Thank you for praying for:

Jim Fletcher, Columbus, GA

Kenneth Garcia, Atlanta, GA, his family and friends

John Voelpel, Tampa General Hospital, Tampa, FL

Newborn Raymond Riley Ayers and family, Snellville,GA

Loyd and Katherine Echols, Rayle, GA

Tricia Heliker, St. Louis, MO

Judy Dixon and her family, Panama City, Panama

Phil Harrison, Woodstock, GA

Fred Zluck, Palm Harbor, FL

Patrick Hausske and Simona Preizler

James Moran, Emory Hospital, Atlanta, GA

Dr. Larry Strong, Wellington, FL

Roland Stebbins, Marietta, GA; and his daughter Annie, Fort Collins, CO in CA

Sandie Nicholson, Athens, GA

Brandon Wood, 9, Lawrenceville, GA

Darrell and Alissa Wood, Monroe, GA

Dori Pfender, Buford, GA

Genni Gibbon, Lawrenceville, GA

Gentle rains in the Southeast

Prayer results:
Thank you so much for your healing energy prayers for Margot Terry, she is back home, and confident that she will do well. Blessings

Ruthie Vail has had her heart blockage studied and the Dr. found he could treat this medically with RX. She is doing much better. Thanks to all healers!

From: Shepherd Hoodwin [sgh@summerjoy.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2008 1:17 AM
Subject: Grieving

I wrote this piece in response to a discussion on the Michael Teachings Yahoo group. ***

As big a fan as I am of growing through joy rather than pain, as Michael puts it, each of us will experience the death of loved ones, and it will hurt like hell (unless we die first, in which case others will hurt like hell). And there can be much growth from the experience. Hey, I didn't make the rules. I just work here.

Lest some assume that grieving is merely emotional indulgence, a human foible: there is a real energetic component to it. In any relationship, an energetic bond develops. When someone close to us dies, that bond is ripped, and we have to reconfigure that connection: it's no longer body/soul to body/soul-- it's now body/soul to just soul. This adjustment is basically what grieving is. It's a natural process, but many things can stand in its way. In dealing with them, we grow. We're discussing grieving physical death here, but grieving, say, the death of a relationship or any other loss involves a similar upheaval and reconfiguration.

Brandon Bays, the author of "The Journey," believes that grieving can be completed in a week if one feels it fully, staying in and processing the experience. Some cultures have traditions of public wailing and other physical manifestations of grief; that is much healthier than our culture's belief in holding it all together, and moves people through the stages of grief far more quickly. However, that may not be entirely necessary--it is awareness that moves energy and brings healing; physicalizing it may just make awareness more tangible. The point is to learn to be with our feelings rather than trying to override them with what we think we should feel; to be authentic; to try to bring all parts of Self onto the same page in a compassionate way. When grieving is "clean," without complications such as guilt, regret, unfinished business, etc., it can burn intensely and even sweetly, and then be done. However, being human, there often *are* complications, and we need to deal with them if we are to complete our grieving.

My mother died when I was eight. It was devastating, the defining event of my life. I've worked a great deal on healing and letting go, but the tear in the fabric of my soul isn't even now entirely healed (although it's close).

A movie depicting the death of a mother or something that reminds me of that can still quickly get me sobbing, which actually feels good to me, although I prefer to do it in private. Before she died, she recorded herself singing a lullaby--an amazing gift; for years, I could not hear it without sobbing, but now I can, which tells me that I've healed a lot. I had a vivid vision of her five months after she died (I think Michael was with her), and I've had free communication with her for over twenty years. I've had the intellectual understanding that the soul is eternal since my teens. All that's enormously helpful, but our "inner child" isn't instantly healed no matter what we know; it's on its own clock.

What has delayed a full healing are all the related issues that the entire experience brought up for me. Experiencing her death in this way was a karmic payback for me, so it was especially charged. Beyond the obvious trauma of losing a parent, it brought up the unresolved inner conflicts from the past life when I formed the karma (and was tortured and murdered by the Church--I hate it when that happens). In addition, my parents had just divorced, and my brothers and I went to live with my father and a prototypical "wicked witch" step-mother who didn't want us. (She used to say to me, "I'll get you, my pretty! and your little dog, too!" The funny thing was, it was *her* dog. I didn't even like dogs. At least, she thought I was pretty.)

Had I just been dealing with her death, I probably would have grieved and then been able to move on much more quickly. Clearly, this experience for me was the impetus for a great deal of growth, something no personality would deliberately sign up for, but, obviously, essence looks at it differently. And if it could have been different, it would have been; we all mostly make the choices we know how to make at the time. In any case, I sought healing early on in this life, which led me to where I am now. Had I not been broken in that past life and re-broken by my mother's death, I would not have had the need to plumb the depths to fix the breaks.

This is simplistic, but we can chart a repeating pattern over all our lifetimes:
1) We start out whole (at least insofar as the surface our soul is showing in that lifetime, the aspect of self we're dealing with).
2) We encounter a stress we are not equipped to handle, which "blows our circuits" and breaks us.
3) We seek the understanding and experiences that will equip us to handle something similar in the future.
4) We gradually heal, becoming stronger and more evolved.
5) We are whole at a more sophisticated level.
6) Repeat.

If you know someone who seems pretty happy and untroubled, she is probably at step 1 or 5. The rest of us are in between. It's a mistake to assume that someone who is a mess is less evolved that someone who is in equilibrium. It's just different places in the repeating cycle.

The new paradigm of "growing through joy" rather than pain is becoming more real to some of us, but most of us have rarely known how to choose that thus far. Even today, I initiate many of my most interesting inner explorations because I'm searching for a truth to set me free from a pain or discomfort. If things are okay, I am more likely to just go about my life (which is fine, too--we need time to regroup).

Nancy M. mentioned wallowing in grief. My mother's mother was an obvious example of that. She cried every day for ten years after my mother's death, but never got any closer to healing. As a teen, she had starved through WWI in Warsaw and saw people dying in the streets. Then, she lost most of her family, including her beloved only sibling, in the Holocaust. She had already lost some of her sanity and could not bear the loss of her only daughter, who was supposed to live the perfect life that had been denied her. That was obviously a very difficult life, for anyone but especially for a delicate mature artisan. It's sobering to realize how many people in the world even today live lives this painful or worse. I don't believe that the fact that others have it worse invalidates one's own pain, but it does add a perspective. Here I am writing this post, and there are billions of people in the world who don't even have high-speed internet access.

With my grandmother, there was a disconnect to her grief; it didn't come from the depths of her heart, but more from a weeping sore on the surface. She had a chief feature (obstacle) of martyrdom, and much self- pity. In martyrdom, you give yourself brownie points for having suffered, so there isn't much incentive to let go of your suffering.

I knew that I didn't want to wallow--I was aware that the goal of healing was to let go--yet that didn't entirely stop me from doing it. I still do my fair share of wallowing, as well as mulling and over-thinking. A few weeks ago, an acupuncturist I see once in a while told me that he could tell from my demeanor that I think too much. Interestingly, I'd just been thinking about that a lot.

Anyway, about twenty years ago, after a good amount of therapeutic deep emotional release, I was working with a new practitioner and started again sobbing when we got to the mother stuff. I had always thought that that was a good sign, indicating that I was going deep and releasing. However, the practitioner stopped me and said that I was on a tape loop, going over the same territory--I needed to go deeper and really let go; otherwise, it was just emotional masturbation. I don't know how he knew that, but it was an important insight for me.

Why was I still holding on? I didn't get much attention as a child (and, God knows, I'm a sage-cast sage with a sage essence twin and sage overleaves); was this a way to get attention in the form of sympathy? Did I get brownie points for having endured a miserable childhood? Did I feel that I needed to hold onto my mother because no one else loved me and no one ever would? Did I get a payoff from feeling sorry for myself? Could I excuse my failures and self- involvement because of my losses? All of the above, to some extent.

The bond between parent and child is necessarily the most powerful one, because without that energetic connection, children will not survive. When parents lose a child, it's understandable that they often feel guilty, since parents are responsible for their children before they come of age at what Michael calls the "third internal monad." With all troubling experiences, it's worthwhile to explore what we might have done differently, what mistakes may have been made. However, usually, objectively speaking, the death of a child is not the parents' fault. Even if a death was theoretically preventable ("I never should have let her go to that movie.") it's unreasonable to expect anyone to be perfect and to anticipate and prevent every possible freak occurrence. Yet people often cling to blaming themselves when a loved one dies because it seems better than facing the powerlessness of being a human: that there are some awful things that happen that we simply cannot control. When we are able to let go of trying to control the universe, we take a key step towards acceptance and surrender.

People often get angry at God when painful things happen. I clearly remember thinking after my mother died that God must not exist, because a loving God would never let such a thing occur. I assumed that this was an original thought. Now, it's obvious that I was reading from the same script as billions of others have before and since. It reveals a childish lack of understanding of how life works. How is God supposed to stop "bad" things from happening without shutting down free will? And how would we grow into co-creators if we didn't experience the results of our choices, the most notable being karma? I later spoke with a lovely Christian Scientist who'd been my mother's friend. She said, "God is like the sun. People can choose to close the blinds." A simple thought, but very helpful.

For me, it has been indispensable to know that each of us is eternal; that my mother and other loved ones are still present, albeit without a body; that death is not the end. Many of those who believe that death is the end must have to close down a lot to cope with this world. This knowledge doesn't eliminate grieving, but it does eventually make letting go easier.

Anything that stands in the way of our letting go, in any facet of life, is an important area of growth for us. The fact that holding on keeps us miserable and out of the present moment is an incentive to find our way to letting go, which may be the most difficult thing to do that there is. Letting go without giving up is the beginning of joy.

All the best,
Shepherd

1) New Moon in Aquarius by Lisa Dale Miller Link to Lisa's Website

2) What's Up on Planet Earth from Karen Bishop: Link to Karen's Website

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