Fear of death has never stopped anyone from dying. It has only ever stopped people from living.
Nature's 4 Steps of Healing · Step One: Balance
This week opens with a dream song, because this week I am living it.
Now that the spring is gone, what was right now seems so wrong,
don't know if I belong, now I'm growing old.
Things that were fast are slow, as I watch each step I go,
and I was feeling high but now I'm low, now I'm growing old.
And I always thought the friends I had would always be right here,
but now the truth is clear, now I'm growing old.
Children grown and moved away, grandchildren run and play,
while I'm left to live each day, now I'm growing old.
World has left me behind, too fast to watch the signs,
and I'm too weak to change their mind, now I'm growing old.
And I wonder if they'll ever love the things I leave behind,
and I hope that love's still blind, now I'm growing old.
And yet each day of living is more beautiful than all the words I could ever know,
and remembering all those lovely times of loving still fills my heart with the warmest glow.
I guess it's too late to complain, so I'll take the sunshine and the rain,
and love the laughter and the pain, now I'm growing old.
And yet, in its blindness and uncaring, the world still holds more beauty than I can sing,
and looking forward to many more times of loving still makes me realize that love is everything.
Love is everything.
So I guess it's too late to complain, I'll take the sunshine and the rain,
and love the laughter and the pain, now I'm growing old.
I wonder if they'll ever love the things I leave behind. This week I am leaving nearly everything behind. I'll tell you why further down. First, the fear that sits underneath it.
There is one fear that sits behind every other fear you have ever named.
It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't need to. It simply waits behind the fear of loss, the fear of not being enough, the fear of being forgotten, the fear of the diagnosis, the fear of being alone in the end. Pull back any of those fears far enough and you find the same shape underneath, wearing a different coat each time.
Death.
Not death itself. You have never actually met death, not once. What you have met is the fear of death. And here is the first thing worth sitting with before you read another word: fear of death has never stopped anyone from dying. Not a single person in the history of this world has out-argued their own mortality. But it has stopped people, millions of them, from living. From loving fully. From walking outside without their armor on. From spending their one wild, glorious moment of being human actually inside that moment, instead of flinching away from an ending that hasn't even arrived yet.
So which is it really doing, this fear? Is it protecting your life, or is it quietly, patiently robbing it?
This post arrives the week the world dresses up as what it fears, and in the days when many traditions honor those who have walked on ahead of us. Perhaps that is exactly right.
The Elephant Behind Every Room
These past months I have written about the Field that Ervin Laszlo spent his life describing, about the science Dean Radin gathered to show what indigenous people have always known, and about the thousands who gathered at the Greasy Grass for the 150th. These last two weeks I wrote about what you are underneath your name, and what you owe the circle you stand in. Every one of those posts, if you go back and look, was circling this same fire without naming it directly.
Because death is the elephant standing behind all of it. It is the reason we run ahead of the circle. It is the reason we reach for the roof, the fire, the whiskey, anything that promises to hold us. It is the ego's loudest, oldest, most convincing case for why you should stay small, stay guarded, stay clenched. And underneath that case is a lie so old we forgot it was ever a lie: that you are only this body, only this brief stretch of years, only this one flickering candle the wind could take at any second.
But that has never been the truth of what powers life. Unconditional love is what powers life: every bit of it, every healing, every dream, every resonance. Fear and love are not equal opposites fighting for the same ground. Fear is the story an isolated ego tells to keep itself relevant.
Love is what was already there before the story started, and what remains after the story ends.
What the Mystics Confirm From the Other Side of the World
I did not need to travel to India to arrive at this. Dreams carried it to me on Lakota ground. But when you hear a teacher like Sadhguru speak plainly about death, a man who has spent a lifetime in direct inquiry into these questions, the confirmation lands the same way Laszlo's did.
He points out something simple and almost embarrassing in its simplicity: fear of death exists only because death is unknown to us. We have built our entire sense of "I" out of this body, these years, these possessions and people we can name, and anything built that small will always tremble at the thought of its own ending. But that trembling was never natural. It was learned. A being who has touched something larger than the body does not fear the loss of the body, the way you don't fear misplacing a coat you know isn't really you.
Sadhguru on life and death:
That is not a foreign idea to anyone who has sat in a Circle. That is Mitakuye Oyasin. That is no separation. And it is the same answer that came to me the morning I woke asking What am I? It is Balance remembered: the moment you stop confusing the vessel for the water it carries.
Four Steps Out of the Chains
Balance begins the moment you stop fighting the fact of death and simply see it clearly: not as tragedy, not as enemy, but as the most natural doorway life has. A child does not fear death until an adult teaches them to. Somewhere in you, that child is still there, still unafraid, still able to see clearly if you let her.
Harmony is what happens when you stop treating fear of death as a private failing and recognize it as something nearly every human carries, inherited and conditioned and passed hand to hand for generations. You can hold compassion for the fear without letting it hold you.
Abundance is discovering that once the fear loosens its grip, there is so much more of you available: more love to give, more presence for the people in front of you, more room in your chest for joy that isn't waiting for permission from an uncertain future.
Peace is the walking. It isn't a peace you arrive at once and keep. It is a peace you choose again in every step of the Circle, because peace was never the absence of endings. Peace was always the presence of love, right here, in this timeless, eternal moment you are standing in right now.
These four steps are not mine alone. A four-part path toward awareness appears again and again in the old teachings. The Yogic tradition describes one in a conversation on consciousness, where science and spirit meet, that will live in the Circle Medicine Bundle Library when it opens in December. Here is a free preview. Start at 23:24 for the four steps, and if it calls to you, go back later and take in the whole conversation in a long, quiet stretch: a Yogic perspective on consciousness and Nature's four steps.
My Own Small Death
This month I am handing the keys to my home to strangers. It sold in a cash sale, and I am leaving it move-in ready to greet the two sons who will live there, along with nearly everything I gathered during my years in it: the furnishings, the comforts, the treasures. They stay, at no extra charge.
What I am keeping fits in a basement room in a dear friend's home: my clothes, my music equipment, my regalia, and my buffalo robe. I cook my meals with his dishes in his kitchen upstairs.
Only while reviewing this post did I understand why this giveaway felt so necessary. I am practicing my own death: the death of owning things that ask for money and maintenance in return for being possessed. A sofa, a set of dishes, a house with a mortgage. None of it was ever really me.
And what is left is not less. The chains of my aging years are loosening, and there is more of me available now for this work, and for the generations coming up behind us.
No More Chains
There is a song that came to me the way all my songs come, not written so much as received. It says what four paragraphs of prose can only point toward:
No more chains to clang around my life, to give my worry to…
let them rob me blind, I'll still have peace of mind.
Let 'em strip me bare, then I'll be smiling everywhere.
Let 'em take it all, I'll still have all my love to spend,
for I won't live again in chains.
That is what the far side of this fear sounds like. It isn't denial that loss is real, and it isn't pretending the body lasts forever. It is the quiet discovery that nothing anyone, or death itself, can ever take from you was ever the thing that was actually yours to lose. The love was always yours. It still is. It always will be.
Love is everything.
This is Step One of the Circle the Walk of Peace Path, opened right here, right now, to any heart tired of carrying chains it never needed to wear: let the fear go, and find out what was underneath it the whole time.
You are always welcome here. Nothing you need to buy. Just come, walk Nature’s 4 Steps of Healing with us, and be well.
Come walk with us in wellness, with and for all our relations.
Mitakuye Oyasin 🌿
Bunny Sings Wolf is a Dream Song Carrier, Stone Medicine practitioner, and Ambassador for the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation, descended from Chief John Grass. She lives nine miles from Mato Tipila (Devils Tower) in Hulett, Wyoming, and is the founder of IndigenousHealing.io, a free global healing community walking Nature's 4 Steps together toward the Circle the Walk of Peace Path, Summer Solstice 2028. All are welcome. The circle path is always open.
