How do you touch your inner guidance?

Start with stepping back from your mind. Doing so creates space for you to just be in this moment.

How do you know when you are fully alive?

Maybe a surge of energy moves in your body. Maybe a warmth fills your chest, or a strong emotion of gratitude or love fills your being. You feel the softness of the wind touch your cheek.

The sun was shining bright through the weeping willow tree near the driveway. The range of warm hues glistened as the sunlight hit the grass. A warm breeze touched my cheek and my hair blew in the wind. I felt energy move up and down my spine.

It was Friday afternoon, and my pager went off. My hospice team nurse was notifying me of a new admit, Jean, who was actively dying and whose family was requesting a visit. I turned my car around to head to a nursing home in Edina. 

My cell phone rang, and it was Scott. “My dad is septic,” he said. “The doctors are saying that he is probably not going to make it. If you want to see my dad, you need to catch a flight now.”

I hung up the phone and told my 20-year-old son, Owen, the news.

I jumped into my dad’s car, and we headed to school.

I was 11 years old and in the sixth grade. I had lost all my hair in the latest round of chemotherapy and decided it was time to wear a wig. I’d covered the shoulder-length wig with a blue bandana, and I thought no one would notice.

Driving up to the airport, I see my friend Laurie waving at me with a big smile at the end of the platform. I pull up, and she jumps in my car and gives me a hug.

“Hello, my dear,” she says. Her warmth and big energy fill my entire car.

A small, elderly woman was sitting on the couch as I walked in the front door of her home. She had a prayer shawl covering her frail shoulders and thin arms, and she gave me a big, warm smile. She had an uncanny glow about her, I noticed, as I sat down in the chair next to her.

It was 1998, and I had been feeling stirrings in my gut saying that I was ready to leave my corporate advertising job. My heart felt restless. I had just been offered a management position that I dreamed of and wrote the job proposal for. Yet when I got the offer, the word “yes” would not come out of my mouth.

Breathe, I told myself. My 22-year-old son, Owen, ran down the hospital corridor to find a nurse. My husband, Scott, was hooked up to heart monitors that had started beeping loudly. The monitors showed no heartbeat. He was flat-lining.

On our first visit, Joe talked about his highly successful corporate job, his travels, and his lucrative income. He worked nonstop and only occasionally enjoyed a beer with colleagues. He had been married for a few years and then divorced. His focus was on his career, money, and recognition. 

Sitting up in his bed, Bill gave me a faint smile as I entered. He had lost the ability to talk due to ALS. He communicated to people by looking into a computer screen that then spoke his words. As I came up to the side of his bed and offered greetings, he said via the automated voice, “I am alive.” Tears rolled down his face. 

Sitting on the couch, petting my cat Chaz, I felt the sun streaming in through the window. I felt Chaz’s silky fur run through my hands and the warmth of the sunlight shining on my face. In that moment, I was okay.

My mind wandered back to the last week and how sick I had been after my chemotherapy

Jack was my first boss in the corporate advertising world, and back in the early nineties he was a master salesman, gifted manager, and wonderful sales trainer. I attribute my successful sales and marketing career to him. Just as my life has gone in a much different direction since Jack and I worked together, so has his. 

Not long after leaving my corporate job and joining my husband’s start-up internet company, I was sitting in a conference room, and next thing I knew, I was watching many sets of animal eyes floating around the room. I was not alarmed. I was curious. I thought, “Wow, what the heck is this?”

As I was driving to see my father in his final days in hospice, I heard a voice in my mind say to me, “He is going to die today.” This message from my inner guidance confirmed my feeling that I had only precious moments left with my father. 

Growing up, I was often told that I was “too sensitive.”

I could walk into a room and feel all the emotions of everyone there. I remember that when my dad would come home from work, sit down, and have a martini, I felt stressed, anxious and uneasy, and I would wonder why.

As a hospice chaplain, I’ve had the privilege of companioning hundreds of patients at the end of their lives. Each patient was a teacher and offered me unique lessons. But one lesson that I continually learned from these patients witnessed was that of trust—trust in the great unknown and trust in the process of letting go and leaving one’s body.

The doctors had told my-mother-in law, Karen Duncan that there was nothing more they could do for her. The last few weeks of her life were filled with peace and acceptance. She entered hospice care and lived out her final week in her home.

I have a vivid memory of the hot, sunny, Friday afternoon in July 2004, when she invited my husband and me to join her in her bedroom. At that time, Karen was still walking around, highly functional, and eating. We all sat down together on her bed.

Whitewater rafting in level III rapids in Costa Rica, I was thrown overboard. Despite my life vest, I was pulled deep underwater, and complete darkness surrounded me.

“This is it,” I thought. “I am finally going to die.”

This fear of death was familiar to me from my childhood facing cancer. And here it was again, front and center.