This week’s conversation with Sarah Kerr invites you to broaden your perspective on death, shifting toward a soul-centered understanding. We talk about the role of archetypes: what are they, and why do they matter? In particular, we delve into the Archetype of the Deathwalker. As Sarah notes, “We are creatures of narrative. Everything in our world makes sense to us because we tell ourselves a story about it.” This leads us to consider the dominant cultural narrative around death, and how that story shapes our experiences. Could a new/old healing story emerge – one rooted in the journey of the soul – that would better serve the dead, the dying, and the living?

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Transcript:

Diane Hullet: Hi, I’m Diane Hullet, and you’re listening to the Best Life, Best Death podcast. Today I’ve got a guest that I’m really, really excited to talk with, and someone I’ve been following for quite some time, and have really developed this mentorship and colleagueship and friendship with, and I’m so excited to have Sarah Kerr with me today.

Hi, Sarah. Hi, Diane. It’s great to be here. Yeah, we’ve talked about doing this for a while, and today is the moment. And I think there’s so many interesting things we could talk about. Sarah’s work really brings forward a soul centered approach to deaf care. And one of the things that got me so mood when I first took a course with you was back in 2021.

And I took a course called the archetype of the death Walker. And, you know, Sarah, listening to you talk, it was like the prickles on the back of my neck stood up. I mean, here was language here was a framework that began to put, uh, you know, make sense of what I was experiencing and feeling. And so we thought today we’d talk about that, the archetype of the death Walker, which I know is one of your favorite subjects.

Sarah Kerr: It’s true, it’s true. You know, a lot of people get that response when they hear that course, that they kind of make sense to themselves, their experience makes sense, their way of being in the world. And the course is really about awakening that archetype. An archetype is an energy that moves through the world.

through us. It’s a human experience that this Deathwalker energy moves through people in cultures all over the world. A certain number of people in any society will have this archetypal gift in a way. But in dominant Western culture, we don’t really have a space for it, so it remains pretty hidden and for lots of people quite secret and maybe a little even shamed because we don’t really like death and sometimes we don’t like people who want to be with death.

And so, my work around Awakening the Archetype of the Death Walker is to try and give people a place and a way to understand what’s happening for them. The people who resonate with this have often always been a little interested in death. Maybe since they were little or maybe not since they were little, but often they’re attuned to death and dying and dead people.

Dead people come in their dreams, they knew when someone was going to die, they’ve had really significant and kind of transcendent experiences around death and loss, or they just have this deep calling, this deep knowing that it can be done differently, can be done better with more connection and meaning.

And there’s a way to serve dying people and their families. And we don’t have a lot of places for those people to go with that energy in mainstream culture. 

Diane Hullet: Yeah, that’s so well put. I mean, there’s this whole thing about how we’re kind of I like to say a death illiterate culture. Maybe I got that term from you.

I don’t know where somebody said that. I don’t think it’s so much that we’re death denying in some way like we actually see a lot of death and we we have death put in front of us. Through the media all the time, I’ve somehow gotten on this terrible algorithm with People Magazine that sends me all these horrible, horrible news stories that I do not want to see the titles of.

So, you know, death is in our face, but that doesn’t make us literate about how we face death. And I’ve always just been so moved by your very simple tagline that you say, or your phrase that you say, which is. We can do death better. And I can’t tell you how many times I repeat that to people because there’s just something about the way we widely hold it in dominant culture here in the US.

I think also in Canada, other countries where we just don’t. Quite look it in the eye and we don’t hold it in this broad perspective of what it means as a part of life. And I think that’s where the Deathwalker archetype comes in. Now, if, if there are people listening who aren’t really familiar with archetype, is there anything more you’d say?

Like I probably first heard that term with Joseph Campbell, you know, back in the eighties, the archetype of the hero’s journey, that kind of thing. But how do you frame that? 

Sarah Kerr: A lot of the, sort of, way archetypes have been popularized in culture, too, is through, um, Carl Jung. So, their archetypes are, I think of them almost as like a, Psychospiritual DNA, they’re a set of codes of patterns, just like we have physical patterns of DNA that cause certain things to express in our physical body.

Archetypes are like a psychospiritual code that causes psychospiritual things to express. And they, the understanding is that they live within us. But we also live in them. So they’re, they’re, they’re pulling us forward, and they’re all, they’re pulling us from the outside, but they’re also pushing us from the inside.

And there are, you know, there’s the archetype of the artist, the archetype of the healer, the archetype of the warrior, the archetype of the athlete. You know, the kind of classic ways that people express themselves. And then there are more specific versions in there, but they’re a way of, you know, Understanding patterns that run our show in a way, and we can either cooperate with those patterns and understand, Oh, I’m in this archetypal pattern right now.

If I, if I can understand what it is, I can lean into it and be carried by it, or I can kind of bump against it because it’s taking me one way, but I don’t know how to move with that. It’s much more difficult. So archetypes. Push us and pull us to different expressions of our soul’s truth. 

Diane Hullet: How did you sort of feel that Deathwalker archetype moving in you, or how did you name that for yourself?

Sarah Kerr: You know, when I started my doctoral program, so early 2000, I was having this big spiritual experience, really, for lack of a better way to put it. Suddenly, the world was very permeable to me. I was seeing things, and hearing things, and knowing things, and dreaming things, and being aware of things, and precognitive.

I would, I would know what was going to happen right before it happened. It was a very disorienting period, and I didn’t really know how to make sense of it. I knew I wasn’t going crazy, but my life was really not operating on the ordinary path that it was normally operating on. So a lot of my work in my dissertation, in my research at school was trying to figure out what was happening.

And I really named that as a, as a kind of shamanic archetype that in Everyday cultures all over the world, there are people who are more attuned to the other realms, more attuned to the other dimensions, and it’s a normal thing, it’s natural, it’s healthy, it’s useful for the culture to evolve. cultivate and develop the skills those people have.

But in dominant culture, we don’t have any space for the other realms. So when people start to express that, we make them push it away. And so it took me a long time to find the support I needed to get there. Be able to meet and develop and ground and come to terms with these experiences I was having so that they could be useful.

And so that was, that was a huge part of my research work, was looking what that is and looking at what it means to initiate that energy. Archetypal energy needs to be initiated. We, we feel this archetypal transmission of these energies coming through us, but they need to be met. By, um, a reciprocal cultural transmission.

So, for many of the deaf walkers I work with, people who feel this energy, it’s coming through them, but they don’t feel anywhere that they can be met. By it. And so this cultural transmission and the course Awakening the Archetype, the Deathwalker, is about meeting it from the outside and showing you how to use it.

Diane Hullet: Oh, I just love those words, this idea of awakening it and supporting it and grounding it and putting it in a community because it’s, it is this strange, um, kind of As you said, you felt like, well, I’m not going crazy, but this is a little out of the box. Like this is not a typical thing to explore or have a career in.

So how do I make sense of this? Did you find community that did, you know, did you find elders or mentors or community that could guide? 

Sarah Kerr: It took me a long time. It took me 10 years to make sense of this and to be able to work with this information that was coming in, not be overwhelmed by it. To learn energetic boundaries, learn, first of all, how to, how to just manage and, and stay healthy as I was able to perceive all this information.

And then beyond that, I call it, you know, using these as superpowers. Once I got myself grounded, then I could actually be helpful and start to help other people by this. So it took me a long time and really that’s. That’s the work I’m doing now, is offering to people what I wish I’d had, that I didn’t get the support.

I had to fumble around and put it together and kind of cobble together this version of how do I take what I know I feel, what I know can be true about how we meet death and loss, and actually turn that into a useful, grounded way of offering it in my community. It took me 10 

Diane Hullet: years. Yeah. Yeah. And, and how, when you say offering in your community, like, what do you do as a death walker, as a, uh, coach, I don’t know what word you use to describe the work you do.

Sarah Kerr: Um, I don’t use death walker sort of on my business cards, or I don’t really call myself that a lot. I could, but I just, it’s not just how I do it. Um, I’m a death doula and a sacred death care guide. So my first path into this was through the world of the death doulas. And it’s I’ve been a Death Dueler now since 2012, maybe 2011, 2012, something like that.

So, I finished my degree and had done some other work around that realm of death and loss, and thought, okay, this is what I’m going to do. So, I stepped onto the Death Duel path, began practicing very quickly. There weren’t really any trainings you could do, very minimal. Um, and suddenly I was practicing and training people.

And I did that. And that was, that was round one of it. Okay, here I am doing this. Here’s a place, here’s a socially sanctioned role for someone like me. Death duel. As I practice in that, it became clear that a death duel is one thing, but what I was doing was slightly different. It wasn’t coming from the roots of hospice or of kind of legal practices.

It was coming from this spiritual path, from a very particular spiritual path, a nature based spiritual path. And so, I’ve been practicing as a death doula since 2012, but very early on sort of morphed that into a very particular version of it, which is a nature based spiritual guide. I call myself clergy for the unchurched, that when people see death and loss as part of their soul’s journey and they want to meet it in a sacred way, I offer that framework.

So it’s a lot of ritual work, a lot of kind of spiritual direction and building spiritual community. 

Diane Hullet: Repeat what you just said about when somebody wants to meet death and loss. How did you frame that? 

Sarah Kerr: Let me see what I can say that the people who, who recognize that death and bereavement are part of their soul’s journey.

It’s, they’re difficult, hard, awful experiences sometimes, but they also are part of our learning and growing path. And that if we meet them from a deeper Deeper and more expanded way, both of those things. There’s beauty that’s possible. There’s healing that’s possible. There’s grace that’s possible. We can find meaning.

We can find love. Even in these horrible experiences sometimes of people dying. Either through illness or aging or suddenly. So when people are looking for that and they don’t have a religious or spiritual or cultural frame that gives them a pathway That’s where I come in and I say, okay, if, if this nature based spiritual approach resonates with you, here’s a path that we can take.

It’s not a path for everybody. And that’s really another way I differentiate from most death doulas, is most death doula trainings say, you know, you honor the spiritual values of the family you’re working with and you let them lead. Well, in my experience, most families don’t really understand what leading by those spiritual values would be.

If they don’t have a path already, they know they find nature sacred. They know they want this death to be sacred, but that’s where it stops. They actually can’t lead. So I have, I’m not spiritually neutral where many death doulas are, and there’s lots of value for that and it’s great, but for people who want the particular version that I have, it’s very spiritually directed.

And, and that was a big shift. And how I worked and how I began teaching other people. 

Diane Hullet: Yeah, when you kind of realized I’m not neutral, I’m coming from this particular place, then it seems like everything opened up and then the people who wanted what you had really came forward. There’s, you know, you, you had a great video that you put up recently because you’re, you’re, you’ve got a lot of beautiful things on social media.

And you had a video recently where you talked about how the story we tell really matters. And I loved that. I found it so moving because I think the story we tell ourselves about death in our main culture is not very helpful. And so people get really stuck and they think it’s only horrible. Not that it isn’t difficult, not that it isn’t sad, as you’ve said, but there’s another way to hold that, the whole framework.

What is a different story we could tell ourselves? 

Sarah Kerr: We’re creatures 

Diane Hullet: of 

Sarah Kerr: narrative. Everything in our world makes sense to us because we tell ourselves a story about it. And the story we tell ourselves about death in mainstream culture is generally that it’s a physical experience. That we are bodies. And when our body dies, we are gone.

That’s it. And it’s in the grand scheme of all the stories people through time have told themselves, we’re a minority to say that that’s how it is. I don’t think that’s an accurate way of understanding death or life or existence. I think we have physical bodies, but there’s a whole energetic dynamic, a spiritual dynamic happening.

We have souls, which are not the same as our bodies. When we’re alive, body and soul are together. As we die, body and soul separate, whether that’s slowly or it happens suddenly. Body goes back to the land, but soul goes on. And what’s that story of how soul goes on? And when we bring a frame to it that’s bigger than just The lights go out, then we have a way to engage.

We have a way to participate with this. We have a way to move into it. And there are lots of different ways of understanding how soul goes on. And what matters is that people find a way that resonates with them. I have a particular vision of that coming from this nature based perspective, real focus from consciousness research.

What’s happening as soul goes on? And I find that when I share that with clients and with students, A penny drops and I’ll never think about death the same way again. Now I have some tools and some ways to engage because it’s not just a full stop ending. 

Diane Hullet: I love that. I love the term engage. I love this idea that when you’re dying, whether it’s sudden or whether it’s slow, there’s an opportunity to engage with that.

And especially if it’s slow, walk towards it with some intentionality that is just different than pretending it’s not happening or having a story that when it happens, you’re gone. I think that might be the root of people’s existential fear, because a lot of people who come to talk to me as an educator, kind of upstream of actually dying.

They are very afraid of not existing anymore and that there’s nothing there and that it’s lights out that seems to be a real fundamental, fundamental human fear. So if you shift your perspective and open up the possibility of a different story, it really does change everything. 

Sarah Kerr: It does. And it’s not just not existing, which is, Of course, the classic existential crisis, but it’s no longer being connected in community.

Because the very worst thing we can do as a punishment is solitary confinement, exile, banishment, excommunication. We say, you are no longer one of us. And you’re no longer one of anything, is what we say when you die. You’re gone. It’s, it’s, it’s completely, we don’t even have a word for how much of a nothingness it is.

And as human beings, we need at every level of our being, physical, spiritual, emotional, everything, we need to know we’re in community. And so if death means I’m being lost to community, of course we’re terrified of it. But if we can, if we can really validate the experiences of people. who have a sense that something continues.

I dream about my dad all the time, or I get messages from my brother, or, you know, when I see dimes, I know it’s my best friend. And it gets much more complex than that. But if we can say, what if there is some continuity of consciousness? We don’t know, but we’ll take it as a, as a working hypothesis. And then, it gives us a whole new way to meet death.

Both, if it’s happening gradually, through illness or aging, but also, if it’s sudden, if it’s unexpected, if it’s, um, a pregnancy death, miscarriage, abortions, all of those deaths, pet death, all of those deaths get Reframed when we have a bigger lens to look at it. 

Diane Hullet: I think your work is always about taking the bigger lens, right?

I mean, that’s really where the Deathwalker archetype comes in. It is a bigger lens to hang these sensations that you have, or these experiences that you have, or the way that you work with someone in your medical work, but you have this sense of something more. So that bigger frame, I just love that, Sarah.

And I know one time I remember you were telling me that somebody said to you, well, is it true? Is that story true? And you said, I don’t really care if it’s true or not. I just thought that was a great response. 

Sarah Kerr: It’s, it’s, it is true. People ask me that all the time, you know, how do you know that the soul goes on after death?

And, and it, my response is, it doesn’t really matter to me if that is true or not, because here’s the logic of this. I’m alive, I’m not dead, so I can’t speak from absolute personal experience there, but neither can anyone who holds the opposite position. So we’re kind of 50 50. It either is or it isn’t.

It’s a bit of a coin toss on that. But I actually think that there’s a little more evidence on my side because of these transcendent mystical experiences people have. Before death, as someone’s dying, and after people have died. When I speak And I ask, you know, how many people have felt connections to their dead loved ones?

You know, 200 people in the audience will put their hand up in an audience of 300. It is a reality of our experience. So I think that moves us a little more ahead. You know, maybe it’s 60 40, but it doesn’t really matter even then because we need a story and the story that nothing happens is not a very healing story and it causes a lot of dysfunction, a lot of pain, a lot of suffering.

And so I just prefer to hold a story that I find much more healing. And when we hold that story and we meet death and operate through that story, the beauty and the grace and the connection and the love and the just stunning open hearted magic. That can occur is incredible. So hands down for me, this is the path I’d like to follow.

And when I die, I might be surprised, but I don’t think I will be. 

Diane Hullet: So if you’re an end of life practitioner in some way, or perhaps you’re just a son or a daughter or a friend who’s trying to hold this space for somebody, how do you cope if that person is resistant to this idea? Do you just let it go and hold it in your own heart?

There are a couple 

Sarah Kerr: of ways, at least a couple of ways to talk about that. You know, if, if your parents dying and you’re their primary caregiver and you really know and understand and feel that it could be beautiful, there’s all this scope for grace and beauty and healing around death, and your parents not so into it.

I find often there are two things happening there. One, They’re just not interested. Some people, just genuinely, are not interested. They’re quite fine with the way it’s going, they’re quite at ease with it all, and they don’t need a whole lot of deeper exploration. The other is people who are, you know, we can use the word denial, but I don’t know if that’s fully the accurate word, but they’re, they’re, they’re fraught inside.

They’re, they’re tormented a little bit. They, they maybe are afraid, but they don’t want to talk about it. There’s some energy clogged up in that. And so that would change how you would support someone like that. If they really just genuinely are like, I’m going to die. I’m fine. I’m not worried about it.

That’s, that’s their path. And. I’m so happy for them that they have that path. If they have more complexity around it, then it’s gentle. I think of questions kind of like little levers, just, just kind of stick a little, like opening a can of paint, just a little, just put a little bend on there and say, well, you know, without even getting into the mystical and transcendent, just, you know, how, you know, when your mom died, how did you find that?

Did you think that was a good way to go? Would you like to have similar experiences? Or And when we went to Uncle Joe’s funeral, was there anything you liked about that or didn’t like? So you can start with just the very basic and then, you know, one of the phrases I love comes from Laurie Anderson and she says that the purpose of death is the release of love and I love that because it kind of gives us marching orders and so if someone’s dying Our job is to put more love into the system, to create rituals, to create structures, to create events and activities that allow love to flow.

And so, no matter what kind of resistance people have, you can often put more love in the space. And the other part of that, I mean, then there’s people who don’t want to talk about dying at all. That’s another kind of conversation, but there’s also ways that if your parents dying and they want to do it in a certain way that doesn’t resonate with your spiritual values, you can still meet their death.

In a way that speaks to you without having to enlist them. And so often that’s gathering around you a community and a village who really resonates with you. And it allows you to be at the center of the process. And your parent or dying person to be at the center of their process. 

Diane Hullet: I just love all that.

These are, these are ways to think about in a death illiterate culture, how to be with death differently, whether the other person wants to hold it with you or not, there are still ways that you can hold it. And I just think it all goes back to this archetype of the death Walker, that, that, that phrase and that.

Understanding that death is not this kind of external thing that comes for us, but it is much more this deep, deep woven in piece of life. And so connecting with that, whether you do it individually or you call somebody to guide you and your family or friends, you know, this, um, resonant energy changes the way we experience dying and death.

Sarah Kerr: It really is. And you know Stephen Jenkinson talks about the difference between dying and being killed. And so we’re taking deaths from illness or aging in this car, right, right this moment. So you can die from cancer or you can be killed by cancer. You can die from old age or you could be killed by old age, and it’s It’s about flipping around, who’s the subject and who’s the object.

Is it something that’s being done to you? Or is it something that you are doing? And if, if you say, I am dying of cancer. Then, what is the path that you choose to walk and what choices do you make? And it’s a huge opportunity to open up new ways of being because of how you choose. If you say cancer is killing me, there’s a kind of way, it’s a bit of a victim.

You’re at the mercy of this thing. And in some ways, yes, you are. Cancer is going to end your life. But the narrative, the story you tell yourself about what’s happening, do I have agency or am I a victim? Changes everything. And, and for sudden deaths and unexpected deaths and more shocking deaths in a way, we can also take that.

It’s like, how am I going to meet this? There’s a bit of a overwhelm and shock period where you probably just can’t even see straight. But once you can get your feet under you and get support from your community, you can choose how you meet it and to meet it in a way that supports you. Your own growth and healing.

Diane Hullet: Oh, I remember a story from a book, which I’m not going to recall which book at the moment. It was a story about a woman who there was an accident that happened with her son and a ball in the street. And she heard the sound and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that her child had just died. And as they drove to the hospital with this injured child, you know, speeding through the streets, she looked out the window at the moon.

And she thought, I have to use this for good. I have to use, I have to, you know, transform this experience of a grieving mother into something else. And she was so clear, even in the midst of that tragedy, that she could meet it in a different way. And I, I, I just found that so stunning. 

Sarah Kerr: Yeah. Death is hard and death is sad.

That, there is no getting around that, and I mean it’s a moving story, and she would have had terrible, terrible grief. It doesn’t mean that you don’t grieve, it doesn’t mean it’s not hard, it doesn’t mean it’s not sad, but it means that there is also something else. It’s not a, it’s not a counting set of columns where there’s good in one and bad in the other, or easy and hard.

Both things happen together. There’s incredible pain and suffering and heartbreak. And there can also be incredible grace and growth and beauty and connection and love. And if you can meet it in a way that makes space for both. It’s much more bearable. 

Diane Hullet: Well, this framework of the death Walker and this idea of doing death better is really at the core of what you’re doing now and always, whether you’re teaching or presenting or working with individuals, this is what you do.

And I’m, you know, just so thrilled to be able to bring this podcast forward, because I think. This is a different frame than some of my podcasts, which are sometimes a little more in the weeds about someone’s experience or what they think about one angle. But you’re really talking about how do we take the whole thing a broader level and how do we have conversations from that place?

So I’m excited because you and I are going to have another conversation that we’ll put up next week and we’ve been working on a big project together. 

Sarah Kerr: Yes. Well, yeah, I, I really appreciate Dan, first of all, your, your incredible capacity to communicate and share such important stories on your podcast and your ability to really see and get.

This, this work that I do and the, the bigger project of Sacred Death Care. It’s just a thrill to be working with you. And I am also very excited about the announcement we’ll be making next week. So stay tuned. 

Diane Hullet: Stay tuned. I love the radio saying so you can find out more about Sarah’s work at sacred death care dot com.

And it is. Right. Not ca, but you are Canadian. One of our lovely, friendly neighbors to the North. And as always, you can find out about the work I do at bestlifebestdeath. com. Thanks for joining me, Sarah. And we’ll talk again next week. All right, Diane. Thank you. Thanks for listening.