Tag Archive for: #meditation

Planting Seeds

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Planting Seeds

I’ll be traveling to Australia from October 28, 2026 until January 19, 2027, and I’ll be taking private clients again from January 25, 2027. It’s the longest I’ve been away from the USA since I moved here 20 years ago.

I’m going to do a stint of volunteer work at my favorite retreat center, Hidden Valley, owned by the Clairvision School of Meditation. Most of the time I’ll probably be cleaning toilets, making food for lots of people, and helping out with some small building projects. I’ll also get to see my family and be surrounded by love, which will be wonderful.

I want you to know that I’m coming back to do a lot of private client work in 2027, and I’ll be fired up with a lot to give.

I’m excited to go now because I’ve been through the biggest 18 months of my life. I was with my dearest love and husband, Karl, through the final phase of his life battling cancer, and I was present at his death. It was an incredibly life-changing experience, a fire of transformation for both of us.

Whenever I asked Karl what he wanted in our relationship, he would answer enthusiastically: “Growth!” He wanted us to change and transform together. Well, we got that in spades at the end of his life. Not much could change anyone more.

It’s hard to write about this because, as anyone who has been through their own version knows, it is everything. Not one thing. Love, pain, heartbreak, beauty, heart opening, deconstruction, victory, loss, sadness, and even joy. These experiences are precious and unique, and at the same time absolutely universal. We all face loss, illness, and death one way or another.

I noticed this while going in and out of the hospital during Karl’s treatment. I was in the midst of so much feeling, and also very much engaged in my own willpower to stay strong for him. In the elevators and on the path from the parking garage to the entrance, I saw women with cooler bags going to visit their husbands, and families visiting a loved one. Some of them seemed to know exactly what they were doing, as if they’d been in and out many more times than I had. We all come and go from this world, and there is something beautiful about embracing that, as well as something heartbreaking.

The day after Karl died, my world cracked open. I sat on the front deck feeling the sun on my face, and I began to pull the dead plants out of my ceramic pots. I poured in new soil and planted all the flower seeds I had saved. I did it because it required no thought, because it put my hands in the dirt, and because it was all I could do. I also couldn’t bear to look at those dead plants anymore. It was soothing and hopeful, even while I was completely ripped apart.

Three months later, many of those seeds are blooming on my deck and giving me daily joy. They’re a celebration of the way life moves on, continuing to grow and bloom even as we face loss.


planting seeds

It was a special kind of love. My heart still aches for his hugs, his kisses, his proclamations of love. We said “I love you” almost every time we walked in or out of a room where the other was. We hugged many times a day. We had so much joy in each other’s presence.

In the first weeks after he died, I’d catch myself driving home from an appointment, excited to see him. Then I realized I had been excited to see him every day for most of the 8 years we were together. Now he was gone, and I was still excited. That is an emptiness I still don’t know how to fill.

It’s important to say that in that special love, his death was also beautiful. It’s still too raw to go into much detail. But I can say that all the training I’ve done with the Clairvision School of Meditation, both as an Inner Space Techniques (IST) practitioner and as a client of IST, helped me be there for him more than I would have thought possible.

Samuel Sagan, the founder of the Clairvision School of meditation, used to say you wouldn’t know if you had done the work until you died, and then it would be obvious. For Karl and me, it was obvious. We had done far more work than either of us realized. I trust that our preparation for death is part of why he soared to the highest light in his afterlife. I’m so grateful for that.

At the end, this amazing man, the love of my life, was calm and present. He was laughing until a day before he died. He let me help him leave, so that his exit was full of light. It was Peace, but not soft and sweet. It was fiery, profound, quiet Peace, the kind that breaks people open.

I was honored to support him so fully in that transition. I’m grateful to my teacher, my friends, and all the work I’d done leading up to it. It makes me enthusiastic about helping more people change their lives, and their deaths, in this way.

In the months afterward, and still to an extent, I’ve felt a heartbreak like nothing I’d known, as if my whole being had been ripped apart. Yet I kept seeing clients, because of all the love around me and the profundity of the way IST holds me and others. Receiving IST in the days and weeks after he died brought an even deeper paradigm shift. Parts of me that had helped Karl through this time came forward, which felt miraculous. High parts of myself knew just what to do to take him to the pinnacle of himself and to receive the highest frequency of light in and after his death. Friends who connected for me held the depth, and helped me receive the catalyst of transformation that was his death.

What a Grace!

That kind of grace doesn’t come to everyone. But when it does, it rubs off on the people around. I think we all felt it in some way: his family, the medical teams who worked with him, and more than anyone, me.

I know I may sound a little too deep in what some would call magical thinking. But if we don’t make room for mystery and try to control everything, there are other prices to pay: a closed heart, a barricaded self, a stuckness in suffering that goes on unnecessarily long. So I’ll say plainly what I can only offer from my own experience.

I’m changed in ways it will take time to understand. I also have a new, profound respect for Inner Space Techniques, which I’ve practiced with clients and received as a client for over 25 years. In my experience, being present at a death, your own or someone else’s, brings so much light and clarity. It opened my inner vision and knowing, opened my heart, deconstructed core aspects of my identity, and took me into levels of Being I had thought were available only to high initiates. This is a high promise, I know. But I now know it from real experience, as both practitioner and client.

Karl practiced meditation and Clairvision IST for 8 years before he died. He began by quitting alcohol. He just dropped it one day and never went back. At the same time, he started sitting every morning for 45 minutes or more, and he never missed a morning until he was hospitalized in April 2025. Even then, he did it when he could. We meditated together in the hospital many times.

He went on a number of IST retreats with the School, doing hours of practice every day to deconstruct his core inner wounds and samskaras (roughly translated as emotional imprints). He was so sincere and sweet about it. He always wanted a practice from me when I had one to offer. He loved to do the work.

That sincerity shaped the way he faced his illness and his death. There were massive disappointments and hurts, and he wanted so much to live. But he kept opening his heart anyway, receiving me and all the help around him. By the time he died he was so, so open that it was sometimes incredibly vulnerable just to be in the room with him.

And beautiful.

I don’t want to forget that. It was beautiful. The mind can plaster over this Grace and beauty with stories, regrets, and hurts. No. I won’t get stuck in that fantasy of the ordinary mind. It was wonderful. I wouldn’t have wished it any differently, except, of course, if it could have been another 20 years, with so much more life and love together.

But none of us really chooses the timing of our exit, and even those who think they do, do they? Coming and going is part of being human. Embracing that, while painful, is also an incredible experience of being part of the greater motion of the Divine Mother’s universal plan.

I’m not going to go on. I just wanted to share that being present in the most difficult parts of life, while painful, can also be deeply transformative and surprisingly full of Grace. That is the biggest thing IST can do for you, and for me. It helps us to receive.

So I’m off to plant a few more seeds, in Australia, in myself, and in the soil of the work to come. I’ll be back in January, and I can’t wait to see how everything has grown, and to see you.

With love,
Samantha

Recommended Reading for Anyone Going Through a Death Process or Curious to Know More About That