Our mental capacities may wane as we age, with slowing of thinking processes, and memory lapses that range from minor forgetfulness to major losses of our cognitive faculties. Alzheimers and arteriosclerotic disease, especially with strokes, may seriously impair our mind.

Largely unrecognized as contributors to declining mental capacities are unresolved trauma memories. Ive had numbers of people who discovered that a significant portion of their fading memory problems cleared when they used TWR to explore issues their unconscious mind found difficult to accept and deal with. Some of these issues had to do with past traumas; others were related to anxieties about how to adjust to declining physical and mental capacities; and particularly distress about being a burden to others. Paradoxically, this last concern could actually produce and/or worsen the very problems people are worried about, because they wind themselves up with these worries and this worsens their symptoms, their distress about the symptoms, and their abilities to cope with them.

Sleep may be elusive in old age. Common contributing factors include lack of adequate physical activities; pains of any sort; and worries. All of these may influence mental functions, and all respond well to TWR.

Mind also enables us to sort out priorities and to set intentions for pursuing the paths we feel are appropriate and best for our current situations. However, grief may cloud our mental functions and we may need to make deliberate efforts to sharpen our focus and to deal with various aspects of our wholistic beingness that need attention.

Dorothy was an 62 year old retired secretary who had had two difficult marriages, both ending in divorces following disclosure of her husbands infidelities. She had been fortunate that her youngest daughter invited her to live with her and provided a home for her for 14 years. She, in turn, had provided a lot of support to her daughter, helping with household chores, shopping and child care.

She came to me after she was diagnosed with lung cancer and knew she had only a few weeks or months to live.

Issues of spirit are prominent aspects of end of life concerns for most people.

Those who hold religious beliefs about God and an afterlife may feel greatly supported by these teachings and through their communities of faith, or may be concerned to various degrees about feeling undeserving due to perceived or actual transgressions or sins against their religious obligations and about their sins of omission or commission.

Those who have no belief or disbelief in a spirit connection in their lives may, on the one hand avoid suffering guilt over lack of belief or failures to adhere to religious practices, but on the other hand may suffer from sadness, disappointments or despair over their anticipation of the approach of a total end to their existence when they die. On the other hand, they may feel good over a life well lived with satisfactions and achievements they experienced.

Those who have direct awarenesses of their own spirit and of connections with spiritual dimensions may find great hope and solace in knowing they are returning to a place of love and healing, where God, angels, spirit guides, spirits of deceased relatives, and friends await their arrival.

It is most interesting that 30-60% of people who lose someone close to them will either see, hear, or have a strong inner sense of the presence of the departed (Vargas, et al., 1989).

Similarly, those who are approaching death often see angels, and/or spirits of relatives and/or friends who are deceased, coming and telling them their arrival in spirit dimensions is lovingly awaited (Amatuzio, Web ref.; Devers, 1997; LeGrand, 1997; Morse with Perry, 1994; Schneidman, Edwin. 1980; Wills-Brandon, 2000).

So with the visits of deceased relatives and friends, and with deathbed visions, there appear to be substantial confirmations of spirit existence. Further research on reincarnation memories suggest that spirits incarnate periodically over many lifetimes (Alexander, 2012; .Atwater, 1999; Morse with Perry, 1990; 1994; Ring, 1984; Taylor, 2009).

A collective consciousness exists.

Within families and other social groups there are shared awarenesses through verbal and non- verbal communications, as well as from shared experiences over time. With small groups there tends to be more homogeneity than with larger groups, where greater numbers of people and greater variabilities of cultural factors introduce increasingly diverse collective awarenesses.

Considerable anecdotal and research evidence (Benor, 2018) exists for mind-to-mind communications. Therefore we should expect that a collective consciousness will develop between individual members of such groups.

Research strongly suggests that when events occur that impact large numbers of people, there will be a collective consciousness response. Extending beyond social responses per se, there is fascinating research showing the events that stir masses of people, such as a visit of the Pope to another country, a natural or human disaster such as the events of 9-11, or the O.J. Simpson trial that was broadcast to millions of people around the world, can influence electronic random number generators to demonstrated deviations in their functioning when events of significance to large numbers of people occur, such as seasons end sports events, a visit of the Pope to a foreign country, or 911. We have no idea why or how this happens, but this suggests that the collective consciousness includes energies that can influence the physical world.

Clinical observations suggest there is a collective consciousness. Carl Jung found that there were various images, symbols and ideas that were prevalent and held in common within the consciousness of individuals who were part of a group of people. Often, there were iconic images that would evoke responses in individuals that were common to the group, even when the individuals were not consciously aware that the images in their conversations and dreams were common to many others in their culture.

In larger groups of people, such as cities, countries and the global community, there are also commonly held beliefs and practices that are taken for granted by large segments of the population as being true and real. Rarely are these conscious, but once we look for them, they are readily apparent.

• Humans are a higher form of living being than any other species
• Humans are entitled to dominion over all other living beings
• Humans are entitled to dominion over the land, waters and air and that is contained therein
• That other life forms are just resources for human use and exploitation
• Individuals and groups of humans are entitled to control and exploit other humans if they have the power and resources to exert this domination
• Humans can deal effectively with the dangers of carbon dioxide emissions produced by humans, global warming, releases of ammonia from the oceans and bogs around the world due to rising temperatures, extinctions of numerous species, pollution, and runaway over- population so that these need not cause extinctions of much of the life as we know it today on our planet
• Threats to our collective survival that are raising such warnings and alarms are exaggerated and there is no reason to alter our awarenesses, attitudes or behaviors rather than continuing with the routine business of life, as usual, holding onto hopes for changes in global climate change
• The belief that there is little point in our making changes ourselves, as our individual contributions to the collective factors influencing climate change and other global problems are so small that they really dont matter

A small, but growing number of people are seriously concerned that we may not be able to alter our collective behaviors that are producing these threats to survival of much, and perhaps even of most life on our planet. Some are concerned that we may have passed one or more irreversible tipping points already, so that global extinction may actually be likely and not just a theoretical possibility. We have no way to know for certain in these matters, but the overall threat to collective survival is clearly a strong possibility, and there is growing concern that this may even be a probabilty.

Those who are more pessimistic in this portion of the human collective consciousness are struggling to absorb the imports and impacts of aspects of the above collective beliefs and how they are playing out in our world today. Many of these people are beginning to grieve what they perceive as the approaching end of most or all of the current life on our planet, including possibly themselves, and with increasing likelihood their children and grandchildren.

As with our individual grief for individual people, for pets and all the other living beings on our planet, our collective grief over the probable collective demise of most living beings invites us to process our feelings, thoughts, and relationships along with any other residual grief issues we are carrying that are triggered by the impending mass extinctions.

To address our grief, it is essential to understand the grief process. Grief includes recognized stages of experience. Here is a brief summary of these (Benor, 2015).

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1975) identified five clear steps in the process of grieving, including: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I have worked with many individuals who experienced varieties of losses in their lives, large and small. I find that these stages can be expanded helpfully to include seven distinct steps, divided into three major processes of grief:

1. Initial stages of grief responses Generally 24-48 hours

A. Shock: Oh, my God! or What terrible news!

B. Denial: It cant be true! It must be someone else who died. or I just saw a week ago! or God wouldnt have taken someone so young/ good/ important in this world!

C. Bargaining: Please let this not be true! or I pray that this is a mistake! or I wont believe this till.!

2. Middle stages of grief Generally 3-12 months for a friend; 2-5 years for a close family member

A. Depression: sadness, crying, missing and longing for the person; loss of appetite, difficulties sleeping, troubled dreams and nightmares; apathy, lack of energy to carry on with life; feeling empty and that life isnt complete without the deceased; wishing to die too in order to be reunited with the deceased or in order to stop suffering the pain of having lost the deceased; and sometimes the pain of the loss or the longing to be reunited with the deceased is so great that a person will suicide.

B. Anger: At the deceased for abandoning us, for not having taken steps to live a healthier or safer and longer life; at ourselves for acts of omission or commission that might have contributed to the death, for not having helped the deceased enough, for feeling guilty even when there was really nothing substantial we could have done to prevent the death; at other people who might have treated the deceased poorly or failed to offer support; and at God for allowing the deceased to be ill or to suffer in illness, or through trauma, and to die. Anger may be so great that the bereaved want to kill someone in revenge. In tribal societies people often act upon these feelings of anger and it is not uncommon to see revenge killings or even battles resulting in such situations.

C. Guilt: Over our acts of omission or commission that might have contributed to the death, such as not having helped the deceased enough; over being alive ourselves when the deceased is no longer alive; over feeling angry, especially at God; and over having vengeful feelings and even wishes to hurt or kill others in retaliation when the grief is about a death caused by someone else.

3. Resolution/ Acceptance stage of grief 3 months-several years, overlapping with (2)

A. Recalling positive memories about the deceased; adjusting to a world where the deceased is no longer physically present; finding other relationships and ways to deal with life without the presence/participation of the deceased.

B. A majority of people, but not everyone, experience the presence of the deceased when that person was psychologically close to them seeing, hearing or just sensing they are present (Lazarou, et al., 1988). This leads many to understand that physical death is not the end of existence. This is one of the blessings of a good grief. (More on this in Benor, 2004; 2006).

The above are very general outlines of grief reactions. Specific aspects of each stage may occur in any order. Each of the aspects of grief may surface repetitively at any time in the grief process, often with considerable intensity.

The tapping therapies are excellent for dealing with grief and anticipatory grief. TWR/WHEE, EFT, TFT and other EP approaches enable us to deal with all of the stages of grief, and to reduce the intensities and often to release completely any and all of the elements of grief we are experiencing.

Reducing the intensities of our feelings does not alter the facts related to losses we experience or anticipate. If we have lost someone close to us or anticipate serious losses, we will still have to deal with the factual changes in our lives related to these losses. But we can lighten or even free ourselves of the burdens of heavy feelings that get in the way of our thinking clearly and of making the best possible decisions.

Kim came to me for help with troublesome depression three months following the death of her husband of 43 years. She had been moody on returning to work a week after the funeral, and this had progressed to difficulties concentrating, insomnia, and inconvenient distractibility. Her grown son and daughter lived with their families in distant cities and were concerned but unable to offer more than phone support, and she had no other relatives or friends who were able to help. While not overtly suicidal, Kim had little appetite, was barely eating, and had lost 15 pounds. She was quite worried she might make a serious mistake at work and jeopardize her livelihood, and this was in turn making her concentration worse. She had no friends with whom she felt close enough to share her grief.

It is not uncommon to find discussions and research on grief over personal, individual or group losses, as well as reports of the personal journey through grief. (See also the grief issues dealt with by Bob, above.) But the collective grief of large numbers of people is a subject that has not received nearly as much attention until recent years, when group violence has devastated communities, cities and nations following natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and devastations of wars (Beland, 2008; Casserly, 2011; Elizz, Web ref; Hetherman, Web ref; Milstein, 2017; TalkDeath; Van Susteren, Web ref). With many people traumatized by such events, dealing with the collective mourning can be complicated and challenging. Resources may be limited, and local therapists may be overwhelmed by the numbers of people needing urgent, intensive support and therapy. And while urgent support from outside the affected areas may be available immediately after the traumas, long term help is often unavailable.

Larger scale challenges of anticipatory and post-trauma grief are clearly looming and unfolding, with unknowable timelines and consequences. We are faced with the evolving global threats of climate change, rising sea levels, severe weather instability and flooding, population growth, limited food and water resources, and devastations of pollution, as well as growing disparities in incomes between the super-rich and the rest of the population. Disasters of massive proportions are increasingly likely to develop. Anticipatory grief and materialized grief are likely to confront many of us.

If we want to know how to deal with the challenges of dealing with collective grief, we can take our lessons from the stages of grief acknowledged for individuals who are facing losses and learning how to deal with them. After all, the collective grief is built on the grief experienced by individual members of the group.

It can be arguably proposed that many humans are collectively in the first stage of grief detailed above: that of shock, denial and bargaining. It is to most people difficult to absorb, if not actually inconceivable that climate change and the other disasters created by humans are of such proportions that they might end all life as we know it on our entire planet. Yet, an estimated 87 percent of climatologists are in agreement that these rises in global temperatures may be rapidly approaching, if not already exceeding, the tipping point for accelerating, irreversible heating of our planet to a level where most life as we know it cannot survive, and beyond which there will be no return.

There are resistances to connecting consciously with these fears and great reluctance to consider that this rise in temperatures is not only possible but is already in progress (Shepherd, Web ref). I believe that this represents a group denial, typical in general of individual grief, that is very likely contributing to these collective denials about climate change.

Another contributing factor is what I call neuroplastic blindness . Our brains usually default to familiar nervous system pathways, many of which are developed in childhood. These mental maps, imprinted in brain nerve patterns, are our internal GPS system that guides us so that we dont have to consider each decision point in routine matters that weve explored and experienced earlier in life. Whatever is unfamiliar is suspect or excluded from our personal realities, out of habit. So, for instance, we have no neurons that are assigned to global warming and other planetary disasters that we havent experienced. It is thus difficult for us, literally, to get our minds around the statements and alarms about disastrous global climate change that scientists are warning us about (Benor, 2016).

Neuroplastic blindness may also be present around issues of death and grieving. Many in Western society avoid even mentioning the words death and dying, using instead such terms as deceased, departed, passed over, eternal rest, and the like. With these sorts of habitual avoidances of even speaking the word death, the impending extinctions of much of the life on our planet is a subject we are habituated to avoid. This makes it difficult to discuss the serious effects of climate change.

In view of the above circumstances, learning to understand and deal with our collective grief is highly likely to become increasingly important with the passage of time and the worsening of the effects of climate change.

Here are some suggestions that may prove helpful in planning for support for the enormous numbers of people who are likely to experience anticipatory grief and full grief:

• Education to understand the stages of grief and how to manage them should be made widely available to therapists, counselors, medical and nursing personnel, clergy, schoolteachers, and others involved in providing individual support and therapy.
• Self-help for dealing with grief is feasible, using newer methods of treatment.
• Prominent among these are Energy Psychology (ACEP, Web ref.). These methods are easily learned and used, yet profoundly effective in releasing stress, distress and pains of all sorts.
• Muscle relaxation
• Exercise both to release and reduce tensions, and to add to ones self-healing repertoire
• Talking about our concerns, worries and fears with others
• More people will need help than can be provided by the current numbers of therapists and counselors who are available, who can provide professional grief counseling. Laypersons can be taught to teach grief management methods, particularly after they have learned to use these methods for themselves. (As mentioned above, this has been done with impressive successes in Africa and other parts of the world.)
• Schoolteachers have found these methods, particularly Energy Psychology, enormously helpful in their classrooms, especially where classes are large, special education classes have been eliminated, and school counselors are unavailable.
• Members of the clergy can teach these methods, as appropriate, as can other members of their congregations.
• These methods can also be learned from those who have found them successful, who can pay it forward. It is quite common for children who learn these methods to teach them spontaneously to their siblings, parents and peers.

I also add that my experience with tapping therapies has been that when people are severely upset, depressed and/or anxious, they may have difficulties concentrating and difficulties remembering the long sequence of acupressure points used in some of the tapping techniques. This is why I developed TWR/ WHEE, which just involves alternate tapping on the left and right sides of the body.

Others may be embarrassed to use EP acupuncture point methods in public, lest people think they are strange. Children in particular are sensitive to this, as anything different or odd may invite teasing and bullying. Children struggling with problems that bring them to me for help definitely do not need more negativity in their lives! With TWR/ WHEE, people can just alternate tapping discretely on the left and right sides of their bodies (unrelated to acupressure points), in ways that are easily remembered and that do not draw attention. For instance, discrete tappig can be done gently and quietly with ones feet on the floor.

Dealing with climate change and other challenges to our survival also raises angers at those who perpetrated these abuses of our planet, and who continue to do so for their personal gain and profits. Likewise, depression over the progressing effects of human abuses of our planet, and the refusal of major polluters like the US to seriously and urgently address these problems are likely to contribute to worsening of the depression component of our individual and collective grief. Again, the self-healing approaches detailed above can be helpful with these issues.

No one knows for certain what the final, crucial tipping point is, beyond which global climate change is irreversible. If we have not reached this point already, then working on the grief that hinders our accepting there is a clear and present danger and acting to halt and reverse climate change may be possible. If we are too late in overcoming the resistances to accepting that

It is very easy with the trauma of grief of any sort to get into a state of overwhelm, in which we feel the problems confronting us are too great to manage. Our unconscious mind is often programmed to stand guard against our conscious awareness of serious threats, particularly when the threats are repeated or chronic, and when they are of major consequences. So our unconscious may resort to varieties of maneuvers to protect us against going into overwhelm.

When we, as individuals, experience or witness acute psychological trauma, such as physical injury, rape or life-threatening experiences, our emotional reactions may be intense. One of the ways our unconscious mind can protect us from being overwhelmed is to shut down our emotions at the time of the trauma or following it. This prevents our emotional responses from incapacitating us, thereby lessening the likelihood we will be frozen into inactivity by our anxieties and fears. This explains why some soldiers, emergency service personnel, and ordinary citizens who encounter disasters are able to respond with a calmness that appears unnatural.

Alarm bells of anxiety may ring out in our conscious awareness. We may feel any or all of the first two stages of grief, including

• Stage 1: shock, denial and/or bargaining.
• Stage 2: depression, anger and/or guilt.

At modest intensities, these are normal responses to major changes in our lives, especially when the source of the grief is unexpected, or we havent been aware of the likelihood of the loss.

At levels our inner awarenesses experience as overwhelm, these aspects of grief may be incapacitating. We may be unable to absorb the immensity of the changes in our lives that the experienced or anticipated losses entail. Our unconscious mind may protect us from such overwhelms by burying the various aspects of stages 1 and 2 from our conscious awareness.

Dora literally lost her 12 year old Jody, when Jody failed to return from school one day. Jody was her only child, to whom she had devoted the better part of her life following her divorce when Jody was still an infant. Dora was overwhelmed at first by anxieties and fears. After several weeks, when family, neighbors, friends, and the police could find no clues of her whereabouts, Dora became oddly calm, though distinctly distant in her relationships with family and friends who perceived her as cold and unfeeling.

What happened was that Dora didnt allow herself to grieve, because she felt that that would be like being unfaithful and giving up on any chance of a hope that Jody would ever be found alive. It took many years of psychotherapy for Dora to move past the stage of denial and finally start to grieve the loss of her daughter. It was at this point that Dora discovered Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), the most widely used of the tapping therapies.

Within just a few weeks, she was able to tap away much of her unresolved grief.

In cases of such overwhelms over losses of people dear to us, our unconscious mind may lead us to avoid or shut down our conscious awareness of our grief.