After we die
I think the first part is the one that’s the most subject to personal beliefs, to make the transition between living in a human body and not a little easier. I would think that it would be easier for those that are ready for it, more difficult for those where it’s something they’re afraid of, or if it was sudden. Things like that.
When my mother died, it was sudden and completely unexpected. I was given the gift of seeing/hearing what happened as she moved on, which was really nice because I was the one that found her, which wasn’t so fun. After my father died, she and I had bought a house together, so I came home from work one day and she was gone.
For her, my father came through and told her it was time to go. Since this was sudden, and it was my mom, she resisted — talking about how my son and I still needed her. My father told her that we would be fine (thanks dad), that she could always check in on us. She was still resisting and a little confused (who wouldn’t be) and then of all people, her old boss came through for her. He just said “Kathy, come on. It’s time to go.” And she did.
I never knew her boss, I knew of him and who he was, etc., but he had died several years before that. But he was the perfect person for that job. If I’d been creating this story, I would have chosen my grandmother, my mom’s mom. But Art was so much better. He was a no nonsense kind of man, gruff, surly even, but she understood him and knew that when he said something, it was coming from a solid place.
So that first part, where we transition, I don’t know. It could be almost anything, really. A party, a bunch of small groups of loved ones and friends who have crossed, whatever would work for that person.
Part two
Once we’ve gotten through the “meet and greet” part — which may be going through the Pearly Gates for some, or being at their own funeral, a big cocktail party, I don’t know what for others — it’s kind of like an orientation period. Where you’re allowed to get used to the idea, and talk with more people in depth, and start doing a kind of Life Review.
If you haven’t seen the movie “Defending Your Life” with Meryl Streep and Albert Brooks, it’s a fun watch. If you have, it’s only semi-similar to that, but enough that it always reminds me of it.
I see it as if there’s maybe 3-5 others as well as me standing over what looks a lot like a big map that represents our life. And we can pick and choose things of note that we want to look at and process, and others are pointed out to us. All I know about this is that we have to look at all sides of it, the good that we did and the not-so-good that we did.
It’s not about good or bad, though. It’s about what we learned. There are some life lessons that we’re aware of, and some that we don’t understand at the time, or ever, while we’re alive. But now that we have a more omniscient view of our life, we can see what the lessons were or are. Going through all of those lessons is what helps us to choose what more we want to learn, and what life experiences we need to learn them.
That’s what leads us to choosing the next lifetime, if that’s what’s next for us. Sometimes we take a break from living in a body that way and there are other jobs for us to do.
There are a couple of side notes that come with this, so I’m going to write those out separately before moving forward...
Part three
As a quick background, I’ve been a psychic and medium pretty much my whole life. There’s a lot that could go along with that, but for right now it’s just so you know that I give readings and Spiritual Consultations (more of those now than readings, really — things have really been shifting!) for a living. I’ve been doing it for years, and it’s fit in with my Holistic Practice that I’ve had for 16+ years now.
For reference, I turn 52 next month, I started my working life as a teacher, did that for 7 years, then I was in administrative healthcare for 7 years, then went into actual healthcare, by training in Holistic practices, Massage therapy, aromatherapy, Energy Therapy, I trained in Kinesiology/Muscle Testing, and I’m an Applied Clinical Nutritionist. I’ve probably forgotten some things.
At some point during all of this, I realized that it was about teaching people how to help themselves, how to help heal themselves. That’s all I ever wanted to do, was just to help people — my Bachelor’s Degree is in Psychology and I have half of three Master’s in different areas of Psychology.
I owned a Holistic and Metaphysical shop for a few years not long ago also. So I taught classes in metaphysical and intuitive arts there as well.
Moving forward…
When I’m giving readings or spiritual consults, I almost always see it the same sort of way. Everyone pretty much has 3 spirit guides. Guardian Angels, whatever term works for you. One is the primary, which helps us with everyday life and issues, things like that. Then we have a secondary which seems to be one that helps us with things like career, or something big in our lives. Mine was a healer, and she stepped forward during all my training.
Tertiary guide is there for something that is important, but may not seem that way at first. Mine was the first one I actually became fully aware of, and his whole purpose is for me to see the funny side of just about everything. I can laugh at the most awful things that have happened to me. And a lot of times I think that the only reason that I’m still here is because I could laugh. It was laugh, or go screamingly crazy.
These guides, oddly enough, especially our primary guide, has the same quirks, foibles, and short-comings as we do. Seems a little like the blind leading the blind, for sure. But they’re learning the same lessons that we’re looking to learn, from a different perspective, and for more clarity, I believe.
The best way to really solidify something for yourself is to have to teach it to someone else. So they help with that. And they “get” us because we have similarities, which makes it easier to work together, whether we’re aware of them or not.
The difference is that we’re kind of ground level GPS, living our lives at street view, turn by turn. They’re more at bird’s eye view. They have a better overall view of it and can see where there might be pitfalls, or better routes.
One of the things that we might do (that I was told when I started working with remote work, or astral work) is that I had been a Guide before I chose to come back into a body. After I was told that my learning kicked WAY up because I had an awareness I didn’t have before, and seeing the Guides of others became like visiting an old workplace and seeing your former co-workers. It’s been very helpful!
But that’s a job that we might have if we take a break from living a human life for awhile. There are others, I know there are, but I haven’t been shown them, and I can only remember fleeting pictures or visions of what the others are doing, but so far that’s not something I’m supposed to know about (again) yet.
Part three-and-a-half (actually the last part should maybe have been two-and-a-half, and this part three, but I’m going for getting this out quickly, and I’ll edit and fix things later.
What about actively bad or evil people?
I’ve never seen anything other than the one place. No heaven and hell thing. BUT — that life review. We come into that as us, but not us. We come into that as a spiritual being that has completed a particular human experience. So it’s very current for us, but it’s not about being good or bad, doing right or wrong, it’s all about the lessons.
So someone like Charles Manson, or Hitler, these are souls/higher selves/eternal selves, again, pick a term — that are seeing all the points in their lives where they made choices and decisions that led them to what they became and the actions that they committed. For a spiritual being that still has a little bit of humanity happening, this has to be painful. But necessary, because we learn a LOT from our poor decisions or bad choices. And seeing how what they did or created caused so much pain, destruction, death, they might choose a life where they are a victim or have a lot of suffering, so that they can have that experience as well.
Suicide is another thing that people ask about. As far as I know about this, there’s a gentle rest time for them. What leads up to that decision isn’t — can’t be easy, and it’s a tragedy for the person and for their higher self. So things are more gentle until they’ve healed a bit and are a little distant from that life, and can see their life review when they can get the most from it.
It’s sad that there are commonalities between these two groups, but for both, it’s hard to see the bigger picture in the moment, the life lessons that are happening when everything is coming from a place of darkness. Either depression or something else, or delusions of grandeur. Things aren’t being seen clearly, and true self-reflection or awareness is almost impossible for either group. Not completely impossible, but very difficult.
Part Four
This is the section where we assume that we’re ready to come back into a human life, we’ve either completed our tasks that needed to happen on the other side, or we make the decision to come back for whatever reason, or we know we have a lot left to learn, and bring to our collective soul.
Side note: not Collective Soul like the band, but when I was looking at the past lives that I know about I did a little math and realized that I was alive in two of them at the same time. Which went against what I had thought/believed prior. So I had to let that reconcile within for a bit, and what I’ve come up with is that our soul isn’t just one thing. It’s a spiritual and energetic thing that can be separated into several pieces. I feel very much like I don’t have access in the here and now to every single life I’ve ever lived, it could be hundreds over time. But the pieces come together when they’re on the other side at the same time and the info and lessons get shared.
It’s also how I see that my mother can still be “my mother” and giving me guidance and advice from the other side while part of her also may be moving on to another life. I’ve had conversations with my great grandmother and I don’t think she’s still hanging out just waiting for everyone who might remember her or is related to her in some way to cross over so that she can move on. It’s a piece that has that consciousness if/when necessary. And I have another grandmother that completely moved on and was GONE. I’m kind of not surprised at that, given the life she led, but there are some people that just aren’t available once they cross over.
So we’ve decided we’re ready to come back into a physical body. (Sounds like an ad campaign.) I know it takes a lot of work. But time is different there, and there’s a different level of awareness, so it’s not like we think of here.
There’s a decision about what lessons you want to learn in the next lifetime. And it’s not just one or two, it’s a lifetime of potential lessons. And then what would be the best way to do it — again, there’s a lot more of a broad overview of life there, there’s more omniscience than you’d think, but everything can be changed because as people, we have free will. So we can change anything.
And there are some CORE lessons that we set out to learn during a lifetime, and we choose our path for each of those, during our life. We can choose an easy straightforward path, or one with lots of twists and turns, detours, all kinds of stuff. But what I’ve found with these core lessons is that even if we detour away (like when some part of us knows this is going to be HARD), we end up circling back to it.
A big part of me believes that once we’ve learned these core lessons, we’re free to go. And we could be 20, or we could be 80. Or we could learn them all early and choose to stick around. I don’t know enough about that part yet. I was given just a little clue into it with my mother’s death, and her hardest life lesson being learned just a couple of weeks before she died. She could have stayed around and seen the results of learning that lesson, but she didn’t need to. But the timing she chose to leave, oh my goodness, it could have been SO much worse. But it was the best possible time given schedules, even the weather.
Once we’ve decided the lessons and the point of that lifetime, then we have to figure out how to make it happen. What family unit do we go into for it. Sometimes there’s already a family that makes sense, and we kind of create the lessons around the possibilities of that family.
This is also part of why we stick within our “soul families.” Why we find out our mother in this life was a sister in another, or we were our grandfather’s brother. I have a friend that I’ve been sisters with TWICE in other lifetimes. We already kind of know what’s going on and what the lessons and paths are of the other members, so it makes it easier.
And even so, I would think this isn’t a quick little thing either. I’ve never been shown exactly how it works, more like a montage, so I’ve filled in some of the blanks myself, or just really have no clue.
So: lessons, life path, how we’re going to get there with the souls and family that we have around us. Then our guides are chosen. Or we choose them, I’m not entirely sure about that. I think it can be both — it depends on what lessons we’re wanting to learn and what they’re working on from that bird’s eye/teacher overview. Sometimes people step in, but you don’t really know them. My secondary guide, my healer, she was very much a stranger to me. I hadn’t even seen her much and she hadn’t said a WORD until she stepped in for that part of my lessons. So that was a little harder than it could have been!
And after that, it’s getting born into a body and starting the journey.
I have a little bit more to say about guides, I think, but I’ll do it separately. This one is long!
Part Five - Guides
I don’t think this is really a whole separate section, since I talked about it a few times, more like a little addition.
Choosing guides before we come into this life is really important because we’ve already decided, contracted, to the life we’ve decided to live. Not exactly, of course, because once we get here, we’re infants and we don’t remember much, if anything. And free will, freedom to choose, means we can’t plot the entire course.
So we need our “team” in place, which usually means it’s not going to be our grandmother as our guide. Even if she died before we were born. Or a great grandparent, etc. Those were specific people, human bodied people. We don’t stay looking the same as we do now in every life, and this isn’t how we looked when we were on the other side.
I don’t know about that part as much. I know that when a guide shows themselves to me, they’re wearing very specific clothing, but that’s so that I know that they’re an actual guide. So it’s a “me” thing. So when I’m shown all of this stuff, it’s all in human people form, but I don’t really know if that’s what it’s like or if that’s just what I’m shown because it’s the easiest way for me to understand it.
Referring back to the part about our energetic being, our soul, etc., being able to have different pieces of it in different places and in different times, this is how grandma could be a big part of our lives, even after she’s gone. She wouldn’t be your Spirit Guide, but she could be helping them, if it makes it easier for us to get the lessons that way. Or she could be popping in for a period of time while we’re learning a particular skill.
That’s another thing about Guides, we have these primary three, but guides pop in and out of our lives all the time. I think of them like specialists. If I have a shattered leg, I’m going to see an orthopedic specialist, not just my regular family practitioner. I’m not having my optometrist give me heart surgery, like that. Specialists come in for a specific skill that we need, to further us along, to get us up and running, and then they’re done.
Part Six
Life contracts
It’s probably not like this, but I see them as if they’re an actual contract. We create them, and we are held to them, but more, we hold ourselves to them. However, contracts are able to be re-negotiated.
As a person with free will, I could make the stupid decision to try something like base-jumping that I have no knowledge of or experience with, but hey I got drunk or whatever, and it sounded fun. Next thing we know, I’m paralyzed from the waist down. Not part of the plan, so there’s a contract negotiation.
Same thing with major disasters and tragedies like 9/11 — that wasn’t part of their life contract, the suicide bombers/pilots. And those people on the planes and in the twin towers didn’t all have their contracts set to end at the same exact time. I’ve been shown it was a really quick scramble, even for the other side, but that before it happened people were given the option of ending the contract early, or sticking it out. As we know thousands of people died that day. In part, I think it was to help create a lesson for the general human consciousness. To find a way to make something positive happen from this horrible tragedy. But the rest of it was just humans making decisions that affected the lives of people that they didn’t know, and everyone who ever knew and cared about them. The price for free will can be a bitch and a half.
Those are the parts we don’t like to think about or talk about, but I try to ask hard questions if I can, or if I think of them. So if anything came up for you during this, ask me. Like I said in the beginning, I don’t have all the answers, but I might have some thoughts.
I hope this last part makes sense, this kind of writing is really rewarding for me, but it’s also tiring because it taps into a deeper part of my energy. So if I went all wonky there at the end, rein me in and ask me WTF?