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Writing Your Ethical Will
Share Your Experience
Writing your spiritual-ethical will is a way of leaving your values, beliefs, and family stories for future generations to enjoy. Your ethical will is a legacy filled wisdom and love that will live forever.
The purpose of the Spiritual Ethical Will blog is to create a forum so you can share your ethical will and the benefits you received from writing your personal legacy.
The process of writing any type of will is usually thought of as a very serious and time consuming process that is never fun. However, when writing a spritiual ethical will there are sevearl ways you can make it enjoyable. Below are a few creative projects that you can have fun with as you write your ethical will.
The first project is to tell the story of your life in under five minutes. For this activity you will need either a video or audio recorder, five minute, a notepad, a writing instrument and any photos or keepsakes you want to include in your presentation. The preparation for this activity will be to create an outline of the most important parts of your life. This will help you tell your story. When you are ready you can record your lifestory on tape or digital media.
The next project is to write a chapter for your personal memoirs. The title of this chapter is, “The First Life Lesson I Learned.” For this chapter you will talk about an event in your life that really taught you about what is important in life or what path was right for your to take. This event needs to be early in your life.
You can continue on your path to writing your memories with a second chapter for your book entitled, “Mistakes I’ve Made.” This is going to be a hard chapter to write as it requires you to review the mistakes that you made. However, it does provide you with the chance to admit mistakes that you have made and to examine how those mistakes impacted your life. It also gives you the chance to repair relationships and to fix problems that those mistakes have caused.
Having fun with your spiritual ethical will may sound unusual, but it is an approach that can make the process of preparing for your passing easier to handle.
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Preparing for your death is not pleasant. It is difficult to think about leaving your loved ones behind to fend for themselves against the world. However, writing a spiritual ethical will is one way you overcome many of the problems that are commonly associated with managing an estate.
One of the biggest problems that can occur when your estate goes into probate is that your heirs will contest the will. Contesting occurs when one or more people feel that the will unfairly bequeaths assets to someone. You can help to avoid contesting problems with your estate by explaining things in an ethical will. The ethical will can outline your thought process and it can help to ease hurt feelings. For example, someone may have offered you extensive help during your life that your children may not be aware of. This may be the reason why you left them money or other assets.
If you leave assets to a charity then this too can lead to the contesting of your will by your children, spouse or other heirs. Again your spiritual ethical will can be a great tool to help explain why you left money to a charity instead of to someone that you are related to or that you had a relationship with. One of the purposes of an ethical will is to pass on your life philosophies and moral values. If you valued charity and giving then you can explain that these philosophies are important to you and that is why you left money to the organizations that you did.
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Writing a spiritual ethical will is one of the best things that you can do for your family and loved ones. If the process of writing an ethical will seems too daunting then consider the shorthand version called the ethical letter. As the name of this document suggests, an ethical letter is basically just a letter used to convey your best wishes and hopes to those people and organizations that you are leaving behind.
The first step in writing an ethical will letter is to determine who you want to address the letter to. It can be addressed to a single person or to a group of people.
The next step is to set up the format for your ethical will letter. The format is just like a regular letter with a greeting, a body and a closing.
Step three is to compose the body of your ethical letter. The body will contain specific information about your morals, values and philosophies. It will also address what you want your heirs to known about your or to know about life. If you are addressing several people, then you can dedicate one paragraph to each person or group of people.
The final step is to edit your letter. You will want to edit it for content and for general mistakes. It is a good idea to save your ethical will letter in versions. This will allow you to see how your philosophies change over time. It will also ensure that when you pass away that the most current version is give to your heirs.
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Divorce is a difficult time in your life. It tests your belief system and its tests your ability to recover from a traumatic event. However, it also puts your ability to live by high ethical standards as well.
When you are writing a spiritual ethical will and you are divorced, it can be a great testament to your character and moral beliefs to address your relationships with past spouses in a respectful manner. You can talk about what they added to your life and what you learned from your relationship with them. This approach is particularly important if you have children.
If you have dirty laundry to air with an ex-spouse then do not do it in your general spiritual ethical will. Instead draft a private ethical letter that will be addressed only to your ex-spouse. This will allow you to tell your ex-spouse what you need to tell them. This can be anything from an apology for the mistakes that you made in the relationship, or it can be a statement about how they hurt you or how their actions impacted your life and the life of your family. Writing this type of letter can be very therapeutic, even if the letter never gets to your ex-spouse.
Including your ex-spouse(s) in your ethical will is not a requirement. You always have the option to include what ever information you want, and you always have the option to exclude any information that you want. However, keep in mind that the example that you set with the content in your ethical will, will impact the lives of those that you leave behind.
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Your ethical will is like a catch-all document that you can use to deliver information to the people that you are leaving behind. This information can be about just about anything that you want to talk about. You can discuss your love for your family, regrets that you may have or you can even talk about what you hope will happen for those that you love.
While most ethical wills are not going to include surprising information, they can be. If you have been carrying around a secret or secrets with you for decades and want to get them off your chest, then this is the document to do it in. Most secrets are more hurtful to the person who is carrying them around so airing out your secrets in your ethical will can be really cathartic.
You have complete control over how you phrase things and how you address your issues in your ethical will. However, it is still a good idea to be tactful when revealing secrets that may be difficult for those you love to understand or deal with. Depending on the type of secret you want to reveal in your spiritual ethical will, you may want to reveal it to just a select few people. This can be done through the use of an ethical letter.
Writing an ethical letter is just like writing any other letter. You will address it to one or more people, you will include a body of information and you will include a closing.
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The ethical will is a document that is normally written by adults as a way to pass on their traditions, philosophies on life and their final wishes for the people that they will be leaving behind when they pass away. While this writing activity is normally done closer to the end of life, it can also be done earlier. Children, for example, can create their own ethical wills.
When children write their ethical wills they will most likely not be thinking about their deaths and who they will be leaving behind. This is okay, as ethical wills are also great tools for soul searching and for realizing what is important in your life. This is where they are a great project for kids, as they can be used to help kids understand what is important in their lives and what they treasure the most about the people that they love.
The first ethical will activity that kids can complete is called the “I am most thankful for…” project. This activity will have kids create a list of what they are most thankful for. In addition to listing the item, the person or the experience, they also need to explain why they are thankful for that item.
The next ethical will activity that is appropriate for kids is a memoir activity. In this activity kids will write about their life up to this point. For some kids the memoir will only cover 10 years, while others will cover 17. The goal of this exercise is to simply get kids to think about all of the lessons that they have learned so far and to identify the people and philosophies that have helped them the most.
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Most charitable contributions are given out during the last two months of the year. This is when holiday cheer seems to inspire charity. The charities that receive the most donations are those related to feeding families, providing toys to underprivileged children and to other religious charities.
Since your heart and mind are on charitable contributions this is the perfect time of year to write down what your charity traditions are. In this spiritual ethical will entry you can tell those that mean the most to you about the charities that mean the most to you. This section does not have to be long. A single paragraph will usually suffice.
When writing this section you will want to first detail what your charity traditions are. For example, you may donate a percentage of your annual income to a specific charity, or you may make it a habit to donate all of your change to charity collection buckets after each shopping trip. Make sure you identify how you determine how much you donate and how you determine which charities to donate to.
Next you will want to talk about your favorite charities. You can explain why certain charities hold a special place in your heart, and you can also explain why you avoid donating to certain charities. In addition to monetary donations you can also talk about donating your time. For example, you may want to talk about your tradition of volunteering to make cookies for local nursing homes, or volunteering to deliver meals to shut-ins.
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When you are in a long term relationship your philosophies on life, love and family are naturally going to evolve together. However, couples rarely share these precious insights into their soles with each other or with their families. This is truly unfortunate.
If you are married or in a serious long-term relationship and if you are interested in sharing the things about yourself that really matter then consider writing your ethical will as a couple. Couples that write an ethical will together have a couple of options.
The first option that you have is to write a single ethical will. This ethical will will reflect both of your philosophies on life and your hopes for your families.
The second option that you have is to write one ethical will, but to have a section dedicated to the philosophies and memoirs of each individual.
The third option is to write two separate ethical wills. Each person will write their own will. You can write the wills at the same time so you can help one another with encouragement and suggestions.
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Today you have nearly a 50-50 chance of getting a divorce. This really is a tragedy, as some couples can save their marriages if they put more effort into figuring out what they still loved about each other, or if they just got a little encouragement. I think that couples that are facing the decision of divorce need to sit down and write an ethical will as a couple.
This activity will help them to identify both areas of their spirituality and lives that compliment one another and those areas that clash. This will be particularly true when you are working on sections that detail your philosophies on life, love and family. This can be a really eye opening exercise.
The next section that will help the couple to determine if they have anything worth saving is the memories section. Here the couple can stroll down memory lane. This stroll will take them through the good times and the bad. Hopefully it will help to remind the couple why they fell in love in the first place.
While not all relationships will withstand the test of time writing an ethical will as a couple can help to define what was good and what was bad about the relationship. In the end, this exercise will at the very least help the couple to decide if they can move forward together or if it is best to go separate ways.
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Writing a spiritual ethical will is all about passing on the lessons that you have learned during your life. These lessons relate to important things like family relationships, love, charity and spirituality. These are the topics that you will want to focus on while writing your ethical will.
If you are having a hard time starting your ethical will then consider reading the memoirs of people that you admire. This will give you an idea about how to organize your thoughts and how to weave the lessons that you have learned into an entertaining story. Reading the memoirs or important people may also inspire your own writing career.
Another great resource to turn to is religious texts on ethical wills. These will be found in Jewish sections of the library, online and in ethical book stores. You may also be able to gain access to these documents through your Rabbi.
The final resource that you can turn to when writing an ethical will is your old journals and diaries. These documents are collections of thoughts, feelings and experiences. They will be invaluable to you when you write your ethical will.
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