A story of love, death, and psychedelics.
By: Yuval Man
Tags: True Story, Death And Dying, Relationships, Psychedelics, Love

There are tears in my eyes as I am confronting the shadow of death and the remnants of love, contemplating how fragile the human condition is.

Though the body can perish, love remains an unmalleable force that cannot be broken or destroyed. The energy that transforms and shapes shifts from life after life afterlife.

This story about the undying nature of love starts from an unlikely place — a motorbike on an island.

In late 2020, I became obsessed with motorbikes. Although I hold no driving license of any vehicle in any country, I can confidently operate; a 12-ton truck, any car, automatic or manual, and even a tank (yes yes, I’ve been in the army in artillery). Yet, I never felt particularly drawn to motorbikes until that point, in the mountains of a foreign land that felt like home.

Luckily, in Thailand, you don’t really need a valid license to drive.

I was in Pai at a time, a pastoral town in the North of Thailand, I call it ‘the Switzerland of Asia’ as it’s surrounded by magnificent indigo-colored mountains all encapsulating lands of rice fields and lush green. Natural hot springs frequent the forests in a cloud of steam and loveliness, and cows freely roaming the fields. I lived in a beautiful wooden loft apartment watching the mountains and life had been incredibly calm.

Other than its incredible nature, Pai is known for its beautiful, well-maintained curvy roads, perfect for motorbike lovers. My neighbors, a cute couple, were both dirt bike riders, and one day they just taught me how to ride. I immediately fell in love, so I rented a bike of my own and started roaming the roads around Pai in solitude and bliss.

As with every new hobby of mine, and now bikes included, I became completely obsessed. I spent the next weeks either binge-watching riding tutorials or being out on the roads practicing religiously.

At some point, in my spontaneous and endless bike worship, I came across a specific machine, so beautifully sculpted and well designed, I couldn’t get my head off it; Husqvarna Vitpilen 400cc.

This bike is the pinnacle of brilliant engineering, it is artistically designed, light, and powerful. For weeks on end I spoke of it with everyone I came into contact with and even tried to buy it and order it in Thailand, just to find out it’s close to impossible, as this bike is manufactured in Sweden and the taxes of bringing it here would be more or less the cost of the bike itself. I’ve been in Thailand for close to two years now and had never seen this bike once.

Nevertheless, this remained an object in my mind, and I often spoke about it with fellow riders as “my dream bike”. A month or so later, while back in the South, on the island of Koh Phangan I saw my dream bike parked casually near a coffee shop.

I was so tremendously excited, that I entered the coffee shop and began to ask everyone who the bike belonged to. “It’s mine,” said one guy with piercing blue eyes and a coy smile sitting by the corner, with a beautiful woman by his side. “What’s up?”.

At first glance, he struck me as one of those nerdy and shy types, yet something in his eyes radiated a sense of love and playfulness I felt immediately drawn to. This is how I met Andreas.

From the moment we met, I felt that our souls were connected somehow, but had no idea to what great an extent this would be in the unfolding of my life and the immensity of how our story together would develop as time passed on.

Andreas scanned me up and down with his cerulean blue eyes, and when he noticed my interest in the bike, without a word, he threw me his keys, nodding at me to jump on the metal beast and take it for a ride. At this time, I didn’t even know his name, and he was allowing a complete stranger to riding his expensive, rare bike.

Around that time, something very beautiful was happening to me internally. I was beginning to live the sense of freedom and joy that I had been helping my clients work towards. I was so moved by life.

While I was still in Pai, out of nowhere, while sitting quietly in my apartment looking at the sun setting behind the mountain tops, I was overwhelmed by a deep, unfamiliar sense of pure joy and started crying. A surprising and unfamiliar cry that came out of a pure sense of joy, appreciation of beauty, and a sense of connectedness, and not out of sadness or

I felt that I held in my heart all the sufferings and joys of the world, the pain and pleasure, the life, death, and feeling it all as an expression of love. This experience was so deep and direct, it overcame my entire body, I was sitting there for a long time, unable to move, and just surrendered to the crying grief.

These weren’t tears of sadness but immense, incomprehensible joy. This newfound love has continued perpetuating throughout the next few weeks. My entire outlook on my life, what I did, my relationships with people, past and present, all experienced from an entirely new light. Like I’m suddenly experiencing everything from the inside rather than things, people, and happenings that are outside of me.

I would go on a call with a client, and suddenly feel their pain as it was mine and start crying. I would sit with a woman telling me how she had been raped and my heart would break open as if I was the one experiencing her sorrow.

The same depth was experienced in all the happy, pleasant moments of my life. I was walking around feeling physically “high”. Swimming in an ocean of swiftness and love that no words will do justice to.

I didn’t know what was happening to me, or how to make sense of it at first, and the only way I could describe it to myself is that I was going through some kind of personal awakening.

This was my inner state when I met Andreas. We kept in touch, meeting here and there, taking fun joy rides around the beautiful curvy roads of the island. One day, at a small birthday party of a friend at the beach, we were having our usual chat about life philosophy, our outlook on business, and the state of the world. At this point, I haven’t even told Andreas what I was doing in life and the nature of what I do. As we were standing there talking, people, some I knew and some complete strangers, kept coming and were commenting on some of my posts and the content I’m publishing, saying how much they like it and how certain writings resonated with them and helped their relationships. Andreas got curious and we started speaking about my work. He was listening attentively, then at one point stopped me, and pointed out a happy, jumpy, fairy-looking girl that was dancing right in front of us.

“That’s Ella”, he said.

Ella and Andreas met here on the island a few years back. Andreas, as he told me, took an immediate liking to her but it took him months to actually get up the courage to ask her out, and the two started dating after a while. A few months later Andreas and I started to work together, discussing his and Ella’s relationship and having our first session at his pool, he was sharing with me vulnerably that, as of lately they had hit a rough patch in their connection. He was having major doubts, unsure if this is the relationship that’s right for him, if she, the island fairy that she is, could truly fit his business savvy lifestyle.

As with most of the men I have ever worked with, there seems a trend. They all yearn for purpose and intimacy, yet their minds block them from obtaining the deep love their hearts crave. The “problem” comes from their rational mind, hiding something deeper- a heart that is still blocked and hasn’t yet tasted unconditional love, and a willingness to keep it open through and through. In romantic love, we often contract and close when we feel we are susceptible to pain, and being a man, we have the social conditioning to be strong, and demonstrating emotion can make us feel weak. It is a difficult barrier to breakthrough.

Andreas and I spoke to great lengths about the idea that we so often get stuck in our minds, letting its endless doubts and rationale take over what we actually feel and desire to express at the moment with honesty. That was especially true for him, being the brilliant programmer, shrewd businessman, problem-solving-oriented that he is. We spoke about how when we open our hearts fully, and from the perspective of love, there’s no “right person for me”, there are only beautiful souls and hearts that came to our lives for a reason and we must honor that with great joy.

This session, and those that followed, seemed to influence him greatly, and their relationship took a meaningful turn for the better. To me, it felt like he was so ready for the deep love he wanted, and just needed someone whom he trusted. A partner that would give him the permission to calm his mind, connect with his heart and allow it to open fully to his love for her that was always there, hidden under the endless chatter of reason and logic.

Ella and I never met fully and deeply in person. The first time I saw her was at that coffee shop, sitting next to him, all smiley and glowing. The second time was at a party by the beach, we only exchanged a few words, but it was enough for me to get a glimpse into the brightness of her soul. She was dancing around so lightly, all jumpy and beautiful, she was so lovely and giving with everyone around her, yet, in her eyes, I could also see an ocean of sadness, the kind you find only in people who knew suffering from up close.

About two months later, on a sunny April day, Ella and Andreas went to her favorite beach called Why Nam. Ella was doing what she loved most; dancing, surrounded by her many incredible friends. On what seemed like a beautiful idyllic day of laughter and play, Ella dropped her body. She died suddenly later that night.

On the night of her death, while it was happening around midnight, I was at my house. In my villa I was blindfolded laying on my bed after taking a “heroic dose” of psilocybin, having my own life-changing experience of loving and dying. I am an avid explorer of psychedelic substances, yet I have never in my entire life experienced anything near what I have that night. Throughout the entire trip, I was only a soul, malleable and free, traveling back in time throughout my life, all the way back to the warmth of my mother’s womb, I could vividly feel her nourishment and care as I was just an embryo in her.

Then, I started going back in time even further, starting with being in the room as my parents made love and conceived me. Not as an imaginary scene but rather as an actual memory to me. I was receiving the intensity of their love, as they were in the process of bringing me into this world.

I continued on, even further, or at least my soul did. I started waking up, living, and dying as many different people, reliving their most painful memories from their own body and through their eyes. I was raped in a barn as a woman, feeling her pain, and crying in her sorrow. I was a young man running from a burning house, an old man on his deathbed with all of his family surrounding him.

As traumatic as these experiences may sound, as much as I was experiencing them vividly and like my own, I was overwhelmed by a sense of love so beautiful I could melt. It was horrific, yet so sweet at the same time. I could feel their pain as it is mine, yet recognize the grace, love, and beauty in all of it. Their life, their pain, and their death. My life, my pain, my death. It all belonged to us.

I experienced firsthand, all the love that had been perpetuated throughout generations for me to be here now. I could feel the love that is moving and connecting everything and everyone in this cosmos, like a mycelium of pure unconditional love.

After hours of living and dying and coming out of my trip alive in grace, it finally ended. I went to sleep full, at peace with the multitude of experiences the psilocybin had given me.

I woke up the next morning to a call from Andreas, “Yuval, it’s Ella, she died, come please, I need you”. I immediately jumped on my bike and came over.

On my way to him, I was wondering what does one even say to someone who has just lost the most powerful love of their life? How do you even start? Then immediately I was washed over by everything that had just happened last night and all the newfound love that has woken within me as of late and I knew that it was all preparing me for being able to hold this very moment.

As I entered the room Andreas was in, I saw everyone moving around in a state of shock, they all seem stressed, unable to hold the sorrow and grief, not knowing what to do, And in the midst of it, Andreas sitting there, quiet, eyes closed, breathing slowly, like he’s untouched by what’s happening and is somewhere deep in himself.

I walked directly towards him and sat in front of him. We looked at each other’s eyes and said at the same time: “It’s all love” and started crying. There was something so beautiful and sweet in those moments, I will never forget it. It wasn’t a cry of shock, panic, or resistance to what’s happening, there was only a quiet yet powerful acceptance of what Is and a willingness to be with it, to face it head-on and stay conscious. We spent the next few hours doing just that, meditating on death, crying out our grief, and loving each other and Ella’s soul.

I don’t fully understand it all, the mystery of death, no one does. There is nothing I can do or say that would be able to take away the pain of a mother losing her child, or Andreas losing his loved one, grief is very real when someone close to us leaves this world. I can never begin to imagine how Ella’s parents may feel, how painful it must be to lose a child and how deep their sorrow must go. It is very challenging to be able to stand in the pain of acceptance, to hold in our heart both our grief as well as the notion that there’s a divine order beyond our capacity, an order that though we could never fully grasp, we can choose to live by.

We cannot see the full picture, or fully understand why suffering exists and why it comes in this way, but we can have faith in that order nevertheless. It’s a matter of scale really, and much like a cell in our body, although it does not have awareness of the entire brilliant process that is the body, it still moves around and does its work. For some reason, because we have awareness of our own existence, it often seems to us that this is it, our scale of just experiencing reality is the highest and final scale. We are also that but cells in a much bigger body of existence.

I believe that while walking towards the pain and the fear instead of running away from it, death can teach us some incredible lessons about living. To take as long as we need to grieve fully, yet stay aware of what’s actually going on. When we hold the undeniable notion that each moment could be our last, and as such, should be honored, we then love fully and fearlessly.

There’s nothing I could say to someone who had just lost someone to ease their pain, nor should I. Instead, I may try to point them in the direction that as we grieve, and with the pain- comes the greatest gift of grace; the ability to see beyond the veil of this illusion and into the undying nature of love itself. When we lose someone dear to us, they cannot love us the way we need them to love us anymore, even if they wanted to, yet, their love is very much still here, and they keep living in our hearts forever.

Andreas was in a deep well of sadness when I saw him that day and in the weeks and months that followed, yet I could feel the immense love he recognized in what’s happening and his full acceptance of it. Andreas told me, “from our session by the pool and until the night she died, we spent every night together, and it was the most beautiful time of our lives. Right before I left the beach and saw her for the last time she told me how much she loved me and how loved she felt by me. He knew she just needed to wait for me and that I would open up my heart to her”.

In the days that followed, the whole community came together and there was an incredibly beautiful sense of souls coming together in death and love and celebrating life.

We made a ceremony in her memory on the beach where she lived. There were about 200 people gathered, the burning sun was setting over the ocean and you could see the other islands at a distance. In the air, there was a sense of deep grief mixed with immense love, our shared love for Ella as well as a compassionate awareness towards each other. The whole ceremony was streamed online for everyone that knew her and her family in Germany to join. Andreas and a few other friends said a few words and told stories about her life and their relationship with her.

Then they invited me to lead a meditation. At first, I was unsure about it, as I’ve never done such a thing, though my heart was telling me this is how I could serve the moment best. So here I was standing on a rock, watching the sunset as everyone was sitting at my feet, eyes closed. I took a few moments of silence and prayed, prayed so I can remove myself and my own personal need to show up and be someone, my own feelings, thoughts, and ideas, so something deeper inside can arise, so what needs to be said will find its way out of my heart.

Then, I felt the same power that brought me to meet Andreas on the day of her death on the level he needed me to, arising in me and taking over my body. It was as my ancestors, my teachers, and Ella herself were speaking through me.

I spoke about the nature of unconditional, undying love. Ella’s soul and love are very much alive within us. Now although she cannot love us the way we need to be loved anymore, she’s giving us the gift of looking into what love really is, and so let’s let that love vibrate through every fiber of our being towards everything and everyone in our life.

We meditated for a while in silence, then chanted and finished by holding each other’s hands. I could feel everyone’s hearts as I was standing there hearing them cry. The light was bright, glowing in purple and blue, It was a very powerful moment.

We started a bonfire and gathered around, a few people came to me sharing their personal losses of loved ones and how these words touched them in meaningful ways. One man told me how he lost his sister a few years back and hadn’t realized how much of a gift that was until now hearing my words, he shared that he feels how much his sister’s love is alive in him right now.

Ella came into my life through my friends and work with Andreas. The love that had awakened in me back in Pai and changed my entire relationship with my own life and death, projected and passed to Andreas. This same force wanted to show up with more love towards Ella, unknowingly setting in motion a process that will end up giving them both the most elevated profound love of their life in her last months on Earth. Neither of us could know how things would unfold, yet chose to follow our hearts. How powerful is that? We each have so much influence on our surroundings and the world. A simple act of love can change lives and deaths in ways we can never foresee.

Love and death are interconnected and inseparable.

We don’t need to wait for someone’s death to love everything and everyone. We can start right now. As we contemplate the mysteries of death, both our own as well as everyone we love, we can walk towards our fear of it and make it an integral element in our living, we can then live more fully and love fearlessly.

When we are afraid, we can be in a loving relationship, yet find ourselves wondering if this person is right for us or we can do better. We can be single and spend days in longing, loneliness, and depression.

Even in the moments of absolute union with the other, in lovemaking, we’re somewhere else.

Thinking about work, about orgasms, and when and if we’ll get there.

It’s only when we awaken to the simplest truth of them all; That the love we get to experience through our partner is just a doorway, a taste of the true nature of love that exists in everything and inside of us all along.

And that love, it has nothing to do with our circumstances, with if and how this other person loves us the way we need to be loved, and even if they are alive or not. This love is a constant, a state of being, a fundamental force of reality itself.

Once we love someone this way, they will never leave our hearts, regardless of how the nature of our relationship has unfolded, if they will continue to behave the way we need them to, and if they are alive or not. We recognize the Divine in our beloved and give the fullness of our heart, and so as to everything and everyone else.

We never know how one simple act of compassion can affect people’s life. It was life’s perfection in the way everything unfolded miraculously just so things can happen exactly as they did, leaving me speechless and profoundly strengthened my faith in looking at life and people and doing from the perspective of that love.

If I wouldn’t have been obsessed with that bike, and coming to this specific coffee shop at that specific time, if Andreas and I wouldn’t have been connecting and working together, If my own personal life would not put me on that path of love and the heart miraculously a while back, and if and if and if, so many if’s that happened just so Ella and Andreas will experience exactly that and so she would leave this world full of love.

Death and love are intertwined and connected, and our fear of both is preventing us from experiencing the fullness of life directly without mitigation.

We have a strange relationship with death in our Western culture. We tend to either suppress the very fact that we and everyone we love are going to die eventually, or we realize that but live our life as “not me, not today”. We turn our minds and hearts away from death, when really death is a gift, for it teaches us to embrace life.

What is death really? Is it merely a mistake? A tragic error in the system of evolution?

And what is love? Is it merely a feeling? A pleasant sensation we crave and hold so dearly?

Or do they both have a much deeper understanding? And what can we learn from both about how we can live our life more fully, joyfully, and freely?

For us to understand death, we ought to first examine what life actually is.

When they teach us what life is in biology class, they usually refer to certain characteristics, for example; for something to be referred to as alive, it must be able to procreate, interact with its environment, and so on. But that’s far from capturing the true meaning of life.

In truth, everything is alive. Life is any collection of chemicals, using energy in order to stay as far from equilibrium (point zero where things go back to nothing) as possible. Life is the process from point zero to point zero, in every direction, at every scale.

From Schrodinger’s “life is a force resisting entropy” to the Buddha’s “Everything goes back to zero”, this is what life is.

From that perspective, death is not a mistake, an error in the system, rather it is an integral part of the cycle just as much as life. Everything we see, and everything we don’t see, on any scale of existence, a cell, an atom, a human, the sun, and the entire universe, is on its way to equilibrium. Once the chemical structure that consumes energy in order to support any ecosystem “dies”, the ecosystem is back to zero.

We, as a society, seem to have a very fearful relationship with our own mortality. We are afraid of the moment of death, the pain that might be associated with it, and from what comes or doesn’t come after, and that fear is shaping our lives in very meaningful ways.

Allow me to clarify what I mean when I am speaking about love, as this word can mean different things for different people.

There are two types of love, there’s love that’s an emotion and is the absence of hate, I don’t hate you yet, since you behave in a way that fits my needs, therefore I love you. And this is how we love our partner, friends, parents, and everyone else.

This love can be very beautiful, caring and compassionate nevertheless, but it’s just a doorway to a much deeper love, a love that’s a state of being. A love that’s an energy in the very fabric of existence. It is in everything you look at, everyone you touch and see.

And we can tune into that essence of love within us at any given moment, regardless of if reality is going our way or even if it can be painful we still love. l. We can align ourselves with that love and direct it toward everything and everyone in our lives regardless of their behavior and if it satisfies our needs.

This love is the whole cycle, life, and death. And from the perspective of love, death is merely a moment of transformation. A death of one physical body so the process can continue and love will be perpetuated on. And the undying, infinite essence of love, is never more apparent in our lives as in the death of someone we love.

In loving memory of Ella, may she rest in peace, and may her undying love and soul keep vibrating through every fiber of everyone she touched in life and through her death.