The world lost a brilliantly bright light last month, and there is a lot from our times together and even the celebration of her life that she continued to teach me and others.
1 – The five regrets of the dying by Bonnie Ware. This book was mentioned at her funeral, and Judith had even organised a slide show to include the five regrets that Bonnie had found where the most common that the people she spoke to shared. Firstly was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” I am sure you can understand why this one resonated with me in particular, I am often talking about our false identity and our true self. Imagine being in our final moments and being able to say “yes, I lived life as me.”
2 – The second regret is around wishing that they hadn’t worked so hard. We do spend so much of our life at work, and that will be necessary for most of us, but what about out of hours, are we doing extra, are we often talking or thinking about it in family/relationship time. Is this something that would make a difference in your life if there were healthier boundaries from it.
3 – “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” This can be quite a process because there can be quite a few steps around feelings that need to happen first, and that can be even exploring and learning what they are to begin with. We need to be able to do that before we can try and communicate and express them. Feelings hold a lot of clues and if we are able to tap in to them, a lot of heartache can be relieved.
4 – The fourth regret is about wishing they had stayed in touch with their friends. Sometimes point two can take over this, we get consumed with work or life’s other commitments and friendships fall by the wayside. Is there someone that you would like to reconnect with, how can you get that ball rolling today? What would be the tiniest step to reconnecting?
5 – “I wish I had let myself be happy.” Crazy right, when it is the one thing that I hear so often, I just want to be happy. Sometimes it is finding some of those things that make us happy, sometimes it is giving ourselves permission to do those things, and then other times it is actually about simply being happy just being…
6 – Judith often referred to being above or below the line, and again had arranged a slide for this for the funeral, below the line being about blame, excuses, denial and above the line being about ownership, accountability, curiosity, openness. Runs along the same lines as the red and green zone wording that I use. We are absolutely going to be in both red/below and green/above, we are human; but it is having a conscious awareness about it and a desire to shift that is absolutely key.
7 – “How fascinating!” I heard this said a few times before the funeral from people in conversation sharing their stories and memories of Judith. It was an approach Judith suggested to help bring about some of that curiosity and openness, especially if we didn’t agree with what was being said! Judith also suggested using it when ‘stuff’ came up for us, some words of gentle compassion and enquiry that can lead the way for more understanding and help navigaing through what we are experiencing.
8 – Judith also loved this quote from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
9 – Judith also lived and loved the word coddiwomple, meaning – to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination. I related to that too!
10 – Judith requested this poem to be shared, I hadn’t heard it before, and again felt very aligned to Judith’s work as a coach as well.
Thank you for our times together Judith, and the many, many wisdoms you shared with me and the world.
