Nothing Like A Family Trip To The Rim To Help Heal A Wounded Heart!

https://youtu.be/Dee7vh9F_4g?list=PLbdYd52Yo5TrOUlpZemI_OH9PTzZRS0Hu

The Youngest Have The Most Power

Feel All The Feels

You're invited to celebrate Unhappy Hour. It's a ceremony that gives you a poetic license to rant and whine and howl and sob about everything that hurts you and makes you feel bad.

During this perverse grace period, there's no need for you to be inhibited as you unleash your tortured squalls. You don't have to tone down the extremity of your desolate clamors. Unhappy Hour is a ritually consecrated excursion devoted to the full disclosure of your primal clash and jangle.

Here's the catch: It's brief. It's concise. It's crisp. You dive into your darkness for no more than 60 minutes, then climb back out, free and clear. It's called Unhappy Hour, not Unhappy Day or Unhappy Week or Unhappy Year.

Do you have the cheeky temerity to drench yourself in your paroxysmal alienation from life? Unhappy Hour invites you to plunge in and surrender. It dares you to scurry and squirm all the way down to the bottom of your pain, break through the bottom of your pain, and fall down flailing in the soggy, searing abyss, yelping and cringing and wallowing.

That's where you let your pain tell you every story it has to tell you. You let your pain teach you every lesson it has to teach you.

But then it's over. The ritual ordeal is complete. And your pain has to take a vacation until the next Unhappy Hour, which isn't until next week sometime, or maybe next month.

You see the way the game works? Between this Unhappy Hour and the next one, your pain has to shut up. It's not allowed to creep and seep all over everything, staining the flow of your daily life. It doesn't have free reign to infect you whenever it's itching for more power.

Your pain gets its succinct blast of glory, its resplendent climax, but leaves you alone the rest of the time.

If performed regularly, Unhappy Hour serves as an exorcism that empties you of psychic toxins, while at the same time -- miracle of miracles -- it helps you squeeze every last drop of blessed catharsis out of those psychic toxins.

Pronoia will then be able to flourish as you luxuriate more frequently in rosy moods and broad-minded visions. You'll develop a knack for cultivating smart joy and cagey optimism as your normal states of mind.

Our First Phoenix Death Cafe

Our first Phoenix Death Cafe Sunday afternoon was fascinating. 14 people showed up! Everyone participated. People were genuine. Open. Self disclosing. Sisters who had just lost their Dad we’re also dealing with their Mom’s memory loss. One dear gal who’d lost her mentor bravely admitted to drinking everyday to get through her grief and shock. No one tried to fix or rescue anyone. One dear man talked about his fixation with what happens after last breath... it was fresh, wild, rewarding. Jan and I are very pleased and look forward to hosting another Death Cafe soon.

On This Day Rumi

ZERO CIRCLE

Be helpless, dumbfounded,

Unable to say yes or no.

Then a stretcher will come from grace

to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.

If we say we can, we’re lying.

If we say No, we don’t see it,

That No will behead us

And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,

Beside ourselves, and only that, so

Miraculous beings come running to help.

Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,

We shall be saying finally,

With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.

When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,

We shall be a mighty kindness.

Long Awaited Vacation - The Light and The Shadow, So Like Life Itself

End of Life Doula

In July I had the privilege of taking the End of Life Doula Training in Vancouver BC. Henry Fersko-Weiss, the founder of The International End of Life Doula Association (INEDLA) was my teacher. Henry is this work. His teaching style was compelling - a perfect balance of lecturing often in the form of storytelling and experiential exercises. His curriculum was profound - brilliant and expansive.

Inelda's End of Life Doula training contains a three phase model.

The first phase involves summing up and planning. In this phase we facilitate the exploration of meaning in order to help the dying person fully appreciate the richness of his or her life and its impact on others. Additionally we help the dying person take care of organizational details such as living wills etc., and deal with any regrets, guilt or unfinished business that remains troubling. Finally in this phase we help the dying person create his or her vigil which describes the space and interactions he or she wants during active dying. Vigils contain information about where this person wants to die, what sounds they want to hear or not hear, who they want to be there for last breath, whether or not touch is desired and if so what kind of touch, how they want to make the experience personal and if it is their wish, sacred, and what is wanted after last breath etc...

The second phase happens during active dying. During this time we quietly hold the space for all that came up in the summing up and planning phase for all present, and assist in respecting whatever is in the dying person's vigil. We are often asked to help the dying person by implementing the guided visualizations he or she created during phase one. We support all the loved ones emotionally and physically, providing respite to exhausted family members. Often we offer to stay present even in the hours after the dying person's last breath.

In the third phase we help family members and loved ones navigate the transition from life to death by assisting survivors in reprocessing the death experience. Because the lives of all the survivors will always be altered by the death of their loved one, and time is simply not enough to create healing, we normalize the grieving process and assist them in moving through their early grief process.

 Erik Erickson, the famous developmental psychologist, identified different developmental challenges across the human life span. The last developmental period he called "Ego Integrity versus Despair" which he saw as occurring during old age as the person quite naturally reflected upon his or her entire life span, reviewed its successes and failures and arrived at wisdom that would then be passed on to future generations.

Over thousands of years in uncountable numbers of indigenous cultures, people have used The Medicine Wheel as a symbolic mirror into which they can look and see things about themselves and their relationships to life that are not ordinarily visible. The Medicine Wheel represents the "circle of life" which has no beginning and no end. On this sacred circle everyone is interconnected. Each person sitting in the circle is equal distance from the center and therefore fully equal. The honor of one is the honor of all. The pain of one is the pain of all. The wheel is made up of the four aspects of the human. Although there are many variations in the teachings, the one I was blessed to learn says that every human who has ever be born or will ever be born is made up of these same four aspects: The Mental in the North, The Physical in the West, The Spiritual in the East and The Emotional in the South.

The East which stands for "spirit" is where we are born and where we live as children. The South which stands for "innocence" is where we grow through adolescence into young adulthood. The West which stands for "introspection" is where we live as adults. The North which stands for "wisdom" is where we are in old age. The elders ("Ego Integrity versus Despair") sit on the North of the Wheel of Life.

As end of life doulas, we believe regardless of age, that when a person has a terminal diagnosis and faces the end of life, he or she automatically enter this developmental phase and faces the challenge of seeing life either as a predominantly positive experience or an experience filled with negative events and failures that lead to a sense of despair.

This is my first of many blog posts about end of life doula work. Should any of you who are reading my first post want to discuss the role of end of life doulas, please don't hesitate to contact me.

With Love,
Ilene

When Death Comes        ~  Mary Oliver

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth

tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.