I recently spent 6 weeks with my father in a hospice in Philadelphia. Early one morning, I was by his side as he passed peacefully in his sleep. The time of bonding, grieving and celebrating with my father and family, left me with a precious gift. This gift is the profound experience of touching the world we come from, also known as “the afterlife”, and knowing this 3D world to be the dream.

I have "mid-wifed" many people from this world to the next. I have helped others to release their regrets, fears, and attachments so that they may transition with ease into graceful surrender, either by staying in this world or leaving. However, being present for my own father's death took me to new heights and depths with this experience.

Sitting with him in his final days, my dad talked openly to "others" in the room. In one moment he was with us, the next his eyes shifted into an other-dimensional gaze and he talked outwardly to the other side of the room, addressing old, previously deceased friends. My father had always been a skeptic. So when he so apparently moved from one realm to the next, my siblings, with their own doubts, were deeply moved and shocked into questioning their beliefs. The whole house of cards began falling as my family circle shifted and quaked, and little by little, let go and sought renewal.

When the goodbyes felt complete, and the reunion of souls became my father’s reality, his breathing slowed and our hearts broke. Grief washed through me, for the beloved parent who held me as baby and taught me to tie my shoes and the confidant of my later years. Preverbal feelings and images came to the surface and the full meaning of our lifetime together opened up as I held him and cared for him in the end.

The day he was preparing to leave us, I felt him everywhere around me. He was finding his expansive identity as a soul once again, feeling the freedom of releasing his diseased body. There was more of him accessible to me then ever before. Through the bond of our hearts, the other side was revealed and became crystal clear. What had once been temporary glimpses and feelings about where we return, became a full picture, a complete experience.

This river of life ends as a return to wholeness. Limited perception, and a small, conditioned identity returns to a complete version of Self expanded in love and joy.   Life is an opportunity to ‘know thyself’, remember who we are before death, making this world an extension of the other, or, what some may call “heaven on earth’.

In moments I really miss my Dad. I long to pick up the phone and talk to him. And then I open my heart and feel him, all of him, and my heart sings.

Fulfillment, creativity and passion come from one source, your heart. Living from your heart every day is the answer. This is easy to say but sounds like another spiritual platitude unless grounded in experience. To be real, it must be felt and embodied.

When I began meditating years ago, I started with a simple "watch your thoughts" approach, always coming back to the breath. I stuck with it for some time, even though for long periods on the cushion Id forget I was meditating and daydream about people, places, conversations and anything else the old thought generator could conjure up. Eventually I realized it was time to try something else. I wanted something more tangible than the breath to come back to. I wanted to sink my teeth into something real, an internal presence that I could feel morphing my thoughts and emotions into clarity.

After years of searching for this inner experience, I found the teachers and training that lead the excavation into the intelligence of my heart. What I learned during my “unearthing” is that sustained well being can not be found in a tincture bottle or a text book. The heart center holds the secret.

Once uncovered, the heart center produces a strong electro-magnetic field that has the capacity to draw synchronicities, manifest a higher reality, and bring spiritual alignment. It heals emotional wounds, clarifies thoughts, strengthens health and mends relationships. The heart holds a timeless, non-linear form of intelligence that lives underneath thought forms and emotional needs. And it provides an elixir that we all long to drink from: Love.

Love is the doorway into the heart’s intelligence. Within the feeling texture of love is the highest form of insight and comprehensive truth. It is the development of receptive stillness in this feeling that opens one to hear, see, feel and know this stream of communication beneath the clatter of thoughts. The challenge for the majority of us is to learn to access this state when our mind and emotions are busy putting on a production that steals the show.

Once again, the heart has the answer. It not only provides the insight and communicates its high intelligence whenever we are able to receive it, it offers a place for us to release our burdens when we are out of touch. Surrendering all states of mind and emotion into the embrace of the heart relaxes one into an ongoing flow of release and deeper immersion in Love. As a result, creativity, passion and fulfillment become a way of life.

A simple practice:
When emotions surface, open your heart and embrace them. When needs go unmet, fill up from the wellspring of your heart. When thoughts are cloudy, bow your head to your lucid heart. When you need anything, ask your heart and wait. The answer will always come if you are listening.

If you are searching for a way to step onto the path, find healing, become present, live from love, what better place to start than with what you are experiencing right now? This busy mind, this back pain, this happiness, this emotion, this clarity, this confusion, this situation—it all has value and meaning. As Pema Chodrin says, “Start Where You Are.”

Do you feel love and connection right now? If so, expand on that, feel it, drink from it, let it consume you. Become the sensation. Drop deep into the intimate knowing of this personal experience of love as the doorway into the universal depth of divine love. Open the floodgates and let it fill you, form you and redefine you in its image. Become limitless in your flight of freedom.

These are times of great change, times of chaos and of healing. Most importantly, these are times of the greatest transformation of consciousness on our planet in millennia. Ancients, looking ahead, called this era leading up to 2011-2012 the end times.* My heart sees these not as the end of our lifetimes, but a transition into no time, or The Now. What is changing is our experience of literal time. Through our personal struggles, each one of us has the choice to wake up to a greater awareness and accept life in the present moment. We live at this point in history with an incredible opportunity to awaken our minds and live not in the mental concept of past or future, which brings pain, but in the peace, joy and love of the present. The harmony that will remain when disharmony takes its last breath will all at once be realized as the only true reality.