Secrets of Love, Loss, and Forgiveness: Discovering the Loving Life

In an age when we seem to have no time for ourselves, and competition, disconnectedness, and terror form the backdrop of our lives, we must replace fear of living and fear of dying with love. If we are to live and die peacefully, we need revisions of thought and action—paradigm shifts—that are simple, but not easy. Secrets of Love, Loss, and Forgiveness offers tools to bring about these transformative changes and make love, liberty, and happiness a way of life.

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In the Foreword, Matthew Fox writes: “I welcome this book, this bard, this storyteller, this self-healer who speaks not just his own thoughts, but the stories of so many he has witnessed in their last days and the many he has witnessed in workshops. The author summarizes the lessons of living and dying, of wisdom and caring. It is a timely book, simple in its message, deep in its analysis, and sure in its offering of methodologies to assist us in ways of mindful living and dying.”

Fear and self-neglect may be clouding our consciousness, but love lies waiting for us within, and Secrets is a spiritual GPS that will guide us home. “You have nothing to lose but your suffering, and love really does provide us with a lighthouse that makes clear the way.”

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Gazing at the Lighthouse: Reflections on the Loving Life

From the sunroom where I wrote this book, a lighthouse on the west end of Bere Island in southwest Ireland is but a mile and a gaze away. The solid predictability of the lighthouse is so comforting, and it winks at me through the darkness. The darkness of the night is often the time when my Mortal mind is still, and ideas bubble forth from the warmth of my Soul and from my eager Spirit that seem like the stuff of dreams. Words from this font of inspiration—my daemon—form most of these short pieces.

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I remember a man in a workshop I facilitated who was a very practical engineer, and during the first day he asked several questions because, as he said, he didn’t understand what was happening. His quest for understanding was a reminder to me that our inner world that opens up in workshops and during the night is far beyond understanding by the Mortal mind. When I am gazing at the lighthouse, or I am gazing at my mortal fears and worries with two others in a workshop as part of a trio of explorers, I am “in” love. My three natures—my questioning Mortal who is fearful of living and fearful of dying, my witnessing and wise Soul, and my vibrant and imaginative Spirit—weave in and out together making love, and in those moments beyond understanding I know for sure that love is the only meaning in my life.

I hope that these reflections inspired by the lighthouse will ignite more love within you, and be an aid to navigation through the fears of living and the fears of dying!
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The Wisdom of Dying: Practices for Living

This book evolved as a result of my experiences of starting and developing a hospice in Albany, NY. In the beginning, I was as ignorant about hospices as I was about dying. Looking back on my decade and a half as a psychiatrist I realized that the psychiatry of the time was not a very helpful preparation for this work, steeped as it was in denial of death like our mentor, Sigmund Freud.

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For the first few years in the hospice I behaved as I was taught, and kept my distance. As I began to experience my own concerns about dying, I became aware that dying is a great teacher about love and forgiveness if we will listen, and I became a better witness for myself and others. By both acknowledging my own fears and allowing those of others to enter in to me, I became less afraid of the closeness required of one who is able to assist others to heal themselves.

My most important work was having family meetings for almost every family that was involved with the hospice, for everyone in most families needs gentle encouragement to listen to their other family members and themselves. Many will also need a nudge if they are to ask and receive forgiveness and speak about love as they say goodbye. Most families when asked said they did not need a family meeting, usually because of unspoken dark secrets that had been carried for years. So only a small fraction of families have a family meeting in most hospices, and while hospice care is usually kind and loving, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for healing is often missed.

This book, first published in 1999 and now updated, will guide you through some of the mysteries and possibilities that occur in families when one of the members is dying, and lead you through the heart break of saying goodbye and giving thanks, so that all is said and done.
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Most of us wish for loving relationships with our family, partner, children, and friends. But we often carry deeply held grievances and hurts that inhibit our ability to live and love fully. The practices of Love, Loss, and Forgiveness help us lay down these burdens and move towards more fruitful, satisfying, and healthy relationships. Moreover, they prepare us to live a more loving life by teaching us how to love ourselves unconditionally.

Learning to love ourselves with compassion is vital to all relationships, both personal and professional. The practices of Love, Loss, and Forgiveness are, perhaps, especially important for caregivers—parents, teachers, doctors, nurses, therapists, and others—since caregivers can only give sustainable care to the extent that they know how to love and care for themselves. The practices of Love, Loss, and Forgiveness are also vital for men and women in the competitive business world, where the bottom line receives far more attention than soul and spirit.

Why get involved in opening ourselves up to feeling pain and suffering that has been more or less kept under control? Life has plenty of challenges as it is—many responsibilities, lots of work, and limited leisure time. Why would any of us want to spend some of that precious free time thinking and talking about difficult times?

A woman who attended a workshop and then became involved in one of the nine-member, community-based groups said: “When I decided to attend a Love, Loss, and Forgiveness workshop, I was ambivalent about the process that lay ahead. I was taking a week out of my busy life to attend the workshop—a week when I could have been on vacation exploring a beach somewhere, taking it easy,  not talking about unpleasant memories.

And in truth, I faced some pretty difficult things that week. But I also laughed harder, dreamed more vividly, breathed deeper, and felt more grounded than I have in years, maybe ever. And I mean literally grounded—I felt like my center of balance had shifted lower in my body. I remember looking at myself in the mirror in the middle of the week and barely recognizing the person who looked back at me. She was so much younger looking than I remembered, so much softer.”

The practices of Love, Loss, and Forgiveness help us move beyond outer awareness into the realm of inner awareness. Outer awareness focuses on the superficial details of our lives—our physical appearance, our perceived achievements and failings, our financial assets, our children’s grades, our social standing. When we’re preoccupied with outer awareness, we look critically at ourselves and others and judge what we see. Outer awareness involves the mind—analyzing, comparing, evaluating, enumerating. Preoccupation with outer awareness can inhibit love both for ourselves and for others.

When we look into the mirror at ourselves, we usually do so to judge whether or not the image we present to the outer world is in place—whether we look good. Often, this looking is critical and fearful as we search for signs of aging in grey hairs, wrinkles, and other “flaws.”  Our reflected exterior is often so frightening that we may spend a great time and effort masking our aging and mortality, or we may avoid looking in the mirror at all.

Inner awareness transforms the hard, critical, evaluating look of outer awareness into a soft, unconditionally loving gaze. The gaze involves no assessment of any kind, for gazing is an act of unconditional love. The gaze happens in the moments when there is no barrier between us caused by judgments, expectations, and weighty stories. The power of the Gaze is obvious when a loving mother gazes at her child, and the child reflects this loving embrace with his own smile-filled gaze. That Gaze is timeless—mother and child feel no compulsion to avert their eyes from one another—they could seemingly remain that way, held in each other’s gaze, forever.

Most of us lose our ability to give and receive the gaze in childhood, but we need it all our lives if we are to love and be loved. A core idea behind the practices of Love, Loss, and Forgiveness is that until we learn once more to gaze at ourselves with unconditional love, we will not be able to love others unconditionally. Once we become practiced in the art of gazing and bask in the unconditional love it offers, then we can turn that gaze out onto the world around us.

The Love, Loss, and Forgiveness Project is developing an Internet platform to inspire participants to take better care of themselves, their families, and communities by learning about practices that help them to live more loving lives.

We call this Internet platform “Living the Loving Life.” It will be designed to attract potential members to The Love, Loss and Forgiveness Project. For people already involved in the project… it will offer a “base camp” that supports their continued personal journey of growth and transformation.

The platform becomes the international home for information for participants to learn about the project, a place that keeps them posted about upcoming area events and inspires their engagement in the practices. The platform becomes the Love, Loss, and Forgiveness Project’s communication hub allowing LLF organizations in Holland, Belgium, Romania and the United States an efficient way to keep in touch with each other and their growing member populations and the place from which Project books and other media offering (podcasts, YouTube videos, etc.) are disseminated.

The platform will focus on the nine-member, nine-month community-based groups that are the center-piece of the project helping to support their process from formation through administration and beyond.