The evening intro started with a crowd of bright shiny faces new to Access Consciousness™. A minute later, my cell phone rang. “It’s your husband, do you want to take the call?” my organizer asked. Since the intro had hardly begun, I said yes. He was calling to tell me that he’d just received a notice that a friend of mine since high school had passed away, from colon cancer, the same thing that my mother died of many years ago.

He had waited to call me until after class was over, forgetting that I also had an event that evening. I thanked him for letting me know, and continued to evening as planned. It was a lively and enjoyable evening for me, and hopefully for everyone. When I asked others the next day if they had noticed even a hiccup in my universe, they were surprised to hear I had received what could have been such traumatic news.

This was an amazing experience for me. It was a demonstration that not only do the Access Consciousness™ tools like “interesting point of view” work, but also a demonstration of how my very being has changed as a result of what must now be thousands of Access Bars™ sessions and clearing statements. I had known about my friend’s illness and knew that it was quite likely she would die. What was so interesting to me is that there was no sadness.

At the same time, I was aware of the points of view of this reality. This woman had been my friend since high school! Should I excuse myself for a few moments? Should I have a cry? Should I share the sadness I was supposed to have with the group? It was so interesting to watch the things that would be expected of me from this reality without having to engage in any of them. In the days that followed, of course I thought about my friend.

What floated into my awareness were memories of the many good times we’d had together, despite living 6000 miles apart on different continents. We’d explored Michelin starred restaurants in her home country of Belgium. My husband David had picked up her son by his feet when he was a skinny kid of about 10, and turned him upside down on a street corner in Haight Ashbury when they visited us. I recalled her amazement at the vast dark silence of the forests of Oregon, where we lived when they visited. But still no sadness! How could this be?

The only emotion I could contact was gratitude for having known her, for her contributions to my life, for the beauty and color of those happy memories. When I saw the death announcement that the family sent out, I kept it on my desk. On the cover was a lovely color picture of my friend, and every time I look at it, I feel happy to have known her. The fact that there will be no more of those happy adventures with her, in her body, does not fade in the least the happiness and gratitude I have for everything we did share.

If she had told me she was going to Timbuktu and not returning, and I heard that she’d made the journey, I would have been happy that she’d achieved her goal. She had told me through her reactions and her choices that she was choosing to not continue living, although she could not admit this even to herself. When she arrived at the destination she had chosen, I could only be happy she’d gotten what she desired.

Many years ago, Access Consciousness™ Founder and best selling author Gary Douglas, who was channeling at the time, received this information: When do you celebrate death? Do you celebrate it, do you honor it, and do you see it as the joy, the joy of transition? When the tree dies, does the forest mourn or do the worms go “Yay, meal time”? The forest doesn’t mourn the passing of a tree. It celebrates the beginning of new life. Death is the transition from the limitation of this lifetime and the defined roles that one has created here and the defined reality, the destiny that they have written in stone for themselves. It is the opportunity for them to create something entirely new.

Honor the dying and the passing as you honor the birth, there is no difference, one is the other side of the coin, but it is the same coin, it is the same place in which beauty exists. If you will honor the dying instead of mourning them, what you will create is the memory, in the person who passes, of their past life happening with ease in their next life so that they can choose how to rewrite what they come to accomplish and they won’t have to struggle to know who they are, they won’t have to fight to have awareness, they won’t have to sift through the gray matter of their brain to know.

Honoring death gives awareness to the being and improves the possibility of knowing in each lifetime. That is the gift you give to the spirit when you honor death. How could I wish less than that for my friend, if I were truly her friend? I have taken Gary’s statement to heart and it has changed my point of view about death totally. This is just another way that Access Consciousness™ functions from a different reality than most people espouse. I must say I’m finding it much easier to deal with my friend’s passing from the Access Consciousness™ reality than from the one others live in.

I am so grateful for the freedom and ease of this experience! In contrast, most people in this reality have the totally polarized view that life is good and death is bad and to be avoided at all costs. Even my late friend had this point of view. When I wrote after hearing her diagnosis, expressing my gratitude to her and asking to visit her to say goodbye, she asked me not to come because she wished only to be surrounded by “positive people.”

Acknowledging her choice was clearly not positive, from her point of view. Her point of view clearly aligns with most people in this reality. When my husband David’s friend and boss of 10 years died 6 weeks before his 50^th birthday, his widow arranged a memorial cruise on San Francisco Bay in honor of what would have been his 50^th birthday. David noticed that on that entire boatload of people, there was perhaps one other person who had the awareness that his boss’s seemingly premature death was a choice. To everyone else, it was a tragedy and reason to mourn. But who are we mourning when we mourn? Even someone who has left their body is still an infinite being. We can no longer hug them or speak to their physical body, but they still exist, and they are not worse off than they were here on earth.

Indeed, as Gary’s piece demonstrates, they are actually better off because they have gotten free of limitations of being here in the only way they knew to do it. So whom do we mourn, our loved ones or ourselves? Gary recalls crying when his father died when Gary was 17, and knowing even then that he was crying not for his father but because of how his life would change following his father’s death. The death announcement created by my friend’s family includes a poem that says, “Nothing will ever be the same.” Is that not an acknowledgement of our loved one’s contribution to our lives? Should we not wish them the best? If we truly wished the best for our loved ones who leave their bodies, would we not celebrate? It’s just an interesting point of view.