Dear Reader:
 
I'm not sure what possesses me right now to write about working with murderers. The impetus behind this is an acknowledgment of something I experienced while I was working with one. I remember both what I felt around this person before he committed the crime and how shocked I was to feel the energetic shift that had occurred within him after he killed.
 
The moment I first got a sense of this guy, I could feel that this person could commit murder. Some people talk about it in jest using sayings like "I could have killed him/her" or "I was so angry, I wanted to commit murder." This was something different.
 
Murderers have an extremely intense personality or streak inside...at least the ones that I have met. They have to have one (or a total absence of one, i.e., anti-social.) The act of killing must be so intense. This feeling of having the power to take a life, and then taking one, has to bring with it some false sense of temporary superiority. Back to this guy...I knew he was capable. I could feel how he was living on the edge of life. He carried a kind of tension that was indescribable but constant. When I found out after that he had indeed killed someone, I can't say I was all that surprised.
 
What amazed me most about the energetic shift that occurred after the fact was that it seemed like all of the tension he carried prior to shifted and went into his head. It was as if the life force that he carried that I knew to be him went completely to his brain; and in that space, he seemed absent. His intensity shifted, but within that shift he had lost his connection to humanity. Oddly enough, as I am typing this I realize that by committing murder, it was he who got killed in the process. The person, who died, died. But the killer who is now in prison is also dead.
 
We may have different feelings about the victim and particularly the killer. But as we grapple with making sense of the killer's mind, we have to remember that he was the one who created his destiny. He could have chosen or acted otherwise. He had the power to do so.
 
What strikes me as odd is that through and through, this is not just about the difference between knowing what is right and what is not. This is also a lesson on how powerful we are as human beings.
 
In every moment, we have choice. We choose to be angry, hostile, kind, compassionate, etc. We choose how we treat the people around us at home or work or other. We are so powerful that we get to create the life we are living. We get to change what we can through intention, effort, and sometimes hard work. In fact, we are so powerful that one move in any direction can change us indefinitely like it changed him.
 
Living a spiritual life in the physical world is about being able to channel our individual and unique spirits into the flow of our lives producing results that reflect who we are as people and who we wish to be. It is about making the world a better place so that we recognize ourselves as being better than we were yesterday because of our contributions.
 
It is through this action that we create and shape our identities and support our connection to all living things.