Love and Grief -- Touching Hearts

What most of us want is to be heard – to communicate.

Dory Previn

The greatest gift we can give a person is rapt attention.

Unknown

Why?
Recently I have been asking my God and my selves why I want to write, express, and communicate. As I have listened, what I have heard is that I want to reach out and touch others with my experience, strength, and hope – because in those moments, I feel most clearly the loving life changing touch of my very Present God. To have Presence that transforms my life with new and loving energies, I must give Presence to others. I want “to be heard”.

The Golden “Principle”
Consider the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Religion has made this statement into a moral mandate about how we should not mistreat others. I experience that the Golden Rule is actually a loving suggestion related to improving our conscious contact with God and ourselves by “loving others” – unconditionally. It gives us a principle of intimacy with others that benefits us, not a warning that we will be punished if we are bad.

The Apostle John wrote, “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. He that loves not, does not know God: for God is love.”

“Understanding” Inspirational Life Quotes
Before I discuss this quote, I want to reference something that is important to me about how I “understand” Biblical inspirational life quotes. I will be writing more about this later.

Having studied the Bible and religion academically and intellectually since I was a child, I have experienced how worthless and even harmful this specific method of understanding scriptures can be. So I had to be given another way to experience spiritually related words, and their energy and life meanings. The way that I have been given is what I presently call “experiential intimacy”. This involves having a personal and interactive relationship with my God, where I come to “know” by being with Them, and by listening to their words and responses. So when I share my perceptions of scriptures or other inspirational life quotes, I am sharing my personal experience with my God – He and She -- , and I am sharing what I “hear” them saying as I listen and speak to Them.

The Love Principle
Let’s look at this Biblical quote again: “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. He that loves not, does not know God: for God is love.”

First, I am aware that religion makes “love” a rule and not a spiritual life principle. Love cannot be legislated. If it is not there, it is not there. And we are only using warm fuzzy masks to cover up the separation and loneliness we are experiencing with others and ourselves. We can only give what we have.

Next, what in the world is “love”? It is a term that we humans use frequently arbitrarily as if everyone knows and agrees on what it means. Not really true.

I have experienced that my God’s love is Their unconditional and unending caring for me – without rules, conditions, judgments or any form of separation by Them. I experience that they see me as being perfect and wonderful – you, too – and They are only concerned about our inability to see ourselves as they do. And, by the way, they know everything – there are no secrets with Them – and They still see us as perfect and wonderful.

Love as Action – Touching Hearts
Another part of “love” from my experience with Them is that it involves action – being actively Present. They are emotionally attentive, courteous, thoughtful, encouraging, playful, humorous – and very honest and direct. They actively “touch” my heart and I can feel Their unconditional warmth and Presence.

“Let us love one another” – as our God does – for love is our God’s gift of intimate Presence to us. When we give our presence to others – when we touch others -- we experience a higher Presence of our God than we are capable of by ourselves.

Gifts of Loving
Every one who gives unconditional Presence is given two gifts:
1. First, we are “born” of God. I experience this as a rebirthing transformation of my being. In the warm and unconditional loving womb of their Presence, I began to be reborn out of my human, shame based, conditional genetic makeup. I began to become transformed into the loving truth of Their being. And as I “touch” and love others, I become increasingly reborn into Their loving “image” – I begin to take on their spiritual genetic makeup. They are spiritually, in fact, my real Parents.
2. Second, we come to “know” God. Mankind, religion, and the human brain makes this word mean, “we come to understand God intellectually, with our brains.” For me, “knowing” is an intimate experience of growing conscious closeness and interaction. My experience is that the “kingdom of God is within us” – within the sacred intimacy that They offer and that is infinitely possible for us.

When we do not lovingly “touch” others with our spiritual presence, we become disconnected from God, from ourselves, and from other human beings – not because our God is punishing us, but because our humanness has separated us.

The essence of my God is “love” – total, unconditional, caring, “touching” and interactive Presence. That is who They are. That is who we really are. Life more abundant is the active sharing of that “love” with others – which reconnects us to our God and ourselves.

Love – Grief and Loss
Because grief and loss is something that I help many people with, I like to reference this topic in each of my articles. What actually creates “loss” is a loss of presence – loving connection with others. It can occur with death, where we experience a loss of conscious contact with the person who is deceased. And it occurs every time someone was unable to “love” us – and whenever we were unable to love them. In my experience, there is a collective effect of losses over time, and there are violent and sudden losses of presence, for example, divorce and physical abuse. The most effective way I have found to grieve and “digest” loss is by finding others who want and can accept my “love” , and give them my presence and attention on a steady and regular basis – while receiving the same from available others and my God.

Love and Finding Daily Inspirations
Another important topic related to each article is “finding daily inspirations”. In order to available for, and in order to maintain spiritual awakenings, we must have steady, dependable, and effective sources of our God’s Presence. Otherwise, we go as far as our spiritual resources, and have to stop. Or we find ourselves losing what we have gained. I encourage you to find your own spiritual words, persons, and groups that give you optimum connection to your God – daily inspirations – and live with them rather than just visit.

To be continued…..

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Beware of Daily "Anti-Inspirations"- More Grief and Loss

Happiness in the older years of life, like happiness in every year of life, is a matter of choice – your choice for yourself. (Harold Azine)

We empower ourselves every time we accept responsibility for choosing the thoughts and feelings we act on. Choosing behavior that encourages happiness is often as easy as any other choice… We complicate our life unnecessarily when we choose to act out of meanness, self-centeredness, or self-pity… Happiness is if often as simple as making the decision to take charge of who we are now, as we rely on God’s will for us. (IGC)

This quote was taken from one of my favorite meditation books that I have read almost daily for over 15 years. And it represents a type of daily inspiration that I believe needs to be avoided wherever possible – daily "anti-inspirations". It looks positive and uplifting – appears as an angel of light – but really it is the poison that man and woman first ate in the “Garden of Eden.”

Humanitis – a Mental Illness

Programmed into the genetics of the mental illness of “humanitis” is the belief that we have some unquestionable ability to choose how our lives will be, how we will react to life, and what actions we will participate in – separate from our God. Religion aptly calls it “free will” – free of God’s influence and strength -- and uses it to justify rejection and abandonment – sometimes even abuse – of others who do not meet their established standards of thought and behavior.

And so as a species, we perpetuate the shame and guilt by failing to realize that – without an intimate personal unconditional and conscious connection with our God, our faculties of mental perception, emotional reaction, and conscious decision making ultimately fail, and we are miserably lost in an abyss of endless hopeless helplessness. The hardware and wiring is there, in our brains, but the power to activate and operate it does not exist -- outside of our God’s conscious Presence.

Does It Hurt Enough?

I am debating whether to be logical or simply leave these words open to those “who in mortal combat” with their own human weakness have consciously been adequately defeated to be able to hear I am saying.

I was leading a group on spiritual maintenance today. There was the usual reluctance to what I am sharing about “choice”. And one lady spoke up. I have known her for many years -- she is normally very quiet and shy, and I know how struggle intensely with her humanness and spirituality, including the painful death of an alcoholic son recently. And what she said to others very passionately, from the depths of her soul was, “you may have choices, but you can’t speak for the rest of us!” She had done everything she could for her son and he died of his disease. And she still hurts – and she does not have a choice whether to hurt or be sad or not – separate from her conscious contact with her God.

Can We Be Reasonable?

The logic of this subject seems to include:
1. If we had a choice to be happy or not, we would never be unhappy, sad, depressed, angry or frightened. Why would we choose to hurt?
2. It is not hard for us to be happy, it is impossible – alone.
3. If we could choose to be happy, and we are not, we are “choosing” to do something “evil”. “To those who know how to do good, and doeth it not, to them it is sin.” (The Bible) We are left with rejection, judgment, and shame – because we could be happy, but we have supposedly chosen not to do so.
4. An electrical appliance – for example, a computer – may have all the necessary parts and wiring, but if it is not plugged into a power source, it will not operate. The same is true of us – in my experience.

Where Does Spirituality Begin?

In my experience, the Twelve Steps of AA and Alanon is the only set of spiritual principles that has the First Step – “We admitted we were powerless – that our lives had become unmanageable.” Every other system seems to hold people accountable, before they have been restored or reconnected to conscious Presence with their God.

All of us are doing and have done the very best we could, in every situation and circumstance, since we were born. We are not bad – we are wounded and sick. We would never deliberately choose “to act out of meanness, self-centeredness, or self-pity” because it would hurt us – like slamming our fingers in a car door.

Grief and Loss

Some of the major life losses we have experienced have come from our belief that we had “choices” and made the wrong decisions – causing seemingly irreparable damage and harm. We have lost major parts of ourselves as a result.

I am only sharing from my own experience, strength and hope, the suggestion that we consciously note the dangers of meditations and inspirations that state or claim that we have choices. Without the conscious connection I have with my God today, I would be continuing – helplessly – to perceive, feel, and act in harmful ways – without hope. Today, my life is continuing to become a better and better place – with my God, with my self, and with other human beings.

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Step Nine -- Changing Memories from the Past -- Daily Inspirations: Part Two

Step Eight: We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. Step Nine: We made direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others.

Please consider reading the prior article on Step Eight, before reading this article. Click here: Step Eight -- Changing Memories from the Past -- Daily Inspirations: Part One

Grief and Loss

When we harmed others, we wounded ourselves, and experienced painful losses of our selves in the losses of our closeness with others. “Harm” – in any form – rips us away from essential emotional connections to others, our God, and to ourselves. Steps Eight and Nine are about identifying our losses, and participating in a healing treatment of amending our memories and past experiences -- unconditionally forgiving our selves of our harms – through improving conscious contact with our God. Spiritual principles – principles of healing higher Presence – give us the intimate means to relive and re-experience our pasts-- and have different “outcomes”. Life can become a better and better place as we live by our God’s loving redesign.

In Step Eight, we make a list of all the persons we believe we may have harmed, evaluate the reality and level of the harm, determine what action could and needs to be taken to amend or change the situation, relationship, or memory, and become spiritually prepared with a steady and improving level of intimate conscious contact with our God In Step Nine, we take the identified action needed to forgive and release ourselves from the guilt and shame of perceived harms we have done to others.

Understanding the Nature of our Harms

In experiencing Step Nine, we need to remember the dynamics that are involved in our illness, and in our harm of others:

1. As a result of others emotional injuries and/or illnesses, others abandoned and abused us – two major forms of emotional separation.

2. In this emotional separation -- abandonment and abuse, we became injured and ill as well. Our injuries and illnesses were caused and perpetuated by our brain’s reactive constriction of emotional energies.

3. In our injury and illness, we abandoned and abused others – with our thoughts, words, and/or actions. We “harmed” others.

4. Abandonment is where we withdrew our attention, care, and presence (conscious contact) from others – separation – frequently with passive indifference and inability to share our experiences with others.

5. Abuse occurred when we actively pushed others away with the force of our anger, rage, and overall negative energy – whether in attitude, actions or words. Typically this abusive and separative “harm” involved exaggerating circumstances to the point of damaging the living human flesh that connected others to us. I remember taking situations that were level two or three in actual problem level, and making them rageful “tens”.

6. Abandonment and abuse are about our primitive brains trying to protect us from the ultimate death – separation from persons we are emotionally connected to. Abandonment harms by an internalized constriction of emotional energies, and abuse harms by an externalized discharge of constricted and forceful energy. Separation in either or both forms is an ongoing pattern of harmful perceptions, reactions, and actions that have been programmed into our instinctual brains, forming our ego, our guardian and protector self. I am not a programmer. But my God is.

Definition of “Amends”

“Amends” means to change something about the harm. Ultimately the change we need is self-forgiveness – much more so than the forgiveness of others. And our God holds nothing against us, so we only need to be able to accept their unconditional loving care. The Serenity Prayer says, “God grant me the courage to change the things I can.” But this follows the more important request, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” We will attempt to change or “amend” the things we can, hopefully with the needed level of conscious contact – higher Presence – with our God that allows us to forgive ourselves in the process, and not be dependent on external outcomes.

Four Levels of Amends

In my experience, there are four levels of amends and change involved in this step. It is important to note that “direct” here, in my experience, means with conscious contact (with God, ourselves, and others) and with actual action in some form. The specific level or levels of amends needed will be determined by our level of pain – guilt and shame – attached to the harmful event:

1. Direct awareness, acceptance, admittance, and experience of how we have harmed others.

2. Directly practicing spiritual principles – conscious contact with God – with every perceived harm.

3. Direct and active presence (conscious contact) with others in the forms of kindness, generosity, courtesy, honesty, and empathy – the opposite of separation.

4. Direct addressing, as appropriate, of our harms with the others we have harmed, offering remorse, concern, repayment for losses, and/or restoring of personal contact and presence,

In my experience, we are not “ready” to make amends until we have admitted and reviewed our harms list and the specifics of our potential or planned amends –changes -- to a spiritual sponsor, .

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I Am Afraid of the Pain -- Dealing with Grief and Loss

A friend wrote this comment on Facebook:

I have to go to bed. Why can't I act like a normal human being and go to bed at night? I know. I've had PTSD since my surgery. I'm afraid to go to sleep; afraid of the pain that will be there when I wake up.

My personal experience is that “trauma” is anything separates me from conscious contact with God, with myself, and with others. This loss of conscious contact – separation – separates my conscious cognitive reasoning and decision making abilities from my impulse driven primitive brain, and I am either unconscious and numb, or conscious and overwhelmed by waves of pain, fear, and horrible loneliness.

For me, there are “answers” which my cognitive brain can know and understand, but these answers are not solutions which can heal my woundedness and relieve my pain and fear. In my experience, the trauma was the loss of conscious contact by pain and fear, and the solution is a spiritual process of improving my conscious contact with my God, with myself, and with others.

Spirituality, for me, is about my conscious experience of intimate relations with my conscious Higher Power’s Presence.

In separation – trauma – my brain constricts neural energy in order to try to control the pain, and ends up creating an ongoing illness which inflicts more pain and fear – separation – even when the trauma is less or no longer occurring. For me, the following has become my daily, moment to moment process of dealing with post trauma and chronic separation:
1. Experience and admit my powerlessness over the pain and fear, and their causes. This, for me, is an improvement in conscious contact with myself, with the beginning of a conscious experience that I am not expected to – nor could I when I tried – control my perceptions, reactions, actions, and the outcomes of my life experiences.
2. Connect with a Presence greater than myself. “Abandonment”, separation, loss of conscious contact was ultimately the actual trauma. So the solution, treatment, medication for the “illness” is a restoring of conscious contact – intimately, personally and consciously. The major way that I have been able to do this is by self disclosing –expressing -- my pain and fear to others who have experienced and/or are consciously experiencing similar trauma, separation, and their results. Where two or more are “gathered” together in conscious contact with themselves, God will appear – intimately and personally – as an unseen but infinitely powerful Presence that can soothe our pain and restore healthy connection to the separation within our brains – and relationships.
3. Based on the Presence I have begun to experience, take actions of trust and confidence in my God. I was taught, “if you believed that your God were healing your life and taking away your pain, what would you be doing right now?” At times, it was as simple as taking conscious deep breaths. Other times it was giving a smile or a nod, or a listening ear to someone else. Other times it was having fun, or finding something humorous to enjoy.

I believe, from my experience, that you cannot change your situation and pain with thought, knowledge, or understanding. But I believe that there is hope – because you – we -- are Never Alone.

Where two or more come together in conscious powerlessness, God is allowed to consciously appear – to be intimately Present – and “things” change. Maybe you have been given this opportunity as a spiritual means of becoming even more than your have ever been. Experience and Presence will tell.

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Rememberings and Daily Inspirations

Friday morning, I was sitting in the ICU waiting room at Baptist East Hospital. I had just driven back from Lexington to Louisville because doctors believed that my daughter may have experienced a stroke and/or seizure, and might be paralyzed on her right side. She had given birth to a beautiful little girl just two weeks before, and Thursday morning she had begun having a major hemorrhaging. They did a DNZ Thursday, and had given her two pints of blood. But something happened while she was recovering in her hospital room, and she was rushed to ICU. Billy had called me in Lexington at about 12:30 in the morning, and I drove back, while calling family members – Billy’s cell phone was going out. The situation sounded and felt majorly out of control – people were sobbing in fear – and it had been five years this very night since Liz died.

I am sitting here in the ICU waiting room watching the clock – listening to other voices around me – and remembering -- 2:15 – 2:20 – 2:30 – that’s when I had realized – five years ago – lying beside Liz in her hospice bed – that she was gone. And I am sitting here – now -- fully awake – experiencing the humanness of my life and rememberings – wondering and amazed at the precision of my God’s planning and action.

There is a Plan. There are no accidents or coincidences – no mistakes. I have learned by experiencing their Presence that they are very much in control of what occurs – or what doesn’t occur. They have infinite unconditional love – and total consciousness of what is and could be. And in Their infinite love and wisdom, They direct our lives directly to what we would want, if we had Their level of knowledge and understanding.

I read a story, as a child, in a Sunday School commentary that has stuck with me my whole life. Obviously, I have had fluctuating levels of conscious experience of its truth, but it has seemingly always come back to me in painful situations.

The story is that a man saw an ant crawling on the ground looking for food. The man decided that he wanted to help the ant, so he dropped a piece of bread in the ant’s path. The bread startled the ant, and he ran off in the opposite direction. So the man got down on his knees, and using his hand, he blocked the ant’s path, gradually turning him until he brought the ant back to the bread.

I experience my God’s Presence in this way. Nothing happens in Their world by mistake. Acceptance – the conscious experience of their lovingness – is the ultimate solution to all my”problems”. My “problems” are my human, limited, and wounded perceptions and reactions. When I consciously experience their love, I become intuitively aware that all is ok – that I am being cared for, protected, and loved.

All of this reminds me how important “daily inspirations” – conscious inspirational experiences of my God’s Presence – are to my human experiences of life. I need to have a steady and consistent flow of Their Presence in order to remain comfortable – and conscious – to be able live my life within its own conditions and circumstances as clear and present acts of my God’s love and care.

Sunday: Dana is doing well now. Her temperature is down. She can use the right side of her body. She was able to have her baby – Nancy – stay with her and Billy last night at the hospital. She has received many gifts of presence from many loving family and friends. A very different outcome from five years ago.

And we go on. Grateful for life – and maybe for death – because we are maintaining our conscious intimate contact with our God through steady and strong “daily inspirations”.

Daily Inspirations Can Change Darkness into Spiritual EnLIGHTenment

Life is difficult – when it is conscious. In the absence of consciousness – without spiritual enlightenment –human beings live in a massive void of darkness, without it ever becoming a major life problem to be dealt with. Normally, one is born, lives 70-80 years, and never really experiences the darkness – unless something or someone in one’s life breaks the seal of the primitive brain, and opens the stored neural darkness to glimmers of light and conscious sensation.

Our Real Enemy
Our real enemy as human beings is not illness, poverty, bondage, or death—but consciousness. We can endure the worst of circumstances and even death – as long as we are not forced to do so consciously. And everything can be going exactly as we think we want it, externally, but if our level of consciousness is too high, we are of all people most miserable. So our brain resists and fights consciousness as if it is death. Actually the fear of death is the fear of consciousness – of ultimate conscious separation and abandonment.

Stay Away From the Light
The problem with consciousness – with the Light coming on inside -- is that it begins to expose the wretched separation and abandonment that is the real human condition on this material plane. We human beings live separated and alone – aching in the shame that something is terribly and horribly wrong with us, and that this is the reason we are so alone -- why no one is there – no one is there inside with us.

iWorld
As a result, our brains have closed our eyes to truth, and created an imaginary world, composed of imaginary people -- where we have a collection of alternating imaginary selves –masked selves – who participate in this imaginary world without having to experience the Darkness -- consciously.

“I Am Not Sick!”
There is a story told about Jesus talking to a group of religious intellectuals of his day. He said to them, “those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” For years I puzzled his statement. Spiritually, these intellectuals were some of the “sickest” people of the day. Then one day I experienced what he was saying: if a person does not consciously experience that they are sick – or in the Darkness – they have no need for help – or the Light – no matter how sick or how dark their lives are.

The fortunate -- or unfortunate -- few have had some major life event or series of events that shoves them into consciousness of the Darkness – and they have been blinded by the initial light of human consciousness. The result is major conscious bearing pain and fear.

So when this happens, what can we do? How do we learn to live in Light?

Connect with the Light of Presence
Darkness involves our brains blocking out parts of the neural network in order to avoid conscious experience of the absence of higher Presence and of the incredible separation and alienation from ourselves and from others.

First light begins when human life experiences expose these dark areas of the brain to light – human conscious awareness. If higher Presence is not also accessed, the brain will reassert darkness, and the human conscious awareness will fade back into the dark abyss.

Sustained Light begins with the insertion of an emerging spiritual experience of higher Presence, which most frequently begins with the experience, strength, and hope of others. So to begin we need to connect with others, specifically through the experience of daily inspirations. We need to connect with the Light of Presence.

Openings
Daily inspirations are others’ expressed experiences of the Light that has entered and influenced their lives. These expressions are openings for receiving spiritual enlightenment that reconnects us with the Light. I believe that sometimes these expressions were conscious experiences for the author, and sometimes they were expressed in unconsciousness. Ultimately, what I hear and experience is more important than what was said – or meant.

These openings – daily inspirations -- include inspiring life quotes, inspirational readings, spiritual coaching, and the stories and sharings by others of spiritual principles -- their application of spiritual enlightenment.

Connecting with the Light of Presence means to collect and regularly experience those daily inspirations --spiritual openings and resources -- that bring spiritual enlightenment and Presence into our Darkness on a regular basis.

The Light of Presence reveals and heals the Darkness of the past and present – creating openings and opportunities for spiritual enlightenments and a Better Life by Higher Design.

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Elizabeth Wass -- Becoming Acquainted With Grief

Today, January 26, 2010, Liz would have been 52 years old. Today marks the beginning of her final hours.

Five years ago today, we celebrated her 47th birthday at the hospital – 24 hours later she went into a coma induced by the level of pain medication she had to have. The next day, Friday, she was moved to hospice.

Around 2:30 Saturday morning, she went home.

This loss became for me the defining grief experience of my life: the nearly eight years of periodic illness and treatments, and then the final two horrendous years – the pain, the surgeries, and the struggle to survive the inevitable.

I would like to remember this with you as my way of beginning my sharing about grieving and regaining our lost selves. This is my experience, strength, and hope – not my knowledge, intellect, and understanding. It is personal – and it is emotional – and it is healing. To avoid the inevitable pain is to lose so many beautiful parts of our selves. To live and love is to become the best versions of our selves – and it’s definitely worth the price of grief.

Will Wass