What's the right way to end a relationship?

For Beliefnet, Thomas Moore offers a young woman asking how to end a one-year relationship, six rules to follow. These are paraphrased:
1. Remember that ending is not a nice thing. Acknowledge the shadow's role which may contain it's own pleasure.
2. Be clear about the ending before you talk about it.
3. You don’t have to give reasons. Love is not reasonable.
4. Be one part firm to two parts gentle.
5. Let the details take care of themselves. This is the end.
6. Moore's final rule in his own words:
"In spite of rule #5, know that closure is only an ideal. You may always wonder about and even regret this ending. You may dream of this person all your life. Deep down in your soul, endings are only commas, not periods. They aren’t as final as they seem to be in the moment. Allow yourself a lot of contradictory feelings, but don’t let them interfere with the achievement of a good, clear ending. Sharp and neat makes gentle possible."

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Moore talks about healing through illness

Following last month's presentation at the University of Minnesota's Center for Spirituality & Healing, Thomas Moore offers a Q&A interview for the centre's online service Taking Charge of Your Health. Moore talks about healing through illness:

"When people get a serious illness they go through a lot of changes. Relationships to family members change. Friends become very disturbed. Work is threatened or suffers or ceases. An awful lot of things happen to a person when they become ill beyond just the physical condition. One of the things people do is struggle with how to maintain their identities. With cancer they may lose their hair. All those things have a social impact.

Out of all that comes a deepening -- not automatically – but a gradual deepening of their sense of who they are as a person. Illness is an opportunity to ask difficult questions. People ask what is important and what isn’t. By working through these things they are healed of many of the problems they had."

When asked about things that people with serious illnesses can do to help themselves heal, Moore responds:

"They should follow their intuition first of all. If their inclination is to trust the medical world, they should. It could be very valuable. If their inclination is to seek out alternative and complementary medicines, they should and feel good about it. Another good step would to be to find someone – a friend, counselor, priest, a rabbi – someone who they can trust and confide in. They have to decide who this person is for themselves. This movement toward congruence and honesty with saying how we feel is an important step. Sometimes families will try to cover up and won’t talk. Sometimes medical people won’t talk straight. The patient can set the tone. Be honest.

Some people have turned to writing. People have written about their illness, and it’s important for them and important for those who read their experience. Writing expressively would be really valuable."

Ater talking about common mistakes people make that might prevent healing, Moore describes his two recent writing projects, including Opus: Finding Your Life's Work, to be released next autumn.

Celebrate Spring 2007 exploring deep ecology

In the spring of 2007, Thomas Moore is offering a weekend workshop at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, with his wife Joan Hanley (Hari Kirin Kaur): Soul Yoga. The session is from Friday 20 April to Sunday 22 April, 2007 at the centre in western Massachusetts. The program description includes, "Using lecture, discussion, creative arts exercises, kundalini yoga, and meditations for creativity, relaxation, and self-acceptance, this workshop will offer simple, time-honored suggestions on how to care for your soul, and the soul of your family, community, and world."

Registration and tuition information is available on the Kripalu site.