*Part two of the series: Teaching as a Spiritual Path: Soul Work for the Teacher in the New Paradigm.

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“Die every day, Elizabeth.”

That was the message I received in a recent esoteric astrology reading. My chart is strongly woven with Pluto, the planet of death, transformation, and rebirth. The astrologer told me this was my practice.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to take it. How does one practice death?

I tried small experiments.

At night, I imagined shedding the day like a skin before sleep. That helped a little. But the real invitation wasn’t about bedtime rituals, it was about identity. About the subtler deaths that move through our lives. The thresholds of tensions, pains, and conflicts that show up as endings that strip us of who we thought we were.

Who we learned to show up to be to survive in the school system as educators, in relationships, with co-workers, identities that served only our own ego, and what identities we need to discard to move closer to our own frequency of truth.

The ending of the identities that no longer serve us is a death.

When we look at educators, and understand that most educators are part of a larger system that is built upon fear (see my last article), we realize, how many identities educators have adopted to stay “safe” in a fear-based school system. We can also look at these identities as archetypes. Or characters we consciously (and more often, unconsciously) play out in our life.

And when I finally began to see through this lens, death softened. It stopped being a looming threat and started to feel like a blessing. A natural rhythm. A necessary clearing. The old dissolves so the true can take form.

This is what it means to “die every day.” Not to despair, but to live more fully, aligned with what is real and closer to your own frequency of truth.

Our Cultural Allergy to Death

In the West, we are allergic to endings.

We glorify youth, pour billions into surgeries, creams, fitness regimens, and supplements in a desperate attempt to hold time still.

We exalt the maiden archetype, fertile, fresh, endlessly desirable, while cloaking aging in shame.

Young girls at age 12 are obsessed with beauty products to make themselves look “wrinkle free.”

Our elders, who in ancestral cultures were honored as wisdom keepers and bridges between worlds, are often hidden away. Their voices softened, their stories silenced, their wrinkles seen as defects rather than maps of hard-earned knowing.

We live in a society addicted to beginnings and terrified of endings, allergic to grief, and therefore unable to metabolize it. We numb, we distract, we push forward.

And yet death is everywhere.

In the leaf that falls. In the dark moon cycle. In the classroom that closes. In the role you can no longer play. In the moment you realize you cannot keep betraying your own soul.

When we allow ourselves to come into relationship with death, we remember it is not simply an ending—it is a threshold. A passage that insists we feel, grieve, and surrender.

The Impasse: When Identity Collapses

I’ll never forget my first major burnout after 10 years of teaching.

I had just signed my contract for another year. On paper, it made sense. But as soon as the ink dried, my whole being rebelled. I slammed into an invisible wall. Something in me would not allow life to go on as it had been.

I sat in my director’s office, sobbing. He didn’t use the language of soul, but he named my truth: “You’re in conflict because you don’t yet have the next branch to climb to.”

The story was, “But I am a teacher, I must teach.” Yet, my body could not back that story at that time.

My ego was grasping, clenching to what it “knew” teachers “do.” And it could not see the possibilities of what could come.

I was in an impasse.

The space between who I had been and who I was becoming. Between the death of one identity and the birth of the next.

The place between one identity breaking and the new one formless.

The impasse is terrifying. The ego cracks. The familiar dissolves. The new has not yet arrived.

It feels like free fall, and yet it is sacred. It is the soil where soul stirs. The silence before rebirth.

This is where teachers, parents, leaders, and anyone living deeply, will eventually find themselves when they are pushed toward questioning of the deeper “why” and purpose behind their work.

It is the space where we are stripped of our roles and asked:

What is real? What remains when the performance is gone?

The Archetypes Asking to Die in Education

My forthcoming book, The Initiated Teacher, speaks to the possibility in the New Paradigm of Teaching of what could emerge as teachers awaken to teaching as a spiritual path, discovering that the soul’s unfolding, not methods or performance, is the true curriculum.

In order for soul to emerge, false identities need to die.

For teachers, this death comes in the form of an identity collapse. To survive in systems that demand performance, we adopt archetypes to keep us safe. They protect us at first, but over time they harden into cages that become inauthentic and not serving of the deeper purpose of our soul.

The Good Teacher: Always composed, never angry. Shadowless.

The Selfless Giver: Sacrifices everything, glorifies burnout.

The Savior: Rescues others, confuses love with over-functioning.

The Performer: Polished, inspiring, terrified of ordinariness.

The Always-Available One: Says yes to everyone but herself.

The Knower: Clings to certainty, unable to say “I don’t know.”

These roles once helped us survive. But eventually, they cost us our aliveness.

Teachers, who are often plagued with exhaustion, burnout, and overwhelm, the antidote doesn’t necessarily come in the form of better strategies, programs, or professional development, but it comes in the form of the amount of energy it takes to hold archetypes that are no longer our truth. To become an initiated teacher is not to perfect these archetypes—it is to let them die.

To return to self as reclamation. To remember what is essential, what is yours.

Each time a teacher lays down one of these masks, they not only free themselves, they free the collective teacher body.

As each teacher allows outdated archetypes to die, they open space for collective healing within the body of education. Together, we move from the energy of survival into the yes of soul.

Thresholds as Portals

Burnout, collapse, resistance, impasse, these are not failures.

They are thresholds.

Invitations into transformation.

Bill Plotkin calls a threshold a liminal crossing between worlds, a place where old identities fall away and new ones stir. In my own life, I’ve come to see that the very moments I once judged as weakness, heartbreak, overwhelm, even illness, were portals. Doorways into the next deeper understanding of self.

This is the paradox: the most painful endings often carry the seed of what is next. Death is not just an erasure. It is a passage.

When we stop asking, How do I fix this? and start asking, What is this trying to end? 

The path changes for the teacher as we allow death

The Initiated Teacher’s Path is a Practice of Death

To live as a soul-aligned educator is to practice death. To shed roles, masks, and identities that no longer serve. To gracefully dissolve what is false so that the truth can take form.

This is not easy work. It is terrifying. It breaks the ego. It empties us out. But in that emptiness, soul emerges.

As teachers, parents, and leaders, every time we die to what is false, we do so not only for ourselves, but for the collective. Our courage to release becomes medicine for the whole.

*This essay is Part Two of my six-part series, The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Soul Work for the New Paradigm Educator, based on my forthcoming book, The Initiated Teacher: Reawakening the Soul of the Montessori Educator in the New Paradigm (January 2026).

PS. In the forthcoming book, every chapter closes with a Soulwork practice, rituals, reflections, and embodied tools to help you live what you are reading. Because this isn’t just philosophy. It’s a path.

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Read part one of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Naming the Pain we’re not Supposed to Feel.

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