Our Relationship with Death - Nikki Wardwell Sleath

What if our greatest fear could become our most profound teacher? Death – that inevitable transition we spend our lives avoiding – might actually be our most significant spiritual initiation.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath, occultist and author of Dream Sorcery, brings her unique perspective as both a magical practitioner and former hospice worker to this transformative conversation about our relationship with mortality. Drawing from her experiences witnessing end-of-life struggles, Nikki reveals how our cultural avoidance of death creates unnecessary suffering while robbing us of meaningful closure.

"I feel that we as a society largely have a very unhealthy relationship with death," Nikki explains. "The suffering, the denial, the taboo around death stands in direct contradiction to how I view death as a witch, as a shamanic dreamer, as an occultist."

As autumn leaves fall and nature prepares for winter's rest, we explore why so many cultures celebrate death and ancestor veneration during this season. The natural world offers perfect metaphors for understanding death not as an ending but as part of a continuous cycle – like night following day, with its own unique beauty and purpose. Through practices like lucid dreaming, shamanic journeying, and mediumship, we can develop personal evidence that consciousness extends beyond the physical body.

Nikki shares practical wisdom for connecting with ancestors, using "death as an advisor" to clarify life decisions, and preparing ourselves to become "good ancestors" for future generations. She invites us to reframe death as the ultimate adventure – "moving into the next dream" with all the wisdom we've gathered in this one.

Whether you're grieving a loss, contemplating your own mortality, or simply curious about what lies beyond, this conversation offers comfort, perspective, and tools for approaching death with greater peace and even anticipation. Listen now to transform your relationship with life's most certain transition.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath is a practicing occultist, author and teacher, and the founder of the Society of Witchcraft and Old Magick. She is a trained facilitator of Active Dreaming and is the author of Dream Sorcery, The Goddess Seals, and You Might Be A Witch. Nikki holds a masters in Integrative Health and Healing and provides readings as well as magic spiritual and energetic healing sessions for clients.
www.nikkiwardwellsleath.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to As the Veil Thins
• 3:37 Our Unhealthy Relationship with Death
• 11:55 Death in Nature's Cycles
• 23:16 Dreams and Consciousness Beyond the Body
• 34:03 Hospice Experiences and Hard Conversations
• 43:17 Death as Ultimate Spiritual Initiation
• 50:12 Celebrating and Honoring the Dead

Transcript

GDC: 0:01

Welcome to Belief being Beyond with your host, Granddaughter Crow, as the Veil Thins series. Join us as Granddaughter Crow interviews spiritual leaders in riveting conversations about this time of year.

GDC: 0:23

Hi everybody, hi everybody. Granddaughter Crow here for yet another episode of Belief being In Beyond. But right now, in the month of October 2025, we are doing as the Veil Fins series and I have wonderful guests. I'm going to bring one on in just a moment, but just to let you know, every Saturday night in the month of October, tune in to the podcast Belief Being and Beyond, anywhere you get your podcasts, and we will release another episode at 8 pm Eastern, which is what? 5 pm, yeah, 5 pm Pacific time. However, if you decide to watch it on Granddaughter Crow's YouTube channel yeah, I'm Granddaughter Crow talking in the third person If you decide to tune in on the YouTube channel live chat, we will premiere them and we will have a live chat. And so let me kind of give you the rundown of who we have. Last week, we had Jenny C Bell and she talked to us all about Samhain. Now, if you guys want to listen to that, it's archived in the podcasts. Please go and check it out.

GDC: 1:37

Today, on October 11th, we have Nikki Wardwell Sleath the author of Dream Sorcery, and we're going to be talking about our relationship with death. This time of year is a really good season to bring these things out in the As the Veil Thins. Next week we'll have Jamie Wagner. She's going to talk to us a little bit about sacred feasting and the wild hunt, and then, finally, we have the Blue Witch, Laura Gonzalez, talking to us about Dias de las Muertes, so that we know how to celebrate. So I am over the moon excited about bringing in today's guest and, yes, I said it, we've got Nikki here today.

GDC: 2:25

So Nikki Wardwell Sleeth is a practicing occultist, and I love that. She's also an author, a teacher and the founder of Society of Witchcraft and Old Magic, which you can find up on her website at Nikki Wardwell Sleathcom. She is trained to. She's a trained facilitator of active dreaming you guys as the Veil Fins right and is the author of Dream Sorcery, a book that I absolutely love. Also the Goddess Seals. You guys got to check that one out and you Might Be a Witch. Huh, check that one out and you might be a witch. Huh, I love that. So Nikki holds a master's in integrative health and healing and provides readings as well as healing sessions.

GDC: 3:13

And you know, I was talking with Nikki I had her on before and she made this statement Before I bring her on. She made such a profound statement and this is what we're going to talk about today. So Nikki says I feel that we as a society largely have a very unhealthy relationship with death. Having worked as a physical therapist in geriatrics and in hospice care in the past and in hospice care in the past, I she has witnessed this firsthand. The suffering, the denial, the taboo around death stands in direct contradiction of how I view death as a witch, as a shamanic dreamer, as an occultist, as an amazing being, as an author. I added that last part in there. We need to have a healthy discussion about death as potentially the most important spiritual initiation that we've ever had to go through or that we will ever go through. We've got some riveting conversations and I would love to welcome Nikki Wardwell Sleath to the show. Welcome, Nikki Wardwell Sleath back to the show. Welcome, Nikki.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 4:27

Oh, wow, that was such a nice intro. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here back on the show with you. And, yeah, I think the reason is we both feel very strongly about this and the importance of this topic. And you're right, this is just an apt time of year for people to be thinking about it, you know, because as the plant life, the trees, the world around us begin to shed, begin to get ready for the metaphorical well, not metaphorical, literal death of the year, we feel it too, and it's not a coincidence that many of the celebrations of the world's cultures around death and ancestor veneration happen at this time of year, because we feel those reverberations of nature within ourselves too.

GDC: 5:26

I couldn't agree more. It's like you know, I also shamanic practitioner medicine woman wrote a book on the wisdom of the natural world. This is one of the beautiful things that, as we align with the natural world, we do go through life death rebirth In the spring, we wake up and life in the summer, and then the natural world shows us what death release let go looks like, and so I love that you started this conversation out with such a natural world, organic. This is what happens.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 6:04

Yeah, I mean, I think magicians and occultists, you know, since time immemorial have been looking to the cycles of things for the magic, for the wisdom, so that they would understand how to embody magic within themselves.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 6:21

They were looking to extract that from the natural world.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 6:24

So we can't very well do that on the one hand and then ignore the fact that death is just a very, not only normal, but absolutely essential part of these cycles, of these cycles.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 6:54

And I have a theory about why our relationship to death is so poor in our human society. So I think that under the surface of things, we have a knowing that our spirit is eternal, even if people don't have a way of truly believing that or accepting that or putting you know. We're so scientific and physically oriented that a lot of people don't have a way of putting trust in that thought. But I think everyone knows at a very deep level that our spirit is eternal and without the trust in that we end up in a position of contradiction, because that's what we feel and yet our body has such a short expiration date, you know, a small lifespan. So I think that we feel out of step because we know we need to die, but we feel like we should be eternal. So then we end up with the society of people who do everything under the sun to try to prolong life and avoid death, even when it is absolutely really the time.

GDC: 8:07

Yes.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 8:08

You know we spend billions of dollars on evading death. I mean, the amount of money that is spent on the last few weeks of life in trying to prolong life for people in whom it is not possible, is amazing. You know we could, instead of struggling against it, use a lot of that money to feed children or, you know, work on the environment or lots of other things that we need resources for and allow those last few weeks of the human life to be gentle. You know, to not be focused on changing the meds and getting invasive procedures. And because the doctors actually know. The doctors know that, but because people don't want to admit it and we're a very litigious society, the doctors don't want to, uh, they don't want to go against the grain. You know they don't want to tell people it's the end there's. We have this culture where we're supposed to always have hope, even when we are in, like, the last stages of the most terminal thing or we're 105 years old People. They give chemo and stuff to people at that age. Do you know?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 9:26

Like all the time. You know, I mean I would never. You know, I'm like, if this is, it's time for me to listen to music, have some important chats, Right, Just be comfortable, maybe watch the sunset, I don't know. You know I feel very strongly about this topic, as you can see, but I think we have that disconnect, yeah, and so if that's our disconnect feeling like we should be eternal and then struggling against the fact that we're not physically eternal Great.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 10:00

This is the beauty of magical practice, of shamanic practice, of spiritual practice is that if you engage in these things enough, you get these experiences that build up and can prove to you that consciousness is not local to the body. Right, Like, if you have great psychic experiences or precognitive dreams, or lucid or spirit communications or you know revelatory shamanic interactions, these things can help you to build that personal truth. And then, when you know consciousness isn't local to the body, you don't have to be so afraid of death. You can look at it as just moving into the next dream, afraid of death. You can look at it as just moving into the next dream, Absolutely.

GDC: 10:46

I love that, I love that you also. I mean you said so much there that you know, especially in the United States, what? Because that's the only culture that I've really looked at with regards to end of care or end of life care. It's more like this quantity of life, like keep living, keep living, irregardless of the quality. And, quite frankly, I have brushed, I had a brush with death a handful of times in my life, like a handful, maybe less than five, that I can recall.

GDC: 11:22

And at this point in my life I'm like, oh, you know, angel of death or whatever you are called, my, my savior, because when my body is wanting just like a leaf to release from this branch, may you be there and welcoming me, I not have to struggle in pain, and so that's kind of my positioning. And so I really liked the way that you're talking about it and you know it's a, and I do shamanistic work and I do have those experiences beyond the veil, in the unseen world, and a trust. I've developed a relationship and a trust, but I love that you brought it back to dreams too.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 12:08

Well, they're just one of the many ways and it's a way that everyone has potential access to, since all humans dream. But it's one of the ways of experiencing ourselves as a spirit, and I think that's the important thing. When we realize that we are already a spirit, that's the important thing. When we realize that we are already a spirit, we don't have to think of death as losing part of ourselves. I believe we gain when we die. That's why in our previous talk, you know, I referred to it as possibly the most important initiation that we'll ever go through, because we come in here through birth. You know we have a life that has a sequence of experiences where we learn, and you know we undergo challenges and all kinds of stuff happens and we have to form. You know what our total package of learning and accumulation is as a person? Yeah, and then we move on from it at some point and we don't necessarily get to decide when that is right, and that's what people get all up in arms about. That, like every person's lifespan should be fair and it just doesn't work that way. But it doesn't work that way in nature either, you know. I mean, if you plant 50 seeds in a patch of soil, of a green bean plant or whatever any plant. They're not all 50 going to grow the same. You know, maybe 60 to 70% of them will grow really nice and will do what you expect. They will vine and fruit and create the beans and do all the things. And then you might have, you know, like 20% of them might be kind of stunted or die early or not produce the vegetable, and then maybe another percentage when the harvest is passed and the plants have normally started to go back to seed. You'll have a few that are hanging on. Past Halloween, into November, the snow is coming. You're like there's still, like that, one last plant you know I'll have that a lot of times where like a rose will bloom, you know in November and here in New England, and I'm like, how did that happen? But it's an anomaly, you know. So there's always going to be outliers where humans get upset when a death happens, when they think it's been too soon.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 14:31

You know, or something like that, based on my experiences so far, that when we go, we've taken what we're supposed to take from our experience here and we're meant to bring that forth into our next adventure or what I like to call our next dream. You know, because I truly do a hundred percent believe that when we die and I'm not telling anyone to believe this, I don't ever tell anyone what to believe. I want to give people things to think about, but you've got to form your own. And I believe that when we die, it just feels like when you wake up in the morning and you're remembering an odd dream you have and you're going well, look at that, what was I doing with those people? What was that city I was in? And so I believe you know I might wake up into my death and go.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 15:38

Was I running a school of magic? What was I doing with those people? That looks interesting but, hey, weird. I believe I'll wake up into my next big anchored experience of consciousness whatever dream that is and be able to appreciate this one and hopefully take forth things that I was supposed to learn while I was here, helping me make the next one richer and more robust, and all of that. I believe we're evolving always eternally, that there's no end to that.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 16:10

And that's how I like to look at it, yeah.

GDC: 16:14

I love that because in all of these themes that we're talking about, be it the, you know, the beans, or the tree, or the leaves, or the rose, or the dream time in the morning, and all of these have a cycle, they're cyclical, there is no end. Cyclical, there is no end, whereas, you know, if we think in linear, it's done, it's gone somewhere inside us, like you said, the conflict is, but it's not. There isn't a feeling of finality, there is absolutely a feeling of death, which then, after that, comes life and rebirth. And I love that you bring up these natural world things as well as dream time, because in a very interesting way, it's showing us how to engage and dance with death and that we will wake up once again. Almost like in life, we live these little deaths, these little even falling asleep and waking up could be viewed as a death, and we're living these little deaths.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 17:23

Yeah, it is actually considered one of the major parallels of life and death is day and night. And so if we look at, you know, the cycle of a day going through the night and into the next day, yes, the time when the sun is shining, you know, is the time when plants take up the sunlight to help make chlorophyll and all that stuff, and things grow and we have the ability to see and to be more productive. But don't we also love the night? The night is beautiful. Think about the moon and the sparkling stars, you know, and think about the potential that constantly lies within the dream time when we go to sleep, and how great it feels to rest. Doesn't it feel so good to lay your body down? That parallel has to exist also across our lifespan, not just our day to day. But we need to love the night, which is the death. Our death is going to have silvery moonlight upon the surface of a lake, things that are just as beautiful.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 18:31

So if you study the laws of hermetics at all, they're just principles of trying to understand how the universe works and the whole as above, so below idea which comes from hermetics is the idea that on every single plane of existence, the same kinds of parallels and truths ripple through and relate to one another always. So you know, and we always tend to understand that best in our current society, in terms of mind, body, spirit, we understand that something that we do to our body that's productive or healthy can have a positive impact on the mind, on the spirit, and vice versa. So, with the law of hermetics, we would absolutely look at the qualities of the night, as we know them here on earth, existing within death, because the night is the death of the day. And so if we know how to find the beauty in the night I mean, oh, the hooting of the owl, you know the ability to see these glimpses of the northern lights, the ability to let the mind drift into that soft state where you're in and out of sleep and noticing all that magic and how thoughts form, you know, from chaos when you're in that state All of that is going to be accessible to us in death. All of that magic, all of that beauty.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 20:04

I have no doubt. I have no doubt.

GDC: 20:08

I absolutely love that because it is death kind of coming up to us and I see death as an entity. That's how I'm talking about it. It is a spirit that comes to me and you know there was. What was it? Carlos Castaneda in his books somewhere wrote use death as your advisor. Everyone's death sits on their shoulder. And when you are in life and you don't know what to do, ask your death. And I started doing that just because I was like I'll fill in the blanks and make it my own. So then I was like, should I go back to school? And I asked my death when I die, will it matter if I go back to school? And my death said, oh, I'm so proud, I'm so proud of you for doing that. So I'm like, oh, I'll go back to school. And it kind of helped me to solidify what is important at that time. What do you think about that?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 21:19

practices like through shamanic dream work and things that I've been trained in that have some overlap with some of the ways that you look at the world, and I love that in all sorts of shamanistic approaches we have the benefit of taking the all time is now standpoint so we absolutely can speak to the part of ourselves that is already experiencing death beyond this life and extract that wisdom so that we can benefit from it now and make good choices, live in a more robust manner, live without fear. It's so important. I believe that all aspects of ourselves are accessible all the time. So I love that approach greatly. And you're reminding me of.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 22:08

There was a TV series about Emily Dickinson and it was so well done I can't remember it was just called Dickinson but I can't remember what channel streamed it, but they had an awesome representation of death personified that she would speak to. And then, if you look at Emily Dickinson's actual poetry, she does speak to death as an entity through some of her work and it's really beautiful and sometimes in a few small lines it can be very profound. Yeah, it's a great practice.

GDC: 22:43

I absolutely love that Because, like you said, death personified it kind of almost. You know, as a highly empathic individual, I'm like, oh death, how hard it must be when people are scared of you and running away from you and you're like I'm trying to take you somewhere. And I know that you said that you worked in like with physical therapy and hospice. Did you? What did you encounter in there, that kind of really solidified that we need to stop running or that we need to rebuild a relationship? Could you give us just a little insight? Relationship?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 23:17

Could you give us just a little insight? Yeah, so generally. Yeah, I worked as a physical therapist for about 25 years and mostly with the geriatric population, so that means that I was working with a lot of people in the end of life. Now there's plenty of elderly people that can receive rehab from someone like me and continue to go home and function and do things and recover from illnesses and surgeries and whatnot. But many times it's not possible when it is their time and the body is, you know, showing that without a doubt.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 23:55

In a lot of these cases what happens is people are losing physical function, right. So like if you're very old or you're very sick and the body is starting to decline. People get very down on themselves about that and they think that the capabilities of the physical body are the direct reflection of who they are as a person. We often define ourselves by that, which I think is a very poor trend. So they're down on themselves. They may also be in pain and they're trying to do everything that they can to fight against the decline, when there always will come a point when it's not possible for the body to do so anymore. And in those situations what I witnessed and what people were often asking me to do was to continuously give false hope, and I wasn't into it. So families lie to their loved ones all the time, so you'll have the situation where that's the patient, now the doctor's over here in the other room telling the family, the next of kin, the real truth, and they're all agreeing. We won't tell them that the time is near, so they don't actually have the opportunity to possibly finish conversations, say things they might want to say that have been left unsaid in life, that are important to really just enjoy themselves. You know, if I know that I might go within the week, I don't want to have a 90 minute physical therapy session, I want to, you know, listen to some music. I want to sit with my kids and hold their hand, yeah, and just remind them how much I love them and make sure that there's nothing that they're hanging on to. That they haven't been able to ask me. You know those are the things that I would want to do. They haven't been able to ask me. You know those are the things that I would want to do.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 26:00

So I just saw so many hundreds of people in my one tiny career go through that and then die, never having known that it was coming, nor having the opportunity to make the best of it. The best of it, and also I mean just on a purely practical level. I'm talking about, you know, all of that ideal stuff, but on a practical level, if the patient knows that they're going to die soon, then there's. They don't have to shove themselves through painful therapy for no reason. They can have pain medication instead of, you know, rounds of IV antibiotics to fight something that's never going to go away. You know they can do things differently that are for their comfort and so that they can just enjoy the time they have left and then go peacefully rather than with a struggle. So I just saw way too much of that and I feel like in our medical system doctors are complicit because they're not taught to have these very difficult conversations.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 27:08

They're taught just to be diplomatic and end their session with the person on as positive a note as they can. But they'll often do that in a way where they're just avoiding the truth. And I would often try to speak to the families in those cases, because I also was beholden to try to uphold the family's wishes and balance what was going on there. So I would often be truthful with them and just ask you know, hey, what if we find a nice way to tell them that the reason they're declining is so fast is because they really don't have a lot of time left, like they could use this time differently?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 27:51

Sometimes families would see the beauty of that and the usefulness of that and go along with it with me, which always just felt so much more properly aligned. But sometimes they would say, nope, we don't want her to lose hope, lose hope. So they're believing somehow that if the person has hope, that they'll magically be able to transcend the fact that the body is going to die at some point. Yeah, have they not noticed that none of us are getting out of here alive? You know, we all have to shed this skin at some point.

GDC: 28:26

Yeah, and I think that you hit a really good point, because some people are like, well, if they tell them and their will declines, if they stop wanting to be alive, then they're just dead and it's like, yes, will does have something to do with it, but you need to honor their will by telling them where they're at. You know misunderstanding of if somebody loses hope, that's what makes them die. If somebody loses their will, that's what makes them die. No, maybe that's what causes acceptance and that maybe, as bystanders of watching a loved one die, we're in our own personal denial going no, just hold on. So when we talk about death, we're actually talking about when I face my death or small deaths as well, as what does it look like and how can I be there to have these types of communication when a loved one is passing?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 29:32

Right, and what I found has been helpful is broaching those conversations gently by starting with the hypothetical.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 29:42

So what I mean is here's an example I had a person that who knew me as a witch and a mentor, who was dying, and she was pretty young and she did not want to admit Even. She only finally admitted it on the day that she was going to really go anyway. So she didn't want to talk about that and I just said, ok, well, yeah, as a mentor and someone in the spiritual community, I would be remiss if I didn't at least ask you this If you were to die soon, what kinds of ceremonies and celebrations of your life would you want the community to do in your honor? So that enabled her to actually think about it. Not as I have to attach to this right now because I'm still in my life and I want to stay in it. That was her, you know. That was her mindset, but she thought about it in the hypothetical, and so she gave me a beautiful answer to the question and then I think that was allowed to percolate, you know, over the coming weeks that she had left.

GDC: 30:57

Wow, that's beautiful.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 30:59

Yeah, so the hypothetical.

GDC: 31:01

Yeah, it's almost like with a hypothetical question. Once that's introduced, then their body is like this is what I've been telling you. You know, the body is like which doesn't speak. You know our English language or whatever language. You know you speak. It's a human language. It's like the body is like can I go to sleep please? And when you introduce that to the mind, then the body's like thank you for being an advocate for me. That's how I feel. Yes, yeah.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 31:34

So it can be really tough, you know, to be one of the folks in this particular culture, in this particular life, who tries to spearhead a bit of change here and there, to to shift a mindset here and there.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 31:49

But I always think that even if I help a few folks to think about it differently and I I've helped more than that, just through the magical practices and the dream work and, um, all of the, we do a lot of oracular work in um, my tradition as well, so we have priestesses that are devoted to different deities, um, and some of whom are deities of death, and so our community gets to speak, you know, directly through the channeled intelligences, and try to pick up some of that wisdom while we're still death as an external entity. You know, we've got the dream work around death, we've got psychic explorations and ways of feeling yourself as a spirit. All of this stuff is really important and having access to at least one of those modalities can, I think, can, help a person very greatly in making that little bit of a shift I agree, one of the things.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 33:09

Robert moss does a lot in his trainings and he's a mentor of afterlife abode for themselves in the spiritual realms, a place that they would want to go to. And it's such a great practice because, again, we're giving. When you know, when we do shamanic practices, we're bringing bits of that energy that then ripple through our physical being and help us inform who we are and what's real and what we do. So by setting up your own space, whatever it might be maybe it's a cozy cottage, maybe it's a beach cabana, you know, maybe it's a sacred lodge where you can meet with ancestors of the past, Maybe it's a magical library. Whatever your place is on the other side, by practicing going there you're, you're starting to let your body know that it will be okay to go.

GDC: 34:03

Do that it's time I it's okay, it's okay. I absolutely love that because I have some spaces that I go to and now I'm just like now, which one do I want to spend, you know, an interim in, before I go into another dream or whatnot? So in your statement, the last part of your statement that you had written to me, you said something about the death can be our one of our, if not our greatest, initiation, and I want to delve into that with you. But before I do, from my perspective I call it like.

GDC: 34:40

I go through a lot of shamanic deaths. I go through the loss of the death of my own ignorance. I go through the death of the fact that I thought I had control over something. I go through the like ego deaths and all of these things in order to go. And so, from that perspective, just talking about like a shamanistic initiation or shamanistic death, I see it as that is where we gain our greatest wisdom, that is where we face our deepest fears, that is where we actually recognize who we truly are. So that's my kind of ooh, that sounds good. And now I'm like Nikki, tell us, why do you say that it is my computer? It stopped recording the recording died people. The recording died Death is here. Everything died.

GDC: 35:50

Everything died, can't make that up. Now I have to. Literally, I just I was recording it to my physical hard drive and then I had to start recording it to the, to the cloud, wherever this is. And so our yeah. So now we're on the other side of the veil, bringing to you Nikki Wardwell Sleeth and Granddaughter Crowe talking about what it looks like from the other side. So from the other side, here we are. Oh my god, that was so crazy from the other side. So from the other side, here we are. Oh my God, that was so crazy. That has never happened to me. I've never heard it happening. It was absolutely beautiful and I love the synchronicity. So, beyond that, nikki, why do you say, or see death being a great initiation? What does that mean?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 36:38

Well, in the tradition of American witchcraft that I practice, we love to ritualistically celebrate rites of passage, things that are important landmarks in a person's life. So when a new baby is born in a person's life, so when a new baby is born, you know, we can do a baby blessing ceremony. For them, we're introducing them in sacred space, we're having them blessed by the elements, we're introducing them to the gods and things like that. And then there is a coming of age right. That's when a person is moving, you know, into puberty and towards adulthood and trying to give them grace as they move through that trying period of life, which can be so awkward and scary and uncomfortable. And then we have rights of motherhood. So when a woman is pregnant and we have rights of motherhood, so when a woman is pregnant, you know we have special rights that can be done to help prepare for the huge shift that's going to happen, the wisdom that they'll need, how they'll be able to integrate what they've experienced so far in order to be a good mother in this next stage. And then we have the croning rights, and then we have the croning rites. You know, we have the rites of post-menopause, which I've already gone through, the croning rite and we acknowledge we're no longer in, you know, the physical, life-giving stage of life. And what will we do to integrate all that we've experienced, to make this last stage of life the best that it can be? If we're taking all this time and expending energy to ceremonialize these things, I mean our death has got to be one of the it's the pinnacle rite of passage, and it is one of shedding what we don't need anymore, which at that point, is the body, and moving forth into a state where we take what we've learned and hopefully try to fuel our next stage of evolution, of evolution. So what could be more renewing, what could be more exciting than a completely new adventure? I just think it's the biggest of the initiations. When we go from a child to an adult, we're still familiar with the terrain of this world that we live in. Same thing, when we go from a young adult into motherhood, or we go from a caregiving adult into the elder stage, we're still familiar with the terrain. When we die, it could be all new terrain, and so this is the beginning of a whole new adventure. I love how you're talking about the little deaths, but what's important about this rite of passage. Is that it really the metaphors hold through all these examples? We know those of us who are readers that that card doesn't mean someone's literally physically dying. We know that when you pull this major arcana card which is an archetype, an idea, not a circumstance we know that card is about what needs to go, what needs to change, what is being left behind, and there's just a time when it's time to leave this body behind and get ready.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 40:22

Now initiations, also in witchcraft and the occult. When someone accomplishes a whole completion of a curriculum you know and an understanding of that stage of learning in the craft and they get to undergo an initiation, it's super special. The initiation actually stands for giving yourself over to a whole new adventure that's about to start. When you initiate as a witch, it is considered a rite of rebirth. It's a rite of purification and then rebirth into your new self. And what is death if not that You're purifying yourself of your body and rebirthing into whatever our next new dream or adventure is going to be, and it might be a pretty exciting adventure. Let's not count that out.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 41:22

One time speaking of my lucid dream practice and I use that a lot to inform my understanding of things in this world. But I once had a lucid dream where I was doing my own magic and I was focusing on the plan I had. I was doing my own magic and I was focusing on the plan I had. But my deceased grandmother showed up randomly in the dream. Now, my grandma was like. She was always very sort of well put together, kind of quiet, very pretty, proper, you know sort of like the lipstick on the cigarette kind of grandma. And so she would wear you know pearls and whatever. But I she came in to my lucid dream on a motorcycle, wearing leather.

GDC: 42:18

I was like Grandma, what are you doing?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 42:23

And she was like I can't talk right now, I've got important things to do. And she went through this portal and zipped off, you know, to another plane where she had business. I absolutely love this Grandma, and one of the things about lucid dreaming is, I feel like you get to experience other spirit intelligences, sort of relative to what we perceive as real time. Relative to what we perceive as real time. Yeah, so you know, I really believe that I got a quick glimpse of her running around and having a pretty badass adventure.

GDC: 43:02

I absolutely love this. Yeah, oh, my goodness, I mean, it really is that time to open up and like, be curious and the new adventure. You know, I have some stories. I could talk to you forever about my dream time and me and my own circle, kendra, are working together through dream sorcery by Nikki Wardwell Sleeth. We're keeping dream journals and I'm like we're keeping dream journals and I'm like, whoa, the shifts that are going on with me, consciously, I don't even know, because I'm like sometimes in the it's almost like Nikki, and I'll just put this really short because I have a question about how can we celebrate then death in this time of year and what your thoughts about that.

GDC: 43:48

But as I'm going through, you know, working through dream sorcery, lucid dreamings and all of the magic within, what starts happening to me is I will go in my dream, I'll be like, oh, I'm dreaming, and then the next day I'll be awake and I'll be like, oh, the next day I'll be awake and I'll be like, oh, I'm awake. It's almost like lucidity is blurring the lines and I'm just conscious. And when am I actually paying attention? When is my mind awake, irregardless of whether it's daytime or nighttime. So I'm getting this as the veil thins in my own life. I know it's a sidetrack, but I'd love to hear just a short. What's going on with my sidetrack?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 44:34

It's not a sidetrack, because what you're experiencing is the truth that this is a dream too, right? So by waking up to your dreams, you're waking up to the reality of this dream, this living dream. Just because we have a physical body here that's dense doesn't mean it's not a dream and we are moving around from one reality to another with our conscious awareness. Love it. That's super, super important. So I love that you're sharing and dream journaling and sharing dreams with your spiritual community, because it's so important, because it will help everyone have less fear, have greater access to their ancestors, them in and have a conversation. Or even if you can't succeed in summoning them in a particular way, on a particular attempt, you can still ask a question and get an audible, divinatory response. You know there's so much that you can do and it just allows death to be normal, to be a part of our spirit. It really is. I love that.

GDC: 45:53

I'm so happy. Yeah, yeah, I absolutely am having fun. I'm having fun. So what do we do? We are in October 2025. We're doing as the Veil Thins. You are a wonderful presenter who is actually just sitting up there saying look guys, death is a part of this cycle. You know from so many different, you know ways of schools of thought and everything, and we need to understand that. Nikki, would you say in the last few minutes, how do you celebrate this time of year? Or how can someone who maybe has had somebody die and now is listening to this going oh, I missed my opportunity because it was a few months ago or it was a few years ago. How do you celebrate death right now?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 46:51

Well, at this time of the year, when we are so aligned with the death of the year coming on, it is the time. So appreciating nature and looking at the beauty of that is one of the ways that can support the process, ways that can support the process. And in American witchcraft we do a lot of mediumship practices, spirit communication sessions and then ultimately, on all hallows, you know so, at midnight on that night we have a very late night ceremony, on that actual night, which is considered to be the most liminal point. So for a lot of our ancient ancestors there was just the. They didn't look at seasons the way that we do, they just had the warm half of the year and the cold half of the year, and those switches happened at Beltane and Palamas. And so that point of midnight on Halloween, midnight October 31st for us, when it's not, when it's right between midnight or you know, 1159 and midnight, that's that liminal point where it's neither neither, you know. So looking at that liminal space is the whole idea of the veil being thin. The liminality is what gives us that feeling of thin veil, not quite summer, not quite winter. It's that place in between where we sneak through and so we try to speak to the spirits at that most psychic point. You know, witches tend to love this time of year because just by being very closely entwined with nature, we're feeling that liminality within ourselves and our psychic skills tend to sharpen and heighten up to that point. That's actually what drew me to the craft in the in the very beginning, as I realized that my psychic awareness was becoming really crisp each year. In the very beginning is I realized that my psychic awareness was becoming really crisp each year in the fall and I didn't know why. So I researched it and then I was like, oh wow, here we are.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 48:58

So ancestor veneration, think about the love of those we've known who have gone before, whether it's people we've lost recently in this life and have grieved, or whether it's ancient ancestors who paved the way so that we could one day be. We try to acknowledge all of those different types of spirits. Even ancestor veneration doesn't even have to be your blood ancestors. It can also be like we often look to, for example, historical witches of the past, Like we often look to, for example, historical witches of the past, you know, who did magical work and laid the groundwork that we now benefit from in our practice today. It can be any anyone, and ancestors don't even need to be human. You know, we often will honor our deceased animals, but even spirit guides that we look to for support and wisdom. They are probably also experiencing their own life cycles and death cycles and cycles of evolution, and so we're all ancestors.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 50:11

And another thing that we talk about when we venerate the ancestors and we acknowledge their names, you know so they're not forgotten and we speak to them with love and we say prayers and we drum and we do chants for them. We raise energy so that that helps them have a way of coming through for us. But we also acknowledge that we need to prepare now to be the best ancestors we can be. We should get ready now. Why struggle to hold on to this? We know we're going to die at some point, and don't? We want to be there for the ones that are still left behind on earth when we've moved on. I would like to be accessible as a good ancestor.

GDC: 50:55

You too. You know. It's so funny that you said that because, as you're saying this, I'm like those of you who are watching this in the way distant future. When granddaughter Crow ceases to exist in this form, I am expecting an invitation. You better not be all. Oh my God. Granddaddy Krogh died because of this and this. Please remember my life. Please remember that I am here for you and I will be haunting you if you invite me in, not a problem.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 51:31

So I try to be a good ancestor. Yeah, and I have people in my community, and myself as well, who've done lots of mediumship work, so speaking with the spirits of the dead, and I've never yet encountered anyone who was sad that they were dead.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 51:47

They're still just going about their business. So I tell people this like guys, I know a lot of you depend on me, I know you know I people look to the teachings that I give and stuff like that. But if I die tomorrow, like I'm not going to be sad about it. So I don't want you to, like, sit around and be super sad about it. You can still look to my teachings or whatever, and you can call me up in the dream time in the other realms. But I think we need to look at that way and to your point about folks that might be watching this way in the future because maybe they stumble upon the podcast at the time they're meant to.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 52:25

They always do. It doesn't have to be Halloween to venerate your ancestors. You can do it anytime. Just because it is nice to align with the cycles of nature and it's a tradition Doesn't mean it's the only time you can do that. I have an ancestral altar here in my magic room year-round where I stop and I say hi to photos and I'll light a candle or leave a glass of water. You know different sort of traditional offerings. It can be any time and a small thing.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 53:04

You can speak to your ancestors and you don't have to be what professional world would call a medium so you can write them a letter. That conscious connection will be there for them. You can just speak to them aloud. Speak to them maybe when your head hits the pillow at night before you go to bed. You might predispose yourself to having an interaction with them in the dream time if you're thinking about talking to them right before you go to sleep. There's so many ways that you can stay connected, such that death doesn't have to be perceived as the terrible barrier everyone thinks that it is. It does not have to be an ending. It can be that beautiful initiation into the next big dream. It really can.

GDC: 53:46

Well, there you have it, people. There you have it, people. This is Nikki Wardwell Sleath to us about death and we're transversing the veil and we're just having so much fun. You can find Nikki at NikkiWardwellSleethcom. You can look at her schools. You can get in contact with her. Definitely highly recommend this book. I also have my eye on the goddess seals, all of it. And Nikki, I mean so many little mic drop moments that you threw down. You really really did. Is there anything else that you'd like to share before we sign off?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 54:23

Just since you mentioned the goddess seals, I will say that one of the seals in that book is the seal of the Norse goddess Hela in that book is the seal of the Norse goddess Hela, and the purpose of that seal is actually to help the user or the reader to speak directly with the dead. So it's pre-consecrated magical tool that draws upon the legions and intelligences of the goddess Hela in order to help you do that. So there are tools you know, like. Like we're saying, there's so many different mediums and ways that you can go about this, but you can develop these skills for yourself, for sure.

GDC: 55:00

Oh, I love that Hail to Hela and all that she brings into the world. And thank you guys for tuning in to yet another episode of Belief being Beyond as the Veil Thin series. I love you guys, I love you, I love you. I hope that you have a wonderful October. Thank you, nikki, for being here and I love you. We'll see you on the flippity flip as the Veil Thin series. As the Veil Thin series, join us as Grandadder Crow interviews spiritual leaders in riveting conversations about this time of year.