This document discusses communication and caring for the spirit at the end of life. It explores how people express their spirituality through embodied experiences, symbols, metaphors, stories, rituals, prayer, art and silence. Contemplative listening involves vulnerability, living with questions rather than seeking to fix things, and compassionate presence. Enabling creativity, resilience, hope and being held safely allows the gifts of dying to be experienced. Recognizing and speaking the language of the spirit requires developing reverence, ability to stay with suffering, doing one's own spiritual work, and learning from experience.

2. Creativity and Dying:
Communication in Caring for
the Spirit at the End of Life
Meg Hegarty
Illustration: Michael Leunig

3. Ageing & Dying
Living fully and preparing
for dying:
-“the final career in life:
moving towards death”
(MacKinlay E, 2006)
Time of transition: “in-between time”/
liminal or thin space

4. Do we recognise and hear the language with
which the person‟s spirit is speaking?

5. Expressions of spirit(uality)
Depend on
personality,
culture (social, religious & family),
the times in which we live,
life experiences and developmental capacities.

6. Language of the spirit
Whole person - includes head, heart, gut, spirit
Embodied: dance, touch, tears,
laughter,
and physical symptoms

7. Symbolic language
“We forget that the strongest influences
upon our lives are always
symbolic. Contrary to common belief, we
do not respond to the actual or the
concrete; we respond to what each event,
relationship or feeling means to us
symbolically.”
Reeves, 1999, p73

8. Symbolic language
• Metaphors
– Physical: “Signs, symptoms and symbols of
spiritual distress” – Heyse-Moore, ….
– Verbal: Words, phrases, stories
• John‟s story
– Art, music, poetry, silence,
beauty
– Dreams

9. Language of the spirit
Whole person - includes head, heart, gut, spirit
Embodied: dance, touch, tears,
laughter,
and physical symptoms.
Symbolic – image, metaphor, story
– meaning

10. Ritual
The place and healing creativity of ritual

11. Prayer

12. How do we see spiritual struggle?
Or a sense of being abandoned by God,
or what gives meaning?

13. Silence
Some
experiences
are too deep
for words…

14. Silence
Silence is the language of God.”
- Rumi

15. “Dying people in
particular are often in
a purgatory of
routinized
communication, and
they crave silence.”
(Halifax J, 2009, p 109)

16. “To be silent enough to stay
with something… without
feeling so uncomfortable
you have to say something
or do something or change
something…The longer I
stayed in palliative care the
less I spoke.” (Nurse 3)

17. Language of the spirit
Whole person - includes head, heart, gut, spirit
Embodied: dance, touch, tears, laughter, physical symptoms...
Symbolic – image, metaphor, story – meaning
Beauty, nature, poetry, music, art, literature…
Ritual – celebration, letting go…
Prayer / meditation - awe & intimacy
Silence
Values-holding in compassion, living fully
Struggle AND peace, trust, letting go

18. How do we hear and speak
this language?
Compassionate presence and
Contemplative listening
…often in silence

19. Hearing the language:
3 Kinds of Listening
• Diagnostic listening - listening for
• Empathic listening – listening to
• Contemplative listening – listening with
(Byrne M, 2011)

20. Contemplative listening:
“the vulnerability of listening and
having no answers”
(Lunn, 1990)
“living the questions…”
(Rainer Marie Rilke, 1934)
Shift from “fixing” to
presence/staying with
(Hegarty et al, 2010)

21. We speak this language when:
• We “live the questions” with people
• We’re present with suffering, in silence often,
contemplatively and compassionately, letting go of our
need to fix things, so we can be fully present
• We hear and use the dying person’s language
• We facilitate simple, meaningful rituals
• We respect & reverence struggles as much as peace
• We remember that this language is of the whole body and
person, and deeper than cognitive function.

22. Enabling the gifts in dying
creativity,
resilience,
hope,
through
being held
safely,
listened to,
heard,
reverenced.

23. References
Margaret Byrne, 2001, lecture notes in “Care of the spirit in
palliative care” postgraduate topic, Flinders University.
Fischer K, 1995, Autumn Gospel. Integration Books: New Jersey.
Halifax J 2009 Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and
Fearlessness in the Presence of Death. Shambhala: Boston.
Hegarty M 2007 Care of the spirit that transcends
religious, ideological and philosophical boundaries. Indian
Journal of Palliative Care, 12(2):42-47.
Hegarty, M.M., Breaden, K.M., Swetenham, C.M. and Grbich,
C.F. (2010). Learning to Work with the "Unsolvable"; Building
capacity for working with refractory suffering. Journal of Palliative
Care, 26(4 ), p.287-294

24. Heyse-Moore LH On Spiritual Pain in the Dying. Mortality,
1 :297-315, 1996
Keen S,1990 To a Dancing God: Notes of a spiritual traveller. Harper
Collins.
Mackinlay E, 2006, Ageing, Spirituality and Palliative Care, p69.
Mako C, Galek K, Poppito S 2006 Spiritual pain among patients
with advanced cancer in palliative care. Journal of Palliative
Medicine, 9(5), pp1106-1113.
Nolan S, Saltmarsh P and Leget C 2011 (for EAPC Spiritual
Care Taskforce))

25. Rilke RM The Selected Poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke. New York:
Random House Inc., 1987.
Reeves P, 1999, Women‟s intuition: unlocking the wisdom of
the body. p73. Conari Press: Berkeley.
Savage, 1996, cited in Mundle RG, 2011, The spiritual strength
story in end-of-life care: two case studies. Palliative and
Supportive Care, 9(4), pp420-21.
Pictures
Michael Leunig - slides 2 & 9,
Belinda Clatworthy – slides 14, 17,
Meg Hegarty – slides 5, 12, 15, 19, 23

26. Points for discussion
What do we need to develop in ourselves
to recognise and speak the language of
the spirit effectively?
How do we learn this?

27. meg.hegarty@flinders.edu.au

28. What do we need?
• Deep reverence for the wisdom of the other‟s
spirit
• Ability to stay with, in the struggle
• Ability to be silent, to cope with not
knowing, not fixing
• Own spiritual awareness and practice
• Doing our own spiritual / inner work (healing
wounded healers)

30. Spirit
• Essence
• Energy / life force
• Spark of the Divine / God
(known by many different names)
• Ground of Being, Deep Mystery
• Higher Self / The Self
• The Human Spirit
• “One closer to me than I am to
myself”

31. „Spirituality is the dynamic dimension of human
life that relates to the way persons (individual
and community) experience, express and/or
seek meaning, purpose and transcendence, and
the way they connect to the moment, to self, to
others, to nature, to the significant and/or the
sacred.‟
- Nolan S, Saltmarsh P and Leget C, 2011
(for EAPC Spiritual Care Taskforce)

32. Anam Cara
“We live in the
shelter of each
other.”
(Celtic wisdom)