User talk:Authorsamoliver/Author Sam Oliver

How a Miracle Happens

A Miracle is Energy In Formation.

Anything you hold your attention on over time is energy in formation.

We are transformed by what we hold dear to us and fill our heart with the experience of what we desire. This intent to dwell upon what we hold sacred is our soul. And thus, the miracle of transformation that occurs from this spatial quality of existence creates a manifestation from the formless into form.

Sam Oliver

Prayer
On one occasion, I was asked to go into a room and be with a daughter whose Mom was dying. Mom was expected to die not long after I was to enter the room. When I went into the room, the daughter was at her Mom's bedside. She did die not long after I had entered the room. Her husband was on his way to be with his wife and daughter of this patient. He did not make it in time.

The daughter did not want to be alone when Mom took her last breath. I was called to step in for her husband who could not make it in time to be with his Mother in Law and wife. When he arrived, his wife was so grateful that I had been with her that she shared this with her husband. During this time, I wondered if some guilt on his part may set in with his own personal grief. Just in case, I offered a prayer of release and blessing for their three lives having known one another in this life to include the Son in Law.

Prayer is a wonderful way to invoke the sacred into our lives. Prayer invites a comprehensive understanding that God/Higher Power is in charge of life and of death. It is a reminder how the presence of God's Spirit supersedes everything and everyone's ultimate ability to care for us beyond our own ability to do so. In this case, prayer was able to invite Unity in a situation whereby possible individual grief could have been encountered at a later time. Prayer enabled all to participate in Mom's dying and death from a level of awareness that includes a life's presence beyond the body itself.

As I write these words, I am reminded how vital prayer is to the Hospice patients and families we serve. Prayer encompasses an eternal awareness and brings forth healing when temporal circumstances could emerge individual flaws in our own psyche. Prayer invites unconditional grace and healing.

For this family, prayer became a way to include all participating in grief to join one another in the path of healing together. It invited what is most sacred in us to seek God for help during a difficult time. Also, prayer gave everyone in the room the ability to seek, and even find, the healing power of prayer by focusing our attention outside our ego enough to know exactly where our strength will come from.

Prayer is a participatory union between those evoking God's presence through faith in a loving being who knows best how to care for us more than ourselves. It is a relationship based on trust. It is a trust reminding us who we really are as God's children. And, it is a trust in God's ultimate Will for our lives beyond our own understanding. It is as though we trust our lives into a Creative order of existence not made with human hands. It is a reminder to each of us just how sacred every moment is and a way of reminding each other who we really are.

Prayer invites us to close our eyes to the world around us and open them up into insight. Here, we see through our eyes what cannot be seen with them. It is here we envision and participate in unconditional love. Innocence is born in this sacred space healing a separation that was never meant to be.

By Sam Oliver For more on this author:  http://www.pathintohealing.com  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Authorsamoliver (talk • contribs) 02:47, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Forgiveness
Forgive everyone, everyday, and in every way. Each person is doing the best he or she can. No one, absolutely no one is perfect. Since no one is perfect, this means that we all need to share more patience and more understanding surrounding all aspects of our interactions with one another. Think of the last time you needed to forgive someone. And, think of the last time you needed to be forgiven. When we need to be forgiven, there is a feeling of lack or something as missing. When we need to forgive, we often feel anger. Anger is a secondary emotion for loss. When we lose something, the need to restore what was lost. This sends us on a search within ourselves for attention in a peace filled direction. If you noticed, to forgive or to be forgiven leads you to the same place. Both paths of awareness lead us on a search. What are you searching for? You are searching to find wholeness. What is wholeness? This is often one's perception of reality created by what one believes to be true. This creation of what one believes to be true is the path of one's soul seeking manifestation in the world of form from the formless.

There is no set way to wholeness. Simply being aware that you have a self-defined understanding of wholeness that is within you is what we simply need to give attention to within us. This continued attention on what we seek the most within us will grow in our awareness until the need to place our attention on forgiveness fades away.

If a person was to believe that forgiveness is something obtained through the human psyche alone, we all would find the journey into such a place within us as something to avoid. In the deepest parts of who we are, we want to connect to what is sacred within us. Therefore, to re-create a past interaction with someone who we feel we harmed or who we feel harmed us is a useless attempt to embrace what cannot be. This is not to say that certain relationships close to us do not need verbal efforts to make up for a past action leading to harm. In fact, a person can find this useful, and even, helpful. The point I want to make is the place one's attention may be at the time such a verbal interaction will become vital in the success of such expressions taking place.

Dying patients remind me that there are countless times in all our lives where the issue of forgiveness was perceived and we become aware of it. There is no way a dying person can retrieve all their past life experiences in physical form, but we can recall these moments in time and visualize how we would have handled them differently. This is our soul seeking to make right a wrong our personality may not allow us to do, or it may no longer be feasible to take place in our current circumstances. People are such a vast array of experiences. There are endless paths of attention within us calling for our attention. Perhaps, the instant we remember who we are and who others are in the deepest parts of our being, we begin to remember the love that brings all our lives together, and into, being. This remembrance of who we are as children of our Creator reminds us of the unconditional spirit reflected within our own selves. The transcendence of flesh and blood inspires us to give our Creator our lives, the lives of others, and our very reason for living into the hands that created us.

Sam Oliver For more on this author:  http://www.pathintohealing.com  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Authorsamoliver (talk • contribs) 02:49, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Angels
Throughout history, angels have been known as guiding spirits. They have been called "Messengers of God." Angels have been seen as encouraging souls whose purpose is to lead us through transformative events in our lives.

Often, these guiding spirits are embraced so that a sense of comfort can be felt in the midst of despair. A dying patient and family members who believe in the presence of angels report feeling blessed by God.

Angels are extensions of God's consciousness to most traditional religions. They come to us in various ways, shapes, sizes, and expressions. What a person believes to be true is true for that person.

When a person is dying, we can work with their angels in the following ways:

1. Believe the Patient.

Spiritual creativity is often the only level of independence that a dying person has at the end of life.

2. Encourage Inner Exploration.

If given enough time and a nonjudgmental attitude, dying patients feel more and more comfortable with those who care for them and begin to share the inner dynamics of their life with those around them.

A nonjudgmental sharing of lives creates a pathway into inner exploration. As such, a sense of safety is felt and the journey into the depths of one's soul is encouraged.

3. Allow the Patients to follow their Soul.

When we trust in the Wisdom that created our dying patient's life, we are trusting in the Wisdom that created all living things.

When a dying patient begins to trust you as his or her caregiver, you become a midwife, a fellow soul, an angel on a person's path of dying into life. As a patient is dying, he or she generally becomes more soul than body.

As a person let's go of his or her identification with physical matter, what really begins to matter are the things in life that isn't matter. The relationship created between you and a patient in this kind of transformative experience of dying connects us to the eternal realm. Here, we are invited to dance with the angels.

Sam Oliver For more on this author:  http://www.pathintohealing.com  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Authorsamoliver (talk • contribs) 02:51, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Soul
It is the nature of soul to grow, to heal, and to love. As we enter into the world, we emerge as a tiny child. We are open. We do not have conditions placed on us by our parents or ourselves. We have not closed ourselves off from any possibility. It is though the world lay at our feet. We are a bundle of unconditioned purity.

As we age, conditions are placed on us to direct us along our paths intended to keep us from harm. Even if we manage to stay out of harms way, we move into a state of stimulus-response reactions toward life. This draws us further and further away from the natural state of pure being we came into the world with as an infant.

How can we return to our natural state of being? How can we call our soul back and gain a sense of spiritual well-being? The following are ways we can return to the wholeness and healing we seek as spiritual beings incarnated into the human race:

1. Do Something Creative.

Creativity engages our heart, our mind, and our imagination. These activities allow us to utilize our whole being. Our attention moves from outer expressions of the world and enters the inner dynamics of living giving rise to our heart and our imagination. When our heart and our imagination are given attention, we enter into the realm of insight. Insight is our ability to see from within just how sacred and magical our lives really are.

In the realm of soul, our humanity becomes sacred. Through creativity we are aware how life flows through us and not from us. The more we identify with these qualities of attention flowing through us, the more we are identifying with qualities residing in us that are whole and healing. It is our natural state.

2. Spend Time With A Child.

Children have a way of drawing our attention away from activities and responsibilities defining us as adults. All a child wants to do in this world is have fun. They seem to never tire of such activities. Children are constantly motivated by play.

As adults, we tend to think of play as wasted time. Adults who lose a sense of play and joy in their lives are in danger of losing self-motivation. The kind of self-motivation I am referring to involves the desire to have fun in life. This can lead to a depressive state lacking creativity, spontaneity, and the heart of a child.

Each of us has the heart of a child within us that never tires. It is the part of us fully participating in and with life. As our imagination and heart begin to guide us over the mind, we are in soul. In soul, our mind is in its proper perspective. This part of us is our inner awareness not bound by the pressures of the world. When we return to soul, the possibility of living whole and healed becomes a reality.

3. Become A Child.

The next time you look into a child's eyes try to feel their heart. Notice the difference and similarities of your heart and their heart. Is there a difference? Is this awareness a long or short distance from where you were as a child?

What happened to that little boy or little girl inside you? Since we cannot retrieve childhood physically, maybe we can from within. Remember your past as a child - the good times and the bad times. As you look at your life through the eyes of a child, recall how active your heart and imagination were. Embrace it. Let this inner vision penetrate your entire awareness. Let go of your adult interpretations of your childhood and view it with innocence and love.

Our true nature is to live in the world without being fully of it. Inside us are endless avenues that can move us toward the experience of joy. When we let go of our tendency to view the world as right or wrong, good or bad, we leave behind dualism and enter into Unity.

This Unity behind all appearances of diversity is a healing state of unconditional love. It is the part of us bringing all life into being, leading us through life, and what will lead us home. It is the force of nature giving us life. It is our soul.

Sam Oliver For more on this author:  http://www.pathintohealing.com  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Authorsamoliver (talk • contribs) 02:55, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Hospice
Over the years, I have reflected on the needs of the dying and their family members. From working in a Cancer Center for two years to working with Hospice over fifteen years now, I have changed my approach to care a great deal. While doing the work of Hospice Care, it has somehow worked on me as well. I realize that service to others has developed my character and my soul.

I remember leaving Seminary thinking that I was going to “do” ministry. After practicing what I knew for a brief time, I realized that what I knew was not going to get me very far with the patients and families that I serve in the field of palliative care. What I knew from Seminary didn’t matter to those who are dying. This was a big ego loss for myself that I did not anticipate.. I soon learned that my ministry would be one of listening to the sacred moments of a person’s life. Sometimes these sacred events meant family, church, hobbies, and much more.

There is a lived theology in each of us. A lived theology is the journey one takes into their inner most selves and brings forth a creative life from these depths of one’s soul. It is path into one’s most authentic expression of living he or she believes brings joy to themselves and the lives of others. It may be cooking, artwork, care giving, or the writing of a simple article. It is the place inside us whereby one knows such creativity comes through them and not from them. In essence, it is a person’s relationship to what is the most sacred in their lives.

As I have listened to the needs of the dying and their families, I have heard their cries of desperation to hold onto a sense of belonging and the hope that their loved one will somehow watch over them when they die. You hear many people in bereavement care say that they feel their loved one is near them after he or she has passed on into spirit. This kind of belonging enters into what I call an eternal relationship that will never die. I have often pondered on this level of understanding if a person really dies. It seems as though the deceased loved one travels to a place not far from those who have loved them. They travel into the hearts of those who have been left to face an existence apart from their loved one’s physical body. The relationship one enters simply takes on a emotional expression known as grief in our hearts. This grief pulls at our hearts and creates a longing to be with those who have died. It is as though we are drawn into a deeper aspect of ourselves. When the intensity of our grief subsides, we allow ourselves to be at peace with our grief. This movement allows us to imagine and feel what it is like to connect to those who have gone before us in a hope filled way. As such, the ministry to the dying and their families is a creative expression where one’s heart and imagination leads us into the path of introspection.

Introspection serves a purpose in our lives when the world around us no longer makes sense. It is a safe place for us to enter when loss becomes an uninvited friend. In so doing, we become what our imagination and heart desires in order to find wholeness and peace again. It is the realm of eternal relationships I am speaking of at this point. Here is where psychology, theology, philosophy, and metaphysical understanding of the dying experience have their limitations.

I remember the first couple of weeks in my Hospice Care that I became friends with a woman who told me that what she wanted from me was for us to sit in silence together and end in prayer. For weeks, I had an interesting conversation with myself while sitting next to the woman who was teaching me how to care for the dying. I entertained thoughts of wondering why I went to Seminary if all I was going to do was nothing for this woman.

Little did I know that I was being taught lessons in soul care that have inspired me to this day. She reminded me that what I knew meant nothing to a dying person, but my willingness to learn what is sacred to the dying meant a great deal. She reminded me that even my service to her meant nothing, but my willingness to serve her needs was everything. She reminded me that even my Holy Rituals and prayers could not come close to what she needed the most - a friend to sit with her and listen to the depths of our souls calling us home.

Sam Oliver For more on this author:  http://www.pathintohealing.com  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Authorsamoliver (talk • contribs) 02:58, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Suffering
Not long ago, I visited a man whose wife was dying of cancer. He retired early in life, so he and his wife could travel the country on his Harley Davidson motorcycle. He was a big man, and his wife was tiny. But, their love for one another was deep and knew no size and shape after 45 years of being married to one another. He shared with me many stories of there life together. He was deep in grief.

Over the years, I have heard surviving loved ones of dying patients wonder, “why does my loved one have to suffer?” I will often hear that my spouse, uncle, aunt, mother, or father has been a good person. It doesn't make sense to have to watch my loved one go through this people say. After having many years to ponder these reflections, I have come to believe there is "NOT" an easy answer to this question and the mind wanderings that go with it. These expressions come from such a deep place within us that to give an easy answer would pull people from this place they are asking us to meet them in.

The place I am referring to is a dying loved one’s soul. Caregivers are being asked to meet them in a place where suffering no longer exists. Thomas Moore, in "The Care of the Soul," refers to the soul as a place where one's imagination and heart join on a journey the physical body cannot move into. This is the place whereby one's thoughts, feelings, and spirit come to embrace what is beyond us.

When a loved one asks us, "why does my loved one have to suffer?” “Why did this happen to my spouse, daughter, son, sister, brother, or others?” We are being invited to listen to their soul and offer unconditional love. This act of non-judgmental care is a spatial quality of existence enabling us to care for another's soul. Why? Because at the deepest level of our being we know there is not a human understanding to this question, but it does lead us deep within our psyche and opens us up to our soul. It is a place where souls can meet and find healing.

Thoughts give rise to the ability comprehend an idea. We go through a series of wanderings to make sense of the world around us. This path into the grief process eventually leads us to the realization that the intellect will not give us what we are looking for. Although our thoughts are a form of expressing our grief, they simply lead us to more and more questions there are no answers to.

Feelings give expression to our thoughts on a given situation, which may give rise to more emotional pain knowing we cannot understand what is happening. This is felt in the body and moves in and through us. We tire and eventually give up on using our mind and body this way. Eventually, we move into exhaustion and have no energy to feel anything.

Spirit gives us hope in life hereafter, but it does not take away our grief. The expression of prayer and hope in life hereafter does allow us to bring into our grief a sense of consolation. Funeral services include various songs and scriptures allowing us to have words to comfort us. The ability to cope through faith allows us to place some of our grief in a power greater than ourselves.

When you combine the mind, body, and spirit's capacity to deal with grief in an integrated way, we often find a sense of peace. This is what is known in many sacred texts as "a peace beyond understanding." To know “The Unknowable” or and grief will not and cannot kill the relationship we had with our loved one. Instead, we begin to relate to each other on the level of soul. This is the place where our soul can create channels of expression with our dying loved one no other way is possible.

As you can see, the answer to the question of “why" is my loved one going through this is not as important as where this internal process leads us inside our being. This place can be nurtured and cared for by those willing to listen attentively to another’s desire and need to be heard from such depths. This act of going into such sacred space where one's soul is healing simply by sharing one's pain with those who care allows us to heal in places our hands cannot touch.

Here are three final points to consider when you find yourself with someone who asks the question “why does my loved one have to suffer?” First, listen fully to one’s grief and their questions on suffering. Make sure you have listened to another’s grief as outlined earlier in this article.

Second, since you have no control over a person’s journey into dying or the timing of his/her passing from this life to the next, try to get the surviving loved one voice what their loved one will be released of in their dying and themselves as a caregiver. This step requires a great deal of honesty, and you will not probably get this unless you have fully listened to someone tell you about their grief of losing their loved one.

Finally, your ability to help someone through this phase of grief will help the dying loved one and loved one’s who survive build incredible trust in you as the caregiver, volunteer, minister, social worker, nurse, and doctor.There are many distractions in the world. This would be a good day for you to focus. Focus on your needs, as well as, the needs of others. Keep the needs of yourself and the needs of the self in balance. You will notice that you and others have this need to keep life in balance. There is a delicate balance in nature to give and receive. Take an apple tree. An apple tree begins to grow. It will then mature. If you pick the apples too soon, they will taste sour. If you pick the apples to late another taste of sour springs forth as a rotten taste. In the middle of these two extremes is the sweetness of an apple's maturity. The apple time has come to give back before it dies. And oh, how good the ripe tasting texture of an apple whose time has come to give in due season.

You have been in training since the moment you were born. You have been learning and growing from various experiences that teach you and develop you into becoming a mature adult. Along the way, your elders have been sharing with you their wisdom and their love and care. When you mature into adulthood, it is time for you to share with those around you gifts you have learned since being a child. Just like the apple, you are ripe and ready to share with the public those seeds of awareness given to you since birth. You are ready for the community and the world to literally use or taste the talents you have to give.

Dying people have physical bodies that no longer serve them or the community in a way that they did in their prime. Like the apple, everything dies in due season. At the same time, a dying person's worth to society is probably more valuable to those who care for them. Dying people are becoming more soul than body. They are transforming right before our eyes. Their attention turns inward and the virtues and values they have lived through in their lifetime become more vivid than any other phase of their life. They teach us what is important and share their stories with us from their heart and soul.

Stories create images in our mind and elicit emotions from the feelings expressed by the storyteller. It can be as though you were there as you feel and see inwardly what a dying person shares with you. Memories expressed in tranquility come from the soul. They fill all of us with a knowing that who we are now is a result of our past expressions on material reality. Dying people teach us to live in soul long before we die and plant seeds of eternity inside. When it is our time to close our eyes to the world around us and open them up to a place where eternity itself dwells. We will have arrived where we started in life and call it home.

Sam Oliver For more on this author:  http://www.pathintohealing.com  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Authorsamoliver (talk • contribs) 03:01, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Grief
Have you ever noticed the way people grieve? There seems to be those who grieve from an ego perspective, and those who grieve from an integrative perspective. To some degree, you will notice a little of ego and integrative responses in the process of letting go. We live in a society where being able to become independent is necessary to exist in the world. From the moment we are born, we are observed by the medical society and our parents. We are watched to see how we are developing. It is important that we learn to crawl, to walk, to be potty trained, to learn to speak, and you know the rest.

Each of these developmental stages of growth enables us to live independently in this world. Our ego finds new confidence each step of the way. We begin forget we are brought into this world by a power greater than and selves. And thus, self-centeredness takes such a stronghold within our psyche we are convinced that what we are in more real than anything else. Then, it happens. We experience loss. Something beyond our control reminds us there is a world in us that doesn't match the one outside us. There is more to living in this world than our own needs, wants, and desires. This new identity allows our self-centered ego to relate to a much grandeur world. The movement from the world lives inside us. It is an integrative process.

1. Grieving through the Ego.

This kind of grief is found in these words: "life begins and ends here," "life will never be the same," "my life is over." Although there are elements of truth to these statements, there is a limited worldview attached to them. They are statements people use to express their ego needs no longer being met due to the loss that takes away from them a part of their world.

When I hear the voice of ego grief in a profound way, I realize I am dealing with someone attached to the world of form. The ability to become abstract enough to find hope beyond this world in their relationships is challenged by the death of a loved one. In doing so, the deceased loved one becomes a pathway into the soul of those in ego grief.

2. Grieving through the Integrative process.

You may hear these words in this path to grief: "life is different," "my loved one is in a better place," "I will be O.K." Do you hear how these statements reflect a sense of knowing their loved one's body is gone, but their spirit will remain in their heart? This type of grieving allows a person to have a sense of knowing. It is a knowing that only the body is dead. The relationship with a deceased loved one remains in place. It may even be such a connection in soul that some feel closer to their loved one than when they were alive in physical form.

To be known as we are truly known is not an afterlife experience. To be fully human and fully divine is one of the best kept secrets we all pretend we are not aware of until the afterlife. There is no afterlife. We came from eternity and to eternity we return. When we let go of the notion that eternity begins at death, we are free to utilize eternal resources to help us live in the here and now.

The instant we realize we live in the world AND the world lives inside of us reveals a sense of awe. The world and our part in it have neither beginning nor an end. This integration from individual awareness to collective awareness carries within it hopes. It is the hope in knowing that all belong to an unending stream of consciousness. As humans, we have predictable stages of development indicating where we are in human maturity.

As we age, our psyche or our soul integrates its being from individual awareness to universal awareness. The journey into eternal awareness allows a sense of hope beyond the sense to withstand grief. Eternal Awareness integrates the self into the Universal knowing that the power which leads us into the world knows how to take us home.

Sam Oliver For more on this author:  http://www.pathintohealing.com  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Authorsamoliver (talk • contribs) 03:03, 25 February 2011 (UTC)