August 30, 2009: This is my very first blog post. I am not even sure I know how I got here or how to get back again once I leave. It is a bit like life isn't it? We come into this world and we exit often without really knowing how we got here or where we are going. I am enjoying the reading assignments for this course and connecting it to other reading I am following and the Diane Eck book we are reading for Interreligious Dialog.
I am working with a hospice client who was actually seemingly healthy when we started and has since gone downhill very fast. We've spent our time together talking about our spiritual practices and his feelings about his relationships with other people and his thoughts about death. Today his spiritual community is having a "living" ceremony to acknowledge him while he is living instead of waiting for a funeral which he wouldn't actively get to participate in experiencing.
As a hospice volunteer and chaplain, I am sure to experience many different rituals around death and dying. When I read about Tibetan near death experiences, I was surprised at how different they seemed from the western experiences I had read about. I decided that perhaps when we die, we have the experience we expect just as we so often do in life. My client said he always had a wonderful experience with his chaplain and he decided it was because he expected he would have one. Recently I listened to a tape program by an energy healer who assists at death beds. She said that the people that crossed over had the experience they expected.
I am concluding that it doesn't matter what spiritual practice we choose so much as that we choose one and then really sink deeply into so that we move through the transformative stages of our spiritual life. Then we may have some sense of how we got here and where we are going that works for our own soul.
