Ellen's book will strengthen and guide you in your role as caregiver to an elder parent or relative, and help you understand your own physical, emotional, mental & spiritual needs.Now available at
Ellen’s World Category
I invite you to listen to and purchase the first digital EP, called The Ripple Effect, by instrumentalist and singer Lara MatiatioN, a family friend. Lara’s beautiful soulful music is inspired by the events of her life and influenced by the early death of her sister and the close relationship they shared. This moving music has a depth to it that speaks to us at a heart level and expresses a wisdom beyond Lara’s years.
Please help support original and local Vancouver music!
Thanks!
GET YOUR COPY OF RIPPLE EFFECT EP
Follow MatiatioN on Twitter at MatiatioNmusic!
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http://www.facebook.com/matiationmusic
It’s not always easy to live from our heart centre. It takes more time, in some ways it feels like more work. We have to stop and check in with ourselves more often to see if what we’re thinking and saying is congruent with our spiritual beliefs and our ethics – with the way we want to live in the world and how we want to see the world around us.
Our ethics and values, our beliefs about what’s right and what’s wrong reside within us. We all have a philosophy about how we want our world to be like. It may be well-formed or just a few vague ideas.
Many of us see spirituality as ephemeral, separate from our daily life in the physical world. An invisible chasm separates our spiritual concepts and our daily lives and we don’t always connect the dots between our bodies, minds and spirits. We all have ways to reconnect though, to get back to our heart centre – through walks in nature, through our pets, our close relationships, through meditation, prayer.
Whether we call it a spiritual philosophy, or an ethical way of living, many of us now believe that we are all connected, that what each one of us does in our community affects the whole. If we hold strong to this and take our body, our mind and our spirit out into the world each day we can all pull together for the good of the communities we live in.
I enjoy reading a wide variety of books, as you yourself probably do . They reflect my interests and are also a way for me to unwind, to visit another world for awhile.
Here are the books and authors that have attracted me recently:
- Lorne Ladner’s The Lost Art of Compassion. To me this book could be a primer for life, both personally & as a therapist. Dr. Ladner’s deep understanding of western psychology & his years as a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner allow him to weave the two together in a “user friendly” form that’s easy to read & to understand.
- The Heartmath Solution by Doc Childre & Howard Martin is a concept I’ve come across repeatedly over the past couple of years & I finally bought a copy for myself. The heart has an intelligence of its own, & when we tap into that we can use it to calm our nervous systems, slow down our heartrate, etc., resulting not only in less stressful lives, but deeper heart connections with others (& ourselves to I believe).
- For my “get aways” I’ve been re-reading & discovering some of Maeve Binchy’s engaging stories about ordinary, mostly Irish folks. My favourites are Scarlet Feather & Quentins.
Let us know what books speak to you.
Change is the name of the game for many of us of late. My personal process is eclectic as always, ranging from formal meditation, to the occasional Church visit, to psychic readings from friends (I seem to know quite a few psychics, interestingly).
My intuition is increasing as time goes on, as is yours, I’m sure. I’m working on tuning into it more and following the subtle guidance given to me by my internal self. I do find the key to moving through this chaotic time is to to continually ask myself, “What now, what’s the next step?…today, this year, this very moment.”
I find the occasionaly psychic reading validates what I’m already sensing and planning, and adds ideas to my projects. This week an old friend read for me, and oddly (to both of us), said I was too detached from material things!! She/they reminded me the importance of having a goal, visualizing it, and fleshing it out with as much detail as possible, even including writing a cheque to yourself (I’ve not done that before, but have heard of it).
If I give it the time and space, the answers always come. Sometimes I know I’m meant to do nothing, to simply breathe, to walk by the water, at other times creative inklings come to me, plans for the present and the future. For example, the facebook group I started a few weeks ago, Surviving & Thriving as a Caregiver, has been a joy to me; the response of the women and the interactions available on facebook are fun. In the fall an in-person support group will spin off from this group. Other plans for the fall, after months of quietness and “holding the space”, are volunteer coaching work with people with chronic and persistent mental illness, beginning Indian singing lessons and possible other volunteer projects along with my coaching work.
Everything happens at the right time; we’ve heard that over and over, but that’s a hard one to surrender to. Now after my changes of the past year and a half, in my work and my personal life (death of two people close to our family), I’m ready to move forward in different ways.
I began preparing myself for my mother’s departure a long time ago, even before she came to live in our community so that we could support her. Occasional dreams appeared in which I or we, (my partner and daughter) had to save my Mom; in those dreams she was called “Little Mommy”. Often water would be involved, perhaps she would fall off a dock and we would pull her out of the water. The dreams became even more prophetic before our last trip to India in the fall of 2009 when I dreamed that she disappeared from our bed where she was resting, leaving a pile of garments, only to reappear on a small bed in the same room as a baby, then the baby also disappeared, leaving behind red satin garments. That profound dream reminded me of the expression “dust to dust, ashes to ashes” because she was returning to a younger form of herself.
My mother left us in the early morning hours of April 13th; when she heard I was on my way her face changed, her nurse Ray said, and she went. I believe she then felt safe and comforted enough to let go. It was also clear that energetically I was there with her. Elizabeth Kubler Ross says that whoever is supposed to be there when a person dies is present in the room, even if they are not there physically, and I feel this was very much the case. (Most loved ones seem to die when their family is not in the room, from what friends and nurses at Totem Lodge have told me).
Our Celebration of Glenys’ life, held on a sunny, hot Saturday afternoon in our home, was joyful and uplifting. It was a simple gathering of friends and family, a reading of e-mails from family and colleagues in Toronto, some storytelling by myself and others who were present, followed by a toast to our Mom and a sharing of food. I believe it reflected the joyful, social person she was, for the most part. Everyone enjoyed the afternoon, and the next day I imagined Mom “looking down” (a reflection of my childhood Christian upbringing I suppose), clapping her hands and joyfully telling the family and friends with her, “They’re having a party for me”!
It’s been about two months since Mom left us, and the process goes on. Recently I had two dreams that reflect how I’m integrating her passing into who I am, and into my life. They also represent the circle of life, and the circle of mothers and daughters. When I did a vision board a few weeks ago, (pictures and words on posterboard), I hadn’t planned to, but began it with pictures of my mother and myself, and my daughter and myself, and used phrases such as “full circle” and “strength” and “open arms”.
My first dream, just a dream fragment, had a very young girl, hardly more than a baby, being thrown, more than once, to the curb of a road. For some reason she was not a three dimensional girl, she was rather flat, but in dreams unusual symbols appear. I motioned to my partner to pick up bits of her clothing, and I gently and lovingly picked her up and held her to my heart. This girl was a part of me, a wounded, or perhaps a grieving part, and I reclaimed her into myself as I dreamed. (Remember, although there are many helpful ways to interpret dreams, the final word is our own, we are the expert on our dreams).
The second dream, a bit longer, took place in a care home, but not the one my Mom lived in. The home and the staff seemed rather generic, and were unknown to me, totally unlike the Totem experience. In the dream my mother was dying, but then she turned around and improved, in fact to the point where she could speak again (she hadn’t really spoken for a long time). She was going to be sent to the hospital, but then I got the idea of “taking her home” for her last few days. The home wasn’t my current one, however, it was our family home on Lawrence Avenue in Toronto. I was helping her go home. There’s the full circle again.
During Mom’s last week, we all helped her go home, with our visits, our music, and most importantly, our love. Also, and this will no doubt sound weird to some of you, for several weeks before Mom became ill, I craved a pair of large, white, feathery wings to put on – not to worry, they were only going to be worn around the house! (You need to know that I have been enamoured of huge white wings for many years, ever since I saw the several part movie on television called “Mr. Pim” about a man in a small village in England who began to grow beautiful wings.) Anyway, as soon as Mom became terminally ill, my desire – my need? for wings disappeared. Again, I think it was a symbolic way of me helping her go home.
How the future will unfold as I find my new place in the world, I cannot predict. As I said to my brother last week after we left the lawyer’s, “It’s the end of an era”. He agreed.
