On Lineage, Bardo and The True Independence of the Soul …

 On Lineage, Bardo and The True Independence of the Soul …

This month is a heart pour.

I'm writing to you from my ancestral homelands of Türkiye, from my Baba's city, Bursa, so consider this your heads up that this share may run longer than usual. What follows is the story of these past weeks held together as one, because I've come to see that it really is all one story. 

This round of my journey began somewhere between two worlds, in the liminal stretch from SFO, northern California to this very soil I am stepping on, that I write this newsletter from. These lands to me has always been familiar, yet always a bit strange as well, somewhere between belonging and feeling like a stranger to it all my life. This time I've come here to be beside my father in the last cycle of his life, in his Bardo.

In Tibetan tradition, most famously through the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo describes the in-between state, the twilight space where one form of being is dissolving and another hasn't yet arrived. 

This isn't only about death or afterlife. It's really about every threshold , every Bardo, whether personal, familial, collective, or planetary. Each one asks the same thing of us: to humbly listen, with our whole being, to the space and silence between life and death. To trust and give it room to surrender, to integrate the life lessons so we can carry forward the Bardo's truest, tenderest wisdom. To Trust in the Great Mystery…

This has become something of a compass for me these past weeks, and I want to walk you through how I got there. In just these few days here, I've been given the visible, undeniable experience of watching my Baba move through his life transition, up close, in real time, in a way no phone call or distance ever could have shown me. Once a strong body, an immense appetite for life 

( and food ! ) , a fast and fiery being, full of will and momentum, he is now way more fragile, finding it hard to walk, to talk, to eat, each small act now something he has to reach for.

Death and life bring everything into perspective. Even when the mind believes it understands the process of dying, even when it feels it has already made peace with what's unfolding ,  the true descent into the body, the full-bodied, full-souled acceptance, is an entirely different order of knowing.

The body takes its own time as the soul takes its own. It takes layers, each one peeling back something the last one couldn't quite reach. It takes Bardo, that idle awareness to stay suspended in the not-yet-resolved. And Bardo takes patience, it doesn't rush the unraveling, and lets tender letting go arrive on its own time, in whatever order the soul & the body decides it's ready.

I felt myself enter my own Bardo the moment I received the news about my Baba. As I would need to be away from the Temple for a couple of months, to make space for a passage I couldn't map in advance. A passage toward  whatever this season would ask of me, whatever it would ask me to release, and whatever it would ask me to finally hold. And here, in this presence, it is exactly as I imagined it might be. Every ceremony, every threshold I've ever walked with another soul, has been a preparation for this one. And still.. Grief braided with beauty. Tenderness braided with things left unsaid. 

Old wounds between my father, my sisters, and me, generational patterns we've circled for years without quite landing in some ways and yet, woven right alongside them, all the possibilities for true change, heart openings for healing and deeper love. 

Family, I'm learning again, is its own kind of temple. Perhaps the oldest one any of us ever enter. It asks the same thing ceremony asks of us: Love, patience, presence, humility, the willingness to stay in the room when it's uncomfortable, to stay with the prayer of an open heart, even when that heart is breaking. Because an open heart, I believe more than ever now, is the biggest medicine of all our times.

I grew up in this temple ( Türbe ) that carries our last name Tezveren. (Photos Above ) …Our Türbe itself still stands today, tucked inside a two-story house with a garden on Tezveren Street, in the neighborhood of Bursa. Our family name Tezveren traces back to a revered medicine man, a herbalist healer known as Tezveren Dede, original name Sheikh Ataullah, said to have served in the era of Sultan Fatih Mehmet. His tomb rests on the ground floor, in a hall of the temple that feels more like a small mosque , a space for prayer, and offerings, its walls carrying the words of Rumi, Yunus Emre, and my baba's own counsel. It is said that, he came to Bursa from Bukhara, and it's said he eventually fell ill and passed during a time of war, laid to rest. Over time, our house was built directly over his tomb. My grandparents' home, and the homes of my four uncles and two aunts, and the wider family who lived here, all took on this very name, Tezveren, as our surname in 1900s, becoming caretakers of his resting place for generations, most recently, for the past twenty years or so, my Baba, Hayri Tezveren.

People still come, visit , quietly, in every season, especially in summer and on holy days, bringing their hopes for a home, a child, a marriage, a healing using Tezveren Dede as a bridge in their prayers to the divine. Some make offerings as an old custom, though my Baba who tends the Turbe has always gently reminded visitors that these wishes belong to the Creator alone, and the temple is simply a place to draw near to that remembrance. It is humbling to know that our name was drawn from a place people have been visiting for decades, still holding space for exactly the kind of prayer I find myself in now. 

My Baba once said, when asked if he was ever afraid, living his whole late life above a grave.  He said he simply held the tomb as though it belonged to his own grandfather, that in his heart, this ancestor was still alive, still present, still part of the family as he shared "He is the grandfather of us all." 

This echoes as Im sitting here in my father's home this week, that lineage is not only the blood we inherit, but the ongoing relationship we choose to keep with those who came before us. As I am watching a transition that stretches far beyond my father from Tezveren Dede, the swift giver of centuries ago, all the way down to this very room. It is quite a journey to witness. It is quite a lineage to stand inside of. As Tezveren Dede has watched so many lives before mine arrive here, move through their own Bardo, and pass on.

Bardo isn't only personal , it's also collective. More and more people, worldwide, are waking up to deeper truths and reevaluating how they've been living. Many of us are quietly carrying a grief around broken trust, whether in a person, a relationship, or the larger structures we once leaned on. The invitation isn't to force that trust back into the old places. It's to root a trust so deep within yourself that it no longer depends on anything external holding steady. Staying conscious means not letting your energy get pulled into arguments that were never really about truth to begin with.Before any of us can meet the world's chaos with something useful, we have to build peace inside ourselves first.  And true independence, I'm coming to feel, isn't independence from each other at all. It's the freedom of human spirit and soul finally given the time and space to simply be.

That's exactly what the Bardo asks of us. It's the space where the old identity has already dissolved and the new one hasn't yet formed, where nothing external is left to lean on and it's only there that we discover whether our sense of self was ever truly free, or only ever borrowed from roles, outcomes, and people we assumed would stay. Maybe that is the truest Independence Day of the soul , the quiet moment inside the Bardo when we realize we were never actually dependent on what we're now losing.

Wherever you find yourself in your own Bardo this month , a transition, a rupture, a quiet unraveling , I'd love to gently invite you into a question: what is this moment asking me to integrate, rather than escape?

You might explore this through a daily gratitude practice. Through a pause before reactivity, however small. Through a willingness to simply feel what's still unresolved in your own lineage, at whatever pace feels true for you.

There's no right way to meet this. Only an invitation to stay curious, and to let yourself be met exactly where you are.