We can take charge and actively heal our broken hearts. It means we honor ourselves by taking care of ourselves. Will you?

Tired of setting New Year’s Resolutions that seem to fizzle out? Try setting smaller monthly tasks to boost mind, body, spirit in 2020.

Monthly Ideas to Boost Mind, Body, Spirit in 2020

By Robyn M Fritz

Why do New Year’s Resolutions fail? They take too long. In our hyper times, we’re constantly in flux, and slowing down for anything is to admit defeat—or die. But what if you could both keep up with your busy life and slow down, so it all makes sense?

You can, and the holidays are a good time to start. That means skipping one big New Year’s resolution in favor of a monthly method to boost mind, body, spirit tasks that will fine-tune your holistic life by year’s end.

The following are suggestions to boost your creativity. Progress doesn’t depend on the order, so listen to your intuition and soul as you go. And get a notebook to keep track of what you learn.

January: Be Present. Stop and breathe; notice the moments. Remember, you’re a complete being—body, mind, spirit. Notice how it feels to be balanced and learn to stay that way.

February: Understand energy. Yes, everything is energy, including you. Find a simple energy healing technique that you can do morning, night, and whenever you need help to maintain your holistic focus. Here’s one simple exercise: cross your hands on your heart, imagine you’re breathing energy into your hands, hold your hands to your mouth and breathe on them as if your breath was energy, and put your hands back on your heart.

March: Learn how your intuition works. Everyone is innately an intuitive and healer. Now determine whether you’re clair-seeing, clair-hearing, clair-feeling, clair-knowing, or a combination of these four main abilities. Then work them: keep a notebook of intuitive experiments; learn to distinguish between beliefs, emotions, facts, and intuition; and apply this practical skill daily. You will be astounded at how well-rounded you become.

April: Intention. Decide what you intend: how will you incorporate your intuition and healing skills at home and at work, or react to change, or choose to live in the world? Notice how intention changes your view of your loved ones and your efforts to be your best self.

May: Self-love. The biggest problem we all have is a lack of self-love. Learning to love yourself isn’t ego but acceptance of your pluses and minuses, of everything that makes you who you are (yes, warts and all). Be prepared for huge changes.

June: Ritual. Daily, weekly, and monthly rituals remind us that we are souls in human bodies who need concrete, visible reminders that we are greater than our busy lives. Ritual offers a time-out and a connection to family, friends, and the divine, adding peace and harmony to our lives.

July: Clear space. Learn to keep your spaces clear at home and at work. This isn’t decluttering; it’s removing stuck energy through simple energy-healing techniques. It can involve keeping sea salt in bowls around the house, Himalayan salt lamps, lavender, essential oils, incense—whatever it takes to be aware of stuck energy around you and to keep it moving. Because stuck energy leads to overwhelm, depression, lack of self-worth, and everything that holds you back.

August: Mindset. Now that you’re honoring your whole self focus outward. Choose a mindset that helps you live in the world as it really exists—as a union of equals, where everything is alive, has a soul, consciousness, responsibilities, free choice, and opinions. The world will get bigger—and easier to live in because you’ll be in the flow.

September: Connect with All Life. Your inclusive mindset makes it easier to connect with our living planet and all its beings as you learn why you matter to the world and how your unique contribution can benefit all life. You’ll also have amazing experiences relating to the world as a collaboration of equals. You will be less lonely, more awed, and growing your soul at warp speed, which is the whole point.

October: Mantra. You’ve covered the big things by now, so what do they mean to your new holistic life? Keep yourself going by creating mantras that remind you of your new choices. Quick phrases that keep you focused will also keep you grounded and balanced.

November: Choice. Ready to create life-long habits? Look over your notebook of experiments, mantras, rituals, ideas, feelings, interests, thoughts … your entire year of becoming your best self and decide how to make different elements part of your day, week, month, and year.

December: Practice. Guess what? You’ve established a new lifestyle. Your challenge now is to keep at it. Practice daily. Build on what you learn. Remember, you’re a year into your new life. What worked best? What held you back? What will you do next year? Why?

 Relax into your year of growing into your best self. It’s not a chore, not a have-to, nothing but your choice to play, experiment, and find a rhythm that adds meaning and balance to your busy life. Remember that you matter to the world, so let 2020 be the year that you believe that—and prosper.

Originally published in OMTimes.com magazine: 12 Ways to Boost Mind, Body, Spirit in 2020 – OMTimes Magazine

About the Author

Robyn M Fritz MA MBA CHt hosts the OMTimes radio show, “The Practical Intuitive: Mind Body Spirit for the Real World.” An intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist, she is an award-winning author whose next book is “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side.” Find her at RobynFritz.com.

Chaotic times call for new solutions.

In these chaotic times, we are choosing how we define ourselves: as way-followers, who cling to outdated mindsets and institutions, or as way-showers, who are creating a worldwide community that chooses strength in diversity. We begin by first finding our “true self,” which helps us compassionately engage others.

Every generation has a defining moment, something they choose that says, “That is how they’ll remember us.” There were the extreme challenges, like the Great Depression and World War II, and the triumphs, like the Renaissance and the Space Age. As we define ourselves, what will we choose: what defeated us or what built us?

What Our Chaotic Times Mean

In the last few years, community worldwide has been shattered by escalating violence compounded by a bewildering divisiveness that mars our daily lives. In our families and social circles, we’ve been shocked when the previously mild-mannered lash out: “If you criticize my president I’m walking out.” Sadly, this theme reverberates worldwide: “They don’t believe what I believe, and I refuse to connect.”

What is going on?

Of course the age-old quandary, fear versus love: choosing between embracing lack and disharmony or embracing connection and living full out. Throughout history, that struggle has historically played out in divisiveness. We are human, it’s a given.

But this new divisiveness is signaling an epoch change, our defining moment. The fear-full cling to what they believe makes them worthy: an outdated patriarchal worldview and its religious and cultural institutions. As these icons buckle, and world citizenship rises up, fear struggles for relevance, while those who are ready to grow into something new are mystified and unbalanced by the chaotic times.

What do we do? We create new leaders.

Choosing Who We Are and Who Leads Us

How do we choose leadership? Will we continue to defer to a nation-state or will we come home to ourselves? This is a worldwide choice pitting religion, race, politics, and borders—the things that divide us—against a common humanity. The struggle can lead to a larger choice, defining whether we stick to the old and remain increasingly isolated and bitter way-followers, or choose to be our own leaders treading uncertain roads to a new unity as way-showers.

The choice is simple and stark: Who are we? The answer is simpler yet: We are one. The problem that stymies us: How does “one” become our way of life?

That, too, is simple. We start by honoring what shamanic insight calls our “true self”—our eternal, individual soul that grows, learns and forms a complete whole, body and soul, strengths and weaknesses, viewpoints, needs, and desires. We individually choose to be our own “sovereign being, our own sovereign nation,” which gives us the strength to be compassionate, aware, able to negotiate differences, and open to change.

The next step is unity: whether individual or nationwide, sovereignty demands consensus. We live in society because we’re hard-wired for it. The challenge is creating a community that supports and nurtures by honoring all, acknowledging diversity, and requiring thoughtful participation.

How We Create Community

Here’s how we do that, starting with our homes, at our holiday gatherings, and expanding into our neighborhoods, cities, states, and countries.

We breathe. Deep, measured breaths help us find our true self, which calms and centers us, reminding us that life is imperfect and in flux, and that’s okay.

We engage. We calmly say, “Let’s talk, let’s learn how to create community,” because it’s okay to disagree, it means we are thinking. But successful engagement means to defer judgment, listen compassionately, ask questions, be open-minded. It means finding common ground by understanding what others fear and believe—and why—then build consensus.

We evolve. Listening is hard right now, but that’s our growth opportunity. We stay balanced by grounding into ourselves and into all the elements—earth, air, fire, water, spirit. We gather in supportive communities; release what no longer serves, from relationships to thought patterns; and hold love to inspire others and invigorate ourselves. As we grieve for the suffering and celebrate gains, from fellowship to understanding, we embrace the power to create.

We choose. We must know ourselves: what we believe and why. We study history, plan for the future, and consider our differences—because that’s where consensus lies. Moving towards world citizenship is a rocky road, dissolving nation-states into a diverse community that loves, grows, disagrees, walks away, and comes back again.

Will we be the way-followers, who refuse change and wither in fear in these chaotic times? Or will we be the way-showers, honoring others as souls in bodies struggling to grow and serve, sometimes to triumph and sometimes to fail, always to rise again? Will we be the isolated? Or will we be the 22,000 in Las Vegas, the Londoners, the Barcelonans, the world citizens who carry on with strength, resilience, and determination?

Clearly, the majority has already chosen: we are way-showers. We are many who rise, love and create a diverse community that chooses acceptance.

Because we are one.

Originally published in OMTimes.com Magazine: Claiming Our Place in Chaotic Times – OMTimes Magazine

You will also enjoy Communicating with Our Animal Families

About the Author

Robyn M Fritz MA MBA CHt is an intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist with an international practice based in Seattle, Washington. An OM Times Expert and award-winning author, teacher, and speaker, she hosts “The Practical Intuitive: Mind Body Spirit for the Real World” each Monday at 2 pm PST on OM Times Radio. Find her services at RobynFritz.co

With loss all around us, we’re tempted to withdraw deeper into ourselves, to keep love at bay, to not feel pain. Ironically, that’s when grief can support us. Yes, grief.

Grief is an emotion that helps us process change. In the pandemic, we are grieving our loss of freedom and fear and deceased loved ones. Mourning our dead is more challenging because we can’t have ordinary funerals. But our dead are still waiting for us to honor and celebrate them—with them—some tips on dealing with grief in the pandemic.

When we think about grief, our first thoughts are usually about the devastation we feel when our human and animal beloveds die. But grief is an emotion that helps us process change. What we’re going through with the pandemic is a global change that has ripped away from the basic assumptions of how we live in community, from how we work to how we love.

With loss all around us, we’re tempted to withdraw deeper into ourselves, to keep love at bay, to not feel pain. Ironically, that’s when grief can support us. Yes, grief.

Grief in a Time of Crisis

As an emotion that helps us process change, grief is cathartic, allowing us to release pent-up feelings that keep us frozen in place, unable to move forward. The problem right now is that many people are reluctant to acknowledge their feelings. They’re living on the edge, lost in a newly dangerous world, fearing a tsunami of emotion that could incapacitate them. They believe that being strong—for themselves and their families—means bottling it up: if the feelings can’t get out, things can’t worsen.

We can deal with these feelings first by calmly recognizing them. Many people right now just want things to get back to normal, whatever that is for them. Yes, we all do—and that feeling is grief.

We want to freely move in public without fear. An invisible enemy will kill us, to gather with friends and loved ones, to go back to work, to just be safe. We’re grieving for a way of life, freedom of movement, a lack of fear that we don’t have anymore, and may not have again for weeks or months.

That’s okay. We should be grieving the disruptions we’ve experienced.

We’re also grieving, feeling fear. We fear that loved ones, or we will get sick and even die. We fear lost income and even lost purpose. We are afraid because things are so different: in the U.S., wearing face masks and protective gloves, being confined, standing in grocery store lines, and finding empty shelves are abnormal. It’s okay to grieve these changes. Grieving helps to acknowledge the loss, grieving it, and allowing it to move through us helps us move on.

Grief and Death in the Pandemic

There is another aspect to grieving in the pandemic: how we are forced to acknowledge the deaths of our beloveds. Funerals are necessary rites of passage in our society, allowing the community to honor the deceased—and life moving on. But in the pandemic, families either can’t hold physical funerals or just leave people out. Yes, alternatives are cropping up, from delaying funerals entirely to making them virtual.

For many, though, that means grief is on hold. But it doesn’t have to be. Why? Because the dead don’t care when you have a funeral—or what it looks like. They simply need the occasion to come together with the living to honor the change that death brings. As a medium, I know that the dead attend their funerals and that anything goes. That means, no matter how long ago a beloved died, you can honor their memory with a ritual that works for you. It can be as simple as, “Hey, you, I miss you,” to an elaborate ceremony—even if it’s just you, or the people you’re quarantined with.

Creating Rituals to Resolve Grief

Grief sticks around longer than it needs to if it is not acknowledged. While there isn’t a time table for when grieving should end (because it doesn’t, it merely blends into our lives), try creating a ritual to help process grief, whether it’s for a beloved dead or the times we’re living in.

If it’s for the dead, first set time, tell your beloveds when it will be, and invite their spiritual teams and yours to join you. Then decide what honoring the dead (and the living) looks like. It can be reading a poem, or recounting memories, playing music, dancing, a meal with toasts—something you know the dead would have appreciated when they’re alive. (I guarantee they’ll love it, even the cranky ones which might have said they didn’t want a funeral.) Create something that brings the body, mind, and spirit together. And repeat it as many times, and with as many variations, as you want.

Whether you’re grieving a beloved or the circumstances of the pandemic, set a time and invite your spiritual team to join you. When you’re ready, simply say out loud what you’re grieving, think about it, and feel it in body, mind, and spirit. Sit with those feelings. When it’s time to end the ritual, invite the grief to move through you and out. As it leaves, thank your spiritual team for joining you—and you’re done.

Here is what happens in body, mind, and spirit when we allow ourselves to grieve: we help energy keep moving. When energy is stuck, grief becomes what people dread: something that weighs us down and keeps us moving forward. Acknowledging that it’s okay to feel grief helps us to process change and will help us keep energy moving. And us moving forward.

Originally published in OMTimes.com magazine: https://omtimes.com/2020/10/grief-during-pandemic/

About the Author

Robyn M Fritz, MA MBA CHt, is an intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist. An award-winning author, her next book is “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side.” Find her at RobynFritz.com and on Facebook at The Practical Intuitive.

In this two-part series on preparing for death and grief, we’re covering how to prepare others, and yourself, for a beloved’s death.

Preparing for Death and Grief

You’ve just learned a family member is dying. Whether they’re human or animal, the feeling is the same: you’re stunned by grief and struggling to decide how to help yourself, your family, and your dying beloved get through it.

Yes, it’s hard to say goodbye, harder yet to live the goodbye, but it’s possible. Be practical, careful, sensible, loving, wildly intuitive, spiritual—and follow these tips.

You’re a Family

Remember that you’re a family, even if it’s just you. Yes, the dying person or animal comes first, as any proper hospice model should tell you, but prepare the family by seeing to individual needs. Barring a sudden, unexpected death, they all know it’s coming. Guilt, worry, concern, fear, and jealousy can all show up—and amazing compassion as well.

Build Community

Yes, ask for help, but be clear that anyone can refuse—and some will. It’s interesting, painful, and exhilarating to see who shows up, who doesn’t, and what new connections you make. People often mean well, but our culture is big on avoiding feelings, and dying well requires feelings. Your community will feel with you. The rest, well, you’ll be surprised by those who don’t, especially when it’s dying animals. Remember: that’s their mindset, not yours. Forgive and move on. Or out.

Do Your Homework

Help yourself, and your beloveds understand and accept the dying process. Figure out what it takes to care for your dying and what makes sense, decide what to do, and see that it gets done. Do whatever you have to do so you, and yours can live with it afterward.

You and your family, human and animal, get to decide what death looks like, from how you meet it to how you carry on afterward. Nobody else. Yes, listen to others, but only hang on to what makes sense to you and to your dying beloveds at the moment. That’s all any of us can do—and all the dying really ask of us.

Having experienced my brother’s death with absolutely no warning, I’m a strong advocate for preparing children for their own and a sibling’s death—for any death, human or animal. It’s gut-wrenching but necessary. For example, did you know that a common feeling among surviving children is that they were responsible for a sibling’s death, even if it was an illness? Learn from my unnecessary and debilitating angst: I knew better, even at nine, but that peculiar, unearned guilt haunted me for at least fifteen years. You have to choose how you face dying and death, and if you’re a parent, you’re choosing for everyone. So wise up.

With luck, you’ll get to accompany an animal through old age. What can you manage, afford, and stand? How do you explain it to your animal, the family, and yourself? Before you even get an animal, consider how and why your family will walk that last road together, because it always ends one way—in heartbreak. If that makes you flinch, excellent: it means you’re thinking. You’ll figure out a way to get through it because that’s what life is all about. Life with an aging animal is magnificent. You will experience mystery, frustration, exhaustion, and grief, but if you’re looking for grace in action, this is it.

Get a Great Team

Dying can and should be a community event, starting with your own support team. That includes your medical and veterinary team, spiritual counselors, social workers, psychotherapists, intuitive, energy healers, hospice and grief support professionals, ministers, family, friends, and sitters—yes, people who can be with your dying so you can get a break (and a nap). Always remember that the team is your partner, but you and your dying beloved are in charge. If you’re in charge, either as the animal owner or as the medical power of attorney, you make the decisions for and with your dying, if they are lucid. Fire anyone who thinks otherwise.

I believe your team should include an energy healer and a professional intuitive, and not just because I am one. While there are many energy healing modalities to choose from, you can also put hands on your beloved and yourself and invite healing energy to support the dying and those left behind. There are also many intuitive out there, but not many who are practical, spiritual, and well balanced, which is what you need.

If you are a healer and/or an intuitive, hire someone else: you need a compassionate, objective outsider. I hired an intuitive for the deaths of each of my animals. She gave me an additional perspective on the tough issues and enriched my family’s last days together. I know that neither I nor my beloveds would have done as well without that loving woman who confirmed my own insights, added others, helped us say goodbye, and was simply there as I howled with grief and loss. You hear the medical from the medical team, what you want (or not) from family and friends, what you fear from yourself, and what love has to say from your heart—and an intuitive and healer.

 These are the basics of helping your living and dying beloveds. Use your common sense, intuition, and loving heart to add to them, so when the time comes, true grace surrounds all of you.

Originally published in OMTimes.com magazine: Preparing Families for a Beloved’s Death – OMTimes Magazine

About the Author

Robyn M Fritz MA MBA CHt hosts the OM Times radio show, “The Practical Intuitive: Mind Body Spirit for the Real World.” An intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist, she is an award-winning author whose next book is “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side.” Find her at RobynFritz.com. The second part of this article covers taking care of yourself. The material presented is condensed from my upcoming book, “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side. https://www.robynfritz.com

In the first article of this two-part series on preparing for death and grief, Preparing Families for a Beloved’s Death, I covered how to prepare others for a beloved’s death. Here I’m offering simple but necessary things you need to do to keep yourself healthy and balanced as you support the living—and the dying. These are things we don’t usually think about, so let’s get to them.

Whether a human or animal family member is dying, the living has work to do you’re grieving, possibly in shock, and trying to figure out what to do to help yourself, your family, and your dying beloved get through it.

Don’t Buy into the Guilt

The current medical establishment believes that fighting death, no matter the odds or the suffering involved, is more important than a life well-lived, and a death gently met. Someday the system will grow up. In the meantime, you are a grown-up for it. Pain, suffering, and disability are cruel things. You will know when enough is enough. You cannot beat death. You can make it acceptable—even glorious.

If you live somewhere where humans can choose to end their lives, discuss this option with beloveds, and support their choice. For your animals, yes, you’ll feel bad if you resort to euthanasia, and you haven’t sorted through the whys and why-not with them, yourself, and the rest of the family. You’ll feel bad if you don’t and drag out an ending that causes misery for no good reason. You’ll feel bad, regardless.

Take steps to support yourself by figuring out what the limits are for both the dying and the living. Walk away from anyone who tries to make you feel guilty for choosing to meet death on your own terms and supporting your dying beloveds the same way. Hospice is learning, even with animals, but be careful of animal hospice, because some of those people still don’t understand mercy.

Figure out what love looks like to you and to the rest of the family, from the first day to the last. Cling to it.

Stay Present

We can get caught up in thinking about the past and the future—about what life was like before dying showed up and what it will be like afterward. That’s normal but be careful: don’t miss the “now” of the dying process. Walk the mystery with your beloveds. You’ll be exhilarated and crushed, but you’ll also never regret it. And you know what? I’m a medium, so I can assure you that your dead beloved won’t, either.

Schedule Self-Care

Caught up in our beloved’s dying process, we often forget to take care of ourselves first, a mistake that can lead to illness and despair. We can’t help ourselves, our dying, or others, especially children, if we’re worn out. Take time for yourself, whatever that means at the moment: take a walk, a nap, or time to think; light a candle; dance; read a book; sleep; eat. It’s important. Put aside your ego, that part of you that thinks you can tough it out and go it alone or ignore your needs. It’s not just okay to be vulnerable, to need support, to bolster mind, body, and spirit—it’s part of the job of being human, especially when a beloved is dying.

Remember: everyone involved, including you, needs you to put yourself first, if for no other reason than you can’t help them, or yourself, if you don’t.

Schedule Venting

You stay sane by letting out the fear, anger, grief, and everything else you feel as you helplessly watch a beloved die, so schedule time to do just that. Try starting with twenty-minute blowouts: set a timer and scream, yell, cry, throw things, whatever it takes to vent. When the buzzer goes off, dry your eyes, buck up, and get back to your living and dying beloveds. Yes, it works, before and after a death. I’m proof.

Did these tips surprise you? They’re so basic you probably realized they’re part of your consciousness. Also, realize you can easily bypass them when you’re caught in a crushing moment, and there are few things more crushing than a beloved’s impending death. It’s hard to think straight when the experience is before you, so take some time to consider it now, while there’s time. I promise it will help.

Originally published in OMTimes.com magazine: Tips for Self-Care as Beloveds Die – OMTimes Magazine

About the Author

Robyn M Fritz MA MBA CHt hosts the OMTimes radio show, “The Practical Intuitive: Mind Body Spirit for the Real World.” An intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist, she is an award-winning author whose next book is “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side.” http://RobynFritz.com.

With loss all around us, we’re tempted to withdraw deeper into ourselves, to keep love at bay, to not feel pain. Ironically, that’s when grief can support us. Yes, grief.

Grief is an emotion that helps us process change. In the pandemic, we are grieving our loss of freedom and fear and deceased loved ones. Mourning our dead is more challenging because we can’t have ordinary funerals. But our dead are still waiting for us to honor and celebrate them—with them—some tips on dealing with grief in the pandemic.

When we think about grief, our first thoughts are usually about the devastation we feel when our human and animal beloveds die. But grief is an emotion that helps us process change. What we’re going through with the pandemic is a global change that has ripped away from the basic assumptions of how we live in community, from how we work to how we love.

With loss all around us, we’re tempted to withdraw deeper into ourselves, to keep love at bay, to not feel pain. Ironically, that’s when grief can support us. Yes, grief.

Grief in a Time of Crisis

As an emotion that helps us process change, grief is cathartic, allowing us to release pent-up feelings that keep us frozen in place, unable to move forward. The problem right now is that many people are reluctant to acknowledge their feelings. They’re living on the edge, lost in a newly dangerous world, fearing a tsunami of emotion that could incapacitate them. They believe that being strong—for themselves and their families—means bottling it up: if the feelings can’t get out, things can’t worsen.

We can deal with these feelings first by calmly recognizing them. Many people right now just want things to get back to normal, whatever that is for them. Yes, we all do—and that feeling is grief.

We want to freely move in public without fear. An invisible enemy will kill us, to gather with friends and loved ones, to go back to work, to just be safe. We’re grieving for a way of life, freedom of movement, a lack of fear that we don’t have anymore, and may not have again for weeks or months.

That’s okay. We should be grieving the disruptions we’ve experienced.

We’re also grieving, feeling fear. We fear that loved ones, or we will get sick and even die. We fear lost income and even lost purpose. We are afraid because things are so different: in the U.S., wearing face masks and protective gloves, being confined, standing in grocery store lines, and finding empty shelves are abnormal. It’s okay to grieve these changes. Grieving helps to acknowledge the loss, grieving it, and allowing it to move through us helps us move on.

Grief and Death in the Pandemic

There is another aspect to grieving in the pandemic: how we are forced to acknowledge the deaths of our beloveds. Funerals are necessary rites of passage in our society, allowing the community to honor the deceased—and life moving on. But in the pandemic, families either can’t hold physical funerals or just leave people out. Yes, alternatives are cropping up, from delaying funerals entirely to making them virtual.

For many, though, that means grief is on hold. But it doesn’t have to be. Why? Because the dead don’t care when you have a funeral—or what it looks like. They simply need the occasion to come together with the living to honor the change that death brings. As a medium, I know that the dead attend their funerals and that anything goes. That means, no matter how long ago a beloved died, you can honor their memory with a ritual that works for you. It can be as simple as, “Hey, you, I miss you,” to an elaborate ceremony—even if it’s just you, or the people you’re quarantined with.

Creating Rituals to Resolve Grief

Grief sticks around longer than it needs to if it is not acknowledged. While there isn’t a time table for when grieving should end (because it doesn’t, it merely blends into our lives), try creating a ritual to help process grief, whether it’s for a beloved dead or the times we’re living in.

If it’s for the dead, first set time, tell your beloveds when it will be, and invite their spiritual teams and yours to join you. Then decide what honoring the dead (and the living) looks like. It can be reading a poem, or recounting memories, playing music, dancing, a meal with toasts—something you know the dead would have appreciated when they’re alive. (I guarantee they’ll love it, even the cranky ones which might have said they didn’t want a funeral.) Create something that brings the body, mind, and spirit together. And repeat it as many times, and with as many variations, as you want.

Whether you’re grieving a beloved or the circumstances of the pandemic, set a time and invite your spiritual team to join you. When you’re ready, simply say out loud what you’re grieving, think about it, and feel it in body, mind, and spirit. Sit with those feelings. When it’s time to end the ritual, invite the grief to move through you and out. As it leaves, thank your spiritual team for joining you—and you’re done.

Here is what happens in body, mind, and spirit when we allow ourselves to grieve: we help energy keep moving. When energy is stuck, grief becomes what people dread: something that weighs us down and keeps us moving forward. Acknowledging that it’s okay to feel grief helps us to process change and will help us keep energy moving. And us moving forward.

Originally published in OMTimes.com magazine: https://omtimes.com/2020/10/grief-during-pandemic/

About the Author

Robyn M Fritz, MA MBA CHt, is an intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist. An award-winning author, her next book is “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side.” Find her at RobynFritz.com and on Facebook at The Practical Intuitive.

We all know that death will ultimately claim our loved ones and us. In modern times we’ve removed ourselves from the process, so neither we nor our dying beloveds understand how our bodies and souls separate in death. In this article, we will explore the five stages of dying by relating them to ancient mystical traditions that connected our lives with the planet’s through the five elements of earth, water, fire, air, and spirit.

While we all know that death is inevitable, and many of us have lost beloveds, most of us are not familiar with the actual process of dying. A common theme in my mediumship practice is how confusion about the dying process compounds grief—for the living and the dead.

Mystical Tradition and the Dying Process

It is understandable since death has been hidden away from us for decades. Fortunately, we are now encouraged to be present with our beloveds as they die, as our ancestors were with theirs: they knew that it helps the dying on their journey to the afterlife and helps us live on without them.

Our ancestors also understood how we die, recognizing death as a sacred process tied to mystical traditions that connect our lives with the planets through the five elements of earth, water, fire, air, and spirit. These elements are incorporated into our bodies when we are born and separate of us in stages when we die. Death, then, is the separation of the soul from the body, or the dissolution of the body as the soul leaves. Yes, it can be scary to see this happening to a beloved, but it is the process, both stunningly beautiful and heartbreaking to witness.

I learned about the five stages of dying from research, from Betsy Bergstrom, a Buddhist shamanic practitioner in Seattle, and from being present with my dying father. As we review the five stages here, remember that death isn’t a lockstep process: we don’t always experience real boundaries between stages, especially in sudden death. However, if you’re with a dying beloved, understanding the stages will help them, you, and other survivors.

Stage 1: Earth

The earth stage is connected to our skeleton, our physical body. In the early stages of dying, the body weakens. Your beloved may be shaky, unable to fully stand up, or may slide down in bed, even when supported. Pay attention.

Stage 2: Water

When your beloved starts having trouble communicating, the water stage has arrived. As water dissolves the body dries out, and even acts thirsty, resulting in chapped lips, papery skin, dull hair, and flat eyes with an opaque or filmy appearance.

Stage 3: Fire

The fire stage is connected to blood—the circulatory system, including the heart. Here the hands and feet become cold as the body tries to keep its organs warm by pulling heat back to the torso. The dying begins to lose consciousness, either becoming unconscious or losing receptivity.

It’s critical to be prepared for death at this stage because this is when “existential angst” can set in: as the emotional body begins to die, worries and fears arise, and cultural conditioning, or cosmology, can be tested and broken. Doubt tests faith, so whatever our beliefs in spirit guides, guardian angels, deities, or religious traditions maybe when we’re fully functioning, this stage challenges belief and certainty. If this happens, the likelihood of becoming stuck after death, and not making it to the afterlife, dramatically increases.

While we can and should offer body, mind, and spiritual support throughout the dying process, in the fire stage we should get proactive and ask our spiritual team and our dying beloveds to step in and help (yes, we can all do this). Dying is confusing: the dying may refuse their team’s support because they no longer recognize them (if they ever did), so it’s critical to get all-hands-on-deck because this is when active dying begins.

Stage 4: Air

As the element air recedes, the dying person cannot breathe normally. The time between breaths increases, breathing is intermittent, or it is shallow and fast paced for a few beats before it slows. Very little air is going in at this point, and it leaves in gasps or gentle waves. It ends in a final exhalation: death.

Stage 5: Spirit

The body is dead, but the soul may temporarily remain, perhaps for hours or even days, even though in the spirit stage there is a complete dissolution of the body and soul. However, our work as survivors isn’t over, because the soul may need guidance. In my mediumship practice many of the dead tell me they were still able to see and hear the living, so they didn’t realize they had died, or they were conflicted, both relieved to be free of the dying process, but grieving that they died.

Whether your beloveds have just died, or you’re reading this year later, you can still help guide them to their afterlives by telling them point blank that they are dead: explain what happened, tell them you love them, urge them to accept their spiritual team, which is surrounding them to help, and encourage them to move on.

You can do this while performing whatever death ritual works for you, especially if it’s one you worked out with your beloveds ahead of time. The ritual will help both sides by offering closure to the dying process and hope for an eventual reunion. It matters to them and you.

 Originally published at OMTimes.com magazine: Understanding the Five Stages of Dying – OMTimes Magazine

About the Author

Robyn M Fritz MA MBA CHt hosts the OM Times radio show, “The Practical Intuitive: Mind Body Spirit for the Real World.” An intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist, she is an award-winning author whose next book is “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side.” Find her at RobynFritz.com.

When we or our families, human or animal, face tough circumstances, how does that affect our souls? Here we look at physical and emotional impairment and opt-out points and how a soul could view them as challenges or opportunities on its eternal journey to grow in love.

 Here’s the good news: our souls are eternal and always on a journey to grow in love. The bad news is our bodies are not eternal and can frequently “malfunction,” so to speak, becoming so damaged or chronically impaired that the soul must choose how to stay on course to deepen love. Here’s how that can play out.

 When Body, Mind, and Spirit Are Challenged

Despite all the metaphysical flapdoodle out there, this is how life really goes: we’re born, crap happens, fun happens, we die. In short, life can suck. Relying on feel good catchalls like “It’s what’s meant to be” is disempowering. It also keeps us from understanding what our soul may be up to at any given time and, perhaps, from making the best of life, with all its ups and downs. The “ups” are easy, but what happens when things go wrong?

 How Comas and Mental and Physical Impairment Can Affect the Soul

Life can be very hard. Suffering, pain, and disability can happen. However, we can choose how to respond, from making the best of a tough situation to letting it destroy us.

Some situations appear to allow people to work on soul issues or to accomplish that lifetime’s chosen work without having to deal with bodily issues. They include severe mental or physical disability, crippling autism, and comas, all situations where the body simply does not function in what we consider a normal way.

Sometimes people adapt well to difficult situations: we all know of people who faced what most would consider unacceptable and cruel disabilities and blossomed into beautiful, fulfilling, and inspiring lives. More controversially, it appears that some people plan these catastrophic events before they’re born. Intuitives who converse with the deceased have learned that sometimes these choices were meant to allow huge leaps in world work that would have been impossible if the body was occupied with all that a healthy human faces. Fascinating, thought-provoking—and troubling.

Of course, these conditions are devastating. We struggle to accept them, in ourselves or others, but what we don’t always know is how the soul uses them to engage in deep soul work—something we hardly know in good times. If you’re observing loved ones (or yourself) undergoing severe mind, body, or spirit impairment, be aware there could be more going on than you suspect, and decide for yourself if that’s comforting—or not.

As an example, I conversed with a deceased woman who had been vibrantly healthy her entire life until she suffered a massive stroke in her 70s and spent years bedridden and largely unconscious before she died. While the circumstances were appalling, she told me she’d used that time in a coma to resolve issues with her spiritual team so she could have a jump start on soul growth in the afterlife. For her next soul experience, she’s chosen to stay in the afterlife to guide newly arrived souls. You see? We just don’t know.

Opt-Out Points: When Life Is Just Too Difficult

Before souls take new bodies (yes, before they reincarnate), they create opt-out points for their life, from none to however many they want. Opt-out points allow us to choose to die when we hit a physical, emotional, or spiritual crisis; we don’t think we can handle without suffering serious soul damage. The choice involves how difficult the soul expects its body’s choices will be and how equipped it is to handle them, and can include revisiting situations from previous lives or serious mind, body, spirit challenges.

I learned about opt-out points from my dog, Murphy. As I discovered early on with her, we had reincarnated together many times, and currently shared debilitating health issues. Besides, our energy bodies (our individual energy fields) were so intertwined that we would physically feel or know what was going on with each other (this is never a good idea). For example, I would experience symptoms of a bladder infection and finally realize it was her problem, not mine.

That’s how Murphy’s spiritual team taught me about opt-out points: if we’ve built them into our lives, we can literally choose, on a soul level, how to confront a life crisis. Would the soul’s journey to love be derailed or seriously impaired if the crisis continued, or would it be an opportunity for growth? Choosing a response to a crisis is a job like any other, with massive soul consequences. In this case, the body lives—or dies.

Eventually, I knew when Murphy was considering an opt-out point during major illnesses. Each time I’d explain what was happening and what to expect and remind her we’d chosen to come together, in a safe time and place, to heal crap from our previous lives. Each time she chose to stay and tough it out—until the last crisis hit, and her next job required her to leave.

As you reflect on how a soul meets severe body, mind, or spirit impairment, how does that inform your thinking about your own or a loved one’s situation? If you’ve faced an opt-out point, what did you learn from choosing to stay and confront whatever difficulty it presented?

Remember, only the soulfully knows what it’s up to, and it’s often difficult for us to comprehend it. Our job is to do the best we can with what we’ve got, to help when we can, and to keep on learning and growing our souls. Right into the afterlife, and back again.

Originally published in OMTimes.com magazine: https://omtimes.com/2020/06/souls-tough-choices/

About the Author

Robyn M Fritz MA MBA CHt is an intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist. An award-winning author, her next book is “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side.” Find her at RobynFritz.com and on Facebook at The Practical Intuitive.

So, how do we create a culture that acknowledges death?

While death frequently takes us by surprise, creating a culture that acknowledges its inevitability offers mind, body, and spiritual support to both the dying and their grieving survivors. What could it look like to live healthy, balanced, intuitive lives that recognize they will end?

Gratitude and Previewing Goodbye

It may seem trite, and even a predictable run-around, but it really does help to practice gratitude every day for every little thing that goes well. Or is at least all right, or just plain over. Gratitude doesn’t mean everything is rosy. It means that we notice and move on. Acknowledging the simple, benign details gets us through the days—and to the far side of grief after death occurs.

Gratitude includes appreciating those who are in our lives, even if they occasionally, or usually, aggravate us, because, hello, human! Make sure you always let your beloveds know you appreciate and will miss them when you die, even if you’re just fine because you never know.

I learned this as a kid from my dad’s parents. After every annual visit, they made a point of saying, “We’re getting older and may die before we see you again, so know that we love you.” I used to giggle at this quirky ritual: I didn’t know what to make of it, and it made me uncomfortable. Then my brother died unexpectedly, followed by several beloved adults, and I realized that my grandparents were crazy smart to say their goodbyes in person. As it turned out, they both died when I wasn’t around, and all I got was a funeral—and the memories of those savvy childhood farewells. So please, say goodbye before you can’t, and encourage your beloveds to do the same thing.

How We Can Acknowledge Death

So, how do we create a culture that acknowledges death? A Mexican tradition that has its roots in pre-Hispanic history is Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, which is celebrated between October 31 and November 2, the days that also lump together Halloween and the Christian holidays of All Saints Day and All Souls Day. During the Day of the Dead celebration, people invite their dead back to be remembered and honored, thus keeping them part of the community.

Great idea, right? Each country could build on that concept by declaring a national holiday that celebrates life and death with our living and dead beloveds. A declared holiday can create a cultural tradition in the same way that Christmas is an international tradition and the Fourth of July an American one. This holiday could free people from the religious connotations surrounding death and help us have a better relationship with it, even normalize it, instead of ignoring it or shutting it away in hospice.

What could it look like? A day off from work, a family and friends gathering, a nice meal with a place set for everyone, including the dead, and a simple ritual to say hello and goodbye. It would take the time—an entire day in our over-packed lives—to acknowledge death as part of life, honor our dead, and celebrate our mortality while contemplating what we, the living, still want to accomplish. Yes, imagine the Day of the Dead, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, and life coaching all rolled into one holiday where we preview goodbye while relishing the time we still have together.

Losing beloveds is never easy. If we made recognizing the fragility of life part of our operating philosophy, then when death occurs, especially if it takes us by surprise, we would at least remember that we previewed goodbye. I’ve done this with my own beloveds, human and animal. I swear it works.

Originally published in OMTimes.com magazine: https://omtimes.com/2019/05/creating-culture-acknowledges-death/

About the Author

Robyn M Fritz MA MBA CHt hosts the OM Times radio show, “The Practical Intuitive: Mind Body Spirit for the Real World.” An intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist, she is an award-winning author whose next book is “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side.” Find her at RobynFritz.com.