Day 50 from my book “Living and Dying”
Connection
“For the 99 percent of the time we’ve been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine.”
Janine M. Benyus
Connection – when we are able to be most vulnerable and transparent.
The experience of the death of a family member is one of the few guarantees we will have in life. It will happen, I guarantee it, yet it remains an event we continue to struggle with. Let’s take a quick look at the average life experience. With the United State’s average life expectancy currently hovering at around 78.88 years, the age to which most Americans can expect to live is still forty-four years younger than the human life span. So how do we close that gap and elongate our lives? There will always be factors that are out of our individual control like our inherited genes, but we shouldn’t discount the impact of those that we can control. It is generally understood that closing the gap between life expectancy and life span can be done through healthier living, less exposure to toxins, the prevention of chronic illnesses, and a little bit of luck. The most common cause of death is heart disease.
We all know the common physical symptoms and issues of heart disease, but what is it that causes these physical changes? Science is finally looking at the cause of this breakdown. What is being discovered is that long term fear, frustration, anxiety, and disappointment are significant contributing factors in heart disease. These functions relate to our emotional experience (called hurt), which when activated is asking for the body and mind connection to be healed. If we don’t attend to these messages, or if we shut them down so as not to be recognized, our engines (our heart) will break down. In our current state of development, medicine is showing us that the human heart can last about seventy to one hundred years under these conditions.
I believe that Jesus, and others, said thousands of years ago that we all have the ability to live multi-centuries and that our bodies are designed to live this long. It is easy for me to understand the average death rates in the US because the first hundred years are the toughest. In our lifetimes we will lose everyone we have grown to love or care for. We will lose everything; people, pets, animals, jobs, relationships, homes, etc. With the level of technology so advanced, we will lose the world we have grown accustomed to and even mastered, many times.
Our struggle is with our inability to reconcile ourselves with the hurt associated with the loss of our world, and we don’t even know it. We are in a constant state of “re-construction” constantly recreating our place in the world of change and loss. When it comes to the loss of a loved one, the funeral has been, and continues to be one of the only effective experiences in our journey towards health and wellbeing since the beginning of time.
“Blessings on your journey”
Hope and Love on life's journey 