Suicide: Answering the Call for Symbolic Death and Rebirth

Yesterday my 16-year-old son came home from school and told me that his first girlfriend had broken up with him. They had been together for 17 months. My son was feeling rough but loving care from close friends will see him through this.

While at art school in Amsterdam (in the 1980s) I had a classmate called Ad who was very skinny, with spiky black hair, and he always dressed in black. One morning I showed up for class and found my year group in mourning. Ad had committed suicide that night because his first girlfriend had dumped him and he saw no future for himself. Later it transpired that he had hanged himself. Ad was a wonderful draughtsman, he could have gone far in the art world.

“Cosmic Birth” by Imelda Almqvist

Three decades later I live in London, UK. I still paint (unlike many people from art school who have long moved on to other things) but I am also a shamanic practitioner and teacher. I see clients for shamanic healing work and quite a few people over the years came to see me saying: “I am desperate, actually I am suicidal. Something needs to be done so I can dig myself out of this black hole, or else the only other way out I can see is taking my own life.” So what is going on here? This brief article aims to provide a shamanic perspective.

Suicide is often seen as “a cry for help.” I would phrase it differently and say that it is “a cry for symbolic death followed by rebirth.”

Tribal (indigenous) peoples understand the importance of initiation. They offer their teenagers rites of passage. The elders take young teenage boys away from their mothers and community to put them through challenges and ordeals. About a week later these boys return to their communities as young men, ready to shoulder the responsibilities of adults. Our culture fails our teenagers by not offering such rites.

Ancient cultures in Europe had mystery schools that offered a similar experience: people left their everyday lives, were taken through a series of profound experiences (that involved encounters with divine beings and glimpses of other worlds) and ultimately returned to their communities, changed by the experience. We do not know everything that went on in, for example, the Eleusinian Mysteries, but all written accounts of this claim that people experienced a symbolic death, had transcendental experiences, and lost their fear of death. It was that quality that allowed them to return as effective members of their communities: because they no longer feared death. They became role models for younger generations.

When I started my private shamanic practice I soon discovered that I needed to offer personalised experiences resembling what occurred in ancient mystery schools. I observed the most profound progress in students when I had them engage with ancient material (through shamanic techniques and the process of direct revelation) and stage powerful ceremonies where ancient esoteric knowledge returns in modern form. This is the work I most enjoy doing: it is the most powerful group process I know.

With individual clients, too, I observed that many of them (having grown up  in a culture that fails to offer rites of passage) get stuck in darkness or “black holes,” because no one has shown them the way out. No one has met them from a place of knowing that when a human soul seeks death, it is the enactment of a symbolic death that is required followed by a rebirth (or resurrection, if you like). The client can’t see this because they are in it and overwhelmed by it but shamans and elders have always understood this.

As a shamanic teacher and practitioner I have found creative ways of doing this. I have wrapped people in blankets and chanted classical prayers for the dead over them; then I have unwrapped them and welcomed them back to the world. I have had women dance in my garden, howling at the full moon and cutting off their own hair to mark a life transition;  then burning their hair in a cauldron and chanting goodbye to the old. I have had men, who were stuck either developmentally or in their creative process, give birth, either to their new selves or to “creative babies.” You do not always need the trappings of a full mystery school cast to deliver the experience that helps someone move through this tunnel.

When people die (and I have had two near death experiences myself so I can confirm this) they are said to move through a tunnel and be met by a very bright light at the other end. In shamanic healing sessions I have discovered profound similarities between birth canal and death canal. We speak of journeys in shamanism (shamanic journeying) and I have come to see that birth is our first journey (into the world) and death is our final journey  (out of the world) but ultimately a birth too: a birth back into the spirit world.

Today I often think of Ad and where his soul is now. At the time (at age 18) I was of no use to him. I was a teenager myself and did not understand the great processes that govern life and death. I hope that today I am able to reach out to people who find themselves where Ad was.  To walk with them some of the way and accompany them on their journey, so the outcome is rebirth, not untimely death.