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After over 13 years working a nurse I had witnessed some weird and wonderful things. Occasionally, one of them stands out as significant. Back in ‘97-’98 I went to Australia with a one year working visa. During this time I worked for nurse agencies in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. The experience was a good one as I was able to see how another health care system worked.

During this period a stack of interesting experiences occurred for me, though the most significant happened in Sydney. What happened here would alter my perception of life and what nursing was all about.

Working as an Agency nurse in a city usually means working at several different hospitals, in several different wards. This had been my experience after 11 months in Australia.

For some reason I’d been allocated several consecutive night shifts on a rehabilitation ward, in a private hospital. Since this ward was generally quiet for most of the night I usually brought a book along with me to pass the time.

To find my next book I went into a second-hand bookshop, went to the New Age section, stood back and waited for a book to grab my attention. One soon did – The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I picked it up and started to read it that night.

The opening chapters explain, amongst other things, that the main difference towards death in the East and the West is that in the East people are generally prepared for death from a very young age. The West has a general theme that we don’t usually face up to death until it’s staring us in the face.

This resonated with me. How true. I had seen it on numerous occasions – scared patients and hysterical families attempting to make sense of the impending demise of a loved one after being given a death sentence by a doctor.

I thought about this a lot during the next couple of nights.

During my time on this rehabilitation ward I got to know the patients quite well. Each night I would stop in and have a chat with each of them, handing out the assorted pharmaceutical delights, which they had become accustomed to.

One of my patients was a lady called Dorothy. She had fallen over at home several months ago. She had no medical history, just a case of bad luck. She had a lovely smile and a most pleasant demeanour.

After about eight shifts on this ward I went in one night to be informed that Dorothy would be going home the next day. I entered her room last that night so that I could have a longer chat with her, beyond the cursory 5 minutes that we usually spent together.

‘Congratulations. You must be delighted,’ I told Dorothy, as I walked into the room.
‘Huh! Delighted? What possible reason would I have to be delighted?’ Dorothy was unusually curt in her response.
‘I don’t understand. Are you not happy to be going home?’ I asked.
‘What have I got to be happy about. I live on my own and I can barely make it from the bed to the toilet. I’m dependant on someone else to do my washing, cleaning, shopping and cooking. I can’t ask my daughter to look after me – she has enough on her plate. She has two young children and a very demanding job. I have absolutely nothing to look forward to.’

Upon hearing this from this sweet, usually smiling, old lady I found myself momentarily speechless. I had not expected that from her. My mind went blank.

After a prolonged pause I asked her, ‘Do you believe in life after death?’
Then it was Dorothy who paused, before looking me in the eye and saying, ‘Well, I’d like to but I just don’t know.’

This prompted a discussion about life after death and some various perspectives that I’d come across at that stage. We talked for well over an hour and a half. I mentioned the Dalai Lama being reincarnated several times and that this was fact according to millions of Buddhists across the world. I’d also heard about a Native American Indian ritual whereby people knew they were about to die and sat around a fire and gave all of their worldly belongings away. This was their way of cutting the ties with this world and moving on to the next.

I had not thought about death too much before – but given the choice between life after death and no life after death – I knew which one I preferred the sound of. Despite this, I wasn’t sure either way.

At the end of our chat Dorothy grabbed my arm and her face lit up. ‘Thank you Adam, this has been the most useful conversation that I’ve ever had.’

Her words touched me, though I thought little of it at the time. She had been experiencing anxiety and I had said something to alleviate it. I’d done this numerous times before. I wasn’t really sure about what I’d told her but she seemed happy enough, so my job was done.

I looked in her room before leaving the next morning but Dorothy was sound asleep, so I left the ward and went home.

That night I went back into the same ward. As I arrived, there were doctors running down the ward and into the room that Dorothy had been in. I wondered what was going on, as she should have been discharged. I slowly made my way to the room and Dorothy was flat on the floor and the crash team were attempting to resuscitate her.

I went numb at the door as I witnessed the futile attempts of the crash team to resuscitate her and the subsequent disbelief of the entire ward staff. Dorothy had no medical history – this was out of the blue. I’d been responsible for the death of Dorothy and I was the only one that knew it.

After I had watched the resuscitation team in action and gone numb, I felt a resounding peacefulness permeate my body. Had Dorothy waited for my return to die?

I’ll never know this for sure. What I do know is that any doubts about whether there is life after death were eradicated for me that day. For all of the books that I had ever read on or around the subject, nothing had ever, or indeed has ever, come close to what happened on that ward during those two nights.

I dedicate this article to Dorothy and thank her for the gift of hope beyond doubt that she has given me.

Adam Shaw is a traveller, writer and Health Consultant. He has spent most of his life developing skills in working with energy, people and dynamic, personal insight techniques. He now runs insight workshops to teach this knowledge to others. http://www.advancedserendipity.com

The caramel-colored corgi spotted me walking toward the city-run recreation center. Out for a walk with his person, the little dog stopped in his tracks and fixed me in his gaze. The woman on the end of his leash tried to move him along, but he wouldn’t budge.

He stood his ground, waiting for me to approach him. I bent down and opened my palm for him to sniff, talking softly to him. He licked my hand and fingers eagerly, and enjoyed having his head rubbed and ears scratched.

Only then would he consent to being lead away by his owner. Slightly embarrassed and certainly bewildered, she didn’t seem to understand what just transpired, but I did. That sharp little canine intuitively sensed that I could use some affection and comfort, and did his best to offer it to me.

I felt better immediately and will appreciate that compassionate pooch for the rest of my days.

Animals show us all the time how to love. They constantly offer up true love–the unconditional kind so simple that we so-called intelligent beings simply don’t trust it, convinced that love surely must be complex, unfathomable, and scarce.

What a pity we don’t pay more attention to our animal teachers. The few times we do, it’s an even greater tragedy that we generally don’t understand the lesson.

Take the tale of Oscar, a feline supervisor at a Rhode Island hospice care unit. The tabby cat made national headlines when his story was posted on the website of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Then there was Scamp, an adopted canine with similar duties at a Canton, Ohio, nursing home. Like Oscar, Scamp the schnauzer always seemed to know when a resident of his facility was close to death.

We didn’t know what to make of the animals’ abilities to predict and indicate imminent death or their love for the dying person. Idiotic, fear-laden headlines yammered on about “ominous talent” and “first grim cat, now grim dog.”

How tragic that death holds such terror for us, and we are so divorced from our spiritual natures, that we react to the love–the compassion and empathy–shown by animals with fear, distrust, and even a tinge of loathing.

By easing both the dying and their loved ones through the transition erroneously known as death, Scamp and Oscar show us the meaning of love as well as how to love.

The animals’ presence at a resident’s bedside alerts staff to contact the patient’s family in time for them to say their good-byes. Doing so provides a tremendous amount of comfort to the dying person’s loved ones. And for those without family able to arrive in time, Oscar and Scamp make sure that none of those they watch over dies alone.

Science, naturally, provides theories about how animals can sense impending death. These explanations focus on chemical smells, called pheromones, that animals can detect but elude human nostrils.

Pheromones may well be at work, but that does not exclude another interpretation of these events. The dying most often are comatose, unconscious, or too far in mental collapse to be aware of the animals’ presence by what we consider normal methods. They cannot use the physical senses to see them, hear them, or feel the animals’ fur or slight weight next to them.

Even unconscious, however, the dying are still capable of sensing and benefiting from the vibration of love. Detecting love’s presence is a gift of the spirit that precedes physical life and remains once it is over because it is the essence of the energy-spirits that we are. Love does not depend on physical life or physical senses to exist and be given or received.

And surely it is love that Oscar and Scamp are giving those at death’s door, and love that the little corgi offered me. True love that makes no demands, imposes no conditions, sets no restrictions.

All of us long for that kind of love, and we need not wait for it until the end of our physical lives. It’s available to us right now, if only we open our hearts and souls to the animal teachers all around us, willing to show the living as well as the dying the way to love.

Candace (C.L.) Talmadge is the author of the Green Stone of Healing(R) epic fantasy series http://www.greenstoneofhealing.com and a political columnist syndicated by North Star Writers Group http://www.northstarwriters.com.

“Donna” was trapped in an agony of indecision.

Her eight-year marriage to a man older than she, of another ationality, culture, and religion, had never been easy. Now it was threatening to founder on the rocky shoals of severe financial strain and quarrels over in-laws. At age 29, she already had one child, a daughter nearly three years old.

She was pregnant again.

This time, Donna couldn’t feel the joy so many other women experience on learning this news. She thought there was a distinct possibility that she could end up raising not one but two children by herself, and that thought terrified her. Should she carry the fetus to term? What about an abortion? The choice was overwhelming. Her husband didn”t make things any easier. He said the decision was hers and refused to discuss his feelings about the pregnancy, leaving Donna more isolated and in greater pain.

Then a friend suggested a healing circle. “I didn’t realize you could do one for an unborn child,” Donna recalls. She found contacted the Sattva Institute. Jana Simons, institute co-founder, agreed to conduct the healing circle.

Although her husband didn’t believe in all this “metaphysical stuff,” as Jana calls it, he accompanied Donna and participated in the session. A couple who were friends of Donna and her husband also took part. Both of them, accomplished professionals, had never done anything like this before.

One point about healing circles. You don’t have to be a professional psychic, or even consider yourself to have any psychic ability, to take part in, contribute to, and benefit from a healing circle.

You need only know how to send love.

The little soul stands in the middle of our circle, undetectable to the five physical senses but perceptible to the four soul or psychic senses. Tousled dark hair spills out from under a tight-fitting, old-style aviator helmet. He–this soul clearly presents his form as male–is wearing a jumpsuit and a scarf. In the hand that he holds up is a model airplane that dives and loops and curls when he waves his arm. Next to him is what looks like an architect’s model of an office building, almost as tall as he.

He is self-assured with a genuine sweetness. There is also a hint of mischief and of a very strong will. He knows what he wants for this physical lifetime. He wants to fly airplanes. He tells us he has chosen Donna’s husband as a father partly because her husband is a licensed pilot with thousands of hours in the cockpit. He also says he’s interested in architecture and designing things.

He has a very full agenda for his next sojourn on earth. He’s so cute and bright and cheery that he moves some of us to smiles as we gather this information through our soul senses and pass it on to his would-be mother and father.

Then Donna blurts out a few jumbled phrases. She can barely put her feelings into words to explain to this soul why she is so reluctant just now to continue this pregnancy. Her painful quandary and distress are palpable.

The little aviator quickly understands. “I can wait,” he assures Donna several times during the session. “If the time is not right, I’ll wait.”

Before the session ends, the little aviator makes sure we all understand one thing. When he finally does arrive, by golly, he wants to be known by his father’s middle name.

The name suits him.

For twenty years, “Clara” suffered a wound that refused to heal. An elementary institute teacher, Clara was brought up in a small Russian Orthodox community in Pennsylvania. Her mother and father were first-generation immigrants in the days when it was not safe to proclaim a Russian heritage. Clara recalls being punished as a child for telling others about her Russian background.

“My mother denied her past and lived a facade,” Clara recalls. When cancer claimed her mother’s life, Clara felt she had never had the chance to say good-bye to her real mother. After five years, she turned to three years of daily psychiatric therapy and later tried psychotherapy again. The same thing happened both times. Traditional therapy could help her to a certain point. Past that point it was of no further use.

“I felt a pressure that no one could help me with,” she says. “When your problems touch on the spiritual, traditional doctors can’t do much. I had a spiritual injury that I couldn’t ignore.”

Prodded by her unrelenting need, Clara was open to an alternative approach. Her search for healing eventually led her to a healing circle through her daughter, Laura, who learned about it attending a class at the Sattva Institute.

When Clara found out about the possibility of contacting the dead, she asked for a healing circle, even though Laura had some doubts. “I knew the offer of a healing circle was right,” Clara says. “I felt it.”

Despite her confidence, Clara was taken aback by the proceedings. “It was shocking when I realized how real it was.”

Lives Transformed

Through a healing circle, Clara finally made peace with her mother–20 years after her mother’s physical body died. Through a healing circle, Donna was able to free herself emotionally to make a decision about her pregnancy.

Both women reaped totally unexpected dividends from their healing circles. Immediately after hers, Donna found that the nausea she had been experiencing in the early stages of her pregnancy simply vanished.

“My whole attitude changed. The pregnancy became something I accepted. It did something else for me,” Donna says of her session. “It made me realize that even if my marriage didn’t stay together, I still wanted the baby. It gave me more confidence in myself.”

The little aviator touched down on planet earth the following spring.

“I’m so glad now I chose to keep the baby,” Donna adds. “He came to help me with balance.”

Following her session, Clara found that other areas of her life also were healed. She felt more at ease with herself and less compelled to be with other people just to avoid being by herself. Equally important to her was that she now had some terms for the psychic abilities that were always so natural to her and her parents.

“It was a tremendous eye-opener to realize the reality of life after death and that other people felt this way,” Clara says.

Ironically, it was an unorthodox healing circle that reconciled Clara to the Russian Orthodox Church, which she rejoined. “The church is not open to this subject, but I’m in a whole different space.”

Now, when Clara makes the sign of the cross and follows other rituals, she’s aware of a much deeper, spiritual dimension to them. The ceremonies now hold a rich and very personal meaning for her. The rites are no longer just empty motions, done by rote and handed down as someone else’s truth.

A profound and powerful sense of relief and release surrounds and embraces all participants during a properly conducted healing circle.

It’s the kind of healing that transforms lives forever.

Candace (C.L.) Talmadge is the author of the Green Stone of Healing(R) epic fantasy series http://www.greenstoneofhealing.com and a political columnist syndicated by North Star Writers Group http://www.northstarwriters.com.

A healing circle–better known as a seance–is one of the most misunderstood and thus inadvertently abused of all spiritual healing practices. The very word seance immediately brings to mind what most people consider the unreal and laughable notion of “conjuring up spirits.”

Derided by some, proscribed by others, the healing circle tragically has degenerated into a casual pastime with no more apparent significance or meaning than a video game.

The seance begins as a lark or a joke, a way to alleviate boredom, to enliven a party gone flat or to satisfy idle curiosity by seeing if something’s “out there.” Then, to the astonishment, dismay, and occasional real terror of participants, they discover that there actually is someone or something “out there.”

A whole lot of someones or somethings.

A young woman, “Tammy,” found this out the hard way. Scared and bewildered, Tammy phoned the Sattva Institute one day, seeking reassurance and an explanation of the chilling and bizarre event she had just experienced.

She and a friend had decided to use a Ouija board to contact her late grandfather. Things went fine at first. The pointer,moving on its own, spelled out the nickname her grandfather had always called her.

The pointer stopped abruptly. Something changed. The pointer moved again but no longer to any purpose, as though whoever or whatever was propelling it didn’t recognize Tammy or her friend. It tried to spell out a word that appeared to be “help.” Then it spun round and round in wild circles.

The young women, now terrified, ended the session. At this point, all the tapes on top of the VCR tipped over and spilled onto the floor. No one was even anywhere close to the tapes when they toppled over, Tammy reported.

Just who or what Tammy and friend encountered remains fodder for a debate beyond the scope of this article. Clinical evidence that some sort of consciousness survives physical death does exist, however, and has been documented in exhaustive detail by physicians Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Raymond A. Moody Jr., and Melvin Morse, among others.

The Soul is Eternal Energy

Such evidence and more strongly suggests that the soul exists independently of the physical body as love-energy-consciousness. The only thing we leave behind at death is the physical body. That’s all. At physical death, the rest of self–our mental, emotional, and spiritual awareness–remains intact.

The death of the physical body, however, does not in and of itself endow the remaining awareness with wisdom or ultimate enlightenment. This assertion, of course, contravenes extremely ancient and well-entrenched beliefs about life after death. As a result of these widespread beliefs, a lot of people who don’t consider themselves formally religious are still secretly convinced that a nonphysical being is bound to be enlightened and wise.

These unstated beliefs are why so many people conduct their own impromptu seances, hoping to contact some disincarnate master. They’ll contact someone, all right. As Tammy and friends found out, it’s really very easy to communicate with disincarnate beings. That’s precisely the problem, and it can be devastating. Curiosity-seekers who conduct seances without knowing how to protect themselves often end up like Tammy and friend: frightened out of their wits.

Why? Because they didn’t contact anyone enlightened or wise. Instead, they had a close encounter with a disincarnate jerk, a being only too willing to play mind-games with them. Remember, nothing dies but the physical body. If a person in a mental institution dies in a psychotic state, that condition is unfortunately not going to change merely because the physical body has stopped functioning. Although no longer in a physical body, that soul will still be psychotic.

Keep in mind also that the only valid motive for offering a healing circle is the desire to be of service, not for self-aggrandizement or to demonstrate how truly spiritual you are. A healing circle certainly isn’t going to convince a skeptic that life exists after death; do not regard it as some sort of experiment. It is no substitute entertainment when the DVDs run out, either.

Genuine Need for Healing

Instead, conduct a healing circle only when there is a genuine need for healing resolution between a soul dwelling in a physical body and one that is not–the latter often termed “dead” due to society’s very limited understanding.

Always keep in mind that while some will benefit enormously from a healing circle, many will not. The motives of the person asking for a healing circle are just as important as the motives of those conducting it.

Be careful when screening those who ask for healing circles. Such a person is the inquirer. Hold a healing circle only for inquirers who genuinely desire healing resolution. A request is the first guideline. Let an inquirer come to you and request a healing circle after you have made it known that you are capable of conducting one and willing to do so.

Next, establish that the inquirer has some sort of emotional tie to the departed that is reciprocated. This two-way link can be through kinship or friendship; it doesn’t matter and you don’t need to know the precise nature of the relationship. The love connection counts above all else. The emotional bond and recognition are what draw the soul in question to the healing circle participants.

The preceding is obvious, thinking about it. If you were walking down the street and someone in the middle of a group called out your name, would you respond to the summons? You might, if you were to recognize and care about the person calling your name. If you didn’t know anyone there, most likely you would ignore the call and continue on your way, probably at a little faster clip than before.

This is precisely why adoring fans are more likely to contact a deceased Elvis Presley impersonator rather than the soul that once dwelled in the body of the king of rock and roll. There’s no emotional draw to them on the part of Elvis, even if the fans worshipped their idol from afar.

After an inquirer asks for a healing circle, and after you have established a two-way emotional connection between the inquirer and the soul in question, use your intuition. This is another way of saying your psychic abilities or four soul senses. Those soul senses can be invaluable in helping your left brain decide whether or not this inquirer is seeking a healing circle out of a genuine desire for healing resolution.

Candace (C.L.) Talmadge is the author of the Green Stone of Healing(R) epic fantasy series http://www.greenstoneofhealing.com and a political columnist syndicated by North Star Writers Group http://www.northstarwriters.com.