some to ditch the funeral altogether.

As long as your remains are dealt with, there’s no legal requirement for any funeral or ceremony to mark your death.

“There’s probably a number of factors, but certainly it’s cheaper, I think the cost of funerals is a real factor for people,” said Dr Gibson.

“In some cases, it can be because the nature of the deceased person, maybe didn’t want that and was not particularly into any kind of forms of ceremony or celebration of their life.”

But Dr Gibson said people may want to think of those left behind before instructing there be no funeral.

“I’m not sure whether in the long term that is necessarily a good thing because, you know, funerals are about recognising in this communal way that someone has died,” she said.

“It’s a symbolic act of that recognition, but it’s also connected to the capacity to be able to grieve.”

Complete Article HERE!