Fact: Everyone dies.

Opinions: Aging is dread-full and death is frightening.

Our bodies will die, but the experience of arriving at the cessation of sensation and breath might just be a thrilling ride. Drawing on a lifetime of aging and years of being guided by different drummers, David and Doug invite unfettered curiosity about your opinions, beliefs, and experience through questions that invoke joy, receptivity, compassion, and fearlessness, which may help you survive your aging and dying with a dancer’s grace. Melting Into Sweetness offers ways to get a running head start while you still can.

If we are lucky to live long enough, we are rewarded with both challenges and infirmities, along with some wisdom and joy along the way (if we have invested our time well). The pain of aging is inevitable, but the suffering is optional. Melting Into Sweetness is part owner’s manual, part workbook, and part illustrative memoir. It offers practical tools, techniques, and perspectives to soften resistance to the changes in our expectations, self-images and capacities, as well as to physical and mental discomfort.

Click here to purchase “Melting into Sweetness” on Amazon.

David Colin Carr, PhD was an editor, writing teacher, full-life counselor, and end of life educator. A product of the Sixties, his varied careers and adventures were the wellspring from which his understanding and stories are drawn.

For many years he assisted Stanislav Grof, MD and Jack Kornfield, PhD in their teaching. He and Jack were among the founding group of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, CA. He was a long-time student of the Diamond Approach of A.H. Almaas.

These brilliant explorers of consciousness imbued his understanding about surviving your aging body (though he does not intend to represent them), along with 80+ years of trying to figure out the operating system of his own.

David Colin Carr lived in San Rafael, California and passed peacefully on October 5, 2023.

Douglas Philip Cyr, MFT is a graduate of Marist College and California Institute of Integral Studies and served as a project coordinator for this book. He works as a public sector employee assistance counselor, mental health trainer, and graduate educator. He has been a student of the Diamond Approach since 1993 and received the “Fellow” credential from the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress in 2024.