From the wet and sandy shore by the eternal sea: Exploring the experience of threshold consciousness following life or death surgery and its impact on practice

A dramatherapist recounts her own experience of a threshold consciousness after life-or-death surgery in 2015, when surgeons gave her two days to live and offered palliative care as an alternative. Surviving the surgery and the borderline state led her to reassess her therapeutic practice. She invites contemplation of different levels of consciousness encountered during internal and external dramas, and questions how people might access clearer self-knowledge and fuller physical, mental, emotional, psychological, cosmic, and spiritual resources than those offered by the current material scientific worldview alone.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This piece stems from my own experience of a threshold consciousness that followed life-or-death surgery in 2015, when surgeons had informed me that I had only 2 days to live and offered me 2 days palliative care as an alternative choice. My survival of the surgery together with the experience of that threshold consciousness led me to a re-appraisal of my own practice in Dramatherapy. Out of my personal survival of a state bordering on death, I invite contemplation of different levels of consciousness experienced and the internal and external dramas encountered and pondering questions as to how we all may access clearer and more conscious perspectives of ourselves and fuller potentials of physical, mental, emotional, psychological, cosmic and spiritual resources for self-knowledge and consciousness than may be offered by current states of the current material scientific world view alone.