Debra Basham

Living and Loving

Tag: scs-matters.com

  • August 12, 1962

    The dharma talk was direct. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice the precepts. The precepts are practical. I vow to harm none. I vow not to take what is not freely given. I vow not to misuse sexuality. I vow to refrain from false speech. I vow to refrain from intoxicants that can lead to heedlessness. The dharma teacher summarized it as I do not harm myself in thought, speech, or actions and I do not harm others.

    He continued to clarify how it is not just guarding against not hurting self or others, it is also about helping. It is not just about not taking what is not freely given, it is about generosity. It is not just about avoiding suffering, it is also about experiencing joy.

    I wrote in my journal: Today is a flip-the-calendar day, and today Stacey (our daughter from Tennessee) arrives.

    I drew an Osho Zen Tarot card, asking specifically about the risk related to the Delta variant. Stacey is not vaccinated. I drew 9 of Rainbows: Ripeness, and the message seeps into my soul, “Only if your meditation has brought you a light that shines in every night will even death not be a death to you but a door to the divine…. you become one with the ocean…. and unless you know the oceanic experience, you have lived in vain. Now is always the time and the fruit is always ripe…. There is no such thing as wrong time.”

    Reading from “A Midnight Clear” by Katherine Patterson in The Big Book for Peace found in the Little Free Library a few days ago, I meet a young boy who was experiencing fear after the nuclear bomb was dropped on Japan, until he meets a homeless woman who is likely sick and dying and learns from her how he, too, can “be not afraid.”

    Recently I sent those words from the corpse prayer as written by Jarem Sawatsky in Dancing with the Elephants: Mindfulness Training For Those Living With Dementia, Chronic Illness or an Aging Brain (How to Die Smiling Series, #1) to a friend.

    Be not afraid…. I embrace sacred life…. I embrace sacred death….

    A flood of tears come. All the feelings from so many years. All of the emotions from this path of pandemic. Iask the guides and helpers to help transform loneliness (absence of the other) into aloneness (presence of the self).

    Am I concerned about my un-vaccinated daughter coming for a visit? Yes. Am I afraid for her? Yes. Am I afraid for me? Yes.

    Be not afraid…. I embrace sacred life…. I embrace sacred death….

    P.S. I said to John last night that it would be so wonderful if she told us she had gotten vaccinated, but I welcome peace NOW that is not conditioned on someone or something else. There is no such thing as a wrong time.

    Will she get Covid? Will I? The future will reveal itself. If this is my time to die, can I embrace the sacred death? If this is my time to live, can I embrace the sacred life?

    I put the pen in my left hand and let spirit write:

      You know there is no dead. The leaving of the body is just a step on the path.

      You know the ocean-ness. You have always known that.

      It is eleven days until August 12.

    (August 12, 1962 — at age 12 — I had a near-death experience.)


    From the online information about The Big Book for Peace, by by Ann Duren and Marilyn Sachs: Peace — the issue of our times — affects everyone, but especially children, who deserve and wish for a peaceful future. Now over 30 of the best-loved authors and illustrators for children have combined their talents in a big, wonderful book for and about peace.

  • A Place Where All Understand Their Oneness

    “Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life.” Golda Meir said that and it is something you live moment-by-moment.

    I am navigating this by noticing all of the places where I feel responsible for something that I do not have control over. Perhaps this is a UNIVERSAL application, but the way it has revealed itself for me this week in in 3 situations.

    (1) A friend who is getting her house ready to sell.

    (2) Joel’s cat, Zeus, who has matted fur that needs attention.

    (3) The fall Dharma Path classes, for which the links do not work properly.

    I realized these three were/are all revealing the same habit energy of feeling responsible, wanting to fix, and having an emotional reaction to the feeling helpless.

    Referring to number 3, I wrote to my fellow students: Note — I am only the postal carrier delivering these messages. I do not have access to fix the technology issues, nor do I have any more information about the classes than you do at this time.

    I asked the others to have patience and to support my doing the same.

    This morning I stopped in to see Mary Anne’s set up. Mary Anne is one of three Monarch Mavens I know and love. The previous day she had to put her bridal veil into service to cover the container until she can get to the fabric store to buy more netting. What a beautiful labor of love.

    Aaron speaks so beautifully to all of this:

    Thought for Today

    You move into the experience of ‘oneness’— the essential oneness, the identity with God — which is different than unity.

    Then you start to know the true divinity of yourself and All That Is. You are that divinity and have always been.

    From that experiential understanding of identity with God your whole moral system is shaken up. You cease acting from a place of doer, from a place of ‘should’ or outward moral imperatives. Your choices of action are based on the simple fact that there is nothing here that is not God, so you may not harm any of it. To hurt another is to hurt myself and to hurt God. It then becomes unthinkable to do harm. That is why moving towards this experience of identity with God is so important, because until then the earth will need to be run by moral dictates — shoulds and shouldn’ts, commandments. And there are always going to be those who break commandments.

    Eventually, your Earth will evolve to a place where all understand their oneness, and the commandments will no longer be necessary.

    It is clear to me that I am filtering all of these experiences through the lens of what Jeffrey Olsen describes in the aftermath of an auto accident that took the life of Olsen’s wife, and younger son. An accident which resulted in Olsen’s “near-death” experience that forever altered his view of the world. This is what the attending ER physician, Dr. Jeff O’Driscoll, had to say:

      O’DRISCOLL: I sensed a divine presence in the room. And then I noticed a light. In it was the form of a woman, floating above the patient’s bed. She had flowing, curly blonde hair and was dressed in various shades of white. Her form was almost transparent, and the look on her face was serene. She looked vibrant, otherworldly—I knew innately that this was the man’s wife. The divine presence in the room was allowing me to view her eternal soul.

      She smiled at me, as if she’d known me forever. I sensed her immense gratitude toward the doctors who were working to save her husband. She looked directly at me and back at her husband, then back at me. Her eyes were intent.

    You can read their remarkable story as published in Guideposts Magazine.

    Or watch the interview with Olsen, “Knowing: A Journey Beyond The Veil”:

    As Betty Lue shares:

    July 30, 2021 Loving Reminders- Peace First!

    Peace First…… Understanding Follows.

    Do you want to understand?
    Do you need to know what happened?
    Are you trying to figure our what went wrong?
    Do you persist in asking “why?”

    When we are not peaceful, we cannot understand.
    When we are afraid or upset, our thoughts are distorted.
    When we are hurt or angry, we think through our judgments.
    Emotions confuse and come to faulty conclusions.

    The understanding comes when our minds are open.
    Understanding will unfold as we know more.
    Being open and willing is key to real understanding.
    Wisdom will not be available in closed minds.

    May the world as I experience it today (and every day?) be a place where all understand their oneness….

  • What Do You Have to Lose?

    Ultimately,
    direct experience is key
    to fully realizing how
    we are all connected
    through the binding force
    of unconditional love
    and its unlimited ability to heal.

    ~ Dr. Eben Alexander
    author of Proof of Heaven and
    Living in a Mindful Universe:
    A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness    .

    It has been an AMAZING week.

    Sunday, July 18, 2021, I joined an evening Zoom meeting of International Association of Near-Death Studies (Greater Boston IANDS). At a few minutes before 8:00 pm, the woman hosting the room said she needed to log off to join another group in Hawaii. Spontaneously, she invited any of us to join who might choose to.

    What do you have to lose? I went.

    I met Pamela Johnson, who says about her husband, “After he passed, Alan returned from Heaven to tell me that we are meant to continue to live and work together. He has helped me navigate this otherworldly journey from the day he left. I now see him clairvoyantly, hear him all the time (he’s very talkative LOL), and much to my delight, I FEEL Alan’s energy and his love viscerally. I have never known a love like this, it’s better than when he was in a body! Truly! ❤ This experience has healed my grief to the degree that it’s practically gone.” Pamela says their book, Supernatural Love and Life After Death, should be out in the spring. Meanwhile, you can find her on Facebook.

    Meeting Pamela led to my attending a three-day online summit with some other remarkable individuals who shared their near death experiences, and told how that experience forever altered their view of life, and death, and life after death, including their work in the world. The first speaker at the summit was Dr. Eben Alexander and Karen Newell! From Dr. Alexander’s website:

    About My Experience:
    “My coma taught me many things. First and foremost, near-death experiences, and related mystical states of awareness, reveal crucial truths about the nature of existence. Simply dismissing them as hallucinations is convenient for many in the conventional scientific community, but only continues to lead them away from the deeper truth these experiences are revealing to us. The conventional reductive materialist (physicalist) model embraced by many in the scientific community, including its assumption that the physical brain creates consciousness and that our human existence is birth-to-death and nothing more, is fundamentally flawed. At its core, that physicalist model intentionally ignores what I believe is the fundament of all existence — consciousness itself.”

    Many of the members of our Grief Journey group meeting here in St. Joseph for over 20 years have had similar experiences of this continuity of consciousness….

    Our group changed our normal meeting time to join Pamela Johnson on Facebook last evening. Afterwards I admitted that I am finally able to honor the NDE I experienced in an auto accident with my dad when I was 12 years old, and I now recognize the miraculous way that experience shaped my perspective of and work in the world.

    A neighbor whose husband passed last August told me early Saturday morning that she is “doing worse now” than when he first passed. I told her about anniversary energy and invited her to join our group on Sunday. She left voice mail saying honestly that she wasn’t ready. After our time with Pamela, in spite of numerous experiences herself, one member of our group expressed not being there yet, saying, “I still have too much anger.”

    This morning as my fingers move over the keyboard, I am remembering many of the summit speakers. Robin Landsong experienced two near death experiences when she was abducted at age 8, taken to Zimbabwae. raped and killed.

    Rev. Peter Panagore, author of Heaven Is Beautiful: How Dying Taught Me That Death Is Just the Beginning, came back the second time for his granddaughter and says, “I am now here until this body isn’t inhabitable.”

    Jeffrey Olsen’s NDE occurred in an accident which took the lives of his wife and younger son. His story includes the doctor who saw Jeffrey’s wife there with them in the emergency room! Linda B/G had this to say about their story:

      Wow! What an amazing story! I listened to an interview with Peter Panagore and got on his website and signed up to receive his emails. Here are the links:

      https://youtu.be/X0px-lJoH8Q

      https://www.peterpanagore.love/

      I’ve got a lot of listening to do! How exciting!

    Listening to Rinpoche teach “Ten Percent Happiness” and quote a sufi master speaking of our true tender-heartedness toward all humanity: What’s heaven? Love in your heart. What’s hell? Lacking that.

    What if ALL of these people who have had near-death experiences have shared the glorious truth of unconditional love as our true nature? Safety and peace and love and trust is available to us all NOW. What if this truth is more real than all of the distortions we have believed that kept us sad or scared or angry or depressed or hopeless or helpless?

    I do not know if you are ready for REALITY. I do not know what it will take for my neighbor or my friend to be READY.

    The most interesting question for me is simply to ask of myself and of YOU, “What do you have to lose?”

  • 126 – A Message from Rob

    Sacred Stories

    Rob was 5 hours flight away on a business trip when he passed suddenly from a brain aneurysm.

    He was only 45 years old and our sons 10 and 8. We were so connected, I was the one alerting the hotel, to check in his room.

    Soon after, I kept waking up at 1:26 am; each morning. I could not make sense of it, so I googled the meaning of “126” and posted it on Facebook.

    Shortly after, an acquaintance reached out to me and said, “Marie… One two six, can’t you see it? It’s the 12th of June!”

    (In our time format we have the day first, then the month.)

    Rob had passed on 12th June.

    Almost as if he wanted to send me confirmation, the next night I woke up at 12:06. I had to chuckle and said. “OK, I get it now!”

    That was the last time I had been woken in these early hours – and ever since we have been seeing the numbers 12, 6 or 126 everywhere we go.

    I believe he wants us to know he’s with us all the time.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Note* With her blessing, this post includes Marie’s identity:

    Marie lost her husband and father to their two boys in June 2018. Using her own tools and strong intuition, she paved her way back to HaPpiNeSs in a way that now ripples with massive impact around the world. Marie offers new perspectives that work on a soul level.

    Every journey of Grief is as unique as the person experiencing it!

    She founded a movement called “Loving Life after Loss”. With empathy and understanding, Marie gently picks up her clients from where they are at – with a whole lot of respect for their very unique journey. There is no “one size fits all” approach when it comes to Loss. Yet there is a stigma around Grief that she peels back, layer by layer, to not get entangled in other’s expectations, yet honour your own needs and space.

    Marie will offer you a different perspective on Life, Love and Grief and leave you with Choices that are yours to make.

    If you would benefit by connecting to Marie and “Loving Life after Loss”, visit MarieAlessi.com

  • Korean National Flower

    Sacred Stories

    Their daughter came to them from Korea at 4 months of age.

    This welcome bouquet and corsage (from the Korean adoption agency) was presented to her daughter on their first trip back to Korea, when her daughter was 9 years old.

    When the family moved to a new home, the Korean national flower, Rose of Sharon, was already growing right outside what became her daughter’s bedroom.

    Her daughter will soon be married. The couple met through a Korean adoption support group.

    Today, she saw this “double” bloom as a confirmation of and blessing on their love and union.

  • Tommy

    Sacred Stories

    When his patient died on the operating table and medical efforts of the team did not revive him, the surgeon called out, “Tommy, it’s not your time, come on back.”

    And Tommy’s heart started beating again….

    Bernie Siegel, M.D. first wrote about Love, Medicine, and Miracles.

    Now, in his eighties, following the passing of his beloved wife and after enjoying her continuity of consciousness, Bernie has written about No Endings, Only Beginnings.

    We must reject not only the stereotypes
    that others hold of us,
    but also the stereotypes
    that we hold of ourselves.

    ~ Shirley Chisholm

  • Do It With Love

    “In doing something, do it with love or never do it at all.”
    — Mahatma Gandhi

    My husband, John, violated a long-learned rule of relating when he said “WE” would do something that I would never have agreed to do.

    What am I to do now?

    Gandhi’s point is to not do it unless you can do it with love.

    I did it with love when I was honest with John: It was not wholesome for you to have committed me to something without asking me first.

    Then, I did it with love when I was honest with myself: I had to either do it with love or not do it at all.

    The “IT” in question is detailing a house here in our manufactured home community for a friend. She has essentially already moved to be near her children and grandchildren. She hired someone to do the painting, but that did not go well for a variety of reasons. Partially, it did not go well because she had previously painted without proper information or experience.

    For some of it, there is no easy solution.

    Here is the before-and-after view of one corner in the master bedroom. It is amazing what a truckload of Fast ‘N Final Lightweight spackling compound can do.


    It is very good karma to lovingly clean up messes you did not make!

    I am reminded of our helping one of our friends move out of a house that our other friends were moving into.

    I am reminded of the closing of Holistic Alliance in 2005 when we had 6,000 square feet of space to be emptied out and cleaned, making way for the new owner.

    As we were there working on the house, one of our neighbors stopped in to see how it was going. She said how fortunate our friend was to have someone who was willing to step up and lend a hand. I reminded her who our friend is. Our friend works for our local hospice. She paved the way for John’s mom to get hospice care when needed, and then for his brother, Jim, as he was dying with lung cancer. Our friend had also assisted the neighbor’s husband.

    Yes, it is a clearly “compounded” mess. As I mused about all of this, I could see that I have left messes (physical and emotional) for others to deal with. We all have.

    And admittedly — even with all of our hard work this week — we have not been able to make all things right. Doing that will fall to some other at some other time.

    Obviously, universal implications….

    And, while I could not do a great job of everything, it is my intention to leave things better than I found them.

    We can all do that.

    More obviously universal implications….

    Things are improving.

    Evidenced by that before-and-after photo!

  • Landing Page

    Sacred Stories

    She read again the information about private meetings with a woman she had recently been considering having a session with, and closed it without scheduling an appointment.

    Then she thought she might visit the website only, but she could not remember the URL.

    When she did a search for the woman’s name the first link in the results took her to the landing page about private sessions…. NOT to the general “ABOUT” landing page!


    “Circles, like the soul,
    are never ending
    and turn round and round
    without a stop.”
    ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

    We witness the true structure of the universe and hints that the universe really is fail-safe….

  • Happy Easter!

    Sacred Stories

    She (admittedly) is not a morning person.

    Her mother was. Every morning her mom would call her too bright, too cheery, and too early. When she would answer the phone, she would hear this cheerful voice on the line, “Good morning!”

    Her mom passed…

    Easter morning she heard the phone ring! In her head she heard her own groggy, “Hello.”

    Then she clearly heard her mom’s bright and cheery voice, “Good morning. Happy Easter!”

    If you have (or would like to) love life after loss, check out Marie Alessi.

  • Dr. Bernie Siegel

    “When you are on the right path,
    invisible hands will come to your aid.”
    ~ Joseph Campbell

    Imagine my delight to log onto a Zoom meeting of Greater Boston IANDS and see Dr. Bernie Siegel It is no exaggeration to say Bernie is/was my first conscious step onto the path of awareness as self-healing tool, and thus a long-time idol.

    Geoffrey Hayes, our pastor at the time, loaned me his copy of Bernie’s book, Love, Medicine and Miracles, which I read at our small travel trailer on Pitcher Lake Campground, in Dowagiac, Michigan. This was a period of my life during which I was experiencing daily chronic pain. It was revolutionary for Bernie to suggest I ask myself what that pain allowed me to do or be or have that would otherwise elude me.

    The answer?

    REST!

    The synopsis of Bernie’s life-changing words of wisdom: Find another way to give that gift to yourself and the symptom/s may subside.

    I became aware I had been in the habit of pushing myself through tasks.

    The chronic pain gave me “permission” to rest.

    This week, I gave our kitchen cabinets a much-needed fresh coat of paint. That meant taking off all of the doors, doing a light sanding, removing and cleaning all of the pulls and hinges, painting the doors, reinstalling the pulls and hinges, and rehanging the doors. Whew….

    Not having a basement or garage,
    I set up my work station in the great room!

    The morning after the doors to the upper cabinets had dried overnight, I was awake early. They had to all be rehung for me to have room to paint the lowers.

    I figured out a way to stand on a step stool, put one leg up on the counter top, aim the hinge on the door perfectly over the corresponding hole on the cabinet frame. I could use that leg like a third hand, and pick up the screw and screwdriver with my other two hands.

    I now call it my prehensile leg (a term referring to an animal’s limb or tail capable of grasping).

    Hanging the cabinet doors (and aligning them properly) certainly had a learning curve, but by the time John got up, the uppers were all hung and I had started painting the lowers.

    Noteworthy: I have never previously hung a cabinet door.

    That brings me back to Joseph Campbell’s opening quotation, Bernie Seigel’s message, and my current awareness: I cannot say I hung the doors alone, nor all by myself, or even without another human being helping. Each step of the way I was consciously inviting and, more importantly, receiving help.

    And the kitchen looks so fresh and clean!

    Bernie’s wife passed about 3 years ago. On the 4th of July, his family was visiting. Bernie could not find his cell phone. They tried calling the phone; they looked and looked. No luck finding the phone.

    Shortly after his son had left for home, the son came back, saying, “Mom told me where your phone is.” Way out in the back yard, Bernie’s phone was on the chair, exactly where she said it was.

    The kicker of this story is that they had not been out there!

    I have written about a sense of beyond-personal capacity many times before. Many others share this recognition. We can benefit by being intentional in encouraging others to ask for and receive these types of non-physical support.

    I will save how Bernie made me quit my job for another post and close with his words:

    “Learn from the wisdom of others and enjoy your life experience. Remember the Bible ends in Revelations, not Conclusions, and graduations are commencements not terminations.” ~ Bernie Siegel