A Pilgrimage for the Soul

A Pilgrimage for the Soul

When the Divine comes calling....

The Three Doorways to Spiritual Awakening - Number Three

Donna Lancaster's avatar
Donna Lancaster
Aug 24, 2025
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Photo by Miguel Gonzalez on Unsplash

Doorway Three: Death

This is the third of three related newsletters about the Three Doorways to Spiritual Awakening. If you haven’t read the first two, you can here:

Doorway One: Ageing

Doorway Two: Illness


Spiritual Death

Death is such a fascinating and nuanced doorway of Awakening for me. It’s almost like it has multiple mini portals contained within the broader doorway itself. I say this because there are so many different ways that we can, and indeed do die in our life time. From death of out-dated versions of ourselves, to death of who we dreamt we would be, or what we would have, through to death of the different phases of our life, and of course the physical deaths of loved ones, along with our own imminent transition.

As with all of nature, death from a Spiritual perspective is not death at all, but a kind of rebirth. An ending in order to begin. Again. When we reflect upon the various Spiritual deaths we have experienced during our life time, we can come to see how they were often a necessary and inevitable next step on our Soul’s path. That without them, we would have stagnated and ceased to grow. I can clearly remember a time in my own life when I was so content and at ease, coasting along, when the Universe decided I was ready for my next initiation and rebirth. That same day, I received a phone call that led to my whole life unravelling. I began to die once again into Life.

Death Becomes Her

There are so many ways we must die in order to truly live.

Here are a few I recognise……

DEATH of someone and/or something so precious it will shatter your heart into a million tiny pieces.

DEATH
of the inauthentic self: all the lies you have swallowed begin to choke you. They get regurgitated, set alight and burned to the ground.

DEATH of the ego defences: along with those lies, dies the need to be right, to fight and resist, to win, be better or less than, to be more.

DEATH of the victim: blame, poor me, martyrdom and the inevitable extended suffering.

DEATH of your old life: out of date relationships must go, old ways of habitual thinking and behaving too. Life as you know it has gone. RIP.

DEATH of the patriarchal affliction: all of our stories of fears, shame, inadequacies, should’s and shouldn’t’s begin to become clear. We reclaim our body, power, voice and our worth as a form of true activism.

DEATH of the illusion of separation: of the ‘me, you and us’. A recognition of the interconnectedness of all beings.

DEATH of entitlement (and it’s close cousin; expectation): Gratitude for the abundance that is (your) Life.

DEATH of love with a small l. No giving to receive. No us or them. Learning to be Love with a capital L.


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