Wheebook Grief 1k3134

 

Copyright © Daniel J. Benor, MD, ABIHM 2010 Published by Wholistic Healing Publications P.O. Box 76 Bellmawr, NJ 08099 www.WholisticHealingResearch.com [email protected] Cover by KillerCovers.com Web by Conscious Commerce All rights reserved. No part of this book may be altered in any manner. You are free to forward this book through email and print as long as no changes are made in this file and no charge is made for this eBook.

ISBN: 978-0-9819729-3-0

Disclaimer: The techniques described in this e-Book are intended as information for self-healing. If you are having severe stress or other physical or psychological health problems, you should seek the help of a professional caregiver who can guide you in identifying and using the techniques that will best suit your problems. While many thousands of people have experienced the benefits of WHEE, there has been only a little direct research on the benefits of this new method. The benefits of WHEE shared in this book are gathered from reports of grateful people who have used WHEE and found it helpful. See some of these reports on the WHEE Appreciations page. Please note that no claims in this book are made or implied to indicate a promise of cure for any problem. Healing is about becoming whole within yourself and functioning better in the world around you. It is about letting go of habits, memories and feelings that serve you poorly or get you into trouble, on the one hand, and on the other hand about building habits that make you feel better. As you become more whole, your whole being can deal better with whatever physical and psychological problems you have. Please note also that while you are responsible for doing all that you can to enhance your health, and are responsible if you do things detrimental to your health, you may not be to blame if your health is poor. There are numerous factors contributing to health that may be beyond your control, such as congenital predispositions to certain diseases; chemical residues from fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides in your food and water; electromagnetic pollution; allergen intolerances or infections due to immune system stresses; exposure to infectious organisms; metabolic imbalances; life challenges and emotional traumas you experience; degenerative processes with age or heavy use of your body; and neoplastic problems. Despite any of these, you may be able to enhance your health and your enjoyment of life through self-healing approaches you will learn in this book.  

Contents   INTRODUCTION The mechanics of WHEE   UNDERSTANDING GRIEF AND BEREAVEMENT   The stages of grief   The process of grief   VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF GRIEF   Delays and blocks to the usual unfolding of a grief process   Stage 1 blocks   Stage 2 blocks   The loss of a child   Stage 3 blocks   Resolution may continue for a long time   SPIRITUAL AWARENESSES IN GRIEF AND BEREAVEMENT   RESEARCH CONFIRMATIONS OF SPIRITUAL AWARENESSES   SUICIDE   TENDING AND MINISTERING TO THE DYING   LIVING WILLS/ ADVANCE CARE DIRECTIVES   THE PERIOD IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING DEATH   THE FORMAL MOURNING PERIOD   Being positive around the time of death and during grieving   GRIEF AND BEREAVEMENT: OPPORTUNITIES FOR GROWTH

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  RESOLUTION   BASIC HEALING PRINCIPLES   A SPECTRUM OF PROBLEMS HELPED BY WHEE   ADDITIONAL BENEFITS WITH USING WHEE   THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS   PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS   RESOURCES   SUGGESTED READING

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RELATED REFERENCES BY DANIEL BENOR

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ABOUT DANIEL BENOR

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PAYING IT FORWARD

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There is a teasing irony: we spend our lives evading our own redemption. And this is naturally so because something in us knows that to be fully human we must experience pain and loss. Therefore, we are at ceaseless effort to elude this high cost, whatever the price, until at last it overtakes us. And then in spite of ourselves we do realize our humanity. We are put in worthier possession of our souls. Then we look back and know that even our grief contained our blessing. - Gordon Sherman Founder of Midas Muffler

Commencement Address, California School of Professional Psychology 1986.

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INTRODUCTION Grief and bereavement are among the most challenging experiences each of us has to face at one time or another in our life. If you come away from this book with only one message, I hope you come to understand that you can be gentle with yourself as you move through the complex stages of grieving. People commonly comment: "I feel like I've been hit with a ton of bricks." "I feel I'm on an emotional rollercoaster, with frequent, unexpected and unpredictable ups, downs and sudden shifts that are terribly unsettling." "Every time I feel like I've sorted myself out, along comes another wave of emotions I have to deal with." "My family and friends don't know how to respond to me any more because I'm such an emotional firecracker." With better understanding of the grief process, and learning the tools and skills you will learn in this WHEE BOOK, you will find you are able to markedly lessen your pain and suffering as you move through the grief process. The good news is that when faced with the inevitable, we may find ourselves experiencing intense emotions that we never imagined we would or could feel. And these emotions can be cleansing – providing releases from attachments and memories that are no longer possible to resolve with the person who is no longer with us. The further good news is that we may experience enormous emotional and spiritual growth in our journeys through grief and bereavement. Learning to experience and sort out our sadness, angers and guilts that are aspects of the normal grief experience can be enormously beneficial in the long run. The bad news is that these are often painful experiences, which we might rather choose to avoid – if we had the choice. These inevitable and unavoidable challenges along the road of life may, however, be so painful that we cannot ignore them. When we do push them aside or detour around them, we may find that we are emotionally and physically drained and that these burdens of grief are increasingly difficult to bear.

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It can be ever so tempting to bury and ignore these troublesome feelings. While this may be at some times in our lives a necessary response in order to carry on with our duties and responsibilities, if not with a fight for survival, it is a response that is fraught with many dangers. Griefs that are buried often evolve into emotional time bombs that can become increasingly dangerous to our normal lives, on many levels of our beingness. It requires considerable effort to keep the unwanted feelings and memories buried outside our conscious awareness. This is a drain on our energies. We also protect ourselves by avoiding relationships and situations that resonate with the buried, unresolved grief experiences – our unconscious mind always on the alert lest issues and feelings in the current situation resonate with the buried materials and set off a bomb that it fears will be overwhelming. Our lives may become narrowed and constricted as a result of these defensive maneuvers. Other parts of our unconscious mind understand that these buried bombs are an unhealthy burden to be carrying around with us. Signals are sent from healing parts of our unconscious mind to draw our attention to the buried feelings and memories that need clearing. These signals may include troubled dreams, physical symptoms, or unusual, excessively strong responses to various triggers in our current lives. In this e-Book on grief and bereavement you can explore many avenues for dealing with challenging psychological and physical issues through wholistic affirmations for self-healing. The 'W' of WHEE stands for 'Wholistic.' Wholistic healing addresses body, emotions, mind, relationships (with other people and with our environment) and spirit, harmonizing all of these levels to harmonize for optimal health. A shift on any one level facilitates wholistic shifts on all of the others. When we relax physically, we have an easier time relaxing mentally and emotionally. When we meditate, we focus and discipline our mind; we also relax, learn to choose when and how much to engage our awareness with our emotions; and we may open to spiritual awareness and healing. Being open to changing on all of these levels and using self-healing practices to help access our resources on each level can markedly facilitate our self-healing. From the other side of the mind-body connection, our inner self may speak to us through our body. For instance, when tensions are building up in our mind or relationships, we may get 'up tight' and then start to get headaches, backaches or stomach cramps. Listening to our bodymind when it speaks to us in such ways can waken us to de-stress our psychological tensions, thereby relieving the tensions in our body.

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We are made of atoms and chemicals, but we also have biological energies that guide our inner processes. Einstein pointed this out, early in the last century. Modern physics has confirmed that this is correct. Matter and energies are actually two sides of the same thing. Conventional medicine has been very slow to absorb that our bodies can be understood and treated as energy. Wholistic healing also helps through energy medicine, the art and science of biological energies (bioenergies). These and many other aspects of wholistic healing are explained in the WHEE BOOK series. Our mind is an amazing biological computer that contains inner knowledge and stores memories of what is going on inside us. We know through our unconscious mind what is going on in part of our being. These e-Books teach you ways to get in touch with your inner wisdom, to explore and explain what is going on in your life and to help you find the best ways to deal with your problems at every level of your being. For more on the inter-relationships of spirit, relationships (with people and the environment), mind, emotions and body click here. You may choose to live your life in new and exciting ways. Your symptoms and problems need not be scourges to be eradicated. Using medications to deal with symptoms of grief and bereavement may in effect be a way of silencing the messenger who is bringing you uncomfortable news that something inside you is out of harmony, or a method to deaden your responses to these messages. This WHEE BOOK brings you is a remarkable new method for easing your way through the grief process. While it may seem to you that the lightening of your burden of grief is a difficult challenge, many grateful WHEE s report it has completely transformed their bereavement process and their lives. What is particularly helpful is that WHEE helps you to replace the hurts of grief with positive thoughts and feelings.    

Why can't we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn't work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos. - Charles M. Schulz

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The mechanics of WHEE   The WHEE process involves a combination of right and left stimulation of the body, while reciting affirmations that focus your mind on the issues you want to change. You can learn the affirmations process from the FREE WHEE EBOOK, Deepening Affirmations. The affirmations are sufficient for relieving many problems. For issues involving physical and emotional pains, a system of tapping is reported by many people to markedly deepen the effects of WHEE. For details about the tapping click here. Please feel free to use any of these approaches for your self-healing. You may also reproduce the materials in this e-Book as and where they may be helpful to you, as long as you credit their source, per the copyright page above. This e-Book includes excerpts from Seven Minutes to Natural Pain Release, the WHEE Workbook and from Deepening Affirmations. This e-Book is offered freely as a contribution towards healings of grief and bereavement, with their accompanying stresses, tensions, anxieties, fears, angers, hurts and pains of all sorts – both individually and collectively. There is too much buried, unresolved pain and anger in this world that holds humanity in a collective post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This collective PTSD is making humans into abs and is contributing to our collective movement towards mass suicide through pollution, global heating, exhaustion of natural resources, wars, other abuses of each other, and overpopulation. By healing ourselves, we lessen the collective pain of humanity and contribute to healing our planet. We may also extend the benefits of our healing to clear the collective PTSD of humanity, but that is a topic covered in another article. Through self-healings with WHEE you can learn to address your grief as a challenge that invites you to discover more about yourself. You can learn to deal with your symptoms and stress with tools that are introduced in these e-Books. You will then come away enriched through these self-healing exercises – often rewarded by the clearing of your symptoms, but also rewarded even when your symptoms are not always completely eliminated. You can learn how to understand them and deal with them in new ways, and can learn to

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listen to what your inner self is inviting you to become aware of. This is also a road to deeper personal spiritual awareness and spiritual healing. Personal spirituality is the awareness of being part of something greater than our individual, physical selves. When we connect with our higher selves, there are enormous sources of inspiration and healing available to us through the energies that are a vital part of our inner and outer worlds, and through the worlds of nature, spirits, nature spirits, angels and the Infinite Source. For those wanting to learn more about this, you may find my book on Personal Spirituality of interest. You can also find further suggestions for helpful books and a rich variety of Web resources at the end of this WHEE BOOK.    

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UNDERSTANDING GRIEF AND BEREAVEMENT The stages of grief There are three classical stages when we suffer a serious loss. Stage 1. This stage has three components: Shock – These are "The Oh, My God!" feelings that flood us when we hear bad news. Denial – Not wanting to accept that this tragedy actually occurred, we may at first say to ourselves, "I don't believe it!" or "This just can't be true!" And we may go on, doing our best to rationalize away the unwanted news: "I just saw aunt Jody a week ago. She was looking and feeling fine." or "It must be another Jody Smith. I'm sure someone made a mistake." Bargaining – Seeking a way out of having to accept the unwelcome, unwanted news, we may plead: "Please, God, let it not be so!" or "I'll say 10 prayers and donate a tenth of my earnings to the church if this turns out to not be true." This stage normally lasts a few minutes, but may persists for up to a day – as the news slowly sinks in. Stage 2. This is the stage most recognized a grief, which also has three components. Sadness, crying, depression and a deep sense of loss – the whole spectrum we normally associate with grief. There may also be sleeplessness, nightmares, tiredness, loss of appetite, loss of interest in work and recreational activities, difficulties concentrating and ing, restlessness, feeling very intense longing for the departed person in what used to be intimate situations – such as at the dining table, in bed, or when participating in various activities or visiting special places. You may think obsessively about the person who is no longer there; may feel listlessness and discouragement; may wish you were dead, and might even think about hurting or killing yourself. It may be difficult to be with others because of your constant, deep sadness. Either you or they may find communications strained at these times.

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Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses? - David Brin

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Anger – At the person who 'abandoned' us; • At ourselves for having said or done things we wish we had not said or done; • At ourselves for not having said or done things we wish we had not said or done; • At God for taking the person, or for inviting/allowing the person to leave their earthly existence; • At ourselves for feeling guilty over things said or done; • At others for having possibly contributed to the death of the departed; • At others for their lack of understanding of your distress; for saying insensitive things; for staying away from you; for not helping you as you helped them in the past, or would have helped them had the circumstances been reversed… • At relatives who focus on issues that you consider minor or irrelevant, or who argue with you over funeral and burial arrangements. • At minor issues that make no sense at all, but which trigger intense angers in you. Guilt • • • •

- Over having said or done things we wish we had not said or done; Over having said or done things we wish we had not said or done; Over not having said or done things we wish we had said or done; For having dared to be angry with God; For being a burden on others in our morass of distress during this awkward time of grief and bereavement.

This stage generally lasts about several months to two years, with gradually decreasing intensity. There may often be a lot of ups and downs along the way to Stage 3. More on this below. Stage 3. Reintegrating ourselves in a world without the person who is gone. Resolution - We return to our lives, adapting and adjusting to living without the presence of the departed. This involves the slow and gradual letting go of our emotional connections and habits of relating to those who died. The process is a fluctuating one, punctuated by flows and ebbs of emotions, as mentioned above. Increasingly, we recall the happy times we had with the departed person rather than the sadness of their no longer being with us or the unfinished business between us. Looking at the stage of Resolution from the opposite perspective, it is a process marked by rays of light that are increasing in duration and intensity. The same caution applies here: Please be patient with yourself. You are

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likely to feel repeatedly that you are finished with the sadness, angers and guilts – only to be frustrated and annoyed when you cannot hold onto the sense of having returned to your usual, pre-bereavement self. These ups and downs are absolutely normal and expected. Waves of grief may hit you unexpectedly, even years after the death of someone dear to you. You may find a possession, a letter, a computer file or a photo of the person who is no longer there – stimulating you to clear a neglected corner in the file drawers of your memories. The more you use WHEE, the easier you will find this task. Stage 3 overlaps broadly with stage 2, and may commonly extend for several more months or a few years. The death of a child often takes longer to adjust to than deaths of adults. Moving forward through the stage of resolution, one may come to appreciate the blessings of a thorough and deep working through of the grief process. Nothing in our lives is permanent. Everything is transient. Having learned to deal with a major grief, we become sensitized to the many little griefs of everyday life. • Every goodbye is a little death – the end of a period of time shared with others, or of time spent in a favorite activity or place. • Every song, sonata and concert performance must come to an end, making each note more precious. • Every flower is cherished because we know it will soon die. Its transiency is a major factor in its beauty and its gifts to us. • Every delicious meal is savored for its special tastes, knowing we will never have exactly the same stimulations of our tastebuds again.

 

Every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven.  

- Tryon Edwards

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The process of grief Grief may be a challenging, awkward, difficult and trying experience. Please be patient with yourself and with others as you navigate these challenging, often stormy waters. You and others who are mourning with you are likely to be much more emotional than usual. Accept that this volatility is normal. It is actually helpful in releasing feelings that are natural at this difficult time. Be aware and be prepared to deal with waves of emotions in yourself and others. This is one of the more challenging aspects of grief. The first time or two that you experience a wave of relief, only to be followed before long by another wave of grief, may be very difficult to bear. The fact that you felt better for a while makes the following wave that much more painful in comparison. This is absolutely normal and expected in almost everyone who travels the road of grief and bereavement. Be gentle with yourself when this happens. It is very easy to fall into feeling guilty or angry with yourself for 'being weak' or to blame yourself for somehow failing to hold onto the better feelings you experience between the waves of feeling pain, sadness, loss and all the other feelings associated with grief. Helpful hints to ease your path through grief:   • It is normal to feel you are functioning on fewer cylinders than usual. Allow yourself time for grieving. • Ask family and friends to help you. There may be times that you don't even feel like fixing a meal for yourself. • Let out whatever feelings emerge. The more deeply you can cry and release these feelings, the less likely they are to fester inside you and to return at a later time to plague you. • Be candid with those who are close to you and want to cheer you up. If you feel like accepting their invitations, do so; but do not hesitate to tell them if you'd rather be alone or would prefer to be near them but not do too much interacting. It is absolutely normal to be unpredictably emotional for several months following the death of someone close to you. While unpleasant for you and others, it is also normal to have your grief reaction emotions come out sideways – in irritation, annoyance or anger at others; in depression, selfdeprecation, feeling sad and sorry for yourself; in guilts over things said to others and imagined slights from others; and in countless other creative

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ways that your unconscious mind engineers as ways to relieve you of your burdens of grief emotions.

Our anger stands in front of our love. Letting it out is part of the process of relinquishing it. The last thing you want to do – ever – is to buy into the insidious delusion that spiritual lives and spiritual relationships are always quiet, or always blissful. - Marianne Williamson In most cases, this is not an indication that you have to take medications or go for psychotherapy in order to be 'normal' again. As long as those around you whom you trust can validate that your overall trend is one of improvements and resolutions of your emotional swings, confirming that your ups are increasingly up and your downs are decreasingly down, you're on your road to resolving your grief. Having said that, if you experience extremes of emotions that are seriously incapacitating and preventing you from carrying out your normal functions for a period of time exceeding several weeks – you may benefit from selfhelp with WHEE and the of a professional counselor. If a serious depression sets in, especially if you have been prone to depressions previously, then a consultation for medications may be in order. Much more is shared below on possible problems experienced along the road to resolving your grief. If you have suicidal thoughts It is very common to have thoughts of wanting to re those who died because we miss them so much, or to feel that life is not worth living without their presence. Such thoughts and longings may at times be rather strong. It is helpful to have people you feel comfortable calling if you begin to feel you might give in to such wishes. Just the process of talking through your feelings is often enough to relieve them considerably, if not to resolve them completely. If you have no one in your circle of family, friends or colleagues you feel can be ive, you would be wise to locate and keep handy the phone number(s) of your local 24/7 phone help line(s). This is also a good backup to have – in case people you know personally are not available when

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you need them. In the majority of cases, talking with someone will provide major relief for suicidal thinking. Keep in mind, as well, that such thoughts tend to increase during waves of deeper sadness, guilt and anger. WHEE can be enormously helpful in dealing with these feelings. However, if you are feeling overwhelmed and have no close family or friends to call, it is wise to identify your local emergency services and hot lines where there will also be someone on call 24/7. This is in any case a good backup to have, in case you find yourself in the depths of grief during late hours of the night. Your spiritual beliefs and practices, as well as your personal spiritual experiences may be helpful to you in these contexts. Knowing that suicide is not an optimal long-term solution to grief, and gnowing that the spirit survives physical death can help you to work through these feelings. More on this in a later section of this e-Book.

Memory and the body and our grief are not regulated by the clock, the calendar, or the brain. Grief comes and goes when it is ready. - John Lee There are no two ways about it. Grief and bereavement are not experiences that people generally welcome in their lives. Despite their intensity and heaviness, these experiences have enormous potentials to promote deeper awarenesses plus emotional and spiritual growth, as shared further below If someone you know has suicidal thoughts Coming from the opposite direction, if you are a caregiver, family member or friend to someone who is deeply affected by grief, you may at times have concerns about their thinking of suicide and their possibly acting on these thoughts. If you have any concerns of these sorts whatsoever, it is important to find a way to open this subject for discussion with the person who is grieving. While the common perception is that raising the subject might be inadvisable because this could introduce the idea when it was not present, the opposite is actually the case. People who are grieving often think of their own mortality and death. The idea of reing the lost life partner, family member or friend is often an

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attractive fantasy that appears to offer a by to the suffering of bereavement. Holding the thought of being able to suicide as a way out of suffering the pains of grief also provides a sense of having some measure of control in one's life – at a time when life may feel very much beyond controlling, due to the loss of someone who was enormously important in one's life, and due to the recurrent waves of grief that may feel overwhelming. Thus, suicidal thoughts serve to counteract the tremendous emotional pain that grieving people may experience. People who are grieving may be ashamed or may feel guilty about having suicidal thoughts. They may expect that others would be shocked, alarmed or might think less of them for having suicidal ideas. Thus, they may often hesitate to raise this subject themselves. The best rule I know in these situations is that IF YOU THINK SOMEONE IN GRIEF MIGHT BE HARBORING SUICIDAL THOUGHTS, ASK THEM IF THIS IS TRUE! In the vast majority of cases, they will be deeply grateful you have asked and will share their thoughts, fears and grief issues with you. It is not your job to change their feelings of grief or their suicidal thinking. Just listening is the most important thing you can do.

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares. - Henri Nouwen   Your presence brings caring, acceptance and love – in whatever measure you are able to offer these and to whatever extent the grieving person is able to accept them. You bring a reminder and hope that someone other than the person who died can be there for the person in grief. Most importantly, you are present to witness and to accept whatever this person is willing to share of their deep inner experience. By listening, you confirm to this person that there is another human being who cares for them. After listening, it is important to ask: "Have you just thought about suicide in a general way, or have you thought of a particular way you might do it?" If they have a plan in mind, "Have you come close to doing this?" Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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If you get answers to these questions that lead you to suspect there is any possibility of their acting on their suicidal thoughts, it is important to get them to a mental health professional who can make a full assessment of their suicide potential and recommend what can be done to help them. Mental health professionals assess the seriousness of suicidal potential. They can advise whether hospitalization or urgent intervention is necessary and can provide referrals for ongoing therapy. One of their most important interventions is to help the suicidal person make a 'contract for safety.' This is a promise that the people who are suicidal make, stating that if they find themselves thinking seriously of acting on their suicidal thoughts, they will phone one of a list of people that they know they can rely upon to help them. You, as their friend, could volunteer to be one of these people on their list, if you feel comfortable in that role.

True friendship isn't about being there when it's convenient; it's about being there when it's not. - Author Unknown

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VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF GRIEF Delays and blocks to the usual unfolding of a grief process There is no 'normal' unfolding of grieving. Each of us will respond with our own unique combinations and timings in our responses to our losses. Let me share some examples of where blocks occurred and how they were resolved. Stage 1 blocks: Continued denial The most common block is to remain in denial. This happens commonly when the person who ed on died in such a way that their body could not be found. The person in grief may hold onto the wish and the hope that the death did not really occur that they remain in denial for weeks or months. Donna's husband of twenty-six years, Bill, was an avid outdoorsman who frequently went hunting and fishing, sometimes with buddies but often on his own. When he did not return as expected at the end of a long weekend fishing outing, Donna alerted the police. Bill's campground was found empty, and his boat was found a considerable distance away, empty, with no sign of Bill anywhere. As it was a large lake, with no clues as to where he might have fallen into the water, there seemed to be little likelihood of finding his body – assuming he must have drowned. Donna's response when she heard the news was, "Maybe there's been a mistake. Maybe he wasn't in that boat. Maybe he's lost in the woods somewhere." As days and then weeks wore on with no sign of Bill, everyone else in the family wanted to hold a funeral service. Donna, however, firmly refused, saying that if he were somehow still alive, this would be depriving him of her prayers for his wellbeing and survival. After another month, she very reluctantly acquiesced, in order to stop her family from pestering her about this. She did not cry at the funeral service. She continued in denial for close to another six months. During that time, she found herself irritable, crying over minor setbacks in her life and easily angered. She woke up to her problems one day when a friend who went on a shopping trip with her pointed out that she didn't think the bus driver, the woman who bumped into her on the bus, the clerks at three stores in the mall, Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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and the little boy who spilled his soda in the fast food court all deserved the piece of her mind she had shared with them. In counseling, Donna was helped to acknowledge how devastated and uned she felt, and to begin to let out her sadness, angers and guilt that had built up such steam that they came out in all these ways at every opportunity. In short, she was able to let go of her denial and get on at last with her process of mourning. I have occasionally seen similar responses when there was a closed casket funeral, and of the family did not actually view the dead body. For some of them, it felt like the deceased was still alive because that was their last memory of the person. Misguided medication prescriptions Well-meaning but misinformed doctors may give medications with the intention to allay the shock and pain of grief. My impression is that this often is done (unconsciously) more for the benefit of the doctors than for those who are bereaved. In essence, medications shut off the outpouring of anguish that is distressing to all of those who are present, including medical staff. This protects the medical staff from having to witness and resonate with the grief of people under their care. It also gives medical staff a feeling that they have something to offer in dealing with death – which to them is an enemy that they are constantly battling. Being untrained in managing grief reactions, this is, sadly, the best that many medical caregivers can muster by way of assistance. In Israel, during the Yom Kippur War the standard military operating procedure for informing relatives of the death of a soldier was to send a nurse who was all ready with a drawn syringe of Valium to calm down those to whom they were conveying the sad news. Part of this was a gap in cultural understanding. People who had immigrated to Israel from North Africa have cultural responses to grief that differ substantially from the responses of European immigrants. The North Africans are very loud and demonstrative, and will keen and scream out their bereavement for all to hear. Medical personnel of European descent would find this upsetting, and would interpret it from their cultural expectations as an extreme reaction to grief. Medicating people who bereaved is in most cases unwarranted and may block their movement towards resolving their grief process. Not only does it dull their emotions so that they do not feel them, but it also gives a very clear message that holding in their feelings is desirable.

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As long as the overall trend appears to be one of gradually increasing periods of normal feelings and functions, even though these are interspersed with periods of emotional upheavals, there is usually not a need to have medications for a grief reaction.     Children's grief reactions Younger children's responses to grief may differ substantially from the grief reactions of adults. Young children in urban settings normally have a longer period of denial. Not having experienced the deaths of animals or people, they do not yet comprehend what death means. Children under the age of 8 (plus or minus a year or two of age) are often out of synch with the grief processes of adults. It is not until this age that they have the mental maturity to know what death is. In the normal process of their grief, it may take them several weeks to come to understand the finality of the departure of the deceased. The most poignant, heart-wrenching case of this sort I recall was the 2 year-old daughter of a career military person who had known her daddy largely through phone conversations. For weeks after his death, she played a game that had everyone who knew her and witnessed this in tears. She would go to the phone and pretend to be talking with her daddy. This explains why young children may be awkward participants at funerals. They may still be cheerfully in denial due to their inability to comprehend the finality of death. Having had a pet goldfish, a cat or a dog who died can be a great help to children in understanding and accepting death as a normal part of life.

Stage 2 blocks Several types of issues may block the normal expression of grief at this stage. Blocks due to avoidance of unpleasant feelings Grieving is often a sad and painful process. Our natural inclinations usually are to avoid whatever is unpleasant. We feel miserable when we are crying and sobbing, depressed, lonely, and aching with longing for the special person who is no longer with us. It is no wonder that many choose, consciously or unconsciously, to distract themselves from their painful

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bereavement and divert their attention to topics that are at least less painful, if not more pleasant. While this is a logical way to handle many unpleasant feelings, it may not be the best way to deal with grief reactions. When we bury our emotions, we have to stash them away in our inner file drawers to prevent their release into our conscious awareness, to protect ourselves from feeling them. Then we place signs on the file drawers saying, "Keep away! Here lie painful memories and feelings." In small print, we also indicate on the signs what we are to keep away from in our everyday lives – lest we stir the painful, buried materials into conscious awareness. We may also place locks on the drawers in the form of unconscious beliefs and rules that if we release the feelings it my be too painful or dangerous for us to deal with. Each of these defensive maneuvers comes with a price tag. In some cases the price may be very high. When we bury our emotions in times of trauma, very high stress and danger, this can be helpful – as noted above. However, the prices we pay may include: 1. We use up unconscious emotional energies to keep the materials outside of our conscious awareness. This can become a serious drain on our psychological energies, leaving us weakened and listless or tired, without the energies we need to carry on our normal life. 2. Burying uncomfortable feelings and memories becomes our default mechanism for handling stress. This behavior pattern continues way past the time when we are under duress, and past the time when we have the capacities to acquire and implement more mature and better ways of dealing with stress. 3. Others around us, particularly family , and especially children, may take their cues from us and hold back their own feelings. This can throw individuals and whole families into emotional blocks – not just in the present day, but even for several generations down the line. When we set meta-alerts on the file drawers, our unconscious mind often generalizes from the original situation, applying the warning to all similar situations. We then set up broader unconscious warnings, such as "Don't go near any situation that resembles the one that got you in trouble." This is meant to keep us away from painful situations but often gets us into further difficulties:

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If you always think what you've always thought, You will always do what you've always done. If you always do what you've always done, You will always get what you've always got. If you always get what you've always got, You will always think what you've always thought. - Author unknown

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1. For example, if a person was assaulted in a dark alley, this is a helpful alert to have in place, keeping her away from dark alleys. However, if her unconscious mind broadens the warning in order to keep her extra-safe, she may end up being afraid to go out alone; afraid to go anywhere near places that in some way look similar to the one where she was assaulted; or distrusting any person who even remotely resembles the one who assaulted her. She may then become anxious when she is in the presence of anyone who is loud and aggressive; male; or of a similar ethnic origin to the attacker. When we broaden the rule to stay away from painful emotions in the original file drawer, we may even extend our inner radar to avoid all negative, painful emotions; or worse, we may go so far as to shut off most of our emotional awarenesses. We end up living in our heads, cut off from our hearts. 2. Again, when we set up inner meta-alerts and warnings, we often end up spending a lot of psychological energies in excessive defensive maneuvers. 3. These meta-anxieties and meta-beliefs can block the releases of primary issues in therapy. If we do decide that we want to release our buried feelings, these meta-locks may be a challenge to pick, as many people have hidden the keys so well – in their journey from the time of the trauma to the present moment – that they may have great difficulties locating them. WHEE can release these meta-blocks, but it may take some detective work to identify them, with careful construction and consistent uses of affirmations to release them. Another potential block to releasing emotions raised in the grief process is that mixed feelings or negative feelings we have had towards a person may surface during our grieving. The positive side of this is that you now have the opportunity to let go of these feelings, emptying file drawers that may have been shut, and locked for many years and forgotten. The negative aspect of this is that it may increase the intensity of your grief reaction. Another possibility is that you may be tempted to stuff your current feelings into those old file drawers. When you have no s and no way to deal with the feelings, this may feel like your best option – in order to avoid more suffering than you feel you can handle. This is the essence of why I am putting out this free WHEE EBOOK. There is too much suffering in this world that is actually unnecessary. I truly believe the subtitle of my book, 'Pain Is a Choice and Suffering Is Optional.' When

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you learn to use WHEE, you can release whatever negativity is a problem to you. Better yet, you can also install positives to replace the negatives you are clearing. Family and cultural habits and conditioning may also contribute to our challenges in dealing with grief and bereavement. In various family, ethnic and religious cultures there are different traditions for expressing grief. For instance, in many Western families, men are expected to 'be strong.' If a man shows his emotions he may be considered a weakling or a sissy. This leads many men to mute or hide their emotions of sadness and grief – even if they have not already developed habits of holding back their feelings in general. Western men are therefore particularly vulnerable to problems with unexpressed grief. As with any other conscious or unconscious reasons for holding in one's grief, there are often unanticipated and unsuspected problems. Men as heads of families often set examples and strongly influence the family rules for how people express their feelings. This then becomes a problem for others in the family as well as for the person setting the example of blocking his or her feelings. If a head of household locks away his feelings, he is likely to encourage others to stop expressing their feelings and to do as he is doing. This is likely to occur not just by his example that other copy, but by his actively discouraging others from expressing their feelings. He will almost always engage in such defensive behaviors completely without conscious awareness that he is doing it. This happens because the expression of others' feelings will threaten to stir the feelings he has buried in his own file drawers. 'Jim' lost his father when he was nine years old. He had been very close with his dad, and being an emotionally sensitive child, he was devastated when his father was killed by a drunk driver. Being the oldest of three children, Jim was immediately drafted by circumstances to become the man of the house when his mother was incapacitated by grief and depression for a number of months in her sudden widowhood. Jim had to bury his feelings and get on with helping manage the household and supervise his younger brother and sister. His personality was immediately changed. No longer was he a playful, open, cheerful child. He became an adult way before the time a person should have to take on such responsibilities. When he grew up and had a family of his own, he was a caring but Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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very demanding husband and father. He had set high standards for himself, and expected no less from others. While sometimes harsh in his criticisms, he was loved by his family because they could clearly sense that he deeply cared for them. It was when the family dog was run over and his nine year-old son Tommy was utterly devastated that Jim's unresolved grief became an issue. Jim was so harsh in his demands for his son to "act like a man and stop sniveling" that his usually ive wife stepped in and insisted that Jim stop berating Tommy for grieving the loss of his best friend. Jim found himself suddenly in tears over what he was doing with Tommy. This was so totally out of his normal range of experience that he took several days of sick leave to spend some time with Tommy, but more importantly, to examine his own over-reactions. This brought him for help with WHEE to release his buried grief over the loss of his own father. In two sessions, he was able to begin to release his longburied, unresolved grief. Having learned how to use WHEE, he continued using it on his own until he had worked it through and was able to install positives to replace the negatives he had released. Jim then went on to teach Tommy and the rest of the family to use WHEE for their grief and other issues. Jim's family was lucky that underneath his tough and demanding exterior, Jim was still a sensitive and caring person. I have seen other families in which an unresolved grief froze the emotional expression of generations – following an unresolved grief in a key family member. On the surface, it is so much easier to get along – with oneself and others – when people bury their feelings. This is, however, to live in a rather barren, emotional desert, which is also an emotional minefield – where buried, explosive, unresolved issues can explode at any time. WHEE is outstanding for releasing buried traumas. WHEE enables you to let go of the burdens of hurts that were too heavy to bear at the time they occurred, but now can be safely released. Anticipatory grief If we see the end of a person's life approaching, we may begin our grief process before they die. This is actually a healthy way to handle feelings on all sides. Those who are approaching their death are often enormously relieved when people close to them raise the subject and when everyone can express their feelings – for themselves and with each other.

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A beautiful example of this can be seen in Mitch Albom's book and film, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson. Albom tells the heartwarming story of visiting a cherished old professor who is dying of a slow, lingering disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS/ Lou Gherig's Disease). The clearing of their feelings through frank and open discussions of death is actually heartwarming. It may appear that a person is avoiding expressing and sorting out their grief, when actually they have already done so. In situations where someone close to us has a serious illness and is likely to die, we may experience our grief prior to their death. This is particularly true when the person who is ill becomes severely disabled or comatose. In effect, we lose with the person we knew, even though they are not dead. The same is true for people who slowly lose their capacities to cope with the physical demands of self-care, due to severe illness or injuries. They may work their way through their grief reactions and make their peace with their disabilities and then with their own impending death well before they die. A classic example of reaching acceptance about death is portrayed in the play about a quadriplegic man who requests euthanasia, titled "Whose life is this anyway?" The protagonist, Ken Harrison, has made his peace with being seriously disabled and is ready to die. His request to end his life confronts his caregivers with all of the issues of grief and dealing with death. (This was a London play, made into a film in 1982, starring Richard Dreyfus.) Another situation where this may happen is in nursing homes, where there are many deaths from old age, with or without contributing illnesses. Both the residents and the staff may struggle with anticipatory grief, knowing that those they are speaking with may be with them only for a limited time. In all of these situations of anticipatory grief, it may appear to outsiders that the person is blocked from feeling or expressing grief around the time of death – when actually, they have gone through all the stages and have come out the other side. WHEE gives you the tools to convert the anxieties and worries you feel into manageable concerns. There is no need to torture yourself with over burdens you anticipate will be troublesome. So many times we fret and fester over possible problems that never materialize, or that materialize but are nowhere near as troublesome as we had anticipated.

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The loss of a child This deserves a special note here, as it may take a longer time to resolve grief over the loss of one's child. Betty's story shows how this, too, can be helped with WHEE. 'Betty' had been a cheerful, outgoing person through all of her 52 years, the sunshine in her family and a live-wire in any gathering she attended. The death of her grown daughter in an auto accident seemed to be a blow from which she could not recover. Though she maintained her calm and extremely helpful presence as surrogate mother to her two young grandchildren, and remained the dutiful and responsible wife she had always been to her husband, it was as though the light had gone out behind her eyes. When she was a silent participant, rather like a wilted flower, at the extended family's Christmas dinner nearly two years after her daughter's death, her two sisters took her aside for a serious chat. Though at first Betty did not respond to their urgings to get help for her grief and bereavement, with further encouragement from her family over a period of weeks she finally came for help with WHEE. While there were no serious residual issues we could identify in Betty's earlier life, the loss of her daughter was certainly a sufficient explanation for her very difficult time in working her way through the grief process. She sobbed heavily through several sessions as she cleared the deep hurts, disappointments, angers, self-questioning and guilts, and other feelings that had been buried in her file drawers. She also used WHEE to clear meta-issues of having to 'beg strong' for her husband, extended family and employer. These blocked her releases at several points, but responded readily to WHEE. It took only a few weekly sessions to unlock the file drawers so that Betty could continue to work on her own with WHEE. She was surprised that even though her feelings were at times quite intense, the WHEE process allowed her to handle them so competently that she was able to tolerate the painful emotions and continue her releasing work – on her own as well as in phone sessions. While it took several more years till Betty felt she had released enough of her hurt to be able to feel she was moving into the recovery stage, her path was made much easier through the use of WHEE.

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While no grief is easy to bear, the loss of a child is generally experienced as the most difficult of all to resolve. It is not uncommon for the grief process in such experiences to last three to four years. Death of a child after a chronic disease may be easier to resolve than sudden death by accident because there is time for anticipatory grieving and for resolving feelings between parents and children as children approach their death. It is extremely helpful when both parents can grieve together, or at least share some of their grieving process. The loss of a child is such a draining experience that it can become a serious strain on the marital relationship. Avoidance of feelings due to unresolved prior trauma People who have had previous losses to death, particularly if this occurred under physically or psychologically traumatic circumstances, may also experience prolonged delays in the onset of their grief reactions. While this has the outward appearances that one is stuck in the denial phase, it is actually due to an unconscious avoidance of the Stage 2 feelings that are being stirred. 'Rachel' was astounded when her husband, 'Ira' displayed little emotion when his only son lost both of his legs while on military duty. In the following months, Ira's wife pointed out repeatedly that he had become cold and distant with her, his son (who was adjusting well to the loss of his legs in rehabilitation), and his two younger children, and that this was adding to everyone's stresses. Ira finally agreed, however grudgingly, to come for counseling. Ira revealed that he had survived an auto accident at age 14 in which he suffered a severe concussion. He had wakened in the hospital several days later to discover that both of his parents had been killed. His extended family were enormously relieved that he had survived, and complimented him on "how maturely he handled the bad news." By this they meant that he did not cry or in other ways exhibit much emotional upset. What had actually happened to Ira was that he had been so physically and emotionally traumatized by the loss of both of his parents that he had shut off and buried his feelings of grief. This can be a helpful maneuver by the unconscious mind to protect us from suffering. The good news with such ways of handling grief is that in times of ongoing danger and stress this can help us to have more energies available for our struggles to survive. Soldiers and civilians who lost people close to them in war and disaster zones often Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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report that they were able to carry on with whatever was required for survival, without doing much, if any, grieving at the time. The bad news with these defensive responses is that the intense feelings of grief get buried in the unconscious mind, often along with fears for one's own survival. (More on this under the discussion on Stage 2 blocks.) As Ira's therapy unfolded, it became apparent that the old, unexpressed feelings from age 14 had been locked in with metaanxieties. These meta-anxieties included fears that to let out the buried grief would be overwhelming, as well as the wish to not disappoint his relatives who complimented him on 'being strong.' Many years later, these meta-anxieties led him to also hold back his feelings about the death of his son. WHEE was enormously helpful to Ira in dealing with the meta-anxieties, and then with his grief reactions to his current and earlier losses. As Ira eliminated his meta-anxieties and then released his buried feelings with WHEE, he then connected with his grief over the severe injuries his son had sustained. Unusual responses to grief, as with any unusual psychological or physical symptoms, are invitations to explore for prior issues that have been buried and forgotten. Common grief experiences with intense feelings that are often only partially addressed or completely buried include: • Abortions – Whether it is a miscarriage or a medical abortion, the termination of a pregnancy often leaves emotional scars in both the mother and the father. Sadly, medical doctors often dismiss these as minor, unimportant events and thereby encourage people to bury their feelings. Having carried a person-to-be within one's womb, for however brief a period, there is a powerful attachment there that is far better dealt with through acknowledgment and through clearing the pain of loss. Ignoring or burying these feelings can leave painful wounds that are unhealed and that come back to haunt a person later in life. • Stillborn and crib deaths – Very similar in effects to an abortion, the death of a child prior to or at birth. or in the early months of life, can have a very strong impact on the parents and other family . Guilt is often a prominent feature of these grief reactions, as parents question what they might have done to contribute to the baby's death. The fact that frequently there are no known explanations for these deaths leaves the family wide open to imagining any and all possible ways that they might have done wrong – when in actuality no one can answer this question, and no blame is due.

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We have learned to cope. This means, ‘I won’t feel too much as long as I don’t hurt too bad.’ It is quite a trade-off, and we grieve it. - S. Levine

 

           

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  • Separation and Divorce – The end of a marriage or of a partnered relationship requires a processing all of the stages of grief. This is true not just for the married couple but also for the children. • Children of separation and divorce – Children are often repeatedly retraumatized when they have to 'ping-pong' between the homes of their mother and father. Each time they leave one home they experience a mini-grief situation. It is very common to hear the opposite parent complain, "I don't know what s/he does to them, but the children always come back angry from their stay with him/her." A part of this anger is the anger of unresolved grief. Other parts include annoyance over having to repeatedly move back and forth between parental homes; challenges in adjusting to differing rules in each home; and divided loyalties, among other issues. • Moving from one home to another – Children are particularly vulnerable to this trauma. Marital partners who have to move because of their spouse's relocation suffer similarly. Military families may be transferred every 2 to 3 years. This may harden people to losses, creating emotional calluses on feelings that would be better off if processed or cleared. Uncleared, they remain as landmines just waiting to be triggered by other losses in life, making the later losses ever so much more intense and complicated to clear. • Changing jobs and careers – Even when the change is a desired and well earned employment or career shift, the tendency is to focus primarily on the forward aspects of the relocation, ignoring the losses of relationships and familiar routines that are left behind, ungrieved. Even more intense may be the grief experienced when you lose a job due to downsizing or other circumstances. Don't let people minimize your feelings around such issues. Let them run their normal course of grief so that you don't bury them and end up carrying a load of feelings that can prove problematic in later years. • Transitioning through life stages such as graduating from childhood and adolescence; midlife crises; decade milestones – These often involve the relinquishing of dreams and aspirations that are hitting walls of realities which appear to indicate you must abandon them. Releasing these through all of the stages of grief is a normal reaction. Unexpressed grief over anticipations, hopes and wishes may come back to haunt you.

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With each decade, loss es over a man’s body, painting lines around his eyes, adding inches to his waistline, and a slight sag to those ever-narrowing shoulders. Unless a man grieves each change, each ing, he cannot fully enter into the present. He’ll always be teased and tagged by the past. - John Lee • Retirement – When we stop our employment and end our career, we look back on what we achieved; where we might have done better; where we have failed in our aspirations. Particularly challenging may be the loss of daily routines and the camaraderie with others who worked with us. • Losing a pet – Pets are very much a part of one's family. For many, they provide very intense, strong emotional . In fact, those who live with pets tend to live longer than average. The death of a pet produces as intense grief reactions for many people as losing a human family member. Those who are not pet owners, including other family and many caregivers, may minimize, dismiss and discourage the intense expressions of grief that are actually present – leading the pet owner to hide them socially and then to bury the unexpressed feelings.

 

• Losing possessions – You may experience grief reactions over losing a single possession or over losing your home to fire or other disaster. Increasing numbers of people have grief reactions to deal with – on top of their frustrations and practical challenges when they lose their employments, health plans and retirement benefits. Again, the advice is to let all the feelings out. • Comion fatigue – Doctors, nurses and other caregivers experience many losses. They rarely are trained to deal with emotional challenges of having people under their care who fail to respond to their best efforts to help and who die under their care. To protect themselves from feeling their grief, disappointment, frustration and feelings of failure, most doctors detach emotionally from the people under their care. (Even using the word 'patient' is a way to dehumanize those they treat.) When caregivers do this repeatedly over periods of time, they build up larger and heavier burdens of buried griefs. It is no surprise that doctors have one of the highest rates of alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide

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among all the professions. Likewise, it is no surprise that many nurses leave their profession well before retirement age. • Losing functionality as we age – People often suffer covert, unrecognized grief reactions over being unable to participate in some of their favorite activities, due to the limitations of their aging bodies and altered social circumstances. A significant portion of what is often diagnosed as depression and treated with medications relates to such issues.

WHEE is outstanding in helping identify and release the stresses and distresses associated with all of the above types of blocks in moving through the grief process. Medication prescriptions for people in grief See comments on misguided uses of medications under Stage 1 blocks. When grief reactions are so intense and prolonged that they cause serious, incapacitating depression, and particularly when there is suicidal ideation currently or by history, there may be a place to consider antidepressant medications. As with any medication, this is in some ways a game of Russian Roulette, because some people suffer negative reactions from medications. WHEE is particularly helpful here because it enables the installation and strengthening of positive cognitions and feelings, as well as relieving the negative ones. WHEE can be used together with medications, often reducing the doses required and helpful in reducing or eliminating side effects. Insomnia can be a troublesome part of grief and depression. WHEE is helpful here too in reducing and eliminating the need for sleeping pills. Blocks due to fears of death Anxieties and fears about death and dying are major issues in Western society. These fears have generated vicious circles of: fears of death Æ distancing from and avoidance of dealing with death Æ unfamiliarity with death Æ increased fears when encountering death Æ further avoidance of death Æ etc. Most people in the US die in hospitals. While family may see a deceased relative in the hospital bed where they died, they almost always leave it to hospital and mortuary staff to handle the body. There may even be a closed casket funeral where most of those attending might never view the deceased. This distancing leaves people less and less familiar with death, which just increases their fears. It's like the childhood fear of the dark closet or the dimly lit basement. What we cannot or do not see clearly feels potentially dangerous to us.

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A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist. - Steward Alsop

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These fears of dying create complex, pervasive effects in our lives. People even hesitate to utter the words 'death' or 'dying' and use all sorts of euphemisms such as: 'departed,' 'shuffled off the mortal plane,' 'took a dirt nap,' 'she's pushing up the daisies,' 'ed away,' 'deceased', 'resting in peace,' 'kicked off,' 'kicked the bucket,' 'ed the choir invisible,' 'six feet under,' 'bought the farm,' 'asleep,' 'checked out,' 'extinct,' 'in repose,' 'wasted,' 'conked,' 'croaked,' 'danced the last dance,' 'gone into the west,' 'got a one-way ticket,' 'popped off,' 'sprouted wings,' 'succumbed,' 'going to the big [___] in the sky,' 'is no longer with us,' 'bought a pine condo,' 'went into the fertilizer business,' 'worm food,' 'became living-challenged,' 'was gathered to his people,' and so on. Spiritual terminology may be used, including 'got her wings,' 'gave up the ghost,' 'ed over,' 'crossed over,' 'ed her ancestors' or 'gone to meet his maker.' Not uttering or hearing the word 'death' is a subtle way to reinforce our fears and avoidance of the subject. This contributes to the vicious circle shown above. And it gets worse from there… Many people who are nearing the end of their days may struggle with these fears. At the same time, they often are very eager to speak about their concerns. When a family member or a caregiver invites them to speak, they will usually welcome the opportunity to share fears about their illness, their pains and discomforts, advance care directives (about issues like resuscitation and other drastic interventions) and funeral arrangements. Despite their wishes to talk about death, they hesitate to raise such issue, because they don't want to upset family and friends who are visiting. They fear (often correctly) that visitors will be uncomfortable or put off if they mention these unsettling topics about their approaching death. From the other side, family and friends hesitate to mention the subject because they don't want to upset the person who is ill. So there is a great big elephant in the room and everyone goes tippy-toeing around it, pretending it is not there. While everyone, bar none, is going to die, most of us hope it will be later rather than sooner. The uncertainties around how we will die make many people uncomfortable – often even to the point of being afraid and worrying about how their lives will end. The greatest fears for many are not so much about death itself but about the possibilities of a painful death. This is the most frequently mentioned issue that worries people. Almost everyone has heard about cases where cancers

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have spread to bones or to various organs, causing agonizing pains that were not even relieved completely by the most powerful pain pills. For others, the greatest fears are of dying alone. This is particularly strong among people who do not have a personal sense of spiritual connection with a higher power – which is often identified as God/ Goddess/ the Infinite Source/ All That Is/ The All/ The One/ That Which Cannot Be Named/ and countless other names in different cultures around the world. Other great fears lie around the loss of mental and physical abilities that can occur with degeneration of the body in old age or as the result of problems such as strokes and Alzheimer's Disease. Those who suffer from pains and insomnia may come to dislike having to take pain pills and sleeping pills that cloud their consciousness. Many people dread being helpless and dependent on others. Caregivers, both conventional and medical, are often caught in similar or even worse cultures of taboos around death. When a person under the doctor's care dies, it is often perceived or to some extent suspected to be the doctor's failure. For instance, I was taught in medical school that if someone had the affront to die under my care, then I was probably responsible through some act of commission or omission that contributed to their death. Death, for doctors, is the worst enemy, that is to be fought and conquered. To this framework of fears of death we must also add the fears of lawsuits by the family of the deceased. This is the worst fear of doctors who are practicing defensive medicine in many cases today. In order to minimize risks and damages from lawsuits, doctors must perform every conceivable examination and laboratory test, lest the lawyers for the prosecution claim there was a chance that a condition had been overlooked or misdiagnosed. It is in this morass of fears that surround death from possible medical causes that a knowledge of grief and bereavement is helpful. The angers of stage 2 often seek any convenient target for release of pent-up emotions. Medical staff may bear the brunt of such misdirected attacks. You might ask, "What is the best defense against such attacks?" The resounding answer is to provide as many opportunities as possible for people who are dying and their families to verbalize and share their feelings and concerns surrounding death and dying. Letting off some of the steam and defusing explosive situations on the one hand, and offering care, understanding and comion on the other hand can reduce the chances of becoming a beating post for people whose pent up emotions have found no conscious acknowledgment or release. Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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WHEE and other approaches for dealing with issues surrounding death An approach I have found very helpful is to suggest that caregivers and careseekers speak from a place of 'I – Messages.' If we state respectfully what we are feeling and thinking, this gently opens doors to discussions about difficult issues. If we hold in our minds the image of a fence that is between us and those with whom we are talking, then it is sometimes easier to hold to this process. This way we allow that listeners might be in a different space and invite them to share their views and to let us know if we are making them uncomfortable. We speak about what is on our side of the fence, inviting them to say what is true for them on their side of the fence. WHEE is an incredibly versatile, deeply healing method for dealing with unmentioned elephants that are in the room where death is casting an unspoken shadow over conversations and relationships. WHEE helps to release anxieties, fears, painful thoughts and other feelings, and memories of unresolved grief residues from the past. WHEE helps by reliving physical pains of all sorts, including pains from cancers, arthritis, fractures and other causes. WHEE helps to change worries – that may feel overwhelming – into much more manageable concerns. WHEE also helps with side effects of medications. It can reduce the nausea, vomiting, stomach pains, headaches and other side effects of chemotherapy. By reducing pain, WHEE lessens the need for pain pills, thereby reducing or eliminating side effects of these medications such as clouding of consciousness/ 'brain fog,' drowsiness, constipation and other drug-related problems. WHEE is also available any time it is needed. Many who find themselves in hospitals and other care facilities complain that it often takes a long time for staff to respond to their requests for pain relief with pain pills. By reliving insomnia, WHEE is a direct blessing because sleeplessness drains the limited physical, mental, emotional, energetic and spiritual resources of those who struggle with difficulties of finding a restful sleep. In addition, here too WHEE reduces the need for sleeping pills, thereby eliminating their side effects as well – which can include 'hangover drowsiness,' clouded consciousness, and interactions with other medications such as pain pills, which can produce additive and cumulative side effects. Once the negatives are reduced and released, WHEE can then help to install and strengthen positives. When we come into a place of acceptance about the inevitability and naturalness of death, then we can more readily connect

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with the positive memories and feelings about people we love, whom we are going to leave behind. From the other side, those who are attending the dying can similarly focus on warm, positive memories – celebrating the good times they have experienced together, through shared memories and stories. We can reaffirm the love and caring we have experienced with each other; ask and grant forgiveness for acts of commission or omission that may have left disappointments or hurts; and discuss our spiritual awarenesses that are uplifting. WHEE also introduces a meta-positive element of empowerment for those who have reduced abilities to care for their physical needs. They find it an enormous boost to their self-worth when they can care for themselves. One of the frequent complaints of people who are dying is that they hesitate to impose upon others by asking for help with their physical, psychological and emotional needs. I have also seen people who are dying finding deep satisfaction and pleasure in being able to teach WHEE to those who come to visit them. Blocks in stage 2 angers during grief and bereavement It may be very surprising and disconcerting to find ourselves angry when we are grieving. Sometimes, even VERY angry! Anger is not a feeling often mentioned in descriptions of people who are upset over the loss of a loved one. We may feel that somehow we are abnormal in having these feelings, and may torture ourselves further with self-criticisms or guilt. It is perfectly natural to be angry when you are in grief, for all of the reasons detailed in the discussion of the stages of grief. However, if we feel constrained about expressing our angers, we may lock them away inside us. As with other feelings that are buried outside our conscious awareness, they will seek ways for release. Donna, described above, woke up to the realization that she was excessively angry at anyone and everyone who provided half an excuse or no real provocation at all. She had buried her angers, along with other feelings about her loss, and the angers were coming out sideways at every perceived opportunity. WHEE can help to release angers of these sorts.

Grief is the garden in which anger and hate and violence grow. - Michael Pritchard Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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Blocks in stage 2 guilts during grief and bereavement It is very common to beat ourselves up over little things that we did or said that may have been inconsiderate or painful to the person who died, or that we didn't do but felt we ought to have done. Again, if we hold back and bury these feelings rather than just letting them flow through us and clear through our expressing and releasing them, then they sit in our file drawers and fester. As mentioned above, it also is not uncommon to feel guilty over having vented our angers (either at ourselves or at others) in the course of the grief process. The intensity of feelings released during grief may break through our normal façade of reserve and emotional control. In the process of releasing our sadness, angers and guilts, we may open up file drawers where hurts and emotions from other sources were stored along with those related to the current loss. So what emerges may include much more than the current issues appear to warrant. We ourselves may be unaware of what it is that is being released. This may produce anxieties that we are emotionally out of control. Again, we may find ourselves in another vicious circle of grief Æ guilt over emotional release of sadness and anger related to the loss Æ release at the same time of similar, long-buried feelings from the past Æ anxieties and guilt about being excessively emotional Æ releases of more buried guilts and anxieties from the past Æ more guilt about being so emotional Æ etc. If we get to a point where we feel we may be excessively wound up and out of control, we may shut off and bury our feelings. While this puts a damper on our current emotionality and thereby provides relief in our present situation, it sets the stage for festering buried emotions to cause problems in the future. At times it may not be we, ourselves, who initiate the shutting down and burying of emotions. Family and friends may feel uncomfortable with our displays of emotionality. Rather than simply ing us in experiencing and expressing our feelings, they may either feel very upset at seeing the distress of a person close to them, or they may act to protect themselves from stirring their own buried, unexpressed feelings – by discouraging us and stopping us from upsetting them with our expressions of grief. These vicious circles, meta-anxieties and meta-guilts can be relieved with WHEE if they become excessive or problematic. More on this below.

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Stage 3 blocks Some people have an unusually hard time getting over the loss of someone who was particularly dear to them, and never return to their full functioning capacities. A variety of obstacles may stand in their way.   Marital bonds The bonds between man and wife often are so strong that the partner left behind often feels less than whole as an individual. Men appear to suffer more than women in this regard, as statistics show that a higher percent of men than women who are widowed die within the year after their partner died. While it is not clear what factors predispose men to earlier deaths, my own speculation is that women are often more ive to their partners than men are. The absence of a wife is therefore more of a loss to a surviving man than the loss of a man is to a surviving woman.   Some couples are so closely bonded that when one dies, the remaining partner never finds anyone who feels comparable to the departed one, and prefers to remain single rather than 'settling for less.' In some of these instances, there were also vows of loyalty – conscious or unconscious – that hold a person back from releasing the bonds to their deceased partner. It is sometimes possible to explore these issues and to release the bonds that keep a person in perpetual mourning. WHEE is enormously helpful in dealing with the longing for the departed spouse or other family member. WHEE enables you not only to release the pain, guilt and anger but you can strengthen the positive memories and your feelings and anticipations in the present and regarding the future.    

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Resolution may continue for a long time Just as the start of resolution is gradual and overlaps with the earlier stages of grief, so the various stages of grief may produce waves of memories and emotions at times that are well past when the greater part of bereavement is past – and you thought you were completely finished with it. This is not a sign that something is wrong or that you have not worked properly to clear your grief reactions. It is simply that our memory is such that it may overlook various nooks and crannies in our unconscious file drawers when we are clearing out our grief. These items may get stirred by a later stimulus, such as a birthday, an anniversary or other occasion when we become aware of missing the person who is no longer there; visit a place that we associate with that person, or find another prod from our inner selfhealer to do some further emotional housecleaning.

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't. - Richard Bach As always, WHEE can ease our way through these experiences. With sufficient practice, we may even reach a point where we no longer experience such events as negative, traumatic or stressful. We may come to a place of curiosity and gratitude for these further opportunities for ever deeper healings.

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SPIRITUAL AWARENESSES IN GRIEF AND BEREAVEMENT Varieties of fears surface around uncertainties about the road to death and what may lie beyond the veils of death. Anxieties are found even when we are raised within religious frameworks that inform us in no uncertain what to expect beyond death's doors. As mentioned above, there are numerous fears around pain and disabilities as we near death. When viewed through spiritual perspectives, these raise many questions and emotions. Some of the most frequent questions are:   "Why would God take this person away from me? "Why would God do such a thing as [letting a person die so young; allowing a child/ husband/ wife/ family to be deprived of their mother/ wife/ husband/ child/ loved one]?" "Why would God take a person before they had the chance to complete [their life/ an important personal project/ family obligations/ public service]?" "How could a loving, caring God allow this good person to suffer so much pain at the end of her life?" "If this person, who seems so much more [good/ giving/ deserving] than I am is [suffering so much/ being taken away so young] what can I expect for myself?" Such questions may shake our spiritual foundations, causing us to question our confidence in our understandings about the world. This may add to our distress in times of grief. Here, too, we may get trapped in vicious circles of spiritual questions Æ uncertainties and anxieties about our place in the world and in whether God is reliably there for us Æ guilt and anger at ourselves for questioning religious teachings, beliefs and faith Æ more anxieties about our place in the world Æ etc. Spiritual answers to spiritual questions during the grieving process A time of spiritual questioning is a potential time for spiritual growth. The loss of someone close to us may give us a test of faith that enhances and deepens our spiritual awarenesses and trust in a higher power in our lives. The most commonly reported personal experience that can markedly Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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strengthen an awakening and deepening of our personal acceptance of spirituality is when we see, hear or deeply intuit the presence of the person who died. This often happens in the days following the death. The departed usually appears much younger, healthier and more vibrant than they had looked in their last days in their physical body. The spirit often conveys comforting and reassuring messages, such as, "It's so beautiful here." "It's nothing like what I expected." "I'm just fine, now, as you can see. I'm no longer in pain." "Aunt Tillie is here with me, and says to tell you she'll wait to greet you, too, when you cross over." Sometimes we don't have this experience directly, but another family member or close friend may on messages they receive in this way for us. We may also seek out psychics or channelers (mediums) who are gifted in such perceptions. In spiritualist churches, these sorts of communications are a part of the Sunday service.    

We need to learn from our grief. If we don’t, we won’t be able to grow. Our soul will remain mired in the past and whatever lesson we were meant to take from this life will have to be studied again in the next. The grief process stretches our souls. If we weren’t meant to love deeply or experience loss, it wouldn’t be here. There would be no reason for it. Our loved ones in spirit – whoever they are – know that, and they want to help us move on. - Suzane Northrop

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Pre-death and deathbed visions Less commonly reported but by no means infrequent, there are reports by those who are approaching death's doors that they see and hear their relatives or angels beckoning to them and welcoming them in their transition to spirit life. When the dying person is still lucid and able to speak with the living people at their bedside, they may give detailed descriptions of these encounters. In other cases, those at the bedside observe a peaceful smile blossom on the face of the dying person – sometimes quite striking in contrast to the suffering and pain they had been experiencing just previously. The dying may be observed to mumble or speak and may appear to be in conversation with unseen visitors. While many doctors, nurses and other caregivers may take these to be hallucinations, the similarity with the deathbed visions of people who are still coherently able to report their experiences suggest otherwise. Reincarnation and past life memories In addition to reports of survival of the spirit, there are reports of people who recall the return of their spirit to live a series of lives. This is relevant to grief and bereavement in several ways: •

Many experience disappointments or regrets as they approach their death, feeling that their goals in life were not achieved, or wishing that they could redress wrongs they committed or experienced. Reincarnation offers opportunities to benefit from the lessons of one lifetime and grow through the opportunities offered in subsequent lifetimes.

•

For those who lose someone close to them and feel they had unfinished business with that person, reincarnation offers similar opportunities to rework the relationships and sort out the lingering issues.

•

In working through the feelings that are stirred during the grief process, there are opportunities to release issues buried in past lives but still carried into the current lifetime.

How can we know whether memories of a past life are real, rather than fantasies or wishful thinking? The answer that I find most convincing is that the clearing of feelings associated with traumas in past life memories can alter our current lives.

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If we don’t grieve that last one, the next one knows it and will probably have to leave. She can’t get into the spot on the left side of our chest where we hide ourselves from her and can’t let her in. If we don’t grieve, we can’t go on, but we can go on with our lives while we grieve. Usually we even will be ed in the process, as long as we’re honest about it and communicate about what we’re doing and why. - John Lee

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Hurts and angers that were buried following grief in the distant past may find other ways to draw our attention. Here is an example from my own experience that led unexpectedly into a past life memory: While out cycling one day, I fell from my bike, hitting my left thigh on a lawn. I hardly felt the impact and rode the five or six miles home without any awareness of difficulties. However, over the next few weeks, my thigh ached very uncomfortably. I assumed it was simply muscle and tendon strains, but noted as time ed that the ache shifted from spot to spot in the general area of my hip – suggesting a bioenergetic source to the pain rather than a physical one. In quiet meditation, asking the pain in my hip what it wanted to tell me, I came into memories of a past life as a young Native American or Inuit man, trekking with a clan into which I had married, climbing a steep mountain slope covered in snow. I had injured my left thigh and was having greater and greater difficulties keeping up with the others. We paused to consider the situation. There was no way for the others to carry me, as we had no pack animals or sleds. We came to the inescapable conclusion that I would have to stay back while the others moved forward. There were no hard feelings on my part, because this was the way of our lives. The one who could not keep up had to be sacrificed for the good of the whole clan. However, as I settled into a niche between some rocks that protected me from the wind, ready to die, I was overcome by feelings of resentment towards God for having abandoned me. I had married into this clan, and my wife and baby son had died recently in childbirth. I had been left with no real reason for being with this clan, with whom I did not have a solid bond. These were my thoughts and feelings as I succumbed to a freezing death. The pains in my hip in my current life connected me with memories that resonated with feelings of having been abandoned in this life – by my father, when my parents separated when I was a child. The pains also resonated with resentments towards my mother for not having been there for me in ways I felt I needed her to be. As I identified and cleared these feelings (using WHEE and other energy medicine techniques, and with the help of a gifted intuitive counselor), the pains in my hip abated. Those who don't believe in reincarnation may well point out that I have no Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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way to prove this was anything other than a daydream or fantasy concocted by my unconscious mind out of residuals from traumas in my current life; wishful thinking; a creation of my unconscious designed to allay anxieties about the finality of death; or other, equally logical reasons. I have no way to disprove such theories, any more than they have any way to disprove my interpretation of my experiences. What I find convincing is that my current-life symptoms cleared with my release of the feelings that I recalled from the past life experience. I have worked with other people who have had similar experiences. They had had persistent physical and psychological symptoms that had not resolved with diligent self-healing and psychotherapy, often over periods of many years. It was only when they came into memories of past life experiences that their symptoms cleared, just as mine did. Numerous other therapists and careseekers report similar experiences. Many interesting books have been written about the dramatic clearings of symptoms through past life therapy. More about this in Healing Research, Volume 3, Personal Spirituality. A variety of further alternative explanations for such memories are also considered in Personal Spirituality. For myself, the economy of the reincarnation hypothesis feels the most likely explanation, ed as it seems by evidence from numerous other sources reviewed in that book.

The Body of B. Franklin Printer Like the Cover of an Old Book Its Contents Torn Out And Stripped of its Lettering and Guilding Lies Here Food for Worms But the Work shall not be Lost For it Will as He Believed Appear Once More In a New and more Elegant Edition Revised and Corrected By the Author - Benjamin Franklin

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Research confirmations of spiritual awarenesses I add this section for those who are interested personal spiritual perceptions. If you have had yourself, you may find this only marginally of amusing – that people do not trust the personal experiences differing from their own.

in research validations of any of these experiences interest, or perhaps even reports of those who have

Many in Western society have never been taught a perspective that emerges from scientific research about spirituality. The evidence strongly suggests that life is but a classroom in which our spirit has ed to learn important lessons. Death is not a termination of our existence. It is a transition of our spirit, after its sojourn in the physical world, back to the realms from which it came. While it appears from the perspective of our physical existence that death of the physical body is the end of life, the truth appears to be the otherwise. The evidence from varieties of research approaches suggests that we alternate between a spirit existence and a physical existence. Death in one realm is birth in the opposite realm.    

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. - Richard Bach   The above are carefully considered, research-ed statements, and not just wishful speculation on my part. I do not fault you if you question my statements. I, myself, used to doubt such assertions made by others, having become a confirmed skeptic through my education and training in psychology, medicine, psychiatry and research. I was certain that God was just a figment of people's imaginations; a projection of their wish to continue to have a father in an imaginary heaven in order to replace the father they had grown up with – to avoid their grief over no longer having that protector in their lives; a fantasy and false promise to themselves that their lives would not totally end with the death of their physical body. I believed that life totally ended with physical death. I put psychics and mystics who reported communications with spirits in a similar file folder, but in a file drawer where I also stored tales of kooks and charlatans who bilk the bereaved of large sums of money through phony communications with the dead. Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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It was only in 1980, when I became fully involved in exploring spiritual healing, that I sought out and discovered more and more convincing research evidence that life continues after death. I was surprised to find excellent studies on out of body experiences, near death experiences, reincarnation memories, individual and multiple sightings of apparitions (ghosts), channeled communications with spirits, and other mystical experiences that left people completely transformed in their beliefs and subsequent life paths. Even more impressive to me is the fact that research reports on these diverse phenomena from all over the world are very consistent in their details. Researchers in the US, UK, , the Netherlands, Iceland, Russia, India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Brazil and other places all find close to identical reports of these non-physical experiences. I cannot believe it is a coincidence that there is a very high degree of coherence to the pictures of existence from the diverse reports of individuals who have traveled outside their body; from others who returned to life after they had been declared physically dead; from others who communicate with spirits; and from yet others who past lives. The picture that emerges is that each of us has a spirit that survives physical death. In other words, physical death is not the end of our existence. Interestingly, one of the first impressive research reports on spirit awareness I found was on 201 people who had recently lost someone close to them. This is a survey by Luis Vargas and colleagues, published in 1989 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, a conservative medical journal. These people were asked if they had the sense of the dead person as still being present. Two-thirds reported they either saw, heard or sensed the presence of the departed person. The authors suggest that these phenomena should not be considered signs of mental derangement, unless their manifestations were intense and grossly disruptive to people's lives. Over the two decades since reading this, I have made it a point to ask everyone I have encountered who lost someone close to them whether they had had such experiences. While I have not kept numerical records, my clinical impression is that it is more like 75-80 percent of people who report they have seen, heard or intuitively sensed the presence of the person who had died. Three further factors stand out that were not noted by the authors of the report: 1. Nearly everyone stated that they had never told anyone about these experiences; 2. Most had been worried that other people would think they were losing their minds;

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3. All were very grateful that I had asked them about this and that I explained that this is a normal part of a grief reaction. My interpretation of these findings is that they confirm that the spirit survives. Vargas and colleagues put a strictly psychological interpretation on the findings. They suggest that people want so very much to hold onto the person who died that they fantasize these experiences. While this is not the place for a full discussion and review of the evidence, let me share a few outstanding observations from my years of studies in the realms of communications across the boundaries between physical and spirit existence:   • People who have near death experiences (NDEs) are almost always profoundly transformed. The no longer fear death and they connect with a higher purpose for their lives. They often change their work and lives to include contributions to making the world a better place.   • Children report NDEs as clearly as adults do. I find this impressive, as the children are highly unlikely to have invented these and to have their stories match the typical patterns of NDEs reported worldwide.   • Children report past life memories that can be verified. This has been studied in non-industrial countries with very limited media availability and very restricted travels – which markedly lessens the possibilities for false memories based on information obtained through the children's physical senses.   • Research on the accuracy of spirit communications through the readings of gifted channelers demonstrates a very high percent of accurate statements, as verified by living relatives of the deceased. If you wish to learn more about the evidence for survival of spirits after death, you can learn much more on personal spirituality in my book, Healing Research, Volume III (details at the end of this e-Book).  

 

Birth itself is a death, and death a birth. For in birth, the soul finds itself constricted within the awful limitations of a body, and at death escapes those constrictions again. - Neale Donald Walsch,   Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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SUICIDE I add some notes here on suicide in the context of reincarnation. Spirit communications and reports of near death experiences (NDEs) tell us that suicide is not a punished offense. We are given free choice in our lives, and the choices we make and the consequences they produce are important parts of our life lessons. However, in suiciding we exit our lives without resolving whatever situations were troublesome to us. At the same time, we fail to learn whatever lessons might have been invited through these challenges, however difficult, trying and painful they might have been. Those who suicide are said to be bound to repeat their lessons in later lifetimes. This does not appear to be a punishment. It is simply the rules of the game of life: Our higher selves agree to certain experiences that are soul lessons. When we skip out on the class (our earthly life), the rule appears to be that we are required to repeat the course through different circumstances in one or more later lifetimes.          

Death gives us sleep, eternal youth, and immortality. - Jean Paul Richter

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TENDING AND MINISTERING TO THE DYING Those who work in palliative care and hospice care often report they find deep satisfaction in their work. They frequently liken it to a practice of spiritual midwifery – shepherding people through their transition/ rebirth into the spirit world. While this may sound strange to those who are uncomfortable with or fearful of death and dying, for those who accept death as a natural part of life this is a very natural and gratifying experience. Think for a moment about the last hours of your life. How would you like that experience to be? Would it not be comforting to have someone present who was able to talk with you about your thoughts and feelings at that time? Having a warm, nurturing, experienced person present during the process of dying is a blessing to the family of the dying person. This person is like a midwife or douala (coach for the process of labor) in the process of rebirthing into spirit existence.    

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. - Richard Bach   Having warm, nurturing family and friends present during the process of dying is a blessing to the dying person and to all who participate as well. This can be a time of deep bonding, like no other. Conversely, this also can be a time of stress, deep distress, tensions and conflicts. Anxieties surrounding death of the dying person can resonate with the anxieties of those present – concerning unresolved issues about the dying person, residues of family conflicts and tensions from the past (including especially unresolved grief), and anxieties about the ultimate deaths of those present. WHEE can be an enormous help in releasing these tensions, smoothing the process of dealing with grief for all who are present. At the same time, WHEE offers the opportunity  

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Telling the truth vs. hiding information about illness and impending death I have heard from many people of their disappointments with medical staff and family over not being told the full facts about the severity of illness and when death appears to be immanent. The person withholding information may do this with the best of intentions, wanting to spare others the painful knowledge that someone dear to them will no longer be alive in a short while. In other cases, the motivation may be the conscious or unconscious wish to avoid the tensions and upsets involved in grief reactions. In either case, the withholding of such information denies people the opportunities to clear unresolved issues in their relationships with the person who is dying, and delays the processing of the grief reaction.   In some cases, the effects are even more pernicious. When caregivers withhold information in these ways, both the dying person and relatives may take this as a 'meta' message and model for how to handle their unsettled and painful emotions. They may take the avoidance and denial of information about death as a suggestion that these feelings are too painful to discuss or are best buried rather than being experienced and processed. This is a shame, because denying, avoiding and burying troublesome emotions are almost always poor choices for dealing with painful feelings. Addressing this issue directly, let's ask a few questions: Which would you prefer – • Knowing the truth about your own condition, even when the prospects are that death is probably approaching? Or – • Knowing the truth about the condition of someone close and dear to you, even when the prospects are that death is approaching? - On the positive side: This allows you and your family and dear ones to express your grief and facilitates processing it – personally and collectively. - On the negative side: It may be stressful, painful and challenging to deal with the emotions aroused by this information. •

Would you rather die suddenly, quietly, without advance warning or preparation? Perhaps struck by lightning or simply not waking from a night's sleep? - On the positive side: This allows you to exit your lifetime with less prospect of stress prior to death.

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- On the negative side: It may be much more stressful, painful and challenging to your family and friends to deal with the emotions aroused by this sudden, unannounced departure. It is also likely to leave you and those close to you with unresolved issues and feelings between you.

Look forward to your transition. It's the first time you will experience unconditional love. There will be all peace and love, and all the nightmares and the turmoil you went through in your life will be like nothing. When you make your transition you are asked two things basically: How much love you have been able to give and receive, and how much service you have rendered. And you will know every consequence of every deed, every thought, and every word you have ever uttered. And that is, symbolically speaking, going through hell when you see how many chances you have missed. But you also see how a nice act of kindness has touched hundreds of lives that you're totally unaware of. So concentrate on love while you're still around, and teach your children early unconditional love. So , concentrate on love, and look forward to the transition. It's the most beautiful experience you can ever imagine. Vaya con Dios! - Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

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LIVING WILLS/ ADVANCE CARE DIRECTIVES Dealing with grief and bereavement is not just a matter of psychological issues. Attending to the practical details surrounding death is a part of the process of starting on the road to resolution… Giving some thought to your preferences at the end of your life is very important. It is helpful to your family to know your preferences in many matters where there could be varieties of opinions and approaches to handle them. A few of the many issues you may wish to consider: • Your specific preferences if you lose consciousness and are no longer able to make decisions for yourself regarding your health care regarding - Resuscitation, should your heart stop beating - Assisted breathing, should you cease to breathe - Intravenous fluids and tube feedings, should you cease to be able to eat and drink - Pain medications and any other interventions you wish to receive or not - What you want your family to be told or not told about your condition - Designating a person with power of attorney to make decisions for you (for questions that are not clarified by your directives or outside the range of issues you have specified. • Your preferences regarding the disposition of your body after death - Autopsy - Donating portions of your body for transplant and/or scientific study - Cremation - Place of burial - Other details The more comprehensive your specifications are, the easier it may be for those caring for you to make these decisions. Be aware, however, that it is impossible to anticipate every possible problem that might arise. Having a designated person empowered to act on your behalf assures you that there will be someone to respond to unforeseen situations within your guidelines. Wikipedia has further helpful suggestions for variations on the theme of living wills.  

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THE PERIOD IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING DEATH There are practical matters to attend to that are worth mentioning. If death occurred through obviously natural causes, a doctor must sign the death certificate before anything can be done with the body. This then opens the way to making arrangements for the disposition of the body. An autopsy might be requested if the death was by accident or if there are any other issues that might involve a coroner's investigation, or if the attending doctor asks permission an autopsy for scientific reasons. This can delay funeral arrangements, so it is helpful to ask the medical staff or coroner's office when the body will be available. When death is approaching, it is helpful to make inquiries ahead of time regarding funeral arrangements. The dying person may express particular wishes, and different family may have varieties of opinions on issues such as cremation, morticians, procedures and venue for funeral services, place of burial and other issues. It is often far easier to discuss these with all involved prior to a person's death, rather than in the more intensely emotional atmosphere following the death. As with all other issues surrounding death, it is far better to discuss them than to remain silent if you have any opinions about the disposition of the body and the funeral arrangements. And beware of the morticians who are there to be helpful, but also there to make a profit. They will usually do their best to upgrade whatever preferences and plans you have. This is a situation in which prior discussions with the dying person and the extended family can be helpful as well. If you have agreed on the options you want, then don't let the mortician bully you or shame you into upgrading unnecessarily.

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THE FORMAL MOURNING PERIOD Each religion and culture has its own rituals for mourning. Most of these have been developed over many centuries and provide helpful vehicles for starting the process of grieving. A minister, priest, rabbi or other religious leader can be enormously helpful in guiding relatives and friends through the funeral service and related rituals. Again, it is really helpful to discuss this with the dying person and extended family, so that a person who is acceptable to and compatible with all (or at least with as many as possible) is found. Be aware that the stages of grief may exhibit themselves with any opportunity during and following this period. Many people who are unaware of the stages of grief may be easily hurt by minor procedural oversights or errors, or might jump on any opportunity to vent angers – as may others who are aware, but don't catch themselves. So considerable diplomacy and healing attitudes may be required during this challenging time. My personal most poignant experiences of these sorts have been the repeated reports of people from my psychotherapy practice who shared stories of major upsets and rifts in their families as the result of unexpected incompatibilities in expectations during the mourning period. The most graphic were in cross-cultural marriages in Israel. The European Jewish mourning rituals are conducted with muted voices and gentle condolences. The North African Jewish traditions are to keen and wail as loudly as possible to demonstrate one's emotional pain and grief. You can just imagine how of families from such diverse cultural origins were horrified to be in the presence of people who were so different in their expressions of grief from themselves! The North African Jews felt the European Jews were not at all upset by the death of their family member, while the European Jews were shocked and utterly disconcerted and scared by the loud wailing, which was felt to be an out-of-control type of behavior. So again, a bit of forethought and family discussion about cultural differences and expectations prior to the funeral may be very helpful when relevant.

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Being positive around the time of death and during the process of grieving

  People tend to be very solemn and 'correctly' sad at funerals and in visiting the bereaved. One of the best funerals I attended was one in which anyone who wished to speak out was invited to share their fondest memories of the deceased as a part of the service. The mother-in-law of the deceased young mother explained and opened this segment of the service, sharing some of her fond memories, and included a humorous story. This completely shifted the tone and energies of the gathering to a more relaxed, warm and less strained atmosphere.

YOU'RE ALLOWED TO LAUGH AT A FUNERAL!   • Don't take life too seriously; No one gets out alive. • Being over the hill' is much better than being under it! • Wrinkled was not one of the things i wanted to be when i grew up. • He who dies with the most toys is nonetheless DEAD. I have worked extensively with people who have experienced losses and traumas of all sorts, and have also worked on my own such experiences over many years. In using and teaching WHEE I have learned that focusing on the positives in a situation is one of the very best ways through the more difficult times. We tend to think of the grieving process as a time to mourn the losses we feel. Another important part of grieving is to review and cherish the positive experiences that have enriched us through our interactions with the person who is no longer with us in the physical world. WHEE can be used to identify, install and strengthen positive memories and feelings. This can be of enormous help in dealing with the rollercoaster ride of recurring waves and troughs of emotions that are often very draining and sometimes discouraging during the working through of the grief process. Another helpful way to reach the positives is to look through family albums and videos. This is often best done in the presence of other family , who may more easily hold their focus on positive memories that are evoked Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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by these visual reminders of those who are no longer with us. Again, WHEE is enormously helpful in strengthening the positive memories and feelings, as well as helping to dissipate painful emotions that may be stirred by this process.      

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater." But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, that the other is asleep upon your bed. Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. - Khalil Gibran

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GRIEF AND BEREAVEMENT: OPPORTUNITIES FOR GROWTH Grief often stops us in our tracks. The intense hurt, depression, anger, guilt and other feelings force us into introspections and self-examinations that we would otherwise avoid. This in itself is a healing, pushing us out of our childhood patterns of avoiding painful emotions and running away from them. The skills we learn and the resources we acquire in dealing with these feelings will continue to stand us in good stead with later experiences of intense emotions of all sorts. When working through our current griefs we also have an excellent opportunity to clear our inner 'file drawers' where old, neglected, buried griefs are stored alongside the new ones. WHEE is particularly helpful in this regard, enabling us to diminish the intensity of residual feelings from old griefs along with fresh, raw feelings from the new ones. We also learn comion through our own experiences of hurts. This is commonly acknowledged in the observation that many of the better caregivers are themselves wounded healers.

The dead never leave us and our ancestors are with us all of the time. Even in death, healing can take place when all are honored and held in our hearts. - John L. Payne

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RESOLUTION Resolution is not a time or date when you shut the door on your grief and feel it no more. Resolution starts the moment you absorb the fact that the death occurred. With each step along the path of grieving you take is a step towards further, deeper resolution. Many are misled to feel they have reached an early rounding out of their resolution when they are in the troughs of waves of sadness, anger and guilt of the second . Learning that grief has its own process, its own timing and its own winding, hilly road towards ever fuller resolution is a part of the grieving process. This is one of a series of meta-lessons about grief. That is, it is an awareness about the process of grieving; a growing familiarity with how your mind and feelings respond and deal with losses. Many report that the death of a person close to them "shakes them to the core." Grief over our losses stops us in our tracks. It helps us to realize many neglected truths and to learn many helpful and life-enhancing lessons.

So many of the parts of ourselves we have pushed away come up in grief. That is why grief has this enormity of potential for healing. - Stephen Levine   Our own life might end at any time. If you believe there is nothing beyond physical existence then this is a frightening prospect. Many people prefer to avoid thinking about this truth. This avoidance can even reach unrealistic proportions of denial. People who fear death may engage in 'counter-phobic' behaviors. They will take 'deathdefying risks' as their unconscious way to prove to themselves that they are not going to die. If you believe in survival of the spirit, you may have fewer anxieties and even arrive at a place of much deeper and greater appreciation for all of the opportunities, blessings and lessons you have had and will have in this lifetime. You will come through the resolution process with gratitude for the good experiences you in the life of the person who died; with thanks for the enrichments gathered in your life thus far; and with keen anticipation for the blessings yet to come.

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Everything in life is transient A death teaches us exquisite lessons about the transiency of all experiences. Knowing an end will come to each and every relationship we have, including the ultimate end of our relationship with all we have known in this lifetime, helps us to cherish each experience ever so much more.

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting? - Stephen Levine When we can handle the serious challenges of death, grief and bereavement, we know we can handle just about anything that life brings us This meta-awareness may be one of the greatest benefits of transitioning through the grief process. When we survive such serious challenges, other problems in our life shrink in comparison. WHEE adds enormously to this meta-positive awareness. We have far greater confidence in our abilities to handle any problems whatsoever – after using WHEE with outstanding results on serious challenges of intense hurt, sadness, depression, pain, anxieties, angers and other emotions and issues.  

So many parts of ourselves we have pushed away come up in grief. That is why grief has this enormity of potential for healing. - Stephen Levine Grief can become a positive life-changing event As we clear issues and feelings in the present, we often find similar issues sitting in the same file drawers. These may have been stashed away many years earlier, at times when we didn't have the resources to deal with them. Now, with the successes of handling problems of grief with WHEE, we can do a thorough clearing of such unneeded baggage that we carry with us in our unconscious mind.

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Your imagination can turn deep despair into a new, perhaps more contributing and unhindered way of life. The implosion on grief can become an explosion of comion… When the soul is touched at its very foundations, only a departure from the rational can restore it. - Thomas Moore The ultimate step in resolution is an acceptance of all that is Stephen Levine identifies this as our "healing into grief." It is the acceptance of grief as a part of life; as that which adds deep meaning to life; as an opportunity for clearings; and as the wonderful teacher it can be. This is a broadening of our meta-positive awareness, or perhaps it may even be a meta-meta-positive awareness. That is, once we know we are safe and need not fear our death – which is for many people the worst fear they have had – then all other stress and fears in our lives becomes nothing more than grist for our mill. We know that everything in our life is manageable; there is nothing we need to worry about or fear. We can than accept everything in our life as a lesson. Instead of saying, "Oh, my God! What am I going to do with this challenge?" we can say, "Hmmm! I wonder what interesting lessons I'll learn from this invitation to look deeper within myself?" or "I wonder what I'll find to clear next from the file drawer that this challenge is pointing to?"

…the first stage of healing into grief…is acceptance…The fear which as always guarded these heavy emotions from exploration now becomes an object of examination and acts as a guide into new territory. Fear becomes an ally which whispers that we are coming to our edge, to unplumbed depths, to the space in which all growth occurs. We discover that we have never learned how to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed, how to let go of control, how to go beyond the pain we have become so accustomed to… - Stephen Levine

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BASIC HEALING PRINCIPLES How we get ourselves in trouble We all let a little child program our lifetime computer. Having made this inevitable error, we end up making the silly mistake of carrying these programs for most of our lives. As children, we often cannot understand the reasons for painful or frightening situations. Children cannot change their unpleasant circumstances, cannot leave, cannot fire or exchange their parents. We are stuck in unhappiness and from our child perspectives, see no way out. In such situations, it is very helpful for us to run away from the hurt or to forget it – burying the feelings outside of conscious awareness. As children, this is a good choice for avoiding pain and suffering, since we cannot avoid it. Next, our unconscious mind quickly gets used to protecting us from the distress of these buried hurts by keeping them firmly locked away so that we cannot sense them and do not suffer from them. Feeling memories are stored in unconscious portions of the right side of the brain. The right brain puts a sign on the internal filing cabinet saying, “KEEP AWAY!!” It turns to the more consciously aware left brain and says, “We don’t want to know about this, do we?” And the left brain says, “No, let’s stay away from those painful memories and feelings.” So we pretend to ourselves they aren’t there. While this system works well to protect us as children from fears and pains, it soon becomes the default for our lifetime inner ‘computer guidance’ programs. The unconscious mind remains afraid of these buried feelings locked away in its file drawers. It believes that the original, buried fears and hurts might still overwhelm us with all the intensity of our original reactions from the time when we buried them. As we get older, these programs become outmoded. The unconscious mind, still working according to the child programs, doesn’t know we can handle these feelings better as adults. For example: The right brain may warn us in fine print under the ‘KEEP AWAY’ sign of the closet where fears from our parents’ arguments, scoldings or other hurtful behaviors are locked away. Such a sign may say, “Stay away from anything like arguments and from Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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angry people.” We may thus avoid feeling distressing emotions in our current lives (that unconsciously resonate with our earlier life fears), but we also end up cutting ourselves off from experiences and relationships that might have been much better handled or tolerated when we are adults. For instance, we may avoid people with loud voices or people who resemble our parents in other ways. When we encounter something in our current life that rattles these skeletons in our closets, it is possible that the door to frightening memories could pop open a crack, and we might feel some of the original, buried feelings. This is why sometimes we over-react when a person in our current life reminds us of someone who frightened or hurt us in the past. I (Dan) had a lot of anger towards my mother as a child, but buried it because she was a single parent and I did not feel safe expressing it, and found no other outlets for it. For years, I was easily angered by authority figures, particularly aggressive women. As adults, we continue to stuff uncomfortable feelings inside ourselves, shutting a mental door to keep them safely outside our awareness. Our unconscious vigilantly stands guard over these emotions stuffed away in file cabinets in the caverns of our being, resists releasing them – even when we are no longer in the painful situations that caused them; even when we are clearly in a better position to deal with them. For instance, we might have buried grief, anxieties, fears and angers when we were young. It could start with being upset because our family had to move; with one of our parents having to be away from home for an extended period (for work or to attend to problems of extended family); with grief over our parents' separating or divorcing; or with the death of a family member. If these sorts of grief reactions were buried rather than being expressed, then we could end up with an inner program that leads us to bury all future grief reactions. As adults, if we are again greiving, we may feel very uncomfortable – completely out of proportion to what we are experiencing in the present. We may respond with unusually deep sadness or anger because the memories and feelings are stirred in the closets holding our feelings from our earlier life. So, what do we do? Our habitual response is to stuff the new unpleasant feelings into our inner closets, just as we did when we were too young to know better. With more severe traumatic experiences, such as those of soldiers in

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wartime, the avoidances may be more severe, accompanied by symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In addition to anxieties and sadness, there may be flashbacks to the traumas; triggering of intense fears or angers; uncontrollable crying; severe depression; difficulty sleeping; intolerance for loud noises, closeness with other people, and anything else that remotely resembles the traumatizing situation; and even suicidal thoughts and behaviors. (It is common for people with wartime PTSD to have had severe stresses and losses in earlier life.) There may also be intense meta-anxieties, due to the signs that warn against letting out the buried feelings and memories. It is very common to feel that the intense, long-buried emotions could be overwhelming – just as they felt during the original, traumatic experiences. The more severe the abuse or trauma has been, the more intense our reactions may be to anything that triggers the warnings on our file drawers (which I call 'meta-anxieties') and that stirs the memories and feelings inside these drawers. Common reports of such severe traumas are related by soldiers in war zones, firemen, policemen, emergency medical service teams, victims of violent crimes and rapes, survivors of child abuse, and others who were similarly mistreated or who witnessed such frightening events. While WHEE and other self-healing techniques and various therapies are available to release many of these well-buried and hidden traumas, our inner programs usually resist such efforts. Often, it is only when the emotional pus from past hurts festers to the point of serious physical and emotional pain that we even begin to become aware that something distressing is inside us and come to realize that it is begging us to release and deal with it. WHEE can be helpful with these sorts of stress and grief reactions. When traumas have been severe, however, it is often advisable and helpful to have the guidance and of a counselor or therapist who is trained in grief therapy – until people learn how to use these methods and until they gain the confidence that the released feelings and memories will not be overwhelming. As you work through the emotions that are released during the WHEE process, you will be pleased with the positive feelings, thoughts and beliefs that you find developing spontaneously and that you can strengthen through using WHEE. Your negative, traumatic memories are transformed into deeply healing and growth-enhancing experiences.

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A SPECTRUM OF PROBLEMS HELPED BY WHEE s of WHEE have reported positive effects for:

 

Fears and Phobias – Anxieties about new activities or new places, including visits to dentists and doctors; fears of flying; fears of insects, snakes, mice, pets and larger animals; enclosed spaces (claustrophobia); heights; test and performance anxieties, such as speaking in class or in public; specific fears following frightening or traumatic experiences; anxieties and fears about recurring experiences such as medical treatments, shifting between homes of parents who are not living together (See article on ‘Re-entry problems’ referenced at the end of this e-Book); calming after waking from a nightmare; dealing with underlying anxieties and post traumatic residues associated with nightmares. All of these fears and phobias have responded quickly to WHEE. School phobias respond well, even in severe cases where the child previously had to be dragged from the car by his parents and held by the vice principal so he wouldn’t run back to the car. Milder fears, such as those marked by procrastination, respond well too. Emotional pains – Emotional distress after painful emotional experiences – both recent and from distant past, such as parental conflicts, separation or divorce; worries over family stresses such as illness, injuries and financial issues; bereavement.

   

 

Angers – Preventive use of WHEE is best, emptying the ‘bucket of old angers’ so that it doesn’t overflow when new angers are stuffed inside. Once people have practiced using WHEE when they are not angry, then they can use WHEE at times of upsets, such as releasing anger and calming while sitting in a time out chair; addressing fears and hurts that may be associated with the angers. Insomnia – responds wonderfully well, even when it has been present for a long time. Post-traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) – are very responsive to WHEE, which can help with residual traumatic memories, panic attacks, nightmares, insomnia, temper outbursts, cravings and addictions and more. Motion sickness and morning sickness of pregnancy, and nausea as a side effect of medication – can respond immediately and in many cases can be eliminated.

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Physical pains of all sorts – These have responded rapidly to WHEE, including tension headaches, migraines, stomachaches, pains after injuries and surgery, arthritis, fibromyalgia. CAUTION: Pain may be a signal from the body that people are ‘up tight’ over a stressful situation and are in distress, but may be unaware of what it is that is stressing them. It is important to consider such possibilities carefully before working on removing the pain.

 

In some cases, pain may be a warning of severe physical problems requiring urgent medical attention. If acute pain persists, you should seek urgent medical attention. Cravings – For sweets, food, drugs, thrills, have all responded to WHEE.

 

 

 

 

Allergies – to animals, pollens and other allergens; asthma. Allergies may respond within minutes or may take several weeks of regular WHEE use to dissipate. Weight loss - for reducing, eliminating, transforming: • - Food cravings – for specific foods and in general • - Stress responses – allowing systematic transformation of negative responses that often initiate comfort eating • - Residues of old traumas – from mild discomfort at awkward memories to major post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) • - Issues around self-image and self-esteem • - Meta-issues of habits around being overweight and how to be in the world – heavy or not heavy; lighter or not lighter Reducing side effects and the need for medications – both in the reduction in severity of the issues for which the medications are prescribed (anxiety, pain, allergies, insomnia, etc.), and in harmonizing the response to medications, such as chemotherapy, reducing side effects for which other medications are commonly prescribed. Relationships, social issues, performance anxieties, low selfconfidence – common issues of teens, that may persist into adulthood – respond dramatically well to WHEE. This is an extension of the uses of WHEE into beliefs and disbeliefs about your abilities to deal with issues. Family ’ anxieties and distress – There have been excellent responses in anxieties raised by children’s, partners’ and parents’ issues; anxieties not caused by the children but impacting the children because children pick up on parents’ worries or because children have a shorter Send your friends to http://wheebook.com for copies of this free eBook Donate to bring WHEE to people and places in difficult circumstances http://www.donate4healing.org

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fuse; anxieties and stresses of relatives dealing with a family member’s chronic illness.

  I used to worry that if people released their symptoms and illnesses by using a rapidly effective technique such as WHEE, they would develop other symptoms because of underlying problems that were causing the symptoms. Generally, this has not been the case. It appears that WHEE releases whatever is ready to be released, below the surface as well as on the surface. When symptoms do not abate, or when they return, there are almost always meta-issues needing attention. When the meta-issues are addressed, the symptoms and problems abate. As I work with more and more people with WHEE, I am more and more convinced that our symptoms are the tips of the icebergs of issues that are asking, even begging us, for attention and release. The symptoms are not separate from the issues, they are a very much parts of them. Often the symptoms are metaphors for the issues, as when a pain in the neck is begging you to look at who in your life is a pain in the neck for you; a urinary problem might be saying we are ‘pissed off’ at someone or 'it's scaring the piss out of me;' and a cardiac problem could be speaking of an emotional heartache. By addressing the body metaphor, the underlying issue is also addressed. (See much more on this in Benor, Healing Research, Volume II.)

     

Mostly, people change not because they see the light but because they feel the heat. – David Grudermeyer

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ADDITIONAL BENEFITS WITH USING WHEE WHEE helps to forgive others for their transgressions. WHEE also helps you to forgive yourself for not having done better than your best – at the times when you stuffed feelings into your inner ‘bucket,’ and to accept that you did the best you could at those times and now are more competent to deal with the residues of the situations that left you with bad feelings. WHEE is empowering. It gives you a clear way to deal with almost any problem you might encounter that raises negative feelings. It helps to clear the ‘bucket’ of emotional dross – that place inside where you stuff unresolved feelings when you don't know how to resolve a stressful situation. WHEE enables you to clear away limiting beliefs. Your childhood programs often include negative core beliefs, discussed earlier in this eBook. Clearing these away in manners similar to your clearing of negative emotions frees you to maximize your full potentials and be who you truly are. WHEE develops a sweetening spiral. A sweetening spiral encourages and s further insights, releases of negativity, growth and change. This is the opposite of a vicious circle – where a negative experience generates a negative attitude, which leads to negative behaviors, which beget more negative experiences. (Isn’t it odd that there is no common term in your language for the opposite of a vicious circle?) As you practice self-healing with WHEE, you gain confidence in your abilities to deal with your problems. This enables you to be less afraid of your issues and to deal with them more competently. With an initial success in dealing with your inner stress or old hurts Æ you feel better Æ you are less anxious Æ you have less fear of dealing with old hurts Æ you take more steps to deal with the hurts Æ you have more successes Æ you feel better Æ etc. Similar sweetening spirals can develop in your social interactions as you progress through the healing process. The strong counteracting positives that are used at the end of the affirmations can create a positive shift in your perspectives and attitudes on life, in and of themselves. Repeating “I love myself wholly and completely” and “God loves and accepts me, wholly and completely and unconditionally” (or whatever you find to be strongly positive for you) will strengthen your positive beliefs and awarenesses.

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Transpersonal awareness is facilitated by affirmations that include the Infinite Source and other transpersonal positives; in developing and deepening your wholistic healing; and in opening your awarenesses to your intuition. WHEE shifts your attitudes towards problems so that you can address them as invitations to growth and transformation rather than as irritating, annoying, frightening or distressing worries. Each distressing problem is transformed into a doorway into understanding and clearing the childhood programs that lead you into meta-worries and sap your energies away from addressing the actual concerns. WHEE can be a preventive to future problems. When we release the traumas, pains, fears and other unresolved issues we carry from the past, we free ourselves of emotional pus that we have buried and locked away from our conscious awareness. Any unresolved emotional issues may recreate situations in our current lives that are intended to remind us of the buried issues. In effect, our unconscious mind begs us to clear these festering feelings and memories by recreating them in our lives.

You can only cure retail but you can prevent wholesale. - Brock Chisholm

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THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS People ask, “How can WHEE work so well and so quickly?” The true answer is that we don’t know yet. The best answers I’ve been able to suggest follow the understanding I have of the ways in which the right and left brain handle traumatic experiences, discussed above (under Basic Healing Principles.) When you do the following, you release your buried hurts: 1. Holding the hurts fully within your conscious awareness allows the hurts to dissipate. This requires that you override your childhood programming to bury what hurts, pretending it is not there, and to run away from the buried hurts and from anything in your current life that might remind you of them. 2. Pairing a counteracting positive feeling and cognitive awareness with the hurt. When you hold the positive along with the hurt simultaneously in your awareness, the positive cancels the negative feelings, memories and beliefs associated with the hurt. 3. Activating right and left brain hemispheres while doing (1) and (2) markedly enhances the effects. It appears as though we can bring the skeletons of old traumas out of the closets in the right brain, while connecting it to the left brain – through the alternating left and right sensory stimulation. As the two hemispheres reconnect in the conscious presence of the traumas, the buried hurts dissipate more rapidly. This aspect of WHEE is detailed in the WHEE Workbook and Seven Minutes to Natural Pain Release. 4. Involving the body memories and body-mind processes related to difficult issues helps enormously in dealing with them. Memories are stored in the body as well as in the brain and spirit. Connecting with the body during WHEE lessons will markedly enhance the lessons. WHEE does all of these and is therefore the most potent self-healing technique I know. Some are content to clear their symptoms. Others seek deeper levels of work, which may require more elaborate approaches. I also integrate spiritual awareness and healing, along with transactional analysis, inner dialogue, and many other approaches in teaching self-healing, matching the methodologies to the individual needs of the student.

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PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS EMDR has a solid validating body of research, demonstrating efficacy in treating stress related disorders. (Details at the end of this e-Book). The EFT and other Energy Psychology methods are still in early stages of organizing research. WHEE, drawing from EMDR (though clearly not following the standard EMDR protocols), can claim to have a research base to its efficacy. Early WHEE research is confirming its efficacy. By using the full WHEE protocol that includes right and left body stimulation, we tap into the EMDR research database. Status of EMDR acceptance for PTSD American Psychiatric Association. Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Patients with EMDR has been given the same status as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as an effective treatment of ameliorating symptoms of both acute and chronic PTSD. Reference: Acute Stress Disorder and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association Practice Guidelines 2004. The Meridian Based Therapies (WHEE, EFT, TFT and many others in this group) are in early stages of gathering research to their efficacy.

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RESOURCES Daniel J. Benor, MD. Seven Minutes to Natural Pain Release: Pain Is a Choice and Suffering is Optional – WHEE for tapping your pain away is the most comprehensive single resource. Daniel J. Benor, MD. The WHEE Workbook guides you through all the steps of using WHEE, including the right and left body/ brain stimulation. WHEE-kly articles provide updates on the latest progress in ways for using WHEE for your self-healing.   WHEE Demonstration Video (worldwide ) with a detailed exploration of a man's frozen shoulder clearing after it had been present for over four years. WHEE Instructional Video (worldwide ) with powerpoint and video clips presented by Dr. Benor. WHEE Digital Bundle – your best buy. Includes: 7 Minutes to Natural Pain Release e-Book; WHEE Workbook e-Book; WHEE Demonstration Video, WHEE Instructional Video; Radio interview with Dr. Benor with a live demonstration of WHEE; and a 1-hour TeleSeminar MP3 discussion by Daniel Benor on the many benefits of WHEE for pains (worldwide s). Volume I of Healing Research describes many ways in which spiritual healing can help; Volume II details how complementary therapies and bioenergy medicine can help. Volume III explores research (See brief details under Recommended Reading at the end of this Affirmations e-Book.)

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SUGGESTED READING Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson.  Broadway Books 2002 

Benor, Daniel J. Wholistic healing: The inter-relationships of spirit, relationships (with people and the environment, mind, emotions and body http://wholistichealingresearch.com/srmeb.htm Benor, Daniel J. WHEE introductory article www.wholistichealingresearch.com/Articles/Selfheal.asp Benor, Daniel J. WHEE for trauma and re-entry problems www.heal911.com/C-6a.asp Benor, Daniel J. WHEE for children of all ages www.wholistichealingresearch.com/Articles/WHEE-Child.asp Cohen, Kenneth S. Honoring the Medicine: Native American Healing, New York: Ballantine 2003. Dennison, PE/ Dennison, G. Brain Gym Handbook, Ventura, CA: Educational Kinesiology Foundation 1989. Dennison, P/ Dennison, GE. Brain Gym: Teachers Edition, Revised, Ventura, CA: EduKinesthetics 1994. Gordon, Thomas. P.E.T. – Parent Effectiveness Training, NY: Penguin 1975. Excellent on communications between parents; between parents & children. Hay, Louise L. You Can Heal Your Life, Santa Monica, CA: Hay House 1984. (Has list of symptoms' meanings and affirmations to counter them.) Laing, Ronald D. Knots, NY: Penguin 1970. (See also: The Divided Self – More technical – Discussions on how we split ourselves off into bits and pieces) Payne, John L. The Healing of Individuals, Families and Nations. Findhorn, Forres, Scotland: Findhorn Press 2005, p. 152. Siegel, Bernie S. Love, Medicine & Miracles: Lessons Learned About Self-Healing from a Surgeon’s Experience with Exceptional Patients, New York: Harper & Row 1986. Stewart, Ian/ es, Vann. TA Today, Chapel Hill, NC: Lifespace 1991. (Excellent, thorough introduction to Transactional Analysis.) Siegel, Bernie. Love, Medicine and Miracles: Lessons Learned about Self-Healing from a Surgeon's Experience with Exceptional Patients NY: Harper & Row 1986. (A classic on transformation through illness as an awakening to personal growth.) See also list of books, tapes and other Meridian Based Therapy references www.wholistichealingresearch.com/References/MBTs.htm Research on WHEE is in its early stages.

1. A pilot study of WHEE for exam anxiety in university students showed significant effects. Only 2 sessions of WHEE achieved the same degree of improvement as produced by 5 sessions of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). 2. In another study, WHEE was used as a comparison intervention for an energy medicine intervention. With only 1 hour of group instruction for 41 participants, significant effects of WHEE were demonstrated on whatever issues each individual wished to improve. 3. A study of WHEE is in its early stages for people with chronic pain in which SPECT scans will be used to examine where changes may occur in the brain.

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EMDR

Shapiro, Francine. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, New York: Guildford 1995. Method, resarch and more.

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)

The Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology includes many EFT practitioners, and the ACEP website lists EFT and related research.

FILMS Tuesdays with Morrie - non-fiction novel by Mitch Albom, also an excellent film about a man who is totally accepting of his impending death from Lou Gherig's Disease (ALS). The Boys Are Back – Widowed man working through grief with a son (about 6) and a son from a divorce (about 15) Four (brief\) Films on Grief and Bereavement http://www.fanlight.com/catalog/films/916_gs.php Stephen Redding. What's Next For Us? YouTube on preparing for death – from a spiritual perspective http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzFyJUxMkLI&feature=channel Unresolved grief Love Liza - a psychological drama about a man trying to come to with his wife's suicide, not succeeding. Smart People - an aging professor-turned-bitter eccentric due to the death of his longtime wife. Ever since his wife ed away, Lawrence Wetherhold has become overly acerbic and self-absorbed. He's alienated his son (Ashton Holmes), and transformed his daughter into a friendless overachiever. Touching his emotions brings about major changes.   Out of Proportion – Spiritual Cinema free short film  http://www.spiritualcinemacircle.com/inspiring‐short‐ film??utm_source=Email&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=optinemail_OOPMBs    Many more films – Annotated  http://www.selfhealingexpressions.com/grief_movies.shtml

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RELATED REFERENCES BY DANIEL BENOR Benor, Daniel J. Healing Research: Volume I, Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution, Southfield, MI: Vision Publications, 2001. (Healers describe their work, research in parapsychology as a context for understanding healing, brief summaries of randomized controlled studies, pilot studies.) Benor, Daniel J. Healing Research: Volume I, Professional Supplement, Southfield, MI: Vision Publications, 2001. (Only the studies -- described in much greater detail, including statistical information.) Benor, Daniel J. Healing Research, Volume II (Professional edition): Consciousness, Bioenergy and Healing, Medford, NJ: Wholistic Healing Publications, 2004. (Self-healing, wholistic complementary/ alternative medicine and integrative care, biological energies, and environmental interactions with bioenergies. Consciousness, Bioenergy and Healing was acknowledged as ‘BOOK OF THE YEAR’ by the Scientific and Medical Network, UK ) Benor, Daniel J. Healing Research, Volume II (Popular edition): How Can I Heal What Hurts?, Medford, NJ: Wholistic Healing Publications, 2005. (Written for the layperson - Same content as Professional edition (minus the extensive research details), plus extra chapter on Self-Healing approaches. Benor, Daniel J. Healing Research, Volume III – Personal Spirituality: Science, Spirit and the Eternal Soul, Medford, NJ: Wholistic Healing Publications (in press, late 2006). (Research on NDE, OBE, spirit survival, reincarnation, spiritual awareness.) Benor, Daniel J. Spiritual healing for mental health, In: Shannon, Scott (ed). Handbook of Complementary and Alternative Therapies in Mental Health, San Diego, CA: Academic/Harcourt 2001, 258-267. Benor, Daniel J. Spiritual healing for infertility, pregnancy, labor and delivery, Complementary Therapies in Nursing and Midwifery 1996, 2, 106-109. Benor, Daniel J. Psychotherapy & spiritual healing, Human Potential, 1996 (summer), 1316. Benor, Daniel J. Further comments on 'loading' and 'telesomatic reactions', Advances 1996, 12(2), 71-75. Benor, Daniel J. Spiritual Healing: A unifying influence in complementary therapies, Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 1995, 3(4), 234-238. Benor, Daniel J. Spiritual healing and psychotherapy, The Therapist 1994, 1(4), 37-39 http://www.wholistichealingresearch.com/Articles/SpirHealPT.asp Benor, Daniel J. Intuitive diagnosis, Subtle Energies 1992, 3(2), 41-64. Benor, Daniel J. A psychiatrist examines fears of healing, J. Society for Psychical Research 1990, 56, 287-299 Benor, Daniel J. Fields and energies related to healing: A review of Soviet & western studies, Psi Research 1984, 3(1), 8-15. Benor, Daniel J. The overlap of psychic 'readings' with psychotherapy, Psi Research 1986, 5(1,2), 56-78.

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Daniel J. Benor, MD, ABHM, has been searching over four decades for ever more ways to peel the onion of life's resistances, to reach the knowing (with the inner knowing of truth which has the feel of rightness) that we are all cells in the body of the Infinite Source. While his unique area of expertise is spiritual awareness and healing, his principal work is through wholistic healing – addressing spirit, relationships, mind, emotions and body. He is using WHEE, a potent self-healing method, with children and parents (many foster parents) who are dealing with PTSD and other forms of stress, psychological and physical pain, low self-esteem, cravings and other issues. Dr. Benor founded The Doctor-Healer Network in England and in North America. He is the author of Healing Research, Volumes I-IV and many articles on wholistic, spiritual healing. He is the editor and publisher of the International Journal of Healing and Caring - On Line (www.ijhc.org) and of www.WholisticHealingResearch.com, a major informational website on spiritual awareness, healing and CAM research. He appears internationally on radio and TV. He is a Founding Diplomat of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine; Coordinator for the Council for Healing, a non-profit organization that promotes awareness of spiritual healing; and has served for many years on the advisory boards of the journals, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, Subtle Energies (ISSSEEM), Frontier Sciences, the Advisory Council of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychotherapy (ACEP), Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and the Advisory Board of the Research Council for Complementary Medicine (UK), Core reviewer for BioMed Central, Complementary and Alternative Medicine – On line. Dr. Benor offers personal telephone tutorials, teleseminars and in-person workshops from as short as 1 hour up to 2 or more days to learn to use WHEE to its fullest potentials. [email protected] www.paintap.com www.ijhc.org

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PAYING IT FORWARD I am interested to learn about your experiences with the WHEE process. Click here to email me about your experiences or to share on the WHEE Forum. Your reports of your experiences with the affirmations will be a help to other people who are seeking help with their physical and psychological pains and other problems. While this e-Book is made available to you at no charge, a donation towards the maintenance of the website would be appreciated. This will enable us to make WHEE available to people in difficult circumstances. I also ask that you pay it forward by sharing this free e-Book with other people on your email list, and by teaching 3 other people how to use the methods explained in this FREE WHEE BOOK on CLEARING YOUR GRIEF AND BEREAVEMENT.

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