This alone is to be feared - the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of the spirit. The death of the body is to that, I think, a little thing. Winifred Holtby (1925)

Since there are so many creative writers out there, this time I am offering up a tongue-in-cheek idea about what might be in store for us when we die.
    
Imagine for a moment that the process of death is simply the mirror opposite of birth. Just as human families anticipate a new arrival, so too, do spirit families. About nine months, give or take a few weeks, the spirits that are going to be blessed with your death are informed. The immediate family and friends of the spirit couple are the first ones to be included in the wonderful news.

No spirit parents know exactly who they are deathing until the death is complete. During the nine months, there is a lot of speculation but when the death date arrives the spirit family is usually thrilled, whether it turns out to be a man or a woman.

 Actually, I think the death rate for men is currently higher than women, so there may still be a stronger preference for male deaths. There is some reports that there may be spirit regions that send newly deathed women back into birth almost immediately because women's deaths are not as valued, but that is another story.
    
It is common knowledge in the spirit world that some deaths are difficult, some quite easy, and the rest fall somewhere in-between. It is lucky that the spirits have the nine months to prepare because bringing a new death into the family creates a lot of change. Of course, it also brings an abundance of joy to the new deathing parents.
    
The death process is a profound mystery in the spirit world and it is also one of the primary joyful events of spirit life.
    
The prospect of birth however, is a whole other subject. Spirits don't like to talk about it, even though it is inevitable. It is a fact of death that everyone will be birthed at some time. The problem is no one knows when his or her birth will occur, or what circumstances will surround it.
    
Of course, there are stories.
    
There are accounts of near-birth experiences where the spirit vividly recalls entering into what seemed like a dark tunnel, heard loud rushing sounds, and saw a bright, blinding light shining at the end of a tunnel, as they were being pushed in waves towards it.
    
Though it simply wasn't their time to be birthed just yet, these experiences seem to give a new sense of spirit and positive hope to all who hear them.
    
When someone in the spirit family finally births, it is a tradition to hold a birthday gathering where spirit friends and family come together to console each other and tell fond stories about the birthed one and how much they were loved and will be missed.
    
Once of the great comforts is the belief that the birthed one will finally be reunited with all the family and friends who have been birthed before them. They will have no more struggles or suffering and will finally be at peace, reaping the rewards of a successful life after birth.
    
Much of the great spirit art depicts scenes of what life after birth offers. Vibrant landscapes, bright blue skies and beautiful earthy flesh-filled bodies abound. There are glorious visions of bodies eating, drinking, laughing, dancing and singing. What joy. Every spirit aspires to the hope that they too will be blessed with a full and rich birth life.
    
Why then is the fear of birth so rampant?
    
It is because of the stories. Bits and pieces of information filter through the spirit world about what can happen to those unfortunate souls that don't live a good spirit life.
    
There are tales of earthquakes, floods and devastating fires. There are detailed accounts of bodies that are starved, maimed and tortured. Diseases abound. There are reports of levels of hatred, violence and cruelty that are impossible to comprehend.
    
Spirits are cautioned that unless they live a good spirit life, they will be thrown into all manner of horrible experiences after birth.
    
There are many disciplines available to assist spirits to help prepare to earn a place in the Promised Land.
    
Some recommendations include the daily practice of the art of what is called chewing and swallowing, as a way to prepare the spirit for the body experience.
    
Another popular method is visualizing and imagining body parts that move in rhythmic order. This intricate practice requires that the devotee mock up a container that forms their spirit energy into a consistently repeated pattern that could eventually take up a solid amount of space.
    
Some spirits get so skilled in these practices that they almost seem to exist in two worlds. Some even state that they actually travel between the worlds of spirit and matter and can receive or channel information from spirits who have already been birthed.
    
Many practitioners of these methods claim that it enhances and positively serves them to help cope with the stresses of everyday spirit life.
    
Spirit researchers have begun to study the dynamics of density in earnest. It is reported that the natural realm of sixth sensing that is the everyday reality of the spirit world, is yielding new information that may help to understand the birth phenomenon.
    
So far, five new categories have surfaced and are tentatively named seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling. The field in which these five modalities exist seems to be sustained by a larger force referred to as breathing.
    
This research is still in its infancy. The quest to uncover the mystery of life after birth remains elusive.

Faith, hope and continued effort to lead a good, wholesome spirit life still remain the most common antidotes to the fear of the unknown of birth.

Susan McNeal Velasquez
Unleash The Power of Your Intuition Mentoring Seminars

BEYOND INTELLECT:Journey Into The Wisdom of Your Intuitive Mind - Available Now! Amazon.com - Keyword: Susan McNeal Velasquez
Go to: www.BEYONDINTELLECT.COM for more information

"The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting." - Fran Lebowitz - Social Studies (1977)

A Matched Set

Talking has decided to engage her partner, Listening, into a game of Ping-Pong. They volley for who will serve first and to her delight, Talking wins.
    
She sends a well-placed sentence over the net and is standing poised and ready to have Listening return it, enhanced by his understanding of what it is she said.
    
Listening is ready. He receives this first sentence and responds effortlessly with a simple flip of his wrist, sending the sentence back over the net.
    
Talking decides to put a little spin on the next volley and therefore she increases her speed, volume, and word content, and adds some twists and turns to the message. Listening continues to return what is sent without adding or subtracting anything to the original content. 
    
He is playing the game the way he plays it best, by sending over easy responses of affirmative head nodding and one syllable words like oh, hmm and yeah.
    
The two players continue to approach the game in the habitual way that is most comfortable for each of them. 
    
Talking expends more energy and adds more animation, while Listening appears to be taking each sentence in stride and keeping his outward involvement at a minimum.
    
Talking is starting to get tired. She seems to be getting caught up in over-responding to Listening's returns, which lack enthusiasm but do keep the game going.
    
Talking is becoming a bit frantic and is rapidly losing confidence. She started out exuberantly participating but that initial energetic outlay was now working against her. She is putting too much spin on her sentences and as a result, they travel back to her in an erratic and distorted form.
    
Listening is simply allowing what was sent to him to hit his side of the table. All he believes is required of him is to send it back, unaltered, to the sender. This strategy requires little output from him and maximum return on his investment because it wasn't really his initial idea to play right now anyway.
    
Actually, he has a lot on his mind. He has been mulling over a few problematic issues that had captured his attention early in the week. He had placed these concerns in a compartment of his mind reserved for ruminating. It didn't occur to him to bring any of this up for outside discussion with anyone. It was all too new and since he views himself as an excellent problem solver, he knows that he will eventually decide what to do on his own.
    
The game has been continuing for quite some time now. It is time for Listening to serve. He picks up his paddle and positions himself to start the volley. He stops for a moment and realizes that he isn't really interested in keeping the game going, if he has to generate the conversation.
    
He looks over at Talking and apologizes, as he lays his paddle down on the table. "I don't seem to be able to continue. I don't know where my energy is but I really need to take a break right now."
    
Talking is taken by surprise and feels perplexed. A series of questions quickly formulate in her mind and line up like bullets in the chamber of a handgun, ready to be rapidly fired.
    
As she opens her mouth to speak, a cautionary thought jumps into the foreground of her mind. "Don't speak!" It warned. "Be quiet for a moment," It continued. "Put your attention on Listening and pause. Just pause. Do nothing, say nothing and just be with what you have been told by Listening."
    
Talking put down her paddle and let the questions evaporate from her mind. She didn't say anything. She opened her ability to really see and sense her partner. She put herself in his shoes. She listened.
    
Listening felt seen and truly heard. He felt closer to Talking than he had for quite some time.
    
As a result, he opened his heart and mind to her and began to talk in a way that invited and allowed her to enter more deeply into his inner world.

Susan McNeal Velasquez offers mentoring seminars on the topic of how to Unleash The Power of Your Intuition. Her new book: BEYOND INTELLECT: Journey Into The Wisdom of Your Intuitive Mind is available at Latitude 33 Bookshop, Laguna Beach Books or on-line at: Amazon.com. Go to: www.beyondintellect.com for additional information.

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Our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal. Judith Viorst – Necessary Losses (1986)

The Dynamics of Loss

Some of the words assigned to loss are deprivation, forfeiture, destruction, failure to win, damage, defeat, injury, casualty and disadvantage. These words are mere window dressings that cover up the emotional experiences that are triggered by both major and minor losses that occur for all of us engaged in the business of living.

When loss comes visiting, it can arrive with so much force we are knocked to the ground and our life, as we have known it becomes missing in action.

Our familiar reality can no longer be found. It has wandered off, abandoning us to feelings of bewilderment, confusion, puzzlement and a certain kind of mental distraction. We become preoccupied, absent, absent-minded and suspended in a dreamy, cotton-filled surreal existence that exists out of place and out of time.

I believe this is a good thing. It is our built-in surge protector that monitors the amount of experiential voltage our system can integrate.

Sometimes we go on tilt with seemingly small life changes and sometimes we are able to stand in front of the big cannons and come through miraculously unscathed. Our mental and emotional stamina has less to do with outside events than the state of the union and communion between our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies.

Grief is an emotion that defies control. Sorrow, sadness, anguish and heartache sing their song with their own unique timing that is so often not convenient for our hectic, no-nonsense, over-scheduled lives.

High-minded concepts motivate our mental bodies. Good nutrition, exercise and pampering feed and support our physical bodies. Faith, hope and belief in a power bigger than ourselves brings a sense of peace and inner calmness to our spiritual bodies.

What is the self-healing mechanism for our emotional bodies? Tears. Laughter. Sleep. Openness and receptivity to the sensual world that comes to us through the kiss of warm sunlight on our skin. The soft caress of a gentle ocean breeze. Breathing deeply in and out. Quiet. Becoming still in our bodies and minds. Letting down. Letting go. Stopping the endless mind chatter that wants answers to unanswerable questions. Soothing music. Massage. Acknowledgement and acceptance of anything in our surroundings that is touching, heart stirring, heart opening, tender, beautiful and therefore renewing.

Emotions are messy. They are misunderstood because they don’t travel in a straight line. Like water, our feelings trickle down through cracks and crevices, seeking out the little pockets of pain and sorrow that need attention and have been neglected and kept under lock and key, hidden from public view.

Grieving is a legitimate response to loss. When we make a commitment to own, embrace and honor our orphaned emotions, we begin to assimilate our pain and suffering and through attention they transform into our unique wisdom base gained and earned by personal experience.

We lose the capacity to grieve as a child grieves or to rage as a child rages; hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. We grow up and become intent on being civilized, polite, appropriate and consistent and the price of these behaviors is overly managed emotions.

It takes courage to let down, let go and give voice to sadness and anger. We have all mastered the ability to force ourselves to smile even though we are filled with unexpressed and unacknowledged sorrow.

Though we fear that by opening the floodgates we might drown and be forever consumed by tumultuous torrents of runaway feeling, it simply isn’t so. When we don’t know how to weep with our whole heart, we never learn how to fully laugh either.

Endurance of loss is only the beginning. There must also be acceptance of what is, in order to continue on.

            Intuition is your soul voice speaking.

A Personality Profile 

Let’s imagine that intuition is a person. Here are some of her characteristics.

Intuition loves intimacy. She relishes making connections and building relationship bridges. She withholds, retreats, and withdraws her participation when faced with judgmental, isolating, harsh, or aggressively demanding people and situations.

She flourishes in environments where acceptance, curiosity, wondering, imagining, and musing are encouraged. Kindness and enthusiasm please her and she returns the gift in kind.

She loves to delve. Secrets intrigue her. She has eyes that see through pretense and she can be quite fierce and confrontational when lied to.

Intuition pries things open and pins things down, so she is not to be taken lightly. She has ears that hear beyond the mundane into the very heart and soul of issues.

She is self-preserving and if you invite her into your life, she will sense directions that will yield the most benefit for your soul growth. She can tell you where betrayals are brewing. When you are confused, she can penetrate past surface bad behaviors and actions to uncover the scared child within.

She can shift your path from a habitual attitude of “who cares?” to one of “let me sense, see, hear and know all that is available to me.”

Intuition is your soul voice speaking and all you have to do is listen.

Actually, listening will come to you fairly easily, right after you’ve made the decision to really hear. It is the hearing part that takes some effort and commitment.

Let me say this another way. Intuition detests apathy. She requires attention. Even before attention, she must have a clear intent from you to court her. Yes, court her. I can almost hear your response. “Oh no, this is starting to sound like work. A new relationship that is not one I can take for granted!”

Look on the bright side. When you intentionally set out to establish a relationship with your intuition, she will assist you in being more at ease in all your relationships. You may be thinking: “I don’t have the energy for this. I am exhausted as it is, trying to keep up with the relationships I already have, given my overloaded and demanding schedule.”

Let’s take another look at how we are currently using our energy. Most of us have been taught to approach our lives with determination. We set our goals. We strive to accomplish them. We use persistent, focused determination to achieve predetermined results.

There is another kind of energy available to us. I will call it the energy of enthusiasm. It is unbridled. Exuberant. Responsive. It lives in the moment. Intuition thrives in this environment.

The mistake we can easily make is to live our lives solely driven by determination, while secretly hoping that enthusiasm will miraculously show up. It doesn’t work that way.

When you find yourself losing vitality and therefore enthusiasm for your pursuits, stop for a moment and turn your attention inward. Put aside your long list of what you believe you have to do and what you should be doing, for just a moment. Ask yourself a different question. “If I had no restrictions, what would I love to do right now?” Close your eyes and allow your imaginative mind to whisk you away for a few moments. You may find yourself on a quiet beach, snuggled under your covers and primed for a leisurely nap, or you may simply be gifted with a moment of undisturbed quiet, alone time.

Your intuition can serve you by feeding up mental pictures that have the ability to soothe your soul.

Make a commitment to yourself to find your enthusiasm. What sparks your creativity? What ignites your enthusiasm? What feeds your soul? How do your regenerate your energy? Where is your zest for life? What touches your heart? What do you long for? Are you allowing yourself enough self-nurturance and self-care to keep your vitality high? These are the type of questions that open a genuine conversation with your inner wisdom.

Remember, intuition is your soul voice speaking. Turn your attention inward and take a few moments to really listen.