TCC, for a Good Death

It happened seven years before I’d heard of T’ai Chi Chih. I was training to play prescriptive harp music for patients experiencing anxiety for anything from pre-surgery to imminent death, but most often in a hospice setting. One day in an assisted living facility I was assigned to play for a long-time friend of mine, whom I had not seen recently. Her husband was away for the morning, and no staff was present when I arrived to set my intention and focus as I had been taught. Liz was asleep.

I matched my playing tempo to her breathing, and I was unselfconscious and totally one with Liz and the music. All at once I was overwhelmed with a powerful, peaceful and loving feeling, and the whole room turned a warm yellowish color. When I became so startled that I stopped playing, the feeling went away. I wanted it to come back, the most wonderful thing I had ever experienced. What was it? I had no words to describe it and didn’t share it with anyone for a long time. (Liz died a few days after this occurred.)

Fast forward to one of many trips to Albuquerque to attend TCC retreats with Carmen Brocklehurst. She mentioned being asked by a beginning student as they were learning Around the Platter, “Is Chi yellow?” It wasn’t until I was returning home that I remembered the experience with Liz. Could that have been some kind of union with universal Chi? I was reluctant to disclose what I did not understand.

Fast forward to 2019, when I’d been teaching TCC for two years and had become accredited to teach Seijaku. I was learning, in baby steps, the practice of letting go. I had convinced my husband to do estate planning, and I was feeling comfortable about getting my affairs in order. I even picked up Letters to a Dying Friend: What Comes Next: Based on the Tibetan book of the Dead by Anton Grosz.

Chapter 20 of this short book stopped me in my tracks. Grosz described the light seen in the mind’s eye just prior to the cessation of breathing. This is detailed by Tibetans and borne out by modern accounts of near-death experiences — the bright light first experienced as a pinprick grows in intensity and breadth, as though emerging at the end of a tunnel. Grosz writes:

But the light is more than just light. It is the light as in “Let there be light,” the Ultimate Reality, the big bang, the pleroma, the Source of all. Those who have experienced it during both death return experiences and advanced meditation techniques [emphasis mine] describe their sensing it as a being, a consciousness, or a presence which fills them not with fear or foreboding, but with intense peace and love. They feel immeasurable power, something so strong, so peaceful, so undefinable and all-encompassing that it cannot be limited by giving it a name…. This is the power which changes our lives simply by knowing of its existence….

In Kitchen Table Wisdom, Rachel Naomi Remen writes about a similar experience when she was a young pediatric physician. A young leukemia patient was very frail and in the end stages of his disease. He announced that he was “going home,” and packed his small suitcase. The nurses persuaded Dr. Remen to speak with him, because he couldn’t possibly go home.

He looked up from his coloring and our eyes met. In that moment things changed. The room became very still and there seemed to be sort of a yellowish cast to the light. I had a sense of an enormous presence and I remember thinking wildly that we had stepped outside of time…. Perception may require a certain openness. We see what our lives have made us ready to see. This child had known that he was going home in a much more profound sense than the staff was prepared to appreciate. At that time I had no way to make sense of this experience, either, so I did the comfortable thing: I forgot it.

In a similar vein, I had forgotten my experience with my friend Liz, until TCC helped me remember.

Justin promises us in his writings that through consistent practice of TCC we experience not only a good life, but also a good death. Every time we do our practice, we let go of our worldly concerns though the balancing and circulating of the Chi. I love my life and don’t feel ready to die just yet. But at the same time, I am not afraid of making that transition, ready when called upon for the ultimate letting go into “the Source of all.” Thank you, Justin.