Carol Henders...Living Day By Day in God's Grace: Not Afraid of Death...Just Dying

Carol Henders...Living Day By Day in God's Grace: Not Afraid of Death...Just Dying

Great post Carol would love to connect and chat about my view on death being an inspirational teacher as opposed to the common view of the grim reaper.

Stephen Garrett
www.embraceyourdeath.com

Carol Henders...Living Day By Day in God's Grace: Not Afraid of Death...Just Dying

Carol Henders...Living Day By Day in God's Grace: Not Afraid of Death...Just Dying

Check out: http://www.amazon.ca/When-Death-Speaks-Listen-Learn/dp/1460216253/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373672061&sr=8-1&keywords=When+Death+Speaks

Using Death to open fully to Life: A Hunter's perspective

Every life you encounter is precious, whether it be an animal or a human.

In your life if your diet includes any meat that came from a living animal; be conscious of what that animal may have gone through to provide nourishment for you and your family. If you are with an animal during its last moments, send it love and compassion as you would a dying friend. Allow the animal to become a mirror to your own life; reflecting back where there is fear, pain and suffering and how it is manifesting in our lives right now. Open to this, put yourself in the animal’s place and feel what it is like to be truly dying in that moment.

If you take an animal’s life, treat it with respect and reverence. This will help the animal spirit fully release from its body knowing that its purpose to provide food and continued life for other beings is complete. Death is not pretty, glorious or glamorous. That is not its purpose. Buddha once said that Death is his greatest teacher. Death is the motivation to seek the deathless aspects of ourselves, that part of us which cannot die. We can all live a fuller, richer life with the acceptance of our limited time on this earth, the acceptance that one day we are all going to be worm food just like an animal dying in front of you.

Whether you are hunting, fishing, slaughtering a farm animal or choosing a live lobster from a tank in a fancy restaurant, open to the suffering and pain of that animal, watch as the life force ebbs from its eyes and its heart beats slower and slower until it stops.

Why?

Not for some morbid reason or fascination of killing but to be conscious of how the cycle of life ends, to reflect on how we all will be in that exact same spot one day, drawing our last breath. Embrace your own mortality as it will be the key to living a freer life, knowing that all is taken care of and death is merely a doorway opening to the next stage of your journey.

Live your life full of love, openness and compassion for all things big and small. Open your heart to those creatures dying and allow whatever emotions that arise to just be as they are, without judgment, criticism or denial. It Is what it Is, Death is as part of life as being born. Look at these opportunities where Death enters your life to learn more about yourself, what closes you off, what aspects of your life are you in denial of?

These realizations came about in my life over the past few years, when faced with the death of my father. During that time I chose to remain open and practiced sending him love and compassion with all my heart. I opened to his sickness and to his death as a learning experience of how I can live my life with more openness and more love. Instead of denial, I accepted this was part of his journey and watched without judgment as Death brought out the best and the worst in him and the people around him, including myself. We are all these things, in his passing he became my teacher.

A couple of years ago on a hunting trip, after a wild emotional rollercoaster ride of a day, I shot a deer with my bow. As the deer was dying I knelt in front of it and poured my heart out with love and compassion while gently touching its forehead. I felt its struggle to live, to survive at all costs, Death was imminent and the fear it had became real for me in that moment.

One of my teachers calls this shape-shifting, a shamanic practice of placing your consciousness on another object, animal or being until you become that which you seek, feeling everything it does.

In that moment I had a realization of how I want to be treated at the time of my death. With that came the understanding I need to give to all beings what I am looking for; which is respect, love and compassion. I stayed there transfixed as if time stood still and felt this beautiful animal surrender completely to the inevitable, felt the release of spirit from the body like a wave being sucked back into the ocean. The wave being no more apart from the ocean than when it started, always it was one, a temporary expression of self that dissolves back into the whole from where it came. Stillness prevailed as I came back to my own awareness, staring at a once vibrant, alive being now simply an offering of nourishment and continued life for others. Again with this animal’s passing it became my teacher.

We are guaranteed very few things in life, we are all born into this world, we will have experiences of both pleasure and pain and we will all certainly die one day.

The question we need to ask ourselves is how can we truly live in the unknown time we've got left?

An old teacher of mine told me that awareness seemed to work in stages or levels. Like grades or more esotericaly- degrees.

At one level or degree of awareness, we see the universe as dualistic or polar. That all things comprise one pole of a set. Good for example is the polar opposite of evil. Light/dark, etc.

At another level of awareness we begin to notice that these sets really each only describe a single thing. All they are doing is defining the thing according to it's aspects of opposite. One pole relative to the other.

Once we learn new things, we can take that awareness with us to filter ALL of the things that we have learned previously and applying that filter come to even more awarenesses about the worlds/universes around us. To gain deeper understandings and knowledge.

Some awarenesses act as keys. All do in fact, it is just that some keys are a little more master (open a few more doors) than others.

Many of my teachers have been talking about keys of knowledge and embedded trip codes in text and transmissions that create subtle connections in our processes bringing realizations. I could know and hear these words but until I came to write the forgoing, I didn't really feel them. They are not very fancy but once noticed, a deeper understanding is possible. (to describe a physical sensation, my heart races a little and an inner energy builds, almost like shivers down my back)

An example of a key would be all of the pretty orange mushrooms with white dots that prevail in childrens' literature. Once we realize that these mushrooms open doorways to other worlds or universes, then the childhood tale does not seem like a tale at all but profound wisdom embedded with a wink and a nod to the great mystery.

So as we assimilate keys and trip codes and grow in awareness, we really begin to see the world as a better place. We see the negative poles become one with the positive ones in a dance of mystery and wonderment.

The interesting thing about Aspectics is that it works to process the differences between the poles and after a while the true oneness of all that becomes apparent.

It just came to me that Aspectics isn't the only way. H'Oponopono (cleans the space in between the poles), years of koan based meditations, and yoga too. (After all yoga means union (of the poles) into oneness. A system is a system but in these days of hurry up, hurry up systems can still bring us to and help hang on to the truth.

All my relations
Wayne

I am the Rain

Rain Drops
I feel the
             rain
                    drops
on my face.
They disappear
   into my pores.

I am the Rain.

Some interesting links.

These are links to Zivorad Slavinski's web site that are articles that may deepen our understanding of the processes that we have worked.


http://www.spiritual-technology.com/wp_spirit/?p=98 ( an article by a practitioner of Aspectics who has achieved great results)

http://www.spiritual-technology.com/wp_spirit/?p=71 ( an article by Zivorad on aspectics)

Here is the link to his homepage to explore the site at your leisure.

http://www.spiritual-technology.com/wp_spirit/

Blessings,

Wayne

So here I am Gentle Bear signing on to the monks without a church blog. I am excited to see how this grows and expands as we all share our experiences, realizations and thoughts on living from deeper truth, making choices consciously from that place and having tons of fun doing it all!

Rest in love and feeling much freer than ever before

Stephen aka Gentle Bear