What would be your first thought if someone told you that you were about to die?

This is an interesting intellectual exercise as the contemplation of death cuts to the core of how we really feel about our life.

In the movie 50/50 Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character is diagnosed with cancer with a 50/50 chance of surviving. His immediate response to this grim prognosis was to worry about being denied the chance of doing all the things he hadn’t yet done.

So much of our fear of death is about not having lived the life we desire. We get stuck in the myriad fears that plague us in daily life. Ironically, most of those fears arise out of a fear of non-survival.

Does anyone see the crazy situation we have got ourselves in? We don’t live according to our deep desires because of an even deeper fear of non-survival. Then we fear death because we haven’t lived the life of our true desire.

Mere survival is not enough. What’s the point of this life if all we do is survive it? It would be like enduring 13 years of school learning nothing, accumulating no knowledge about the world and obtaining no skills to create a good and rewarding adult life. Merely ‘surviving’ school just isn’t enough and most of us get this.

But when it comes to the school of life we somehow allow our fears to distort our vision. We know in our hearts the life we want to live, but we cannot silence the voices in our head that tell us it’s not possible, it doesn’t make sense, or we don’t deserve it.

But to create a life that transcends the fear of death requires us to question every deep-seated belief we have about who we are, why we are here, and the meaning of this life.

This is not easy. Our beliefs create our reality. As Wayne Dyer says, we see what we believe.

To change our beliefs requires an excavation of years, even decades, of belief systems that are so entrenched it is difficult to know who we are without them. World renowned Toltec writer and teacher Don Miguel Ruiz, with his son Don Jose Ruiz, in their book The Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery, says that being able to separate ourselves from our beliefs reclaims the very power - that we gave away to fit a particular belief system - to construct a life of freedom:

“If we have this awareness, I think we can recover the power over everything that we believe and never lose control over our own creation. Once we can see that we are the one who creates the structure of our beliefs, this helps us to recover faith in ourselves. When we have faith in ourselves instead of the belief system, we have no doubt where that power comes from, and we start to dismantle the structure.”

We can only really begin to live when we have conquered our fear of death. It lies at the core of everything that holds us back from living our dreams.

The fear of death can only be achieved with the death of fear.

Eileen McBride
Eileen McBride is the author of Love Equals Power 2, a spiritual seeker and teacher. This article was published on October 19, 2011.