911. Columbine. The 2004 Tsunami. The London and Madrid Bombings. The Connecticut School Shootings. The Boston Marathon. Every time a major tragedy happens, I get a lot of questions asking me how something like this could’ve happened. Many of my coaching clients have struggled with these kinds of events. And while I was happy to provide each of them with a tailored response, I couldn’t seem to write a blog post meant for a larger audience. I felt that the incidents were just too recent. People were still too raw. They wouldn’t be able to hear the perspective I would offer, and would find my comments disrespectful and hurtful. It’s never my intention to poke at people’s pain, and so, I held off.

And even though we just had another tragedy, the Boston Marathon, I somehow feel that the time is right. Perhaps people have become a little more desensitized. Perhaps the sheer volume of pain has worn them down to the point where they are willing to accept a different, better feeling point of view.

I obviously received the following question a few months ago, but I feel it perfectly represents all the mails I’ve received about this topic.

Awesome Susan asks: “I’ve had a question on my mind since the Connecticut school shooting last week. I don’t understand how LOA applies to horrific acts such as these. And I also don’t generally understand how it applies to children – there is no way I can believe that they “attracted” getting shot and killed. Makes no sense. But I’m guessing my view is way zoomed in or something.”

Death is not a punishment

Before I can properly explain how and why these kinds of tragedies happen, it’s important to spend a little time on the general subject of death. In the post, Dear LOA: How Do We Manifest Death?, I explain that Death is not a negative manifestation. Particularly Western society makes death out to be something horrible, a mistake, a tragedy. When someone whom we have deemed to be “too young” dies, we ask “what did he do to deserve this?” But that question is based on an enormous fallacy.

We don’t die because we did something wrong. We don’t even die because we have a lot of resistance. If that were the case, unhappy people would be dropping like flies, while the happy people would live forever. But that’s not the case, is it? The Germans have a saying: “Unkraut vergeht nicht”, which loosely translates to “Bad weeds never die.” It’s an expression often cited to explain why nasty people live so damn long and speaks to a deep seeded belief of unfairness. The good die young. The bad will outlive us all. And isn’t that just horrible.

Only, here’s the thing: death isn’t a negative manifestation. You don’t die because you deserved it, did something or didn’t do something. You die when you’re ready to continue your journey in the non-physical. It’s a transition, not an ending. It can be a relief from suffering, but it doesn’t happen because you suffered enough or too much. Death is not a manifestation, at all, really. It’s a means to an end. You die as a way of continuing your journey in a way that’s most conducive to what you want. We shift into a different dimension (we don’t actually go anywhere. We’re still here. Just not as obviously perceptible) because that new dimension is more conducive to us continuing to manifest what we want and play in the way we want to.

When someone dies, it’s not because anything went wrong. And the fact that they died says absolutely nothing about what kind of person they were, what they deserved (we all deserve joy, no matter what), or what they did or didn’t do. HOW they died, however, does carry a great deal of information.

The experience of death is a co-creation

When someone dies, they do so because it was time for them to transition. The death itself is not a co-creation. No one can cause another person to die (No, not even by murder). So, your grandfather’s death was not your fault. You can’t manifest the death of another. But you can manifest your experience of it.

Everyone who experiences a death is a part of the co-creation of that experience. When a grandfather dies, the entire family experiences it. Perhaps some friends of the family do, as well. Each person will experience this death in their own way. The way that gramps transitioned, will be the perfect manifestation for all involved.

For example, if someone falls into a coma for a few weeks before passing on, it usually means that they were giving the family enough time to say goodbye. It makes for a more gentle transition for those “left behind” than a sudden death. Comas are a way of detaching. They can be healing or a way to mostly transition before fully withdrawing focus. Often, the dying person holds on until all of the living who are involved are ready to let go.

When someone dies tragically, the death is usually experienced with a great deal more pain. The experience of such a death will mirror the incredibly false and powerless beliefs that each “surviving” individual has about death. And, in overcoming that pain, each person will have the opportunity to release those beliefs and find more peace around the idea of death.

When someone dies painfully (and they experience that pain), they are experiencing their own resistance. It isn’t the death that mirrors the resistance, but the pain of letting go. In death, there is no resistance. As soon as we’re “dead”, we let go of all our resistance and rise to an incredibly high vibration. But, some people have a really hard time letting go of their fears and limiting beliefs, even at the end. This is then mirrored by the way they experience their own death.

When deaths are public

When someone dies in a public way, or their death becomes public for some reason or another, the incident is mirroring back the energy of a great many people. Racially motivated shootings stir up our beliefs about racism, and in doing so, give us the opportunity to shift into a different perspective. Believing that someone was killed simply for their race causes us to want peace more than ever. Those who are steeped in powerless beliefs will first move into anger (anger is the emotion that pulls us out of powerlessness, and there are no beliefs that evoke greater powerlessness than the ones we carry about death), but in doing so, they are actually taking the first step towards lining up with a world filled with fairness, equality, peace and love.

When a large number of people hold on to limiting beliefs and have done so for a long time, the mass manifestations will get worse and worse (just as it happens in our own lives, on an individual basis). The pain becomes greater and greater, until we’ve finally had enough and are willing to let go of the beliefs that are causing the pain. Mass manifestations aren’t any different than individual manifestations. They just happen on a bigger level.

You cannot know how someone experienced their death

Another aspect that’s hard for us to make peace with, is the suffering of innocents. When children die, we cannot reconcile why they were made to suffer. You may be thinking “even if I can accept that these tragedies were designed as a kind of “wake up call”, and even if I can get my head around the idea that death is not the end and not really a tragedy, I still can’t fathom how the suffering of children could possibly be helpful in any way.”

The answer is: it’s not. The Universe doesn’t require children to suffer. And no matter how low a society’s or community’s vibration happens to be, it CANNOT manifest suffering into the life of a child, or anyone else. Remember that every person manifests their own reality and their own experience. If someone experiences suffering as they die, it is a manifestation of their own resistance (NOT a punishment, but simply an unwillingness to let go. When you fight the energy of Who You Really Are in life or death, it hurts). If you perceive someone’s death to have been full of suffering, that’s your manifestation.

The truth is, you cannot ever really know how someone experienced their death. You can guess, you can assume, you can even imagine how you would experience that death, but you can’t know their experience. Ever.

In the absence of resistance, there is no pain in dying. This means that a happy child, who carried little resistance (and didn’t come here to pick any up and shift it) will NOT have suffered in death, no matter what it looks like. The spirit can withdraw from the physical enough so that the body can continue to function, even look lucid, but little or no physical sensation actually remains. A person who is not a match to terror and pain cannot manifest terror and pain. It’s entirely possible for someone who got shot to have withdrawn enough from the physical to not have experienced the incident at all. Their body would’ve continued on auto-pilot, playing the part that was necessary for the mass vibration it was designed to mirror, but the majority of that individual’s focus would’ve already been in the non-physical. It’s like dialing down your awareness to a really low level.

If you’ve ever had the experience of coming home and knowing that you drove but not actually remembering the drive at all, you’ll have glimpsed a bit of this auto-pilot. You were there but not really aware. Or, if you’ve ever woken up to realize that you’ve been sleeping on your arm, but don’t feel the pain of it until you’re fully aware, you’ll get the idea of what it’s like to be aware of the body, but feel no sensation. I’m not saying that no one who dies tragically feels pain, but I am saying that those who are not a match to pain CANNOT manifest it.

Why are happy children dying?

People often point out to me that the children and young people who died often seemed to have been free of resistance. They were happy shiny puppies, full of life and joy, an inspiration to all who met them. People describe them as angels. Why would particularly these kinds of light workers choose to transition, and often in such horrific ways?

We are each here for various reasons. At our core, we’re here to experience joy. But, we also know that there are obstacles to that joy – resistance. We know before we come here that there are beliefs that we will pick up at birth and beyond, that will contradict what we want. Some of us choose to be born into pockets of massive resistance. Yes, we CHOOSE this. It’s an ambitious endeavor. We come with a massive desire to uplift and be happy, so massive that we know that it will help us overcome this resistance. Of course, when a huge amount of resistance meets a huge desire for joy, there’s going to be a massive clash. It’s going to be a painful first few years. But, this is how the world is changed. This is how evolution happens. Bit by bit, belief by belief, we each shift and transmute energy from a lower level to a higher one. Some people come in to shift a bit, and some people come in to shift a lot. We each play our part. A painful childhood does not have to mean a painful adulthood. And it’s in the realization of that, and the choosing of a happier life despite what has come before that the Universe and everything in it expands, evolves, becomes more, bigger, better. This is what causes the Universal vibration to keep rising.

Now, some of us don’t come in to change the world by transmuting energy. Some of us come in to mirror the energy of others, like our families, or society. Why would a child come in, pick up almost no resistance (and therefore just be happy all the time and uplift everyone around them) and then die? Because picking up resistance and shifting it wasn’t part of this leg of their journey. They came with the express purpose of transitioning in a way that would mirror some really powerless beliefs to a larger number of people. It makes perfect sense to me that those who transition at a young age are often the brightest lights amongst us. Again, to fully grasp this point, you MUST get over the idea that death, in and of itself, is a bad thing.

Do NOT spend time thinking of your own kids’ deaths!

Nothing shakes us up more than seeing kids die. And that’s precisely why it happens. These kids didn’t attract a horrible death. They were going to transition no matter what and, from a non-physical point of view, chose to do so in a way that would push the most buttons and have the potential of waking a great many people up.

Having said that, it’s not necessary for any parents out there to think of their kids dying and somehow make peace with that idea. For the great majority of you, that bridge will never come, so don’t cross it if you don’t need to. A much larger number of people experienced the deaths of the Columbine and Connecticut students than were actually personally involved in those events. But for each person who heard about such “tragedies” and had a negative emotional reaction of any kind, the event was a mirror. In other words, we don’t all need to lose our own children in order to partake in such a manifestation and have the chance to release whatever particular resistance lies within us. The pain you feel when hearing of someone else’s child dying IS your manifestation. And as you find a way to feel better and succeed, you are shifting your energy (and in a way, the energy of the whole planet, making it easier and easier for everyone to feel better, and ultimately making it less and less necessary for us to manifest these kinds of events).

I’d also like to state that as hard as it may be to hear this, those who do directly experience their own child’s death are always equipped to do so. I don’t mean that they don’t experience massive pain. Of course they do. But they have the ability to overcome that pain. It may take them years to do so, but the ability is there. I’ve worked with enough people in grief to know that as they shift their perspective on death and therefore life, they discover levels of clarity, understanding, and yes, joy that they never knew were possible before. These are levels they could not have attained without the experience of death. There was no other manifestation that would’ve gotten them to let go of the beliefs they so desperately wanted to let go of.

The most awesome bottom line ever

Make peace with death. Make peace with the idea that people will die. Because it’s going to keep happening, both on an individual level and as part of mass co-creations. But don’t try to start with your own family. Start with the general idea of death and work your way inward to more specifics from there. You may never make peace with the idea that your own loved ones will die and that’s ok, too. You may never need to. Cross that bridge when you come to it. You don’t need to deal with hypothetical manifestations that haven’t yet happened. But it will serve you well if you can find a way to look at mass “tragedies” in a way that makes sense to you, doesn’t disempower you, and doesn’t bring you to your knees. In doing so, you are dealing with a current manifestation – the pain you felt when you observed those events. The people involved didn’t die because they deserved to. That idea is based on a complete misunderstanding of what death is. They died because their journey would be better served from the non-physical. And they died in a way that was designed to ultimately uplift the world.

You know, and I know that I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here, but my intuition says “Do it!”… It occurs to me that if Jesus really lived (and I think he did), then his death would’ve mirrored back the resistance of billions of people (over time), and continues to do so today. We’re taught that he died for our sins – and that we should feel forever guilty about it and indebted to him. That really never made sense to me. But given what we discovered together here today, it might be fair to say that he died in a way that ultimately gave us the opportunity to shift out of our “sins”, or our beliefs that contradict what Who We Really Are or God, if you will, thinks about us. Just as many individuals continue to do every day. How awesome is that?