Healing for the Earth, Day 25: Death is a Part of Life by Guest Blogger Mae Esteban

Dear fellow Earthlings,

Wow! So much to think about as our Earth and lives go through this transition. My dear friend Mae Esteban, a hospice nurse, is here to tell us a powerful story of embracing transitions, including death, with grace.

When my dear friend and fellow Earth Sister Katherine asked me if I would be interested in writing for her blog, part of me jumped at the opportunity yet a part of me felt like, “What would I have to say that hasn't already been said?” I hesitated but then had a dream. Something was forming in my heart that wanted to be said.....

 I have many roles but one of the more prominent ones is my role as a hospice nurse. I work for a healthcare system in the greater Seattle area. Like everyone else, I am learning new ways of being in my different roles during this time of COVID-19. And despite the presence of the novel coronavirus, I still see my patients at their homes, wherever they may live, and help them during their end-of-life journeys. Some journeys are only a few hours while some can take several months. I have many stories that I could share but today I want to share the story of one particular person.

 I recently had a patient whom I've had the honor and privilege to care for pass away. I cannot tell you details as it would otherwise be a HIPAA violation and because of this, I will call my patient Robin. I met Robin weekly for several months. Robin was alert, oriented, ambulatory, and always, ALWAYS, had a smile for me. Not all my patients are like Robin. Many of them are bedridden and confused. I say this without any judgment as everyone's story is different. However, because Robin was the way Robin was, I got to know their personality quite well. I got to know not only Robin but also their spouse. Sometimes our visits felt more like social calls. We shared opinions of local restaurants. We talked politics. I made them laugh with the story of how my kids and I ate a whole Costco-sized red velvet cake on Valentine's Day, and they encouraged me to do it again! One of my favorite memories was when they shared with me the story of how they met more than 30 years ago. We all knew that if we had met under different circumstances, we would have been dear friends rather than patient-patient's spouse-and-nurse.

 If it wasn't for the increasing pain and lethargy, one might have doubted that Robin had a life-ending disease. But I knew, and Robin knew. It was for this reason that Robin, with the support of their spouse, had sought to exercise their right to use the Death with Dignity Act. (Here in the state of Washington, individuals can choose to end their life. There are many requirements and the individual needs to have met with two physicians.) Robin's pain had been escalating and every time we increased their pain medications, Robin would be comfortable for only a few days before their body rebelled and even more pain medication was required. Because of the public health's need to flatten the curve, our hospice program could no longer utilize some of the alternative or complimentary therapies we frequently used such as reiki or music thantology.

 After a horrible night which including the medics being called to lift Robin off the floor after a fall, Robin had decided it was time to take the medicine that would end their life. Robin's spouse called me that morning and so I drove over. I got all geared up in my car with my gloves, goggles, and mask, hating every second of it. Not only was it uncomfortable, but I hated the barriers it would create during our final moments together. Yet as much as I hated it, I also knew that I had a responsibility to the general public. I donned the PPE (personal protective equipment) that I was blessed to have and got out of my car. While the outside world dealt with the COVID-19 crisis, I entered Robin's home and the sanctuary that was their bedroom, staying aware of the present moment, realizing this gift of a final good-bye.

 Robin had not yet taken the life-ending medicine but was planning to do so soon. They laid in bed wearing their nasal cannula that provided supplemental oxygen and greeted me with a smile. My god, I loved that smile! I walked over and sat on a chair next to the bed. I knew that I was no longer following the 6-feet social distancing rule; but like my medical director likes to say, right now many things are a compromise. So while I was willing to wear the PPE, I was not willing to say good-bye from afar. At that moment, 6 feet may as well have been 6 miles.

 It was just the two of us in the room, though Robin's spouse preemptively brought in a box of tissues. The tissue was more for Robin since I couldn't remove my googles to use one. (By the way, crying in goggles sucks.) I had asked Robin if they wanted me present when they took the medicine and in that unselfish Robin way, they replied, “Well, what do you want?” I told them it was THEIR journey and after a pause and a smile, Robin said, “It's ok,” signaling the preference for it to be just them and a few close family members. During our remaining time together and through the tears, we held hands and I thanked them for allowing me to share these last few months with them. I told them how throughout this journey, they had shown nothing but courage and grace. I could see that they were at peace with the decision to move on. Before I left, Robin said to me, “I don't know what's on the other side, but I do hope we see each other again.” These words will forever be etched on my heart.

 Three hours later, I was notified that Robin had died.

 So what does this story have to do with healing the Earth?

 First, it's a reminder that death is a part of life. That the opposite of death is birth, not life. So to truly embrace life, one must be able to embrace death. Robin embraced life to the fullest. Robin enjoyed going outside in their garden and enjoyed good food. Their spouse always made Robin's favorite meals as they never knew when Robin's last meal would be. And just as they embraced life, Robin embraced death. There was no fear in the end. There was acceptance and with that came peace. So to help heal the Earth, we need to understand and accept that part of the Earth's cycle includes death.

 Secondly, it's a reminder that the death of anything is always followed by transformation. This will be true for Robin's spouse as they integrate their loss and grief into their new way of being. This will be true for me as I fondly remember my many visits with Robin and the lessons learned from them. This will be true for all of us who are witnessing death first hand in so many levels - whether it's the end of a business or employment, or the end of a way of living we once knew, or the end of the life of someone close to us. If we are to help heal the earth, we have to choose to transform into a new way of being that is healthy for us all – all of mankind regardless of race, religion, age, gender, or sexual orientation; all of nature including plants, animals, bodies of water, and even the rocks; and mostly for our Mother Earth. This transformation has to occur to us as individuals and us as a collective society. So I ask you now, while the Earth is in the middle of a huge transformation, how will you respond? Will you be like Robin who accepted death and faced their transition with courage and grace? Robin, I don't know what's on the other side either, but I do hope to meet each transition I encounter with as much courage and grace as you did. I need to do so for myself, for my kids, for all future generations, and for Mother Earth.

So I ask you now, while Earth is in the middle of a huge transformation, how will you respond? Will you be like Robin who accepted death and faced their transition with courage and grace?

Robin, I don't know what's on the other side either, but I do hope to meet each transition I encounter with as much courage and grace as you did. I need to do so for myself, for my kids, for all future generations, and for Mother Earth.

Mae Esteban has been a registered nurse for 24 years with the last 8 in hospice. She is the single mother of two and is passionate about living life's adventures with them. She enjoys traveling and has been many places including the top of Mt Kilimanjaro. She loves learning about different spiritual traditions, religions, and philosophies and finding the beauty in each one. Other interests include reading, watching Marvel movies and DC tv, and taking photographs. Mae also wrote a beautiful piece on my other blog, Lessons from the Monk I Married, as part of 365 Inspirations that I wrote there. It's about the Wake Up Festival she attended. Here it is: http://lessonsfromthemonkimarried.blogspot.com/2013/08/365-inspirations-241-wake-up-festival.html

Divine Earthly Experience 13: Owning Who You Are

Dear fellow Earthlings,

Many are going through a crisis of identity right now. If you aren't currently experiencing that, you will. The earth is vibrating at a much higher frequency. This has been proven by scientists. I am reading a book called The Book of Ho'oponopono: The Hawaiian Practice of Forgiveness and Healing. In this book it says:

"The electromagnetic field of the earth is expanding. This has been observed on the level of the Schumann resonance. This increase in size is the result of a more general increase that is affecting, at the least, our entire galaxy. The cause is the arrival of new cosmic energies that give human beings heightened awareness, new visions, new abilities and new thought....This period of adaptation is expressed by fatigue, irritability, anxiety and depression."

Not sure when I began writing the above. I think it was August and now it's October, but this all still rings true for me. I look around me and all appears to be as it always was. The leaves on the trees are changing color, neighbors have pumpkins on their porches, a new school year is well on it's way, yet I can't help but feel it's not the same. It can never be the same. Sure, we have memories, but everything is shifting and it's shifting much faster than usual.

I have always been tuned into energies and the energies around me, but I haven't always owned this. I am owning it now. It's the shift I am going through. It's hard because I have to cast off a lot of fear as I let go of who I thought I was. Much of who I thought I was had to do with how I grew up. I followed what others did and believed in order to fit in and it served me then. Now, it is no longer serving me. I feel I'm wearing clothes that no longer fit. I keep trying to stretch into them, but they are tight or torn or old or yesterday's fashion. I push and pull my way into these clothes and they suffocate and stifle who I am.

So I will stand naked here. Cut these clothes from my body and stand naked. And who am I without these clothes?

I am a healer
I am a psychic
I am an an internationally published author
I am a teacher
I am a yoga teacher
I am a channeler and am able to connect with those who have recently passed
I am a retreat leader
I am an entrepreneur and business owner
I am inspirational
I am a world traveler
I am a mystic
I am a shaman
I am a blogger
I am a free spirit
I am a scorpio
I am a lover
I am beautiful


By being who I am, I help others tap into who they are. It's hard to own these things in me because I fear those close to me won't accept these things or even believe them, but I know they are true for me and that's most important. Right now my life is in chaos and instead of feeling like a victim, I'm choosing to see it all as an opportunity to cast off that which no longer fits. Sometimes things fall apart or we lose things because we have outgrown them. It's not because we are bad, it's because we are growing more into WHO WE ARE. But it's so hard to let go, isn't it? So many memories and years are attached to who we once were. I lost my husband is 2015 and I am losing my house in June of 2018. My parents have decided to sell the house I've lived in for almost 12 years, so I'm not sure where I will go or what I will do. I still have my job at the college, but even that is changing and sometimes I feel like I've outgrown that too.

I have a lot of fears around embracing and owning who I am. I have a fear that I will end up homeless and alone. However, I am currently in a relationship with a lovely man and I have a home. If I look at the now, things are really good. I see the beauty in each moment, yet the moment is always changing.

When I was younger, I embraced change with open arms. Now that I am getting older, I am a little more fearful of it. This month I will be 48! I can't believe it. But still, I'm not ready to settle into my life. I will always be a free spirit. This does not mean that I'm ungrounded, it just means that I find groundedness in change. Scorpio is the ruler of transformation. It is also the sign of sex and death. Death is the biggest transformation any of us will go through, yet things are dying every minute.

The trees are shedding their brightly colored leaves. It's time for them to drop. There's no holding this back. Change is inevitable. And how beautiful it is to see this fire of red, yellow and orange on the branches against the blue sky. But these leaves will soon be recycled to the soil and come back transformed.

I feel like a brightly colored leaf right now. I'm holding tightly to the branch. I don't want to fall or fail, but at some point I will have to let go. I know this letting go will be the transformation of me. I know that I will finally have to own who I am.

Divine Earthly Experience 11: Going Inward

"Go into the core of your being, all your answers lie there."—Katherine Jenkins

Hello fellow Earthlings,

How are you? I'm currently in hibernation. I'm in a gathering state. I thought I'd come back to Facebook and start engaging more on June 8th, but here we are a June 15th! It's been a month and a half since I pulled the plug on Facebook and I see that I'm still not quite ready to "come out."

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I feel like a lump of clay yet to be molded. I could become anything at this point, but I feel like staying here in this unformed state a little longer. There is so much potential in the unformed state. Not having to be somebody has both its challenges and rewards.

The challenges are feelings of disconnection, loss, fear. The questions Who am I? and What is my purpose? have come up a lot. I've asked for divine intervention. I've asked for signs and symbols. I've waited. In some instances, I've grown impatient and even fearful. What if I am nobody in this world? That question is kind of scary, isn't it? Other challenges are not feeling like engaging much, keeping to myself, feeling depressed due to lack of clear direction, etc.

But floating on a vast ocean without signposts or a map has advantages too. In the unknown there is so much possibility. It's easy, in the day to day world, to make definitions of ourselves. We cling to self definitions like life preservers; without them, we feel we'd drown. Words like mom, teacher, construction worker, activist, poet, business owner, spiritual teacher give us a sense that we are somebody in this world and we are doing okay because we have that to rely on. We are part of this community or that community and within those communities is a pecking order and if we aren't in our place or we don't have a title or a role, we are lost. Just like in families, we are the middle child, the eldest, the youngest or the only child. We base our identities on how we grew up and it's true, at least in early life, we were molded by our families, particularly our parents. But clinging to what happened to us in the past is clinging to "a story" and there are many stories you can tell. What happens when you pick up that molded clay and pound it out and form something else or let it lie in a clump for awhile? What happens if you lose your map?

Here are the advantages to doing that: You get to decide who you become, by having no identity you are now open to having a new one, you get to form the rules, direction, pace. While you are sitting here as the unformed lump of clay that you are, instead of filling yourself up from the outside, you get to fill yourself up from the INSIDE and that's where all inspiration comes from. In fact, inspiration means being "in spirit" or going inward. All co-dependency with others is lost in this state of being. You aren't looking to others for your happiness. You are not relying on your place in society to make you happy.  Your sadness is yours and your happiness is yours too. It doesn't depend on other people or outside circumstances. It depends on YOU.

I've been in a Clairvoyant Awareness Program for 10 months at a place called Psychic Awakenings in Seattle. I have to say, it's really hard to hide yourself from psychics! Ha! It's very easy to pretend all is well and you are happy with your place in life, but people tuned in spiritually and psychically can see right through that veil. I have received so much healing from the training and work I've done there. But the biggest revelation I've had is that we are all in this together. None of us are immune to sadness, pain or suffering just as none of us immune to happiness and joy. Once we know how connected we are, it's such a relief. We can be open and share knowing that we all go through the same things at one point or another in life, just at different times. We can feel happy for people whose lives are going great and we can have compassion for people going through a hard time because we've all been there! 

The other big things I've learned at Psychic Awakenings are to ground and own my space. Those are HUGE! And we practice them again and again and again. After years of meditation, I wasn't aware of how important it is to ground or be grounded in life. I was always seeking the next spiritual experience and I won't lie and say that it wasn't fun to ride that wave for a very long time. So much became manifest in my life. Things I could never have imagined. But as high as you go, that far you fall. It's risky business and having a grounding cord connected to the center of the earth is always a good idea.

And it's no secret that I fell hard. My life came crashing down with the end of my marriage. And now, as I sit here in the valley of my life picking up the broken pieces of it, I see an image of myself throwing these pieces into a big pot. It's my own pot or container. I OWN my space. I get to decide how much water to add or not add. I get to decide what I put in that pot and what comes out of it and WHEN it comes out.

I'm not ready to come out yet, but soon. My teacher at Psychic Awakenings taught us to "bring in a golden sun" and fill ourselves up with our own energy. I always felt this was so grounding and validating. Whatever energy that was not mine could not stay in the space when I did this technique. But we were always "bringing in" the golden sun, which works for me, but it implies that it came from somewhere outside myself. Last Tuesday, she said, "Sit in the center of your own golden sun!" Wow! That resonated with me. We ALL have this light inside of us. We get to go inward and sit in the center of our OWN SUN or our own light. For some reason, right now, the song lyrics "this little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine..." are coming out. Each one of us gets to shine our light and the package it comes in, the lump of clay we get to work with, may be different, but all of us have this light inside.

Last night, before I went to bed, I asked for guidance. All of us have different beliefs. Maybe you believe in God or Jesus or you are a Buddhist or you talk to angels. Maybe you frequently tune into Source or maybe you are an Atheist. I'm not here to judge how you make your decisions about your life or where you get your inspiration from. I believe that I'm in a human body which has its own limitations, yet I'm connected to something much greater than I can comprehend in this body. I frequently tune into that energy and I get my direction and inspiration from that place. When I tune in and connect to Source and give psychic readings to people, it's uncanny how pertinent and timely that information is to the person I'm reading even though it may not make sense to me personally as I'm reading. In the end, it's a healing for me and for them. We connected and shared on a much deeper level. I feel that's what I'm here to do. I'm here to connect and share on this level.

So what came from the guidance I asked for, you ask? I got the message, "Go into the core of your being, all your answers lie there." So that's where I am navigating from and will continue to navigate from: the inside out. Going inward is pertinent to hearing divine messages. Most messages, I believe, come from a higher version or vibration of ourselves. If we move around in life distracted and influenced by all that's going on OUTSIDE of us, we never get a clear channel to hear what is going on inside. When life comes crashing down, we can hurry to get our footing again, or we can sit in the center of our own golden sun and see what lies there.