 I was walking down the hallway of our hospice facility and the daughter of one of my patients came out into the hallway and greeted me and she said, you know, Chaplain, mom just is so strong and she just will not let go. And I paused for a minute and thought about that phrase and my response was actually from what Kubler-Ross observed, which was that when we lose a loved one, we're losing that person. The loved one is losing everybody and everything and I said, I don't blame her for not wanting to let go. My name is Larry Grimm and I am happy to welcome you to this show, Elderhood, Aging Gracefully and today's topic is letting go, the final meditation. I serve as Hospice Chaplain for Bristol Hospice and we are serving terminally ill patients and their families all over the island of Oahu in their homes and in their facilities. I'm happy to be a part of that company that truly lives out its tagline which is embracing a reverence for life. I'm very pleased to be here and to share this with you and thankful to Think Tech Hawaii for giving me the partnership that opens me up to being able to share with you the groundwork, the foundational thinking that goes into my other part of my life which is coaching, master life coach, personal coach for life and faith. I have generated this TV program around the five concepts, five what I call spiritual tasks of elderhood. Now we have childhood, we have adolescence, we have adulthood and I'm saying we have elderhood. When we treat our elderly years as a stage of life, elderhood, we can identify some of the tasks that really are particular to that stage of our life. Just as there were tasks in childhood that were pertinent to that and necessary to complete, same way in our adulthood, necessary to complete. So it is that these tasks become necessary for us to complete in order for our elderhood to be real and I think just very, very wonderful. Thank you for being a part of this and I am glad to share this with you as part of my ongoing work in Chaplaincy and in service to the larger community of elders. We have 250,000 elders in Hawaii, people over 65 if you can use that age as a defining time, a defining age. That's almost a quarter of the population of the state. So there are a lot of us around there out there and there are a lot of us that can support one another and engage with one another in this task, in these tasks of elderhood. I've said I identified five tasks and there may be more and there may be nuances in each one no doubt there are and each one when accomplished means that we move through a transformation inside ourselves, one of which is not always accessible and measurable but certainly has an impact on the rest of our lives. Those five tasks are grieving, sorting out our stories, we sort out our stuff but we also sort out our stories. We grieve because we lose so much more now than we have ever lost in the past. We sort out our stories as a way of identifying who we are and where we've come from and what's made an impact on us all through from those times and from those events and that still have an impact in shaping who we are today. We're giving, not in religious imperative but rather a human desire to lean this light to kind of let all the regrets, clear out all the regrets that could be there. Preparing in order to prepare a life for the future, both one that gives us support in our elder years and one that also plans for those times that will be much more demanding on us as we approach dying and then finally letting go which is what I'd like to focus on today but all five tasks become very important for us as we move through this stage of life. Now what I offer, I could leave this with you. I could leave this with you as really reasonable and worthy concepts for you to read about. But what I offer in both my chaplaincy and also in my personal life coaching, which I do online with people, you can contact me at LarryG at live-connections.com. What I do in my coaching is come alongside you and accompany you and give some guidance and some facilitation for you to make some of these difficult decisions, to go through this task that is pressing in on you. And I become that third eye for you, that third eye that can observe what's going on, give feedback, here's what I hear, here's what I see. Is this what you're experiencing? Is this what you're going through? These five concepts or five tasks give me a framework to look at people and watch people listen to each individual person where they're at and their journey of elderhood so that together we make it real and make it very, very wonderful, very wonderful. I maintain that if it's done on the inside, you figure out the externals as you go along. We do a lot with externals. My preparation videos and my preparation programs have to do a lot with wonderful external resources that are available here in Hawaii and on Oahu in particular. So I don't disregard those. I do want to focus so attention on what goes on inside and the internal dynamics, emotional dynamics of this stage of life. So letting go is very particular, very much a last event. I brought up this cartoon because I like the humor in it. Oh, master, is it proper for a monk to use email? And he says, son, as long as there are no attachments, I think Buddhism has been really maligned by turning this kind of awareness, this kind of humorous thing into a mandate that somehow Buddhism says you should never have attachments because attachments create suffering. And if you don't want to suffer, you just don't have any attachments. Well, I don't think that's the point. I think Buddhism says the mindfulness of attachment is important. To be mindful of what our attachments are, our emotional attachments, I do not know how it is possible to love without having an attachment. We love and we attach, we connect, we integrate ourselves with one another, we interpenetrate our personalities with each other. You've often heard about how and seen perhaps, even in perhaps in yourself, how you and those whom you love become capable of anticipating each other's thoughts and each other's sentences even and finishing each other's words at times. There's this kind of attachment and interpenetration. I don't think that can be avoided, but I think Buddhism points out that we are away to the power of that attachment. And being awake helps us to deal with the suffering that loss can bring. There are times, there is that time when we have to, in fact, let go of those attachments. And I'd like to explore letting go with you, not only in terms of the process of dying, but also, but more so in the process of living. And I want to look back through some quotes, some wisdom quotes with you on this program that will give us a chance to, I hope to learn something meaningful about the benefits and the importance of letting go. I have found in myself that when I live in the future, I have a great deal of anxiety. When I live in the past, I can't have a great deal of guilt and regret. But living in the moment helps me to assess what my values are right now, where I am committed, where my convictions are, what my joy is right in the moment and to identify that, again, a mindfulness approach to the moment in which we live. So let's look at these and see what we can learn about letting go, because letting go at death is certainly what we do last. And there are times, come back to the first one, Rob, there are times when I am with a patient that I have the capability of speaking to that patient about dying, about dying. And with our different cultures, there are many cultural prohibitions about talking about death and dying or inhibitions about talking about death and dying. And yet when you're doing this process, I find that people generally want to be real. They want to be on target with what's going on. They don't want to hide the fact. Now, there are those who will hold out with hope right into the last few days and few breaths. That's fine. And I'll go with them in that, and I'll pray for them with hope. And I'll ask for the best thing to have happen to them that they could possibly want in their life. But when it comes to the final point or the final few days, sometimes the final few minutes, one of the things I have a capacity to do is to talk about letting go. That the dying process is a letting go process. It's not painful. It's not traumatic. It is a letting go, often the closest thing of which I believe is falling into a deep sleep. But I like to coach people on letting go at death and say, take a breath, let it go. Breathe in and let go. Relax with every breath and let go. Whatever that means for the person, whatever they're having to let go, their body, their mind, their heart, their attachments, their concerns about their family, all of that, sometimes we're going to go through them step by step, letting those go. And so I attempt to coach people in that process by which they surrender and let go. And sometimes it's just a matter of, for me at least, of breathing out that final breath as a release and a let go. So that's dying, and obviously, you know as you watch this, as you listen to me, you know that that's the process of dying. You know that letting go is involved in that. It may be conscious, it may be subconscious. I honestly do not know how to choose which, but I do know that it is a matter of intention and being able to help, in my opinion, help that person to intentionally release and let go. But let's back it up a ways from death and come back into life and to the elderhood experience, which is oftentimes, as we've said, fraught with loss, it's fraught with all kinds of challenges, it's fraught with dealing with forgiveness, it's fraught with our stories. We're going to look at some more of these here and think in terms not just the dying experience, but coming back and bringing that back with us into the elderhood, the life, the elderhood experience, the stage of life that we're addressing. We're going to have a break here for about a minute. And when we return, we'll pick up with these quotes and with each what quote, have a chance to learn something new about letting go and something new about living. The closer we are to get death, the more we are excited about living. Hi guys, I'm your host Lillian Cumick from Lillian's Vegan World. I come to you live every second Friday from 3 p.m. And this is the show where I talk about the plant-based lifestyle and veganism. So we go through recipes, some upcoming events, information about health, regarding your health, and just some ideas on how you can have a better lifestyle, eat healthier, and have fun at the same time. So do join me. I look forward to seeing you and Aloha. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to join us on Wednesdays at 1 o'clock for Cannabis Chronicles, the 10,000-year Odyssey where we take a look at cannabis as food, cannabis as medicine, cannabis and religion, cannabis and dear old Uncle Sam. So please join us to learn all about cannabis. Again, Wednesdays at 1 o'clock. Thank you. Hello, I'm Larry Grimm. Welcome back to Elderhood, Aging Gracefully. And this particular program I've entitled Letting Go, the fifth of the spiritual tasks that I've presented to you in this series, Letting Go, What We Do at Death, is Let Go of Everything. And what we do prior to death in order to live more fully, and I think to live age gracefully and make our elderhood real and wonderful, is to let go of many things that we are faced with and challenges that we're faced with in the elderhood process. So let's look at some ways in which people have reflected upon this act of letting go in life. We must be willing to let go of the plan, the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. That was Joseph Campbell. You all have heard of Joseph Campbell, no doubt, because you are intelligent and you've followed the power of myth that Bill Moyers did as he interviewed Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell dealt with images and symbols and archetypes, and he has contributed so much to our understanding of religion as myth, which I am very much part of, too. We must be willing to let go of the life we planned. We come into this adulthood with a great plan of what we're going to do. You can reach back into your childhood and ask that question, what did you really want to be when you were growing up, and you were eight or nine years old, and you set your sights on something you really wanted to be? I wanted to be the lone ranger, but then as I got to be an adolescent, I shifted a bit, and I changed my perspective. I wanted to be a Presbyterian minister, and I lived into that one for sure, but what has been that planned life that you wanted? I lived that life that I had planned, and then I lost that life that I had planned. I had to let it go. Crisis, church crises, if you've been in a congregation of any kind you know church crises can go, and I was in part of one, and after that the career path was interrupted and never could I re-establish it in the same way I had thought, so I let go of that life. It was tough. I just had to let go of it. That's not me. I'm letting go of that, and what I did when I let go was clear the way for this new life and this new ministry, which was actually chaplaincy and the work with people more closely than I had ever had an opportunity to work with them in the role of Presbyterian minister and congregational service. I love them both. They're both great and wonderful, but that's just my example to offer you from my experience of letting go in order for something else to come in. Mostly we usually think, I know when we think about letting go is surrender and I'm going to be in a terrible situation and it's going to be horrible. Think about letting go as releasing in order for that new thing to come about, something that maybe even you have not planned, maybe that is deep within your soul, within your calling, a sense of calling, and it will reshape your life. First there is the need to let go of what is finished, completed, done. Kind of interesting the term finished in Greek is also translated as complete. So not only do we say something is finished, but we also can say it's completed in a way that we maybe didn't plan for it to be, but it has come to completion in some way. Let go of what is so that you can receive the life that is waiting for you. Thank you, Joseph Campbell. Next, in the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself. How do you define yourself right now? Or how did you define yourself? I'm sure many of you watching this have know exactly what I'm talking about, letting go of the past, letting go of something that you cherished in yourself and in your life. How did you define yourself before that as a husband, wife, as a partner, life partner, as a business person, as someone who was a mover and shaker, as a mutity, a leader of some sort. When we are born we don't know who we are, and for the longest period of time we have people teaching us who we are. They're telling us who we are right from the beginning of life. Let's say your name is such and such. You belong to this family. You are part of this life. You are part of this community, this school. We have this mascot. You are part of and identified as this group, this gang maybe. We have people tell us who we are as we grow up, and even up until the time of elderhood in our adult life as well, we take on these layers of identity. I have a favorite play. It's called A Thousand Clowns, and I know it's not a popular well-known play, so you may not know it, but if you get a chance to look it up on YouTube and you'd enjoy it, it's a 1960s kind of movie. In the movie, the main character is a man living in a kind of a simple studio apartment in New York City, and he needs a case manager, a social worker case manager, to help him with his survival needs. So this case manager, this woman falls in love with him, and she finally has a breakdown. She doesn't know what she's doing, she says, and says, I just don't know what's going on. I'm paraphrasing, but they sit at the kitchen table, and he's behind her, and Jason Robards is the actor, and she says, you know, I just don't know who I am anymore. I do this, and then I do this, and now you're here, and this, and this, and I'm in love with you, and I'm not sure who I am anymore, and Jason Robards' character says, you know, this is the way it is. It's like the circus, and you're sitting there watching the circus, and drives this small car into the middle of the circus, and the music goes up, and doors fly open, and out jump a thousand clowns, and you're all of them. You're all of those masks. So what we wear, the masks we wear, you're all of them, but they are sometimes imposed on us, sometimes we gratefully take them on, and we find that they don't always last. We have to let them go. But what you discover, and what we discover at the center, is you. That mystery, that wonderful, amazing experience of self that is connected with the universe, and with all self, with the one divine self, throughout time, and time in history, time in geography. It is that point of transcendence. It is that point of endurance, enduring, but that which lasts, that which is unchanging, and that which is yourself. You let go of the many things from the past, but what you find, what you find is yourself. Thank you. Deepak Chopra. Next, from Dawson's Creek. I don't know about Dawson's Creek, with the authority in Dawson's Creek, but this is a lovely little thing to think of. Letting go isn't a one-time thing. It's something you have to do every day, over and over again. What have you let go today? What did you let go today, every day? Next, let go of the battle. Jack Cornfield, a wonderful writer, again from the from the 60s, 50s, 60s. Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting. I talked about letting go at death and coaching people to let go of death, and this is essentially what I'm saying to them at the time of death, and that is to let go, relax your body and your heart, let your heart soften. I like that term. Open to whatever you experience, but without fighting it, without fighting it. Thanks, Jack Cornfield. Next, Lao Tzu, the author of Nadde Ching, the one who wrote about the Tao. When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. Do you think when you reach elderhood it's downhill? Do you think when you reach elderhood it's coming to the end? Not at all. What might you be in elderhood that you have wanted to long to be all through your life? When you let go of what you are, you discover that there are new potentials and new things that are there for you, and that's what I do in coaching people also, discover that new, real, wonderful life that is for you in your elderhood. Larry G at live-connections.com and I'll respond to you and we'll have a conversation about coaching, about elderhood, about your discoveries in elderhood, about what you're learning, about what you're encountering, what your struggles may be, what your victories are, and celebrations. I'll do what I can to help lift you up under your wings so that you can have a real and wonderful experience. Let's do this, the final meditation. Close your eyes and clench your fists. What is it that you're holding on to so tightly? Identify it. What are you holding on to so tightly? My final and meditation for you is to open your hands and let it go and to have a big sigh of nirvana. That's what nirvana means, the sigh. I leave that with you for every day of your life. Aloha.