It’s an old self-development cliche to always begin with the end in mind.
The idea is that, when you plan out a project, you don’t figure out the steps in order from A to Z.
Instead, you start at Z, and reverse engineer the steps it would’ve taken you to get there.
(I learned this the hard way while installing an Ikea kitchen. Everything went great, until it turned out that in order to do the final step correctly, we had to go back to the first one and change how we did it.)
Beyond individual projects, this advice is often recommended when it comes to “making a plan” for one’s life and character development.
To begin with the end in mind before making any major life decisions or setting big goals, by asking yourself questions like:
“What would you regret not having done on your deathbed?”
or “What will you want people to say about you at your funeral?”
Last year, I got the unusual opportunity to experience both of those.
Here’s how it happened:
Why and How I Ended Up Attending My Own Funeral
At the start of 2024 I was feeling increasingly frustrated with some recurring interactions I found myself in.
In the process of building my business, I kept running into the same situations that triggered me.
The more this went on, the more it became clear to me that certain parts of my personality were holding me back. Aggressively fixating on things that weren’t helpful for me to fixate on.
They were attitudes that no longer served me, but which I had grown fond of. Because they were once very important to me. So important that leaving them behind would feel a bit like “dying” for my personality.
Inspired by some conversations with strangers and a strange YouTube prank, I asked Ari and some close friends if they were willing to host a funeral for me the day before my birthday. And I was lucky enough that they’d risk indulging me in it.
The purpose of this was to create a symbolic transition away from the parts of my personality that were “stirring up a bit too much trouble” lately.
The version of my personality I was holding on to at the time would die on that day.
People would treat it as it did. And my body would lay lifeless while they held a funeral for me.
The next morning, I’d be born again on my birthday, ready to move on without those parts of me.
What’s Holding You Back?
Before the guests arrived, I was laying blindfolded on the couch, trying not to move a muscle while the funeral playlist played.
To my surprise, this process was already quite powerful in itself.
The decision to lay down and imagine I was dead brought up a lot of stuff.
In terms of regrets about how I had lived my life, I was pleased to find out I had none.
(Sure, I could think of many ways I would’ve wanted to behave differently in hindsight. But that’s the point of hindsight. You only have it because things went the way they did.
And I’ve lived an incredible life. Why optimize a past that can’t be optimized?)
Instead, the place my mind spontaneously went to, was all the forgiveness I was holding back without knowing it.
I saw the movie of my life play out. But only select scenes.
Scenes in which I hadn’t forgiven the actors for what they did or didn’t do.
And it was as if I was transported back into them so I could extend that forgiveness.
Then after a while, I started noticing a second type of scene:
Scenes in which I hadn’t forgiven myself for what I did or didn’t do that impacted others.
And again, it was as if I was transported back into them so I could ask for that forgiveness and/or extend it to myself.
Every time I completed one of these, my body felt more light and loose.
It keeps surprising me how impactful it can be just to have an intention and dedicate yourself to it.
If any other day, I would’ve blindfolded myself and laid down to wait for people to enter the room, I probably wouldn’t have seen my life flashing by and started forgiving people. I might have become horn or scared. But that’s about it.
Yet on this particular day, the intention was for these parts of my personality to die, and so they started dying the moment I laid myself down.
What’s remarkable to me about the mental process that occurred, is how in the days leading up to it, I had been asking myself the question “What’s holding me back?”
When the more accurate question to ask was “What am I holding back?”
Forgiveness, that’s what I was holding back.
This is something I’m starting to notice more frequently.
That when we feel stuck on something, it’s often useful to invert the “subject-object” relationship and see what comes up.
Here are 2 more examples of that:
1. A way of looking at your patterns to reclaim agency:
“I have a pattern that makes me ___ when ___”
OK, how does that work exactly:
Is the pattern doing you? Or are you doing the pattern?
What are the steps you take?
Each time you’re aware of taking one, you can pivot.
2. A way of looking at feelings that changed my life:
- “I’m not IN a mood, a mood is IN me.”
- “I’m not going through grief, grief’s going through me.”
- “Anger isn’t holding me in its grip, I’m holding anger in my grip.”
You are the space they move through. Do you let them pass?
…but I digress, let’s get to the most surprising part of the funeral experience!
Your Golden Shadow
As I was laying there, listening to the wonderful eulogy read by Ari, and the words friends were saying about me, I was shocked by what was being said:
- Most of the qualities I aspired to “embody some day in the future” were mentioned by people as defining qualities of who I was.
- None of the achievements I was proud of in life got mentioned. None of it. They were merely footnotes. The things people did mention were things I thought I was still “trying to do” but they perceived —perhaps correctly— as me having already done.
This was a real eye-opener.
And it reminded me of an exercise we did at ART’s Level 2 training once (it might not be part of the curriculum anymore).
I don’t remember exactly how it went, but here’s a way you can capture the essence of it at home.
I highly recommend you try it before reading on.
- Take a large piece of paper and draw 2 circles (one small circle inside a larger one).
- In the inner circle, write down all the character traits & qualities you can think of that define you as a person.
- In the larger circle, write down all the character traits & qualities you intensely dislike in people.
- Outside of the circles, write down all the character traits & qualities you admire in people.
What you may likely find, if you take this sheet to some friends and share it, is that the circle of “dislikes” are qualities you yourself possess but don’t acknowledge. (Known as “the shadow” in Jungian psychology).
And that the qualities placed outside both circles (the ones you admire), are positive qualities you possess that others recognize in you but you don’t yet (your “golden shadow”).
This all comes back to the psychological concept of “projection”.
Projection is like watching a movie of yourself in someone else’s theater.
When there are urges, qualities or traits we are in denial of about ourselves (e.g. because we deem them unacceptable or they don’t match our self-worth), we tend to displace them onto other things we see.
These could be anything from the people around us, to pieces of art, characters in a Netflix series, or orange-skinned presidents with interesting manners of speech.
People often mention projection exclusively in the context of seeing our own dark side in others.
But projections happens with our disowned positive qualities too.
That means the things you admire in others are indeed often qualities you already possess but are in denial of.
That’s the main surprising lesson I took from attending my funeral: Just how real the golden shadow is.
I was spending a lot of energy trying to attain certain qualities, of which it was obvious to everyone but me that I already possessed them.
What if that’s true of you too?
What if you are already the person you want to be, but you’re just not seeing it?
You don’t have to attend your own funeral to find out.
The invitation is merely to sit with that question for a while.
Perhaps to walk around with it. Observe the qualities you ascribe to:
- Things in your environment
- People you engage with
- Topics you read about
And wonder if those things can be road signs to parts of yourself which you might have realized are there yet.
(Picture by Ksenia Chernaya)