It’s National Palliative Care week and this week I am offering you a series of short videos (all are approx 5 mins or less) around Loved One’s Regrets and providing some suggestions and steps you can do to hopefully avoid having these experiences.
They are in no particular order and the next one is “I wish I’d spent more time with them”.
This one requires you to live consciously in your life. We have gotten really great at living the experience of ‘busyness’ in our lives, so we need to choose consciously what is the most important.
I had a process that I used to use with my then teenage daughter when she was having a drama filled meltdown – as they do. It was simply a rule of 5’s. In 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months, 5 years, will this thing that is causing the meltdown matter?
You can use the same process to determine if what you are spending time on will matter when weighed against spending time with your loved one on their end journey. So in 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months, 5 years, will what you are choosing to make more important than being with your loved one still seem more important? And it may well be that it is and that’s OK. It’s just making conscious choices to hopefully avoid experiencing this regret.
Remember too, that as we have talked about previously, even though there is knowingness that this loved one is on their end journey, there can still be sudden and unexpected death – I’ve had this with a couple of clients. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that there is always going to be time.
The other aspect that can come into play with this is some faith and trust to enable you be present with them or use technology to enable you to be with them. If physically being with them is not possible, use the energy connection technique from yesterday’s video to help you connect with them.
Peace & blessings, Sharon