SL01-03-The-End-As-Solution

Today's prayerful meditation came about after the recent news of the suicide of Ellie Soutter on her 18th birthday.  Ellie was a European Olympic hopeful snow boarder.  This summer we've lost many "famous"people to suicide — Ellie, Anthony Bourdain, Craig Raymond Turner, Kate Spade.  Those are the ones we know about through the media because they were famous.  Each year, in the United States, over 44,000 people will commit suicide.  Please if you are considering suicide, reach out, and let someone know you are hurting and need help.  The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 1–800–273-TALK (8255).   A 2017 CDC study reports 31% of high school students in the United States have experienced periods of sadness and hopelessness.  1/3 of all teenagers experience hopelessness.  41% of all high school girls feel hopelessness and sadness.   What inspired this podcast was the sense that the media focuses only on the negative, the disasters, the tragedies, the disenchantment, the dissension, the division.    Our imaginal prayer exercise will be about being, about being there for those who see ending their life as a solution and just being for those who have ended their life.   Time is in our dimension of unbodied life.  In the other dimensions that our loved ones, our friends, the famous and not so famous who ended their lives there is no past, no future, just the ever present.  Even if a loved one ended their life years ago or weeks ago or days ago, our imaginal prayer for them envisioning God's love, grace, and light around them can heal them now, in the ever present now.   That tragic end of a life so loved is one whose impact ripples across the now of that realm, of this realm, of those they left behind.  It is part of the now here on earth and any prayers for them only helps further buff out and shine their true light and love and gift of life in the realms beyond.