Heartbreak Support

On a personal note, I want you to know that I have not experienced this type of loss
(yet) and though I do not know how you feel….I can still imagine. I am hoping a few of
you reading these words actually make it to the very bottom of this page to the
transcript on Death & Dying given by former Harvard professor Richard Alpert but for
starters know that we are here to help in any way we can.

So, we are going to try…
​
First, I'm sorry for your loss.
​
Please consider joining soaringspirits.org

They are an online community that connects widowed people to each other. I have
learned a great many lessons from running support groups. One of them is that
sharing your pain with others who have a similar loss brings great comfort to the soul.

A man once showed up in my divorce support group that started sharing his story by
telling us that he didn’t know if he was in the right place. (because we were in Divorce
Group) His wife had died. He is a tall powerful statue of a man with a strong gruff
voice but when he started to tell us his story....That voice became so soft and tender
as he expressed his tremendous loss and the weight upon his soul. He watched her
body whither away from cancer along with all of their future dreams.

His soul was so haunted. As he recounted his story, I think the entire group that night
including myself almost burst into tears. The story included planning suicide to end
his pain and a recurring dream where he kept calling her on the phone and she
wouldn’t pick up…

Watching his beloved die in the manner that she did, convinced him that God did not
exist. If you’re reading this right now, I do not believe that I have to expand on the
spiritual war that was RAGING within him.

Enter Harold Kushner. He is the author of, “When bad things happen to good people.“
(See videos tab on this website for one of his speeches)

I sent this widower the YouTube video on Harold Kushner and his first text back to me
after watching it...

​

“Now this is a God I can believe in.” (keep in mind that I had NO IDEA how he might
react to me sending him that video)

Any video that can restore someone’s Faith no matter what you believe, should be
watched by all of us in my opinion — once a week, for the rest of your life. 

Buy the book.

Lastly, it was Dr. Frederick Nietzsche who said,

“He who has a WHY to live, can survive almost any How.”

One of the recipes for surviving heartbreak and loss is knowing WHY you were sent
down her to this Earth.

What is your reason to go on? If you don’t know, it’s time to figure it out what is your
Life’s Purpose.

If you cannot figure that out in the next year, then I ask that you consider dedicating
the rest of your life to helping others.

Habitat for Humanity is an org that builds homes for people or you can go to a
homeless shelter to feed the poor. I think you get the idea.

You can go to volunteer.org and put in your zip code and a list of organizations
needing people in your area will pop up. Pick one.

This is subject matter of which I have immense experience and I have seen others
(lost souls) become so so happy in serving their fellow

​

​

​

The Art of Grief – Chapter 1

Grief is the realization of the loss of a dream.

If you have a relationship with somebody, you build an expectation and a model of what the model of
that reality might look like your mind and then when that is torn away--when that person leaves you or
dies, something happens.

The breaking of that expectation takes away your security so there's fear, but also there is incredible
feeling of loss, of sadness, of feeling incomplete because you built a sense of your completeness around
living within your dreams and when the dream collapses, it's as if your whole identity has died.

​

There is a mini death involved because we know ourselves in part through our relationships with all the
people around us. It's like when my father died last September, I went around and say to everybody
“Now I'm an orphan!” Which is bizarre I mean I the word orphan doesn't usually seem relevant to
somebody that's 58 years old. But something very profound changed in me, that up until then even
though dad was 90 and I was definitely out on my own for many years, there was still a way in which my
identity in terms of Elder and Child and something changed. There was a loss of the security that came
from being identified as always having somebody that was my elder. I didn’t know that I unconsciously
attached myself to the concept of having an elder protect me or take care of me.

Grief is the mind’s attempt to deal with the breakdown of Expectation.

What you do to deal with grief is that at first you grab states of mind or grab models to try to make it go
away or to counteract it, because it has a “feeling”. It's RAW and it has emotional qualities that are that
are very difficult to be with sometimes because they're interpreted as negative feelings. (sadness,
depression, crying)

The trick is not to grab prematurely to try to make it go away. Like a lot of people who break off in a
relationship and then start to grieve over the loss of the broken relationship, react to their grieving by
grabbing a new relationship. The problem is they're building the new relationship on the sand of the
grieving of the broken relationship. They haven't given it the space to run its course and to come out the
other end.

So, I'm inclined always to push people back into grief rather than to bring them out but not have any
model about how people should grieve. I don't feel that you gotta cry or you gotta open up or anything.
How do I know how you're supposed to grieve. Some people grieve very quietly and some people are
shy about it. Some cry and scream and rend their hair and their garments and stuff like that. I don't see
that there is much difference in all that. I don't think you've got to show emotion, but I think there is a
timing.

There is a healing process that goes on as you start to Exist after the dream has died. Then after a while,
a natural way in which the raw ends of that trauma kind of heal a bit and you start to find new ways of
being in the Universe. It’s just very gentle, but up until that time, it's like a roller coaster and the person
gets very sad and then they seem to be all better and people will say, “Oh you've dealt with it very
well!” and you rise up and you're all smiley and then suddenly-- it hits you again! I mean it can hit you
when seeing somebody's old shoes you forgot were in the closet (a song, a picture, a smell, a restaurant,
someone’s favorite color, or a specific food, a movie,) and suddenly it awakens the pain again and again
until finally you can live with all that stuff when it occurs. The bitterness gets weaker and weaker.

There's a subtle thing about grief and its where people feel that if I stop grieving, I am betraying the
person or the thing that left because I'm forgetting, and I must remember or else I wasn't a true lover.
The extraordinary thing about it is that as you quiet down from the active process of grieving, you quiet
down and you listen and you begin to appreciate that the way in which you are with another person in
Love exists independent of coming and going-- even independent of death and all of those things.

You see that what you were grieving was at the plane at which you were a separate entity. You were
grieving two separate egos who cannot be together anymore. There is separation.

​

But at the plane where there is Unity, there is no separation. (level of the soul)

To put this is perspective for you, there was a great Saint and when he was dying, his followers and
loved ones said to him, “Don't leave us! Don't leave us!!!!” (wailing)

He looked confused and said, “Don't be silly! Where could I go? I'm just dropping the body. I'm not going
anywhere.”

So, you realize that the grieving is part of the dramatic storyline of your separateness because you can't
grieve something that didn't go anywhere.

That's interesting because even if you break off with a lover and there's acrimony to the extent that
there was even a moment of True Love between the two of you, (true transcendent oneness)
That's there. That thing (True Love) has no time and space connected with it. We keep reducing
relationships into Time and Space. (Like if you love me, spend more time with me. You wouldn’t leave
me if you loved me)

I watched another Saint in India and people would come for his wisdom. He’d give it and say, “Go!”
(quickly, like we are done, move on) I realized that the reason he said, “Go!” so quickly was that what
had to be transmitted between two human beings takes just that long. I observed it. I watched it
happen. I watched that when the minute a person was ripe and comes into a space of unconditional
love---it takes one flicker of one second (they get the teaching) and then it's gone.

Everything else of the collecting is lack of faith. That what really happened… really happened.
It's very profound to me now and that has tempered my life a lot because I now am not willing to spend
as much time with people as I used to in reassuring them that the love is there. And I see it as a
Needfulness constantly. (Do you love me? How much time will you spend to me? Will you do this with
me? Will you do that? Can I have more of you?)

It's because they can't get inside to behind the place of “where we could we go from one another?”
I find it extremely interesting to love people more and more and awaken in them the feelings of love
and then watch their minds take that and turn it into something that fear touches so that then they
wanna grab it and collect it and be testing it and being sure about it. When you wanna say, “It’s here. It's
here! We don't have to see each other again and it's still here!”

That's a big one to ask people. I understand that.

Back to Death…

You look at death and you see it's the heaviest melodrama going. It's the one that sucks everybody in.
You might be very very spacious going about your day and everything like, “Ahhh I am working! Children
are playing!”, but then you come to death, and it’s suddenly, “I’m Dying!”

If ever in your life you used a substance or alcohol to buzz or get high, you were trying to push away the
things that brought you down. Then when you wanna get free, you see that the only things that bring
you down are yourself. Nothing's bringing you down but your own attachments. So, the things that GET
you in life are the secret. They're the clue to your stash of attachments of mind. And you begin to see

how each thing that gets you is showing you where you're holding, where you're still clinging to a model
of this versus that, Of …I want this but I don’t want that…I like this!..... but I don’t like that….
And the quietness of mind is standing behind preferences. You stand behind this versus for that. The Yin
versus the Yang--ALL the polarities, you stand in the one behind the two, so now once you wanna be
free at first you wanna hang out with people that keep you high.

Later, you want to confront the fires that catch you. You want to purify through those fires. You just find
yourself drawn towards the things that are still catching you, so that you can get to the point where you
can be in them but not lost in them. It’s where you can keep your space even when you're in them and
dying is one of the big ones that sucks everybody in and so part of the work is developing the ability to
be with somebody that's dying or be dying yourself and stay very clear and very present because those
that are from religions that focus on the moment of death which is most of the religions that have
reincarnation in them, see life as a preparation for the moment of death. They see that and they see as
Don Juan says that you keep death over your left shoulder, you live each moment as if it's your last
moment but not in a kind of macabre horrible negative way but in a way in which each moment is the
one where if it's to be you a death moment…. it's, “Ahhh here I am ……..right.” (I got this) and that'll be
that moment and then the next moment is the “what follows” after the incarnation is what's created by
the attachments of the moment of death so that those beings that are going to go into the white light
are about 3/4 of the way turned around before the moment of death. They're already right here with all
of it even before they die, so that a lot of the work you're doing in a lifetime is the preparation for the
moment of death and keeping death present enriches the moment of life that the optimum way to be
healed is the optimum way to die, which is your full consciousness but your full consciousness listens; it
does what it can to preserve the precious human body but also allows what is to be and a lot of people
lose it because they are so attached to which way it all goes all the time. Like I work with people that are
having like a slow terminal illness and they're losing their motor abilities and their control sphincter
controls and things and each stage they lose, I watched some people who are able to open to the new
stage and say, “Ahhh so.” (accepting this new stage, like finding out its going to be 68^ outside today,
ok) Those people don't suffer and then I watched somebody who looks at the shoes in the closet they'll
never wear again and sits around feeling sorry cause they can't wear those shoes anymore. They're
holding on to the model of who they were a moment ago. A moment ago-- there was somebody
wearing those shoes, now they're not wearing those shoes.

The minute you let go into what is, “Ahhhh.”-----you found your Peace.

The minute you hold on to the model of what might be or what ought to be or what should be or what
was------Boom: Suffering.

It's that disparity that creates the suffering so that anytime there is suffering, it's a clue to where your
mind is holding and that's why you keep using suffering. Finally suffering is the tastiest clues about your
stash. (the things you’re clinging too tightly to) It's a very interesting thing to play with and so with
Death, the people that open to each stage of consciousness and move with it don't suffer the same way.
Not at all.

There's a whole other level of the game and that's why there is instruction in every religion regarding
death as the deepest teaching of a lifetime.

​

It's the best vehicle for Awakening.

If you only identify with that which dies, why would you want a teaching at the time of death? The
minute you identify with the soul or with the Awareness or with something else, you can see that death
from a curriculum point of view is one of the topics of the curriculum. (curriculum = what you have
learned from living this life) and the question is how much you can learn from that? Now some of us like
me, want to be around dying people because it's a way for me to work on my own attachments. It’s the
same way that in some eastern religions they send members of the flock into the cemeteries to
meditate on the decaying corpse or on different corpse states of decay in order to get them free of that
attachment to body, to see that the body changes and it decays.

Well we don't we don't have that access in this culture, so I like to work with people whose bodies are
decaying because it gives me a chance to work with my reactions to that and see where my attachments
are, where my fears are to all that.

Then there are people who are facing a terminal illness who would like to be in a place where everybody
doesn't get sucked into their drama. It's interesting about how powerful that drama is. When I walk into
a room, I just start to be with another person and then we explore together whatever the drama is.

Here's an example: Jean Umans

Jean is a, she's an awareness that was in a 62-year-old body of a Quaker woman in Boston, very close to
death. She asked me to come and see her. So, I came to see her and I came up into the room, her
husband brought me up and then he left went downstairs and she said to me,

“Richard, I finished my work on Earth. I want to die. I want you to help me die.”

Now that statement sounds like the old Buddhists monks who send out postcards saying:
Special Invitation:

Next Thursday March 16 th

2:00 p.m.

I am leaving my body. Please come by for tea and farewells.

You go and you have tea and then he turns around three times sits down, meditates for 10 minutes and
leaves his body….

So, my point is that Jean’s comments could have come from there but intuitively--I'm listening and
feeling and it's not it's coming from her ego. She's saying,

“I've decided. I've finished. I'm going to leave. “

My response:

“Jean, how do you know you're supposed to die yet? Maybe you gonna lose each sense? sense by
sense—MILK IT! for all you can. It's a precious birth. Don't rush.”

“But Richard, I'm so bored.” (you reading this…you hear that one? Empty. Listen.)

​

“Of course you're bored Jean. If you have to do anything full time, it's boring! You gotta die all day long.
Couldn’t you die like 10 minutes an hour? You know! You have to be dying all day long!??”

(It's interesting, how dying is so preoccupying. Everybody gets caught in it and doing it all the time and it
gets very dull)

Jean:

“…but I feel as if there is everything is too much… too much….. too much energy… too much light…
people are too much…. everything feels too much to me.”

(What I experienced was an image and as a person opens into gets closer to death and opens into these
higher planes of consciousness, they tune into more and more and more energy until the white light is
all the energy in the universe; and if you're holding on to who you think you are as you open into these
other planes, it IS too much energy. It’s like being a 1 quart container and trying to pour in two gallons of
water)

Richard:

“Well Jean. Gee. That's because maybe because you're holding on too tight! Why don't we expand
outward together Jean!”

(Jean and I sat there)

Richard:

“Do you hear the clock ticking?

Let's experience the inside of ourselves.

Do you hear the children playing outside?

Let's experience it inside of ourselves.

Feel the counter pane under your fingertips. Experience it inside of yourself.”

(My voice inside of us and we just started to expand outward until it got very very spacious in the room.
The whole light of the room was a very purple color… and I looked at her she was just radiant with light.
After a while I said she sat up and she started to hug me and it was like a celebration of form from the
point of view of formless.)

Richard:

“Well Jean you know what I know. I probably won't see you again in this body so stay conscious.” and I
left.

The next morning at 7:30 her husband calls me and says;

“She had died during the night and her dying was just like ink being poured into water. I came away
from her death with one of the deepest experiences of peace I'd ever had in my life….”

It's interesting that when it works and a person stays conscious through that transition, if you're around
them you end up feeling like you have been blessed. You feel like you have just experienced incredible

grace—the incredible grace of somebody who is just like Christ. They did it! They were showing you the
ephemeral nature of the body from a quiet space.

Chapter 2
Now the karma that we have accrued over many lifetimes as we start to awaken in the middle of a
lifetime not after death but in the middle of a lifetime… like we are doing here. Then we start to live our
lives consciously in such a way that we don't create new karma but the old karma keeps running off and
it may run off for many lifetimes. So even though you prepared yourself right up to the moment of
death, so that you're ready to keep God in mind as you die-- at the moment when the ego structure
starts to disintegrate and there is what is called “the review” or seeing your life flash before you. You
see all the events that have happened in your life and the way in which you have loved or hurt or
whatever you've done……whatever karma is left will grab at that point and that grabbing will start to
determine what your next work is in your next birth, so that you can anticipate that although you get
yourself very clear and very ready and very open and very flowing, you don't necessarily wipe out on
your karma.

You may still have more work to do but the difference is that when you die consciously openly going
towards there is no karma created by the death process itself, for the clinging to life at the moment of
death that yearning keeps creating life afterlife afterlife afterlife…. and it's at the point where you let go
of physical plane existence that you can start to get on with it, in terms of other work you have to do.

Chapter 3
When Mahatma Gandhi was dying he walked out into his yard and an assassin shot him three times.
Our images of assassins in America…we think of the Kennedy brothers, maybe Martin Luther King and
always there’s horror and violence connected with it and we see we imagine if we can the moment that
somebody shot that they are stunned or confused. Gandhi had just as much time as any of the others
when he was shot and as he shot as he falls over he just says, “Ram.” (pronounced like Mom, but means
God)

He just goes out on the name of God.

He's ready for his death because every moment of life is the moment of death and when you are deep
enough into like vipassana meditation and you see thought being created, preserved and destroyed--
you see the universe being born and dying over and over again with all your thoughts and you see that
Life is a series of many deaths and rebirths.

The whole process you see as death and birth. Not only seasons but thought forms and the Universe as
you created it.

Now perhaps the biggest fear of aging, is the fear of death and as long as you are identified with your
separateness (separateness meaning you think your Name is who you are like Bill Brown, as opposed to
knowing you are a soul…who was just given the name Bill Brown. Bill’s earthly Life is ending. His soul
infinite) and you think that's what you are you will have fear and if you cultivate the part of you that is
not identified with your separateness, you will have a place in you that is not afraid as well as the place
in you that is afraid.

​

You'll have a balancing of those things and you might even get light enough. (light meaning happy &
free) Example: a Zen monk is dying and his he hasn't written his death poems and monks are supposed
to write death poems.

His students say to him, “Master you haven't written your death poem yet!”
He says, “Oh I haven't written my death poem!?!!” He grabs the brush and he calligraphies madly and he
dies.

It says, “Earth is thus, death is thus, verse or no verse., what's the fuss?”
Now my mentor helped change my feelings about……. I mean I had had many experiences of what I call
out of body experiences, so I had a sense that I wasn't this body anyway. My mentor though was
walking with one of his former students and the student asked,

“Why don’t you get upset like the rest of us and mourn when someone dies?”
And my mentor said,

“Would you feel better if I pretend to act like I believe what you do about death being the End?”
So the question is where does somebody go what happens? It's a mystery. When I sit with that mystery
and all the experiences I've had, I don't even have a flicker of anything other than an appreciation that
when we drop our body--- we just drop our body. And now we are back again to the Saint who said to
the people asking him not to die, “Don’t be silly. Where would I go??”

Like I'm just selling the old Ford truck, I’m not going anywhere.

“Don’t leave us! Don’t leave us!”

Its just a shift of form. And if you have love somebody in the love that transcends form, even for a
moment; you and they aren't going anywhere.

Your mind may say they've gone but that's your mind. The minute you quiet down and go back into your
heart….they're right there again.

Love really does transcend death. There is not even a doubt in my mind about it.
I have an imaginary spiritual friend called Emmanuel. I once asked him,
“Emmanuel, what should I tell people about dying?

He said, “Tell them it’s absolutely safe! It’s like taking off a tight shoe!”

​

That's the world I live in, so when I have a sense of who we are that is so much more vast!
The Buddha said, “Do you know how many times you have taken birth like this??? Imagine a mountain 6
miles long, 6 miles wide and six miles high and every hundred years, a bird flies over the mountain with
a silk scarf in its beak and it runs the scarf across the mountain once every hundred years.

In the length of time, it would take the scarf to wear away the mountain--that's how long you've been
doing this!”

​

Sure gives you a different perspective, doesn’t it! About time and the meaning of life. Can you see a life
as so precious and beautiful and still learn how to hold on tightly… let go lightly? How to not cling to it?
How to be open to the mystery and open to the next part of it, by saying, “OK…..and now this… and
now……this.”

Now overseas in some eastern traditions when you're dying, you are trained to stay in the moment
instead of the model I am dying you are just in the moment. The Earth element leaves, you notice
heaviness. The water element leaves, you notice dryness. The fire element leaves, you notice coldness.
The air element leaves, you notice the outbreath is longer than the inbreath…. just moment…then
moment…then moment….and now this….. now this…. And now this……..

I have been sitting now with dying people for 10-15 years I guess and I can tell you that it is the richest
experience of my life. It is such incredible grace the two things that awaken the same feelings in me are
being present at a birth and being present at a death

And at that moment of Death, when you feel the awareness leave the body and when that person's
connection to that which is beyond their body is deep enough because they have relaxed the mind that
keeps grabbing at their separateness, so that they can just let go very gently. There's not even a ripping.
There's not a pushing. There's not a grabbing.

The whole secret is to live this moment fully……. now THIS moment….. now THIS ONE…….
So, if you're in this one, how do you know the next one may be the one you die in?
The Best preparation for your dying is that you live this moment now….. fully…. moment by moment.
And then one of them will be the one in which you drop your body and it'll just be another moment.
Nothing special. It's not really that dramatic. We milk it so much. SUCH a big drama.

Will he die?

Won't he die?

Should she die?

Sure. We're all gonna die.

I want to tell you a secret. You're all gonna die ………..but though you perish, you will not die. The whole
secret is of extricating yourself from identification with form (the Body, your name, all of it) because all
form corrupts.

It all dies> You take care of it. You honor it. You clean it up. You keep it healthy as it is slowly corrupting.
Hold on tightly, let go lightly…

Chapter 4

Just recognize what an Adventure this transformation is…

The appreciation of death and the spiritual journey after death is the prerequisite for living life joyfully
now. Death does not have to be treated as an enemy for you to delight in Life.

Keeping death present in your consciousness as one of the greatest mysteries and as the moment of
incredible transformation imbues that moment with added richness and energy that otherwise is used
up in denial.

I encourage you to make peace with death. To see it as the culminating adventure of this Adventure
called Life. it is not an error. It is not a failure. It is like taking off a tight shoe which you have worn well.
Those that find the way in the morning can gladly die in the evening it is said in the mystical literature. I
encourage you to explore and find in your being that part of you that is on those other channels, so that
when on channels 1 and 2 “As The World Turns” series (used to be on television daily) comes to its final
chapters, you won't be caught in feeling loss but rather the adventure--because from where I'm sitting,
life on this plane of reality, (because I live in the world of reincarnation, of karma) Life on this plane is
like being in the 4th grade. You took birth here because you had certain work to do that involves the
suffering you do, the kinds of situations you found yourself in, this is your curriculum. It's not an error
where you are now with all your neuroses and your problems---you're sitting in just the right place!
Imagine that. (?)

Imagine that nobody made an error and all that stuff and you were saying:

“If only….If only I could be…”

No. This is it! Including your “If Onlys”…this is IT….its Perfect!

And then at the time you graduate and somebody says,

“Oh but he died so young…”

So if you graduate from 4th grade early? Big deal. Wonderful.

Don't get so caught in worshipping life that you lose the balance that realizing that the spirit is says live
life fully and richly as a partner with God and at the same moment don't be afraid of the next thing. Go
towards it with openness and with love and not forbidding.

The Way that is understood in the morning, one gladly die in the evening.
--Dr. Richard Alpert

​

The Dream

I once heard a story of a woman whose fiancée was murdered.

I do not remember how long she had known him but appeared to be maybe in her
early 30s when it happened.

​

Other than the bone she had to pick with God surrounding those events and her
making peace with the situation, there was dream she was waiting on.

Her first chance to talk to him since he passed from this word.

It was beautiful what she recounted within the dream itself but it was the last part that
burned into my heart forever.

She asked him, “How am I supposed to move on without you and what about finding
someone to love again or is it even right?? (should I or should I not, help me)

He said, “The time we spent together was peanuts. You will move on. You will Love
again….and when you do, I will be part of that Love as well.

…and she woke up.