ARE YOU AFRAID OF DYING?

By Stephanie Riseley, CHt

Humans are the only animals conscious of their own end. That fear runs through all of recorded history, through every religion, every work of art. It is, as the neuroscientists are now telling us, the very engine of human civilization.

I figured that out at sixteen.

THE GIRL ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD

I hated school. I’d leave Hollywood High, walk down Hollywood Boulevard, and head straight to Pickwick Books. The cool kids were behind the bleachers with their cigarettes. I wasn’t a rebel exactly. I was hungry for something nobody was teaching in any classroom.

I found it in the philosophy section. Bertrand Russell first. Then Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which cracked my sixteen-year-old brain open like an egg. The idea that ordinary consciousness was just one narrow frequency, and that the dial could be turned to other frequencies, never left me.

It still hasn’t.

WHAT POLLAN AND DAMASIO GOT RIGHT

So when I recently found myself listening to Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, that same sixteen-year-old hunger kicked in. Pollan is a brilliant writer doing what great science writers do: he takes the most urgent question humans have ever asked, what is consciousness, and what happens to it when we die, and makes it accessible, urgent, alive.

He and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, whose work I’ve followed for years, both arrive at a similar conclusion: human consciousness is defined, shaped, and in many ways imprisoned by the awareness of death. The fear of death isn’t incidental to the human experience. According to their research, it is the human experience. It drives our culture, our relationships, our self-sabotage, our desperate need to matter before we disappear.

It’s a beautiful, rigorous, heartbreaking framework.

It’s also fear-based.

And I’ve spent the last twenty-five years watching that fear play out in session after session, client after client.

WHAT RESEARCH CAN’T TELL YOU

Here’s where I part ways with the neuroscientists, gently, and with enormous respect: consciousness doesn’t die.

I know this not from a study, but from my own life.

My husband Dan died on December 26, 2001. I was 54 years old, $180,000 in debt, no insurance, no retirement. What happened in the years that followed didn’t fit any framework I’d been given. Not by Berkeley. Not by UCLA. Not by the philosophy section at Pickwick Books.

Dan came back. He described what happened directly after his death. He came back with information, with humor, with things he couldn’t have known unless he was somewhere, conscious, aware, and still very much Dan.

Joan Didion had similar experiences after losing both her husband and her daughter. In The Year of Magical Thinking, she describes moments of contact, then ultimately dismisses them as grief hallucination, as most people do. I understood why she couldn’t let herself believe it. I also knew, with absolute clarity, that I wasn’t hallucinating.

You are the only animal that knows it’s going to die.

THE BOOK, AND WHAT CAME AFTER

Love From Both Sides: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Reincarnation is the memoir I wrote about it all. It’s not a grief memoir, though grief is on every page. It’s not a spiritual manifesto, though my beliefs are woven throughout. It’s testimony. It’s what happened.

While I was writing it, I was also learning to trust my own gut. I flew to Texas and trained with Dr. Brian Weiss in Past-Life Regression. I couldn’t afford it. I did it anyway.

That decision changed everything.

THE CAGE HAS A DOOR

Both Pollan and Damasio describe the cage of consciousness with extraordinary precision and compassion. What they’re mapping, this consciousness imprisoned by the terror of its own ending, is real. I see it in every client who walks through my door.

But here’s what twenty-five years of practice has taught me, and what past-life regression makes viscerally, undeniably clear:

You have been here before. You have left before. And you came back.

The fear doesn’t disappear the moment you know that. But it loosens. And when fear loosens its grip, everything else becomes possible. The choices you’ve been postponing. The life you’ve been waiting to start. The grief you’ve been carrying alone.

That sixteen-year-old girl walking down Hollywood Boulevard was looking for proof that consciousness doesn’t end. She found it. Eventually. The hard way.

You don’t have to do it the hard way.

READY TO FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF?

If the fear of dying, or the grief of losing someone, has you stuck, I’d love to work with you. Through hypnotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Methods, and past-life regression, we can calm your nervous system, shift the story your brain keeps telling, and open you to what’s actually possible right now.

Sessions are available in person in Los Angeles and via Zoom worldwide.

Ccll me: (323) 933-4377

Sending hope,

Stephanie