Eddie L Dobbins Jr

Tea with Mom Eddie L Dobbins Jr

The energy for Tea with Mom: Spiritual Lessons on Life and Death, evolved during the 203 days Dobbins spent acting as his mother's primary caregiver before she died of cancer in 2011. Dobbins began to realize as a caregiver, that in death there is the opportunity for healing, for both the patient and the caregiver. The time he spent with his mother proved to be a transformational journey of deep healing leading him through reconciliation to renewal and ultimately enlightenment. Tea with Mom, begins just after his mother's death, on the Island of Bali in Indonesia. Bali is where Dobbins was finally able to allow himself to grieve, to truly experience the gift of the year he spent caring for the mother who had abused and abandoned him as a child. As his mother's son, he found he was able to recognize the sadness in her life, her internal pain. He felt her sorrow. He saw and understood with empathy, compassion how her life had descended into an abyss of unlived possibility. He saw and recognized the scars of injustice. His journey asks whether it is possible to show up in service of a loved one without healing one's personal story. Whether it is possible to move into a deep place of unconditional loving where one's pain subsides into the nothingness from which it arose. Throughout the book, Dobbins chronicle's the various challenges he lived through and how through the act of caregiving, through prayer, intention setting, forgiveness and acceptance he was able to heal his pain and let go of the aspects of his identity - his "story" - that had created limitation.