I wouldn’t wish Leukemia on my worst enemy, but don’t ever take it away from me. —Wayne, Marine Engineer
It’s too bad we have to go through such deep pain to let go. —Jerry, CEO, after his son’s murder
I am grateful for the new wisdom that cancer has brought to me. —Laurie, Teacher
How do some people thrive in disaster’s wake? Jim Macartney, Rehabilitation Specialist and one who journeyed himself to the edge of life and back, has searched deeply for answers to this question.
Since the 1980s, he has sought out people who have endured the most extreme of crises, yet transformed their lives as a direct result of the havoc the crises wrought.
Clear patterns of growth reveal themselves in the scores of people he interviewed and the many hundreds he counseled over the last twenty-five years. These people had somehow stumbled upon what Macartney calls the Crisis to Creation Cycle: a powerful catalyst for growth and transformation.
“Crisis to Creation provides dramatic evidence of the power of choice to heal the soul, transform tragedy into blessings, and take people from crisis into creation. One sees just how miraculously “can” triumphs over “can’t.” Whether you have suffered tragedy or not, this book will transform you.”
— Yolaine M. Stout, president, Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences, San Diego, California
Mystery solved. Near death experiences (NDE) have been explained–or have they? Some think so, others, after spending decades of research, have come to just the opposite conclusion. Why the difference? Skeptics seem to grasp at bites of information mimicking one aspect of incredibly intricate phenomena to deny its entire existence. What keeps popping up in the popular literature is how the “light” or going through a “tunnel” some people experience during an NDE can be explained as a consequence of oxygen deprivation, or from experiments on how electrical stimulation of the brain triggers the experience of light.
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Ahh! It’s the first time I can slip into the local hot tub on the north side of town after the docs zapped my heart back into rhythm once again. It’s been an ongoing challenge to get two normal beats in a row since my second heart valve replacement surgery in 2005. I now confront…
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Near death experiences such as mine in 1997 (Crisis to Creation, Chapter 12) has been soundly and roundly discounted by many scientists as impossible, since they start and end by peering at brain chemistry. If true, they are absolutely right. But that leaves huge paradoxes and problems unresolved, such as the placebo effect for starters….
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As I was thinking about a talk I will be giving soon on the near death experience (NDE) in Durham, North Carolina, I thought of Rick Kirschner, a long time ranger at Mt. Rainer National Park and climber, and learned he died on August 1st. We both loved and climbed Mt. Rainier numerous times– its…
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Author Uses a Personal Crisis to Help Transform Self & Others by Charles Swedrock How can some thrive in the midst of crisis? Rehabilitation specialist Jim Macartney, having himself journeyed to the edge of life and back via a near death experience (NDE) in 1997, found that though he is on long-term disability for epilepsy…
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The following is a letter written to a woman summarizing an upcoming workshop to be given in Tucson. The goal is to help shift our attention from the high cost, symptom focused, survival driven medical system to one of wellbeing and self-responsibility. This shift does not in any way negate the magnificent advances in science,…
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His left hand hangs limp at his side, his limp slowing our progress to lunch at the assisted living center where he now lives. Instead of using his wheel chair, he has learned to walk short distances, maybe 200 hundred feet now, but a couple of years ago he was strapped to a wheel chair,…
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Three months to live. If you were told you had three months to live, how would you respond? When Eugene O’Kelly heard this news from his oncologist after being diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, he responded in his usual CEO decisive way. Within days of his diagnosis he resigned from his company of 20,000…
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Studies show children gain and grow through crisis, and adults can either hinder or aide in their growth. Trying to gloss over crisis and not allow kids to fully experience the grief and loss actually retards their ability to even recove, much less grow. And grow they do– in compassion, in giving and service to others, in empathy and spiritual awareness. They have increased ability to see both the possitive and negatives of circumstances. The time it takes varies of course and some remain scarred for years after traumatic events such as 911, Katrina or any deeply life altering event.
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Skeptics assume the near death experiences (NDE) is merely the artifact of a dying brain. But detailed research confirms this cannot be so. In cardiac arrest global anoxia of the brain occurs within seconds (resulting in) total lack of electric activity of the cortex of the brain (flat EEG) must have been the only possibility, but also the abolition of brain-stem activity, such as the loss of the corneal reflex, fixed and dilated pupils, and the loss of the gag reflex, is a clinical finding in those patients. However, patients with an NDE can report a clear consciousness, in which cognitive functioning, emotion, sense of identity, and memory from early childhood was possible, as well as perception from a position out and above their “dead” body. Because of the occasional and verifiable out-of-body experiences, … we know that the NDE must happen during the period of unconsciousness, and not in the first or last seconds of this period.
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I wouldn’t wish Leukemia on my worst enemy, but don’t ever take it away from me. —Wayne, Marine Engineer
