Today, The Relationship Circle is proud to introduce you to fellow life coach Brett Avelin. Brett is a warrior for love and healing and we are glad to have his voice here to share with you. You can learn more about Brett and his coaching practice here.

Death is inspiring. There, I said it.
What, you say!?! Inspiring? Yes, inspiring.

Is there emotion in it? Yes.
Is there pain or grief or sense of loss in it? You bet.
So what does it inspire then?
A deep look at life and how we are living.

Death of someone close to us makes us reflect on what is truly valuable in our relationship to people, time and things.
It also inspires us to make changes that we would not have been moved to do otherwise.
Death inspires us to prioritize what really matters to us.

One of the reasons death inspires me is that it is such a great reminder of the impermanence of all things and relative unimportance of most things.

When I was a young boy riding reluctantly on a schoolbus and feeling scared and alone I was suddenly calmed and soothed by the idea that all this in front of me will pass sooner or later. I was able to accept my current circumstance better because of that thought.

Death is a face smacker.
It’s a wake up call in the highest order.
It allows very little pansy footing around what we actually dealing with here on planet delusion where we spend a lot of our time.

Planet delusion is absorbed in the day to day doings.
It keeps us on the surface talking about bubble gum things.

Inspiration arises naturally after the crap we have downloaded into our mind that clogs the central operating system has been cleared, deleted, or set aside.

To further expand on the possibilities that death can have us ponder I have listed below the five most common regrets from the book The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, by Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse in Australia who routinely asked her patients about their regrets.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

How often have we all made choices that were based on someone else’s expectation or idea versus listening and trusting our own? Look at your relationship, your work, where you live and see if those are your actual choices or are you there because of someone else’s ideas about what’s best for you. Some will quickly defend this idea and say we would all be selfish clods if we lived how we actually wanted. Are we all really that afraid of our natural self and how it expresses? The closer we can come to living the life that is true for us, the happier we will be.

In watching my father in his last phase of life he was clearly living a life based on choice versus should or have to. Did everybody cheer for him and love that? Not necessarily. Was he living from what was true for him and happier for it? Absolutely as I see it.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

Ware reported that she heard this from almost every single one of her male patients. All of the striving men out there for the big kill. All the hours, all the years putting in overtime for the hope of a better life or the golden retirement concept. Does it ever really pay off? Do you ever really get ‘there’?
I have made the choice since I was young to value time more than money. Some of this was born out of fear, but most of it comes from what is actually true for me.
Our time is precious here. How are you spending it?
With a few conscious changes your relationship to time can be a much more enjoyable one.
Are you spending your years toiling, striving, and grinding away?
Is it hard to you to figure out another way?
This area is something I wrote about a few weeks ago and is so pervasive today.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Feelings are what we live for, period.
Everything we want and everything we look to avoid is secretly driven by how we anticipate we will feel by doing so.
Expressing our feelings does not mean we are a hot mess walking around on two legs. It means having the courage to access and express how we are feeling. Living in a culture that lacks an emotional vocabulary let alone fluency makes us all feel like crazy people inside as we try to navigate a hidden world on the inside while appearing ‘ok’ on the outside.
What feelings do you have bottled up that are wanted to be expressed or simply felt?
This is an area where it is especially helpful to have a trusted ally because we can be so blind and disconnected from our bodies.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Staying in touch with the people we FEEL (there’s that word again) connected to in life is a primary way of support that aspect that we are all going for. The trap in this is that we all tend to rely on these connections too much and lose the chance to claim our life on our own terms.
Is staying in touch with friends important to you? If so are you doing it? The years they do pass.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Notice the work ‘let’ here.
Happiness and inspiration are here for the allowing.
We don’t create happiness, it is here naturally when we let ourselves settle in to the situation that is in front of us.
There is ALWAYS something for our mind to be upset, worried, or treating as a problem. Even on all inclusive vacations you will see families squabbling away. You will always find something wrong, even in paradise.
I am allowing myself to be happy in regards to my dad’s passing because there are so many reasons that it was the right time for him to go.
Can you let yourself be happier?
Where could you allow yourself to be happier?

Live Large, this is your life.
Brett