I begin this blog with a post script from the last blog: Looking back on my religious/spiritual journey I realize that it is not a matter of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” I believe that there is goodness in every religion. At the heart of each is a belief in the importance of love, forgiveness, connection, community, joy, peace. At the same time, it seems to me, all religions have abused their power at one time or another, as when they slip into a mentality of right/wrong, good/bad, our god is the one true god and yours is not. This is the cause of many of the wars we have fought over the history of humankind. However, all religions, it seems to me, have a base of spirituality, a core that is beyond the physical realm, connected to but more than physical reality, what some call Allah, God, Spirit, Brahman, and Buddha Nature. It is this core of spirituality that is currently the essence of my beliefs about myself and life in general. And, it seems to me, this kind of spirituality – that All is created by Love, that the Universe Itself is created by Love, that the essence of life is Love and that Healing is a process of Love — this IS the “field of all possibilities.” The wisdom of A Course in Miracles and Attitudinal Healing teaches us that when we choose to view life as the play between love and fear, and then when we choose love, we let go of fear. As a result, our lives are better, healthier, happier, more connected with our true selves and each other.
Chapter 6 of A Year to Live like A Course in Miracles discusses the presence of fear in our lives. Fear of dying and fear of death is actually fear of living. It is the resistance to what is happening in the present moment that keeps us unconsciously in memories of the past and worries about the future. We attach to the fear and get stuck. In the brain the nervous system runs its usual pattern until we consciously change the course of the pattern by choosing love instead of fear. We learn to stay in the present moment with whatever is happening at that moment. Levine states, “Do not fear fear, soften that compulsive resistance.” ACIM teaches to choose love instead of fear and when we do this over and over again, we change to nerve pattern in the brain.
Levine teaches a process that he calls “soft-belly meditation,” a kind of meditation that focuses on the unconscious tightness of the abdominal muscles and consciously and intentionally letting go of that tension. As we soften the belly and relax, our minds also relax; we become quiet, retreat into silence; we are at peace. We are in the present moment of awareness, aware of the present moment. I first encountered this meditation during a weekend workshop I attended with Stephen and Ondrea Levine. I soon realized that I held my belly tight at all times; it is what I had been trained to do to maintain good posture and a slimmer, more lady-like pose. It was not easy to let go of that tightness and just let my belly be what it was – lax, un-lady-like. The instruction for the “soft-belly” meditation is in this chapter.
Many psychologists claim that fear of death is at the base of all mental/emotional difficulties. A lot of the people that I have met and talked to about these issues, often say “I am not afraid of death; I am afraid of dying.” They mean the actual process of dying. Most of us are willing to acknowledge that we are going to die someday, we just don’t know when or how. And most of us do not want to think or talk about it; we want to avoid thinking and talking about it. When we do talk about it, most of us say we want our dying to be easy, peaceful, maybe “in our sleep,” so that we don’t know it is happening. Wasn’t it Woodie Allen who said, “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens?” Most of us say we do not want pain or difficulty breathing or struggle. If we know we are dying, such as when we have received a terminal diagnosis, we want drugs and whatever else will keep us comfortable as we die. Sometimes we don’t want to acknowledge that we are dying; we want to resist that or deny that it is happening. Or we may decide to go through all manner of artificial methods to keep our bodies alive: tubes in and tubes out, expensive ineffective therapies, and long hospitalization.
I decided back in the late 1970s, after reading The Hospice Movement: A Better Way of Caring for the Dying, by Sandol Stoddard, that when it is my time to die, if at all possible, I want to know it and to choose a hospice program to help me stay comfortable, pain-free, and conscious. Since that time, I have been a volunteer for hospices wherever I lived. I have sat with many hospice patients as they approached their death, talked with them about it whenever they wanted to do that, and tried my best to help them accept their situation and prepare for a calm and peaceful moment of death. Some of the deaths I observed have been peaceful and that moment, the actual moment of death, felt sacred. One moment the person was breathing, and the next moment they were not. It seemed peaceful, a natural process, a continuation of something, an ending of this life and a beginning of something else. A mystery. Some patients struggled, resisting the process, even after we had spent hours talking about what it might be like, even when I thought they had come to terms with their own dying. They obviously were still feeling fear, or perhaps the fear arose in spite of their preparation. It was unsettling to sit with these patients, to see them, apparently, once again, dealing with fear. And there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it except stay with them, sit beside them and be present with their process. Was that fear of death or fear of dying? For myself, I hope for a peaceful process.
Some people say they want a sudden death, to be hit by a truck and not have to deal with the dying. And this does happen to lots of folks. Some of you know that my son chose to end his life, years ago, by driving a car at fast speed into a cement bridge support. He was killed instantly. And that was a time for me to learn how to deal with sudden death. Suicide is certainly the choice of lots of people and is very difficult to understand and deal with. I’m pretty sure it is not a peaceful death, although those who choose drug overdose for instance, seem to fall asleep, then coma, then gone. What happens to their mind’s awareness when this happens? We don’t know.
Levine teaches that learning how to be present at every moment is helpful. We can start this at any point in our lives. I have been working on it since the late 1970s. The most helpful method I have found is mindfulness meditation. The soft-belly meditation is a mindful meditation. In Chapter 7, Levine talks about another method for learning how to be present in each moment, which of course means not slipping back into past attachments, wounds and memories, back into fear. Here he talks about “noting,” which is another expression of mindfulness meditation.
Noting is the process of watching our thoughts and feelings and noting them by name in our minds. Am I having a physical sensation? Or a painful memory? Or feeling happy or sad? Each moment something is moving through my brain and mind and body. Naming it helps to welcome it, and then let it go. Levine suggests trying to count the number of changes. This identifies how quickly the mind changes. A thought comes, is here a moment, then fades away as another thought surfaces. Over and over again. He says the mind is in a state of constant flux. No thought or feeling lasts more than an instant before it is transformed into the next state, thought, or sensation. In this process we can learn to notice “fear” when it arises and deal with it in the moment, not allowing the past to create havoc in the present. This is another way to fine-tune our self-awareness. In meditation, we can go deeper and deeper into self-awareness, realizing the true self, pure awareness and universal consciousness.
That is what I want for myself and what I hope to accomplish by daily meditation practice and choosing love instead of fear throughout my life. That is what I want at my moment of death: peace, serenity, moving into the next great adventure whatever that is. May it be so.
Self-Inquiry Questions:
1. What conversations have you had with loved ones, friends, colleagues, regarding death and dying?
2. How does fear manifest in your life? Fear of dying? Fear of death?
3. If you could choose, how would you like to die when it is your time?
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