Reframing Death

Through the magic of Facebook, I have learned that 2 acquaintances, both women in their 50s, have died recently.  My heart goes out to family and friends of each.

One was a woman who went to my high school. She was a couple of years behind me, so although I knew who she was (she was really out there, and hard to miss), I didn't really know her.

The other was a woman I met at a professional conference 2 years ago, and had gotten to know a bit on Facebook. She was always kind, and often funny. She often commented on my daily 'morning walk'  photos. I didn't really notice that she stopped commenting a month or two ago, and then I was shocked to see a post about her memorial service.

Then another friend said that two of her friends had gone recently. These were really friends, and she was sad about their crossing over, missing them. I reminded her that there is ample evidence that the soul survives the death of the body (see Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, by Ian Stevenson, M.D. Stevenson found over 2500 cases, but only 20 are chronicled.) After you look at all that info, it's pretty hard to deny the reality of an eternal soul.

If you have a soul, and your friend has a soul, then it comes down to a communication problem. Most embodied humans have a hard time speaking with non-embodied souls. This makes missing someone more a communication problem than anything else.

Think of it this way: a little more than a century ago, if someone moved from the 'old country' to the US, or even from the Eastern seabord to the frontier, that person might never see his family again. If that person or his family were quite poor, perhaps illiterate, he might never even hear from his family again. So today, communicating with 'the other side' is not so different from communicating with someone on the other side of the world back then. In fact, we can use technology to communicate with those on the 'other side'.  

So I've been thinking about what we call 'death' lately. 

Then I was lying flat on my back in 'corpse pose' in yoga class yesterday, with the yoga teacher talking about breath, when it hit me that death is just another word for release.

Looked at from the soul's point of view, death is simply the soul releasing the body that housed it. The soul that held the molecules that made up the body in place, allows those molecules to release all the elements in them to be reused. (It's called decay, but really, it's recycling.)

This is true for non-physical deaths, too.

While you can say a romantic relationship dies, from the point of view of each of the partners, it's simply releasing the attachment to the other person. This leaves each person free to use the energy that held the relationship in place for other things -- career, home, other relationships.

While you can say that a company that files Chapter 7 bankruptcy dies, what actually happens is that the parts are released to other entities. For example, hard assets can be sold off -- released -- to other people or companies.

Even software has deaths -- updated versions are called releases!

So if someone 'dies', while it is quite natural to miss the easy communication you had with someone, you might consider learning to communicate telepathically. If someone or something dies, you might consider how to use the energy and/or material that has been released in a new way.

What Do You Know? And How Do You Know it?

Friday night, my husband, Kosta, and I were in San Francisco. We were hungry, and stopped in to a funky little place with a diner-ish menu. As we sat down in our booth, there were 4 or 5 people in the booth next to us, who seemed to be finishing up their meal. I didn't pay much attention to them, but noticed they were of both genders, probably in their 20s.

After they left, the 50-ish waiter covering both our booths (actually, the whole restaurant, as business was slow), started kvetching (complaining, for you non-Yiddish speakers, but it also has the connotation of whining, and doing it persistently) about the people who'd just left, "Those are the worst customers I've ever had... probably raised by wolves. They just don't know how to act." And on.. and on...

When I asked what they'd done to earn that stream of bitching, he said that they'd asked him to justify the price of each menu item, asked for everything done in a slightly different way than on the menu, then complained about being charged for substitutions, and decided at the end of the meal that they wanted separate checks. Having been a waitress one summer in college, I completely sympathize with his estimation of these customers.

By this point, I'd detected a slight New York accent. I didn't want to 'lead the witness', but slipped into his phraseology, and asked, "Where ya from?" with a smile.

"Queens, and proud of it!", he answered. Then he began to kvetch about San Franciscans, in general, "No one will tell you like it is, everyone just tells you what you want to hear." And on... and on... He mentioned that all his friends still lived in Queens, that he was the only one who'd left.

"Why don't you just move back?", I asked, still smiling.

"I'm gonna be buried there!", he answered defiantly -- but he was smiling, too., as he left to put in our orders.

At this point, I just knew that he'd moved to SF 30 years ago because he was gay, and and said as much to Kosta. He was surprised, and asked me me how I knew the waiter's story.

This was a complete shock -- I just assumed everyone would have known that -- that he knew that -- because it was so obvious to me. We agreed to ask the waiter how long he'd been in SF, his sexual orientation seeming a bit too personal to ask a complete stranger.

Sure enough -- he'd been in SF for 25 years. Okay, I was off by 5 years -- but then I could have been off by a few years in his age, too.

Kosta tried to pass it off as, "my wife, the psychic lady". But to me, being psychic is doing readings. And readings are something I do in an hypnotic state, where I'm really focused on the other person, with my guides around me, showing me pictures and talking to me, giving me information I couldn't possibly know any other way, especially since I rarely even meet, or see photos of, the people I read.

So I really had to think about how I knew that he'd been in SF for so long. When I backed into the logic of it, it went like this:

The waiter clearly loved NY and had friends and family there, clearly thought it was a great place. He'd been in SF long enough to complain about the differences between the two cities. 30 years ago, when he'd been around 20, NY was even bigger and more powerful in relation to SF than it is today; you could get pretty much anything there. The only reason you'd leave NY to come to SF was lifestyle -- and SF being the gay mecca of the world would probably explain it.

Absolutely none of these thoughts was conscious. It's just normal for me to infer things -- and they often turn out to be right. I don't think of this as psychic/intuitive; it's just what I've always done. It's what used to piss people off about me as a kid, because I did it, and knew stuff, and didn't know not to say it. I still don't know if they were angry because I knew things I wasn't supposed to know -- and was right, or because I said these things -- and lots of them were, I guess, embarrassing to the adults. Anyway, what I learned was to shut up, and only to use the information when I needed it for my own protection.

The dirty little secret here is that my Dad used to do this stuff, too. I spent a lot of time with him as a child, and he'd look at complete strangers and tell me about them. He did it with a medical eye, like seeing the telltale signs of alcoholism -- but I suspect he knew a lot more than he could have gotten just that way. Of course, he never admitted that he was in any way psychic.

I learned how to do it, at least the more everyday parts of being psychic, as a skill, by copying my parent, like all kids do. (Thanks, Dad!)

So this intuition is just a skill, like any other, that everyone can do -- they just maybe haven't been taught how. We all pick up little clues about each other, about the world, that we don't have the bandwidth to process with our conscious minds. (This is what Malcolm Gladwell was talking about in Blink.) We combine that with what we already know about the world to form an even more complete picture of the world.

So if you didn't have a parent who modeled intuition for you, how do you learn?  

• You wonder about things, or people, create a hypothesis -- and check it out (like we asked the waiter). 
• You let yourself imagine how something, or someone, might have gotten to be the way that it is -- and check it out.

And sooner or later, you'll find yourself just knowing that your waiter moved to San Francisco a couple of decades ago.

The Value of a Vacation

• VACATION:  a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation (had a restful vacation at the beach)

I spent the last 2 1/2 days at the West Coast Dowsers' Conference, where I was a speaker and led a meditation -- but that was only 1 1/2 hours out of the whole weekend. That meant that the rest of the time was a vacation.

The Dowsers' Conference is a tiny conference, just a little over 200 people, and of those, about 50 are speakers and another 15 or so are volunteers. What's great about this, though, is the generosity of the community -- everyone is open to their psychic abilities, and most are already using them in one way or another. Because of that openness, the synchronicities are amazing! Each person seems to meet the right person to help in just the way she or he needs at the moment. Sometimes that's in a class, and it's often in line at the cafeteria, or walking back and forth between buildings.

I am no exception. There are 4 class periods a day, and 5 speakers in each of them. So you have to choose which class to attend in each time slot. This being a dowsers' conference, I decided to choose each class using the ideomotor finger response (a standard hypnotic technique for communication with your unconscious mind, repurposed for  dowsing). The first class I attended was from a chi gung master and channel, Ellie, who I consider a friend, despite the fact that we've only met twice (and this weekend was one of the two times), and that we've only talked on the phone about a dozen times several years ago.

What a revelation! It turns out that Ellie and I have been getting the same information for the last few years, but hearing her talk about it, all in one place and at one time, made it completely new for me! I realized whom I need to forgive to move my business forward (and I've already done that), and that it is no longer appropriate for me to make decisions for my business based on what one is 'supposed' to do to market a service. All my own business guidance must now come from my guides. Duh! And if the guidance says 'do nothing', as it has been saying all year, then I have to listen to that (much as it pains me). And I can draw my clients to me using the process I developed 15 years ago that brought my wonderful husband. (If you want to learn the process, please call me at 888-4-HOLLIS).

Then, I was browsing through the bookstore, and came upon a pamphlet, entitled "99 Things You Can do with Dowsing". It included such ideas as dowsing whether a particular food, or method of food preparation is beneficial to you, or a cleaning product is beneficial for you and others in your home. Wow! So I can dowse whether or not to do different kinds of work, whether or not I should teach a class, and when it should begin, etc.

Then I was drawn to another class -- this one on communicating with animals psychically. We each had to count off in 1s and 2s. I was a '2', seated  between two '1's. i just knew I had to work with the woman to my left, that she'd be a better partner for me. Wow, was she! She was very accurate in talking with my lovely cat, Beast, and then I communicated with a dog she is just getting to know (new boyfriend's dog). This was really easy, and she verified pretty much everything I said. Then we did a few group readings of particular animals -- again, really easy, and what I said was verified by the human asking the question.

It turned out that my class partner is, among other things, a professional animal communicator! And she asked me to help with a client's cat, whose legs give out often and with no warning, and for no apparent reason. I saw immediately and clearly that the cat had been a draft horse in another lifetime, worked to death at a plow, when its legs gave out. She thanked me, and said that made sense, and that she could now work with the cat to heal it. Then she told me that I was a natural, and already doing animal readings on the inner planes, and that I should tell everyone that I do this. So:

I do animal readings! And they are half the price of my human ones until July 23. Please call me now at 888-4-HOLLIS (888-446-5547) if you have an animal with a behavior problem. 

When I asked her why she'd come to this class, she said she thought there was a missing piece for her in the class. It turned out that I was the person who had the missing piece for her!

So my vacation resulted in re-creation -- a new attitude to my work, and new work! Pretty cool for a 2 day vacation, huh?

PLEASE NOTE: a 'staycation' is, by definition, not a vacation.