Hi Pauline,

I do feel for you and what you're experiencing - I know these things are so challenging when it touches close to the heart.

So in the Openhand Approach, it's not that you necessarily need to get intellectual insight into the issue to solve it. Karma is beyond the intellect anyway. And to me this feels like karmic source pain, which cannot be solved simply at the level of mind.

Firstly, try to see the bigger picture: in this case that all life passes on into new forms. Death really isn't death at all - it's just that the ego identity perceives loss because it's attached to that particular form of life - it's identified itself with it.

If you can at some level accept this, then you can begin to work with the pain itself. The pain is where your soul has become identified with the illusion of reality - "the horrid feeling that affects your reality" as you put it. This is where identity is getting caught up.

The only way out is through. The keep is to keep surrendering into the feeling, softening into it. It is to honour the feeling - not try to cure, solve or take it away. Let yourself be immersed in it. If you feel like expressing sadness, then go ahead and don't control it.

But whilst in the midst of it, then work to adopt the position of yourself as the observe in it. In so doing, you start to realise yourself as something beyond the ego which has attached to the situation. This is the process of self-realisation - realsing the One Self in it.

I'm not saying this is easy. But it most definitely does work if you persist with it.

I've explained this in much greater detail with a new 9 step process that I've shared in the new 5GATEWAYS book 2nd Edition.

With very best wishes

Open