There won't be any shortage of instructors!

Once again, it will be the result of a choice but it will also be the renunciation of what we have called shared pleasure. Revenge can be a choice; It is up to you what kind of pact with yourself you want to sign up for your future. In the non-judgmental perspective that has accompanied us up to here, I do not think that the desire for revenge should be simply silenced as a forbidden thought that should be just removed from our mind. Being sick is an education in itself when you realize that the world is not all doughnuts and Disney. She had seen several friends in the hospital who were dying. All the children there hear the nurses, even when they are discreet, because the comments are not always whispered. Children also see the faces of other families and they notice how broken many of them are. When they go to the playroom and a friend they've known for years is no longer there, what do they think? Is it my turn next? Amanda was wise beyond her years. I've often said my daughter lived more life in twelve years than some people do in sixty or more. I think she knew, even though we never came out and said, You're dying, she definitely knew. She saw heaven. When Breitbart followed up with one group of patients two months later, he found that their reports of meaning and spiritual well-being had increased, while their feelings of anxiety, hopelessness, and desire for death had decreased. The time between diagnosis and death, as Breitbart saw, presents an opportunity for extraordinary growth. The former IBM executive, for example, was initially devastated by her diagnosis--but after enrolling in the therapy program, she realized, I didn't have to work so hard to find the meaning of life. It was being handed to me everywhere I looked. Breitbart's ideas are catching on. Doctors in Italy, Canada, Germany, Denmark, and beyond are using his therapeutic methods to infuse the lives of their otherwise hopeless and despairing patients with meaning.

The reaction in the field was explosive, Breitbart said. They hadn't paid attention to it before, but now everyone and their cousins have suddenly started discovering meaning. Breitbart developed his meaning-centered psychotherapy for the terminally ill, but the lessons gleaned from his research can help anyone live a better life. No matter how near or far off death may be in each of our individual cases, thinking about death forces us to evaluate our lives as they are and to consider what we would change about them to make them more meaningful. In my experience, the louder the fear, the more urgently I was being called to test, challenge, or overcome that fear. Each gift of fear points us on our way to the exact path of our ultimate uplift. In my experience, fears are best accepted from a place of love--and that doesn't mean you can't challenge them. THE REWARD OF FEAR CHASING Often, people are encouraged to live life on the edge, and they experience the adrenaline rush that results. An adrenaline rush is temporary. Over time, the adrenaline operates like an addictive drug. Anything that offers a temporary high offers a downside. One downside of an adrenaline rush is possible addiction to that temporary state of feeling high. In the case of the state of arousal that fear offers, the common downside is depression. Healing from codependency also means giving a voice to our anger, hearing what it has to tell us, without any taboos, and without any fear of not being able to understand it. Surely, the choice of revenge slows down our healing process and takes our eyes off of who we are today to keep it on who we were yesterday. But to deny its existence in us when it does exist is of little use, and it's better to illuminate, then looking at it better. Forgiveness In our culture, when we talk about forgiveness, we do it within a religious approach and it does not change so much if religion is part of our daily life in the practice. The divine forgiveness and the human forgiveness are presented as something to give to anyone with one only exception: only those who sincerely ask for forgiveness will be forgiven by God but all human beings are invited to forgive each other, whether or not the offender has asked to be forgiven.

The value of our forgiveness seems much higher if we grant it to our enemies. From the perspective of healing from codependency, forgiveness is a sensitive topic; In the relationship with people important to us, forgiveness as well as love, if given to anyone, ends up being unjustly wasted as it consolidates our tendency to accept anything in name of others and it plays against our cure. So, we should legitimate an exception in the name of our right to heal: forgiving only if and when we are ready to do so in the name of shared pleasure and autonomous choice. She had no fear of where she was going. She just knew she was going to get healed or she was going to go to heaven. Whatever happens, she'd say. It was freaky. None of this recall gave me any peace until after the pastor came to our home and shared his story. Amanda was not alone, and never will be. She made me keep our promise. Mommy, look at me with both eyes. Are you listening with both ears? You need to promise me that you will help every child fighting cancer. Psychologists call this the deathbed test. Imagine that you're at the end of your life. Perhaps a freak accident or diagnosis of disease has suddenly shortened your life, or maybe you have lived a long and healthy life, and are now in your eighties or nineties. Sitting on your deathbed, with only days ahead of you to live, reflecting on the way you have led your life and what you have done and not done, are you satisfied with what you see? Did you live a good and fulfilling life? Is it a life you are glad that you led?

If you could live your life over again, what would you do differently? Many people on their actual deathbeds fear that the lives they led were not meaningful enough. Bronnie Ware, a former palliative-care worker, found that at the end of her patients' lives, their regrets fell into the same basic categories. Their principal regrets included not following their true aspirations and purposes, giving too much of themselves to their careers rather than spending more time with their children and spouses, and not keeping in better touch with their friends. One who chases fear to its end experiences complete, everlasting joy. So, fear chasing as a means to some end of temporary rewards is not what is being talked about here. We are talking about chasing fears in order to actualize the natural, eternal state of enlightenment, the salvation state. This state of Being sustains itself without effort. It has no downside and is ineffably better than any temporary, artificial high. The reward for a fear chaser is enlightenment; DISSOLVING IN LOVE In chemistry, a solute is the minor component in a solution, like salt is dissolved in a solvent of water. When you are dissolved of identity, empty of fear, and free from mind-identification, you return as a solute in the solvent of love. Then, what little remains of you gets to experience the solvent state as that love. Forgiveness is one of the noblest things we can give to one another but let's not be deceived, forgiveness is always an active gesture on the part of those who have felt damaged or offended. When we are healing from codependency, it implies a great deal of effort even if we would like to convince ourselves the opposite. For this reason, forgiving someone does not make us feel as good as we would like sometimes, it can be a toxic solution to let us get back home with manipulative partners, or in general, a concession to their not so sincere apologies. It makes us feel that we forgive something that leaves a article still open, a wound that has not healed yet. To tell the truth, sometimes, despite having healed a wound, we are not really longing to forgive yet. This feeling tells us that our forgiveness is not ready yet to be granted or that it is not complete, or that we have given in or are giving in to the pressure of forgiving without believing it.

This is a not so simple nature of forgiveness to accept. Especially when forgiveness has to do with people who are or have been close to us and the specter of codependency still looks at us with hope. At the moment of being offended, we passively suffer the offense. At the moment of receiving the request for forgiveness, even if we recognize this request as genuine and sincere, in the most intimate part of us we all interpret forgiveness as an activity that we must dedicate to those who have offended us, therefore to the man or woman who is now asking to us to take off the weight of mistakes, granting him or her our forgiveness. Not everyone has a mama like you. Don't use my words against me! I said, referring to the wishes I had expressed to her before, that no child should ever have to go through anything like this. Mama, promise. I promised. I wasted no time in creating Amanda Hope Rainbow Angels. I've always had business development know-how and product development is in my blood, so the challenge of starting a new business was not terribly daunting. Have you ever seen those single-wrapped roses in convenience stores with the teddy bears? I started that business in the 1980s and I owned it for twenty years. It was called Roseworld. They wish they had spent more time during their lives building the pillars of meaning. Breitbart has thought a great deal about the challenge death posed to another group of individuals--the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. After Breitbart joined the Project on Death in America, he read the article Man's Search for Meaning by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl about his experiences in the concentration camps. The article made a powerful impression on Breitbart, as it has on millions of people, and he developed his meaning-centered therapy after reading it. He gives each of the patients who receives his therapy a copy of Frankl's article to read, hoping that though their circumstances may differ, they may find in one man's struggle with suffering a source of wisdom and consolation. In September 1942, Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents.