To live be alive, to be alive practice dying

To live, Be alive. To be alive, practice dying: A perspective on my experience of snowboarding in Jackson Hole

Life is a series of tiny deaths. It is a series of trial deaths leading to the big event. We learn to let things die in our gardens and our childhood pets allow us to dip our toe into experiencing the loss of our cherished. Our family members train us to let them go, as they pass from time to time. As we leave the womb of adolescence and venture through our twenties, some of us unconsciously reach for the death (ego) experience by drinking until we blackout, and some of us took LSD and Mushrooms or Ecstasy and experienced...something.

As our thirties approached we started to understand our mortality. We looked back on our life and said hey, that was pretty unsafe, man, look at how I really pushed it there, and wow, look at how I neglected myself there, and so on. What was that all about? How does it serve us to reflect on our choices from a renewed perspective?

For me, there was a revelation that my entire career of being a professional snowboarder was centered around an unconscious drive to test the death threshold by snowboarding on ever increasingly dangerous terrain. There was a multi-faceted driver in my unconscious that was connected to many layers of experience. I even started paragliding for a while just as I was beginning to understand what was happening. Now there is a sport that requires complete surrender.

There was a deep fear of death that I had since childhood due to frequent asthma attacks. As I snowboarded, there was literally zero fear of death as my ego was doing it's thing. There was an awareness of death as a possibility, but my super charged ego was driving the show. It was like my ego was trying to form a relationship with death and really wanted to trust something. There was another layer as well. It was a notion that whenever I completely committed I would more or less make it. This built trust in myself, as well as a sort of faith that I was being taken care of.

By participating in Shamanic style medicine ceremonies I began to see my actions for what they really were.
I was attempting to get as close to death as I could, so I could live through it, and feel like my life had some sort of purpose and that I was being looked out for so that I could fulfill that purpose. Even as I was highly increasing the odds that I might be taken, I was building a sense that I must have another reason for existing, or why wouldn't I have fallen just a little differently? I was also trying to experience the most amount of fear that I could, so that I might overcome this fear of death that was so deeply instilled in me from my most intense and life threatening asthma attacks.

As my snowboarding career got closer to an end, I unconsciously upped the ante a bit. The rush that I got from starting an avalanche was great. The response that people gave me when some of it was caught on film was even better. This was the exact moment that my first opportunity to participate in a well performed medicine ceremony presented itself. After some time I realized that this came into my life as a sort of way to protect me from my self. My ego was so interested in expanding to or reaching the death threshold, that I was highly increasing the odds of allowing my life to end.

In one ceremony I had my eyes closed for hours and all I saw was black and all I felt was fear. The experience showed me how to just allow the fear to sink in and how to just accept it for what it was. The experience also showed me that what my experience with Asthma as a child was my "living hell" and that what I was attempting to do, when pushing myself into these ultra fearful situations, not just snowboarding, but by doing the medicine work as well, was that I was attempting to experience fear that was as fearful as those asthma attacks, and survive, and thus somehow scare this fear out of myself. I had literally become addicted to scaring the living hell out of myself.

This lead to a huge "death" of my identity. Once all of this interior stuff began to exteriorize itself, and by that I mean show itself to my conscious mind, I wanted to embrace it fully. I wanted to see who I was without the shell that I created called Lance Pitman, Jackson Hole, Illuminati Snowboards.

I began to let go of everything. I gave away my 50% ownership in the Jackson Hole Snowboarder Magazine. I closed Illuminati Snowboards. I moved out of Jackson. I got married and now I am just beginning to resurrect my image of my self.

So as life goes on, I continue to see and experience mini deaths that teach me about impermanence and teach me how to live with less attachement and less fear.
I have learned that participating in medicine ceremony can allow a death experience to unfold in a safe and protected space, leading to a less fearful, more conscious life experience.

I have let death come to the idea that I am controlling anything. I have let death come to the idea that I understand politics and what's right or wrong at that level. I have let death come to asthma's control over my body and mind. I have let die the idea that I might ever understand death, and I have opened to the idea that it might completely be an illusion.

I say to live, be alive. To be alive, practice dying.