So here I sit amidst my remaining possessions, all of which have to fit into a house on my new property that is about a third the size of the house I live in now. I’m moving soon, headed to a less arid climate and a lifestyle with which I’m totally unfamiliar. I learn new startling things about this lifestyle every day. For example, gophers are evil. Who knew? Turns out they chew the roots out from under young trees and create holes that are exactly the right size to swallow a horse’s foot and break its leg. There are literally thousands of new gophers on my new property. This ranch is to gophers what Manhattan is to Americans. I plan to address this with diplomacy, but I have been warned that St. Francis himself would have taken up arms if there had been gophers living in Assisi.

But the anti-gopher offensive has not yet been launched. Because right now I’m in the process of ending my old life, not yet beginning my new one. My coaches will recognize this as Square 1, a time of death and rebirth. We train to deal with many clients in this state of change, because it scrambles the average person’s brain like an egg. I’m used to it, and was expecting it, which always helps. Nevertheless, every death, from the death of the smallest hope to the death of the physical body, throws most people into the cycle of grieving: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance. This is not a clean, linear process. It’s more like taking all those emotions, adding a huge dollop of fear, and blending the entire mixture like a green smoothie of psychological anguish.

When people ask me “What would you do if you only had one year to live?” I never come up with the exciting bucket list they expect. I would spend that entire year trying frantically to take care of everyone I would be leaving behind. This, believe me, is a bad choice. So I have reframed my current minor death as weaning.

Weaning is indeed the death of one situation—nursing—and the birth of a new way of life for both nurser and nursee. Far from being a catastrophic separation, it sets mother and baby free to embark on separate adventures, so that between them there will be a far more interesting assortment of experiences. Baby gets to develop self-sufficiency and empowerment. Hooray! Mother gets to sleep and shower without interruptions. Hooray, Hooray! So it’s all good—but it has to be done right.

There are two steps to successfully weaning yourself off any situation. The first is tostep it down. Not to gross out those of you who have never given birth, but if you have ever fed a baby in nature’s way, you know exactly why cows make that horrible sound when someone forgets to milk them. You can’t go cold turkey in a relationship in which much nourishment has been exchanged at any point. It’s painful. It hurts the mother, and it starves the baby. A better way to proceed is to subtract one of your daily nursing sessions, and hold the new level for four days. Then subtract another nursing session, repeat for four days. Etc. (Why four days? I wrote a whole freakin’ book about it. Just take my word for it, it works.)

As you step down the amount of nourishment being given and received, you move on to the second step: substitutes. You must obviously find something else to feed the baby. Trying to be a martyr, to get along with less, is a noble but unworkable enterprise. If you are losing a situation that nourishes you, finding other nourishment should be at the top of your priority list.  (By the way, if you are in relationships that don’t nourish you, something is wrong, but that’s another column.) For example, I am accustomed to receiving weekly energy treatments from a magical healer named John Parker. Sure, I can survive without this—but to do so would probably affect my overall health. But I can’t just substitute any old massage therapist for John Parker; he’s one of a kind. (Plus, if I ever had a massage therapist come to my new property he or she would immediately be eaten by gophers.) So I have to get creative. I have to come up with something so physically, emotionally, and spiritually renewing that it will create the same net effect of a John Parker treatment. At the moment, I’m thinking this may involve Quaaludes and a very clever monkey. I’ll keep you posted.

I can tell you some additions I’ve made to my life that are beginning to make up for this loss, and they may not be what you’d expect. (They never are.) One of my substitutes is downloading entire seasons of TV series I’ve never seen and watching them on my computer. I’m also into visiting sites online where I can find tutorials on drawing the human body in extreme perspective. Another is cooking with my friends who will be living on my property. I’ve never cooked before, but for some reason being several miles away from the nearest Starbucks has inspired me. Also, I’ve stumbled upon a new system for memorizing piano music. What does any of this have to do with energy healing? Not a damn thing. That’s the point of weaning. You are going to a whole new source of nourishment, not just moving from boob to boob. I mean seriously, how is milk like grass? It isn’t! Eat it anyway!

So as your life changes—because everyone’s life is changing—use step-downs and substitutes to wean yourself off whatever you are losing. You’ll never find things going back to the way they were—but you will find yourself forced into discovering delicious new things you may have never even imagined. For example, gopher hunting.