Mother's Day

I know Mother's Day is hard for many of my friends. Know that I love you and you are in my prayers with many healing hugs of care and concern for as ll at this most sensitive moment in history.

For a Total Healing of  heart, mind, and soul. 

PREGHIERA PER TUTTE LE MAMME

PREGHIERA PER TUTTE LE MAMME

Ti preghiamo, o Signore:

Per tutte le mamme che consumano la loro vita,
giorno dopo giorno, a servizio dei figli,
e serenamente affrontano il "terribile quotidiano",
perchè trovino in Te
il sostegno e la forza di continuare
anche nei momenti di stanchezza e di sfiducia

Ti preghiamo, o Signore.

Per tutte le mamme che piangono
gli errori e le cadute dei figli,
e soffrono di sentirli lontani,
perchè nella fede riscoprano il motivo vero
della loro dedizione completa,
anche nell'ora dell'abbandono,

Ti preghiamo, o Signore.

Per tutti i genitori che,
distratti da molteplici impegni,
rischiano di dimenticare
che non si educa con le parole,
ma con l'esempio e la coerenza,
perchè trovino il coraggio di verificare la vita
alla luce dell'esempio di Maria,

Ti preghiamo, o Signore.



Veglia, o Regina d'amore e di dolore,
Benedici, o Maria, tutte le mamme,
Fortifica,o Maria, tutte le mamme,
Santifica, o Maria, tutte le mamme,
Veglia sulle madri addolorate.
Benedici le loro gioie e i loro dolori.
Fortificale nella loro insostituibile missione.
Santificale donando loro il Frutto del tuo seno.
Amen.

PRAYER for ALL MOMS please, o Lord: To all the mothers who consume their lives, day in and day out, to serve children, and calmly deal with the "terrible", why are you the support and the strength to continue even in times of fatigue and mistrust we pray, o Lord.

For all the mothers who mourn the errors and crashes, and suffer from hear far away, because in faith to rediscover the true reason of their full dedication, even in the time of abandonment, we pray, o Lord.

For all the parents who, distracted by multiple activities, are in danger of forgetting that educates not with words, but with the example and consistency, why are the courage to make life in the light of the example of Mary, we pray, o Lord.

Awake, o Queen of love and pain, bless, o Mary, all moms, Fortifies, o Mary, all moms, Sanctifies, o Mary, all moms, sorrowful Vigil on mothers.

Bless their joys and their sorrows.

Fortificale in their irreplaceable mission.

Santificale giving them the fruit of thy womb.

Amen. 

Bereavement Support

1. Smile. Put a smile on your face and in your eyes, voice and heart as often as possible.
2. Make eye contact. Look people openly, warmly and squarely in the eye.
3. Open your body language. While facing the person with whom you are talking, open your chest, your heart and your arms.
4. Address people by name. Honor people by calling them by name as you greet them, give them thanks, ask a question or bid them farewell.
5. Speak with a friendly tone. Warm your tone of voice with love and kindness.
6. Be present. Give your complete and undivided attention to others when they are speaking to you.
7. Express gratitude. Focus your attention on the goodness in others, verbalize all that you appreciate and give thanks.
8. Slow down. Breathe and gift yourself and others with time to address situations and transition from them.
9. Reflect empathy and compassion. Honor people’s emotional experiences. Normalize and validate their feelings so they feel heard, known and understood.
10. Have integrity. Keep your word. Do what you say you are going to do.  Live according to your values.
11. Have good manners. Be polite, conscientious and gracious.
12. Demonstrate thoughtfulness. Get out of your own head and be of service to others. Consider their feelings and experiences.
13. Give genuine compliments. Tell others their strengths, give positive feedback and express what you admire about them.
14. Give salutations. Make the effort to open and close verbal and email interactions with a nice greeting or closure, rather than abruptly asking for something with neither a hello nor goodbye.
15. Be generous. Give and share whatever you can, whenever you can.
16. Be kind. Be the bigger person. Kindness is a choice. 
17. Show compassion. Demonstrate self-compassion by cutting yourself some slack extend this same compassion to others.
18. Be patient. Breathe and breathe out. Patience is a virtue.
19. Demonstrate self-awareness. Notice the impact you have on others by paying attention to their facial expressions, tone and body language. Consider how what you are saying will feel to them and how it will impact them. Make adjustments accordingly.
20. Be truthful. The truth has different layers and sometimes the deepest layer is hurtful or inappropriate. Speak the truth from the deepest layer that is appropriate. Speak from a place of kindness.
21. Be reliable. Follow through with responsibilities and commitments with competency and effective communication.
22. Be forgiving. Each time somebody else makes a mistake it is an opportunity for you to extend kindness and compassion and to let go of resentments that keep you tethered to the past.
23. Apologize. We are human and nobody is perfect. When you make a mistake, make an amend or extend a sincere and timely apology.
24. Take responsibility. Drop the defensiveness and the excuses and accept responsibility for yourself, your actions and your behaviors.
25. Express love. Be open-minded and non-judgemental. Extend love to yourself and to others. Choose to be loving whenever possible—it is always possible.

When to Refer for Medical Treatment

When Grief develops into clinical depression one (1) and family does not know to pinpoint
the Symptoms accurately. For this reason the symptoms and the psychological aspects have been out lined for your education and understanding for this diagnose.

Signs and Symptoms:

Early morning awaking

Serious Weight Loss

Anhedonia:

"The loss of joy," is defined as a lack of the feelings of enjoyment or accomplishment that typically accompany pleasurable events such as socializing with friends, eating a good meal and sex. An individual who is experiencing Anhedonia may no longer feel a desire to go to work, attend classes, manage their health, interact with other people, or engage in hobbies or entertainment. Anhedonia is a common symptom of mood disorders such as major depressive disorder or dysthymic disorder, but it can also be experienced independent from a diagnosed mental health condition. -

Agitation: The Causes

Agitation can come on suddenly or over time. It can last for just a few minutes, or for weeks or even months. Pain, stress, and fever can all increase agitation.
Agitation by itself may not be a sign of a health problem. However, if other symptoms occur, it can be a sign of disease.  Agitation  with a change in alertness (altered consciousness) can be a sign of delirium. Delirium has a medical cause and should be checked by a health care provider right away.
 
Causes

There are many causes of agitation, some of which include:

• Alcohol intoxication or withdrawal
• Allergic reaction
• Caffeine intoxication
• Certain forms of heart, lung, liver, or kidney disease
• Intoxication or withdrawal from drugs of abuse (such as cocaine, marijuana, hallucinogens, PCP, or opiates)
• Hospitalization (older adults often have delirium while in the hospital)
• Hyperthyroidism (overactive thyroid gland)
• Infection (especially in elderly people)
• Nicotine withdrawal
• Poisoning (for example, carbon monoxide poisoning)
• Theophylline, amphetamines, steroids, and certain other medicines
• Trauma
• Vitamin B6 deficiency

Agitation can occur with brain and mental health disorders, such as:

• Anxiety
• Dementia (such as Alzheimer's disease)
• Depression
• Mania
• Schizophrenia

The New Stages of Grief

After the funeral and burial, mundane life patterns such as shopping and working must eventually resume, now in altered form. "Everyday life" often leaves survivors experiencing long-term reactions on top of the more familiar emotional and physical manifestations of grief.

Most common: yearning (intense longing for the person who has died), stress, and depression. These can prevail whether the relationship was happy or turbulent.

"Whatever unresolved issues you have, they get magnified and are elusive at the same time; you feel alone in the world," says Ellie, whose parents and sister all died within five years. "I felt so isolated in my grief."

Recommendations: 

Not rushing yourself. "Being without my parents knocked me down and kept me down for a long time; it was as if something had been severed in me," says Ellie. "Time and new experiences helped, but it was mostly a matter of putting one foot in front of the other."

Ignoring the "grief police." Don't let others rush your adjustment. Turn a deaf ear to the well-meaning comments people make that miss the mark -- including "It's time to move on."

Getting help as needed with practical tasks. Handling finances, cooking, yard work, and so on can swamp a bereaved person, especially if they're unfamiliar duties. This just adds to stress and prolongs pain.

Inching toward new ways of doing things. One woman who had a standing Saturday morning long phone call with her late mother felt bereft at that hour each week. "I switched my walking time to then and called my sister while I walked, which shook up my routine and dulled the pain."

Not expecting you can medicate the pain away. Antidepressants have a place in helping someone who has a chemical imbalance causing depression. But antidepressants can also impede the grieving process, and they can't remove the yearning that's associated with depression. The goal should be to think about the deceased with less pain, over time, and to derive a measure of comfort from such thoughts.

Happiness Is Real

There, I said it.

In order to understand this, let’s first establish some definitions.

Happiness is not a state of having. If this were so, happiness would be a result of what each of us were able to accumulate in life. It would be forever dependent on something other than the self, an externality capable of ceasing within time.

If such were true, happiness could also not mean a state of being. A state of being focuses on the ‘here and now:’ on life at a particular moment within the present. But not every moment in life ought to be happy: people get sick, relationships shatter, individuals experience trauma or lose a loved one.

Being unhappy (a lesser degree of happiness) isn’t the same thing as being sad (the opposite of happiness), and I would advocate a life with periodic unhappy moments over a life of sadness. If not a state of having (past) or a state of being (present), happiness, therefore, must be a state of becoming (future): a process of becoming happier than one is now.

When we think of happiness as a state of becoming, our lives become a process of continuous growth and effort in becoming more than whatever transpires at the current moment. Happiness is a choice to be different tomorrow than one is today.

Happiness is the state of becoming more than what we currently are. It isn’t about knowing every detail about every event at all times, but knowing that we are each placed in a situation because there is something that only we can offer therein. Happiness isn’t about accepting pain and suffering blindly, but picking ourselves up again because we know that our time on Earth isn’t over and that there’s still potential waiting for us to achieve.

A state of becoming means that we’re part of something much larger than ourselves. We connect our unique fragment to the larger, collective whole. And feeling wholesome means realizing that not only is happiness a process, but it is a shared journey of mutual support. We each offer something to repair our fragmented society.

When people ask me how they can live a meaningful life, my answer is usually the same: live life meaningfully. True meaning is personal and can only be decided by each individual. Lots of people use the “cup being half-empty/half-full” metaphor when trying to help others see more positivity in their lives, but I’d like to offer a different analogy.

There are two containers in life: a small cup and a large bottle. We can fill the cup to its maximum and the large bottle less than 3/4 of the way up while still collecting the same amounts of liquid. But, which container is more full?

While the cup is filled to capacity, the bottle still has room for more substance — still possessing that much more than the small cup will ever be able to hold. In life, it’s not how prestigious we are (how large our vessels are), but how much of our potential capacity we’re able to reach.

Being a happy person, and living a meaningful life, doesn’t necessarily mean being bigger or better than another, but rather being the biggest and best you can be.

When we try to be somebody else, we essentially try to fill a vessel, a capacity, that is not our own. Living a meaningful life means that we need to look into our psychological selves and see how best to utilize the vessels we’ve been given.

When I teach that happiness is a state of becoming, I mean that it’s a process of filling our own vessels and looking to maximize our own unique potentials. Some of us have more, and some of us have less, but each of us has a potential that only we can reach and actualize. We each have something unique that we can contribute to society at large.

Or perhaps better yet, think of society (or life in general) as one giant book in which we each contribute a chapter. We’ve written part of that narrative already in the years we’ve lived thus far, but can still make choices as to what we will write moving forward.

So, don’t try to be, or fill, someone else’s vessel — be and fill your own. Don’t look at what you’ve achieved to date — the substances you’ve filled your life with so far — but rather at how much more you’re capable of filling, at what you’re capable of becoming tomorrow. Potential is endless, but only reachable if you’re striving to meet the potential that belongs to you.

In Memory of My Father