Food for thought

Yesterday a long time client of mine and a friend, from New York City, called me about her 101-year old relative who was in her deathbed, more than ready to let go of this world.

The relative was in a hospice saying -how much longer will this take?

I could hear her moaning in the background as I spoke on the phone with my friend. The voice was of someone evidently in pain.

-Everything has been settled, she wants to let go and we are ready to let her go too. Can you help me to make her have a peaceful transition? my friend said.

In the past, I have participated in situations where I’ve been called to help someone even if I was several thousand miles away. After many years of working with people’s energy I know how to access intuitive information about them, a process that doesn’t depend on the linearity of distance, or time.

I somehow connected with this old woman and asked to see what she needed. It was a very clear and concise answer -she needed to be received.

The concept of being received is something I learned last year with Mike Boxhall on his last visit to Montevideo, Uruguay where I live. Mike is an 86-year-old teacher who has accompanied many people like my friend’s relative, in the last stages of their lives.

Coincidentally Mike is in Montevideo right now and I was supposed to be working with him again. Something came up and I couldn’t, so he was very much in my mind these days.

In my Shiatsu training I had learned other ways to refer to “being received”. For example, presence, or being in your center to be fully present, something that has its roots in Zen Buddhism also. I teach it myself as an aspect of grounding, for example.

Mike’s teaching about being received gave a deeper meaning to that concept I had previously encountered. Everything you are is fully received. As a therapist, you are there to receive anything the client is or wants to release to you. There is no system, no preconceived notion of how it should be, or how you can measure this. It just is. And there is nothing you need to do other than fully being present. There is no fixing to be done. No problem to be solved.

When I contacted this old woman’s energy field I understood another aspect of being received. It’s being received back in the arms of God, back to the origin, the source, a merging of your true self with the Universe.

We can forget that we have this need to be received. We can mask it with other needs that look similar but only express a part of the whole. No matter how important we think they are, they barely scratch the surface of our real need. Being received is totally unifying and it contemplates and includes all other needs.

So even if I was several thousand miles away I offered myself to receive this woman, as a tiny speck of a glimpse of how it would be to be fully received by something larger than all of us.

I felt very quiet and peaceful because I felt she understood this on the spot. It took about 10 minutes in all.

As I was connecting to what was going on, quietly sitting in my sofa in Uruguay, my friend was by her elder relative’s side in the hospice room in NYC.

I sent her a message saying

-May this moment be of peace to you both. Let her know she is received.

For this I meant not only that she would be received as a soul returning home but also to give an opportunity to my friend and the people caring for her relative to receive her too.

My friend told me today that her relative had an apparent improvement in her health and stamina. She had the clarity to receive many family members and talk with them in the hospice during the rest of the day. She even talked with others on the phone that were far away and could not come. This morning she passed away peacefully in her sleep.

Thank you Mike. May your teachings endure and multiply.