What I Know About Dying
The same presence that holds someone at the threshold of death is the presence required in a session room. In a bedroom. In a moment when someone says stay.
I drowned when I was eighteen months old.
A moat. The algae on the surface looked like grass. I walked straight onto it in my little pink ski outfit.
My sister pulled me out.
I do not remember the rescue.
What I remember is the tunnel. The light. The moment I stopped being a body and became everything else.
Air. Grass. Light. I became one with it.
There was no fear. There was no separation. There was only the most complete peace I have ever known.
I did not remember this consciously for decades.
It came back through sacred medicine. 5-MeO-DMT. I was already deep in my practice. Already working with the body as compass. Already sitting with people in the most charged moments of their lives.
The medicine took me back. The tunnel. The light. The oneness.
I was eighteen months old and I was also a woman in her forties recognising the first crossing.
This is where the death work begins.
Before the training. Before the modalities. A toddler who went under the water and came back knowing something about what is on the other side.
My sister
My sister was the one who pulled me out.
Years later, she was the one I held as she crossed.
She was dying. Cancer. The pain had become extraordinary.
The doctor left his number, in case she wanted the medication. She said yes. Then she said no. Then she was ready.
When I slept with her in the hospital, I told her about the Bufo experience. How the medicine had brought back the memory of the moat, the tunnel, the light.
She got very still.
She confirmed the story. The algae. The pink ski outfit. She had been a child herself, pulling me from the water.
Then she asked me to tell her again about the light. Again. Again. Again.
She was memorising the route.
On the day she died, she looked at me and said:
“Biem, can I go to the light now?”
I had an answer. I had been there.
After she died, we stayed with her for twenty-four hours.
We washed her body. We dressed her. I put some makeup on her face because she would have wanted that. To be seen one last time looking like herself.
We placed her in her casket.
It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever done.
My father
My father died a year later. Belgium.
Dementia had taken most of the brilliant mind. He had dropped to forty-seven kilos. He floated in and out of consciousness.
I had a planned trip somewhere. I cancelled it.
Something in me knew it was time. The same knowing that has been operating since I was four. Reading what is in the room before anyone has spoken.
I called the doctor and explained.
My father had wanted euthanasia. He was now too far gone with the dementia to formally consent. But in Belgium there is a provision for this. Assisted death when a certain threshold has been reached.
The doctor came.
Something extraordinary happened.
My father surfaced.
He came to. He could speak. He was lucid.
I told him what I had told my sister. The tunnel. The light. The oneness. What it was like to die and find that death is not an ending.
The doctor explained the medical process.
My father listened to both of us. He was so relieved. He thanked me.
I had never seen him so peaceful.
The next morning they administered the medication. I held him. My mother was there.
He took his last breaths holding both our hands.
He died knowing. I was able to give him that.
My mother
Six months later, my mother decided she did not want to live anymore.
The legal process for euthanasia in Belgium is long. Psychiatrists assess mental competence. Two doctors must be present. The bureaucracy of a chosen death is immense.
Simultaneously, I was doing the work with her. All my methods. So she could become more at peace with her decision and say goodbye to everyone she needed to say goodbye to.
On the day itself, she was terrified. She went to her bed.
I straddled her.
I told her to look into my eyes. I told her what was going to happen. I sang her the lullaby she had sung to me and my siblings when we were small.
I had spent months giving her felt experiences through the modalities. Teaching her body to still the mind. To find the oneness. To be held by something larger than the fear.
The Touch Base® anchor: thumb to forefinger, slowly feel every finger ridge, remember you are safe, hold two minutes. I had taught it to my mother.
The same tool that works at thirty thousand feet works at the threshold of death.
The nervous system does not distinguish between types of terror. It only knows whether there is a body beside it that is not afraid.
She looked into my eyes. I sang. She went.
The methodology lives inside the deaths
This is the methodology essay. This is the part where I explain what I do in a session and why it works.
But I cannot separate the methodology from these three deaths, because the methodology lives inside them.
What I learned from dying at eighteen months.
The body knows the way. The crossing is not something to be feared. It is a threshold, and thresholds require presence, not intervention.
What I learned from my sister.
When someone is dying, the most useful thing you can offer is company. Specific, embodied, unafraid company. She did not need me to fix it. She needed me to describe the light so she could find it herself.
What I learned from my father.
Sometimes a body surfaces one last time when it is finally given what it needs. He came to because the conditions were right. The gentle contact. The presence without agenda. This is exactly what happens on a treatment table when the spine begins to reorganise.
The body will do extraordinary things when it is met with the right conditions.
What I learned from my mother.
Every tool I use in a session holds at the moment of death. The Touch Base anchor. The lullaby of the voice. The willingness to straddle the fear rather than stand beside it.
If a methodology cannot hold at the extremes, it is not methodology. It is theory.
The through-line
I started my professional life as a SENCO, a Special Educational Needs Coordinator, working with children on the autism spectrum.
Teaching them to feel. To recognise what was happening inside them. To find language for what the body already knew.
That is still the work.
The through-line from a child who cannot read social signals, to a woman who cannot feel safe in her own body, to a man who cannot track his partner, to a dying woman who needs someone to describe the light.
All of it is the same work.
Teaching the nervous system to speak. Teaching another nervous system to listen.
I never stopped being a SENCO. I just kept following what I needed.
Every time something in me required a new language, I found it and qualified in it properly. Network Spinal. EMDR. Somatic Experiencing. BDSM. Family Constellations. Hypnotherapy.
Each modality metabolised on myself first.
That is how you end up holding this many tools. You do not collect them. You need them.
The death doula work is not a separate skill. It is the same capacity that operates in every session.
The willingness to sit with someone in the most intense moment of their life without flinching, without fixing, without looking away.
That is what is required at the moment of death.
It is also what is required when a woman tells you the thing she has never told anyone. When a couple reaches the place where the framework does not reach. When the body on the table begins to shake and the practitioner’s job is to stay.
How I can hold what I hold
People ask me how I can hold what I hold. How I can sit with grief and terror and intimacy and dying and not collapse under the weight of it.
The answer is that I have been practising since I was eighteen months old.
The first crossing taught me that the body knows.
Everything since has been learning to trust that knowing and to offer it to others.
A newly qualified coach can give you the framework.
I can sit with you in the part that framework does not reach.
The part where language stops and the body takes over.
The part where the only useful thing is a nervous system that is not afraid of yours.
That is what I know about dying.
It is also what I know about living.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette
Ways in.
The VIP day Intensive. We go where the body has been trying to go for years. Work with me
The Intimacy and Communication Cards. Three hundred prompts that do the work one conversation at a time. The Cards
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