Giving someone You Love a Blessing

In my last blog entry, I started writing about the topic of Legacy and about writing legacy letters. If you haven’t read it, you might want to go back and read that entry before this one. 

When I was in training to become a Certified sage-ng Leader (CSL) with Sage-ing International, I also decided to train with Rachael Freed to become a Certified Legacy Facilitator. When I signed up for this training, I had no idea what I was going to learn. As I mentioned in my last entry, I didn’t really think I had much of a legacy to leave, because I didn’t have much money or any precious or valuable possessions. But Rachael showed me how wrong I was very quickly.

Rachael told us that the legacy letter grew out of the ancient Jewish practice of a father leaving an ethical will to his sons. Rachael told us that the ethical will originated in Genesis 47–49, “when Jacob called his twelve sons—but not his daughter—to his deathbed. Shortly before he died, he blessed his sons and extracted a promise that they would bury his remains in the land of Canaan, where his ancestors were buried.” (2) She also wrote this in her first book women’s lives, women’s legacies: creating your own ethical will. She wrote her first book to help women realize that this very meaningful practice of leaving an ethical will should not be restricted to men and their sons.

And one of the very first things Rachael taught us in our training was how to write a blessing. Learning how to do this alone completely changed how I saw the practice of leaving a legacy. When you write a blessing, you can give it to someone you care about by itself on a card, or you can include it in a longer legacy letter as the last paragraph. You can write a blessing by beginning each sentence with “May you…” or “I wish for you…” or “I hope for you…” You can write one for anyone and for any occasion. In your blessing, you have an opportunity to express your love even more deeply than you do in the rest of your legacy letter.

First, I would like to share an abbreviated blessing that Rachael shared in her book Your Legacy Matters. This is an excerpt of a blessing written by a mother to her son, who is going to become a father.

     “I remember when you were a small boy. When asked what you wanted to be when you grew up, you once answered, ‘a daddy.’ Here you are! …I wish for you the joy of a busy, messy, loud house…I wish for you a fridge covered in art projects and spelling tests. May you feel the pride of hearing a line in a Christmas play well-spoken…I wish you the rich, rich texture of a family life that is uniquely yours. I wish for you, dear son, a small measure of the immense love and joy you have brought to me.” (14)

And because this is my blog, I’ll also share the blessing I wrote when I was taking the training;

“Marnie, I’m so happy you’ve decided to make the leap into retirement. In this new life you’re starting, may you wake up in the morning excited to see what the day may bring. May you discover things to do that cause you to lose track of time. May you meet new people who enrich your life in unexpected ways. And may you come to see your new life as an adventure.”

Rachael says that you can write a blessing in 5 minutes, and it has been my experience with people in my workshops that they can do it in 7 or 8. I also ask my students to read their blessing aloud, and they are always wonderful. I hope after you’ve read this blog entry, you’ll try writing one, and I hope you will share it with the person you wrote it for. And, if you do it, I would love it if you would share how you felt about it in the comment section.

In my next blog entry, I will write about legacy letters.