Astrologer Dana Gerhardt in the ‘Getting Started’ pages to her wonderful Twelve Moons Workshop that I just received tells the following story as part of her advice on how to succeed with the workshop:

A friend of mine once got lost on her way to a workshop in New Mexico. She stopped to ask a desert-weathered native for directions. He knew the roads well and described in careful detail how far they needed to go, which turns they needed to take.

He ended by saying, “If you go real slow, you’ll get there fast.”

My friend hurried away. She missed the cactus markingt heir turn and to double-back. Twice she got stck in the mud. Then, speeding over ruts in the dirt road, she got a flat tire. By the end of he journey, she understood the real wisdom of going slow. Working with the Sun and the Moon is a lot like that.

I finished my training last week to work as a hospice volunteer.

For those of of you who don’t know about hospice, hospice provides the opportunity for people who are terminally ill to die at home in the care of their loved ones and friends.

The staff and trained volunteers of the organization that I volunteer with here in Toronto provides and facilitates access to compassionate care for people with life threatening illnesses, offering them support options, honouring their choices and supporting their families and friends.

The Hospice works on a care team model, with the belief that teams of caregivers from different walks of life can best meet the needs of someone who chooses to die at home. A care team often includes spouses or partners, families, friends, neighbours, colleagues, doctors, nurses, personal support workers and volunteers.

The Hospice can help set up the team, provide team members with training and support, and supplement the team with skilled volunteers if required.

Hospice volunteers may do the following:

-care-giving such as helping a person move around, mouth care, bed and personal care
- respite care (giving caregivers a break)
- assist with meal preparation
- provide emotional and spiritual support

The training was 30 hours over a 2 week period and it was very intense in terms of absorbing a lot of information and emotionally.

I’m now waiting to be assigned to my first client and of course I am very nervous. From what I have been told by the other volunteers my life will probably never be the same. This is quite a blessing in my life.

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There has been increasing scientific recognition of the role of consciousness, intention and spirit in the healing process.

What follows are three quotes from an article published in The Prophets Conference Newsletter, Feb. 19, 2004, in advance of Dr. Larry Dossey’s subsequent conference presentation. I expect that whatever truths these quotes contain are even more acceptable now than they were three years ago.

Dr. Larry Dossey’s book Reinventing Medicine: Beyond Mind-Body to a New Era of Healing (1999), shattered accepted boundaries of the healing arts.

Well worth a read.

“One of the most profound social movements in the late 20th- and early 21st centuries is the shift toward integrative medicine, often called alternative or complementary medicine. A key element underlying this movement is a new respect for consciousness and spirituality - how emotions, attitudes, volition, and a sense of ‘the spiritual’ shape our lives and influence our health and longevity.”

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“In the past two decades, more than 1,200 studies have been done suggesting that people who follow a spiritual path - it does not seem to matter which - live significantly longer and have a lower incidence of all major diseases than people who do not follow such a path. Approximately 200 studies suggest that distant healing, in the form of prayer or healing intentions, can make life-and-death differences in health outcomes”.

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“A new view of consciousness emerges from these developments - a nonlocal picture, in which consciousness is viewed as immortal and eternal. This picture brings hope to the morbid views of consciousness in current neuroscience, in which the annihilation of consciousness is assumed at the time of death. The emerging view affirms ancient wisdom: the mind as omnipresent, immortal, eternal, infinite, and, in some dimension, one with all other minds.”

Technorati Tags: consciousness intention spirit, healing process