THE FEAR OF DEATH We are going to die. The terror of our mortality is stark and disturbing. Humans have created many adaptions in an attempt to cope with ‘the worm at the core’, the anxiety that festers beneath all other human fears. Yet it’s this very anxiety that is also the Gift. Death awareness is the sacred key to living the most meaningful, wonderful and enriching life possible. In the words of philosopher Martin Heidegger, ‘we can live intensely only if we stare death

RETHINKING THE EXPECTATIONS OF GRIEVING "Blessed are those who mourn quickly and efficiently for they meet our criteria for managed care", - Dr Alan D. Wolfelt. The Stages of Grief and other informed theories on what healthy grieving looks like, has comforted but also compounded the effort to adhere to a universal human grieving process. I've discovered that raw grief doesn't necessarily follow the rules. In fact, it's such an intimately personal process, that we can't acc

EVERYONE SUFFERS. I spent my childhood trying to understand it's purpose. I found it disturbing to watch nature take the life of insects and small animals slowly and wantonly. A mouse that convulsed before dying, a snake that was run over and lived between worlds while a portion of its belly was suckered to the road. Images such as these completely haunted and invaded my days as a child. It was difficult to watch animals suffer while death lingered. I waited anxiously for so