Then.

Becoming Sar’h is the story of the grandest love affair you can have—the one with SELF. From the time I was four years old, a voice calling herself Sar’h (pronounced sa-RA) played a major role in my life. She held wisdom far beyond my childhood years and served as a pillar of truth in a world driven by the whims of mass consciousness. Sar’h is the voice of my soul and has held many incarnations on Earth—lives of great wisdom and magic and lives filled with darkness and destruction. Later I learned that my human self, Lauren, was an expression of Sar’h—but not before I got completely lost in the singular human existence.

The Becoming Sar’h series is the story of me, Lauren, the extremely imperfect human, reluctantly reconciling with my master voice within—that of Sar’h. Throughout the book, I do just about everything to get rid of Sar’h in order to fit into the modern world—antidepressants, drugs, and, worst of all, developing an addiction to success. It took the death of my father to shake me out of the illusion that the physical world in front of me was all there was to know and a dear friend named El Morya to light the way when I got too lost in the dark to carry on alone.

Once I remembered who I was at the soul level, Sar’h and I traveled the world on one of the grandest adventures imaginable, as my human self, Lauren, faced her biggest fears and healed immense heartbreak. While this is a personal story rather than a teaching-and-preaching book, both Sar’h and Lauren know that a wise master lives within all of us, and if we, the humans, can open up to our souls’ voices, we can know God.

Additionally, as a fellow former skeptic and someone who denied her soul’s voice for years, I ask you to read this book with the openness and imagination of a child and to be patient with me, the often-ridiculous human. I felt it important to share all aspects of myself, not just the attractive ones, including past feelings of exclusivity, no matter how absurd they seem to me now. It was all part of my journey, after all. As Sar’h says in the book, we must remember the act of being human is wildly courageous in and of itself. She means no matter what we do in our human lives, no matter our thoughts and our actions, our sheer existence on Earth is magic enough.

This book is a work of narrative nonfiction—actual stories that I experienced. Yet it is only from my perspective. Reality is not an absolute; it changes with every pair of glasses through which it is viewed. Some names have been changed at people’s requests. Others insisted on keeping their real names. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. No matter your feelings on the book, it is my dream for everyone to experience the grandest magic life has to offer: the journey back to SELF. 

Now. 

In January of 2017, I published my first book, Becoming Sar’h: Book One. The book holds within its pages the story of my awakening experience from childhood until age thirty-two. It details my relationship with my soul and friendship with an Ascended Master named El Morya, who many are familiar with in his relation to the Theosophical movement. Never a guide, like any master worth his weight, he showed me where to look, not what to see.

The week before the book hit the virtual bookshelf that is Amazon.com, nightmares plagued my sleep. I was sharing too much. People wouldn’t get it. Worse, people might think I’m crazy. Breathing through the fear, I allowed my creation - my baby - to flow - to birth - into the world. Your reactions to my creation stunned me in the best way possible.

In six months following the book publication, I received nearly one hundred personal letters from readers who also felt alone and a smidge crazy in their awakening experiences. Turns out many readers held similar experiences as described in the book and took comfort in knowing they were not alone in the wild ride that is the self-realization experience.

For example, one reviewer wrote, “Do you have the feeling that life is kind of strange and you are not sure if you really belong here? Or you feel you are not normal and getting kind of crazy? Please read this book before you go down any other road and you will see that the crazy is the new normal. I am sure after reading the book you will feel that you are not alone and it will encourage you to trust even more your inner wisdom and guidance.”

Many others reported the words in the book created energetic pathways for them to connect deeper within themselves and allowed them to move further into the self-realization process – an entirely personal and unique experience for us all.  I hold there is no one size fits all approach to the embodied enlightenment experience, which is why I prefer to share stories rather than give lectures. Plus, stories are so much more stimulating than any webinar or PowerPoint presentation I might share on the matter at hand.

Further, when I wrote the book, my aim was to capture to the multi-faceted, multi-reality essence of the embodied enlightenment experience, which Master M calls the Triple E. So when I read the next review, I wept tears of joy because I knew my intentions made it into the pages of the book.

“If you are curious about the bridge between spiritual mysteries and real life, read the book and you’ll find yourself walking that bridge. I particularly enjoyed the multidimensional nature of the book, and the self-love that could be heard in the narrator's voice. A book that opens the mind and the heart alike, it is a gem for anybody choosing the path of enlightenment.”

I wrote Becoming Sar’h: Book One first and foremost for me. It was a way to express my own soul experience through my craft, my creative medium – I’ve written professionally for nearly two decades. The added bonus of receiving your reviews - from readers not critics - and personal letters, let me know what I share held a value in this world. Your comments, questions, and general faith in me, encouraged me to publish this next book.  Otherwise, the self-love journal would be gathering dust on my bookshelf.

I have kept a journal - a diary - since I learned to write. It is what Book One was based on, yet I chose to write it in a narrative format. I will admit it has become quite the experience to write Book Two in hindsight and to keep my journals going. As Anaïs Nin wrote in 1933:

“My book and my journal step on each other’s feet constantly. I can neither divorce nor reconcile them. I play traitor to both. I am more loyal to my journal, however. I will put the pages of my journal into my book but never pages of the book into my journal, showing a human faithfulness to the human authenticity of the journal.” (1)

I could not agree more with Nin’s experience, which is why I am summoning to the courage – once again – to share the good, bad, and ugly with the free world. Like Sar’h, the voice of my soul, said in Book One, “We must remember the act of being human is wildly courageous in and of itself.”

What Sar’h meant is no matter what we do in our human lives, no matter our thoughts and our actions, our sheer existence on Earth in human form is nothing short of pure, undiluted magic.

In honor of your unique soul experiences,

Lauren, Sar’h & Master M

(1) - Nin, Anaïs. Henry and June: From a Journal of Love. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1986.

Dedication:

To Sar’h and the soul voice residing within all of us.
To anyone who has ever been lost as fuck on their spiritual journey.
And to my fellow gypsy souls who have walked the cosmos for eons.

Contents:

Acknowledgments
To the Reader
Introduction
Chapter 1: I EXIST
Chapter 2: Sar’h Returns
Chapter 3: The Calls
Chapter 4: The Vibrating Island
Chapter 5: The Menu, the Cage, and the Pills
Chapter 6: The Sunny Shack
Chapter 7: The Serpent Years
Chapter 8: Mortimer, Merlin, and Master Morya
Book Two Preview
Bibliography

Acknowledgments:
 
With deep gratitude, I thank my human parents for always allowing me to be myself (although they never had much of a choice); my friends, specifically El Morya, who put up with me even when I was Kerouac-level mad; my previous husband for everything he taught me, especially backwoods camping and which fork to use; my dog, Professor Ollie; the ocean for providing surf; the Colorado Rockies for serving as my playground this past year; and my friends I met in October 2015 at the Crimson Circle organization, who inspired me to share and provided me with a larger vocabulary for my stories.

To the Reader:

The author of this book does not dispense medical or psychological advice or recommend the use of any specific technique or treatment without the advice of a physician or mental health professional. The information contained herein is only the author’s personal experiences. In the event you use the information contained in this book for yourself, the author and publisher do not assume responsibility for your actions or outcomes. This is your journey, and you are responsible for all the creations in your life.


© 2016 Lauren Hutton
All rights reserved.
 
ISBN: 0692817271
ISBN 13: 9780692817278

I EXIST. It’s what I kept coming back to, the only truth that wouldn’t crumble under force. I was thirty years old. The walls I’d so carefully built around myself were caving in. With one phone call, I knew without a doubt that this was the end of life as I knew it. On the horizon I saw a tidal wave of chaos headed directly toward me. I scrambled in search of the internal truths that might serve as my life raft. I knew only a few things for sure: I was not my thoughts. I was not my body. I was not the stories I told myself. I was so many things at once and yet nothing at all.

Somehow as a young child I remembered the truth of the I EXIST. It was simpler then. Society hadn’t yet infiltrated me with the “should” or “supposed to” of life. I was four years old, taking shelter under the kitchen table, wearing nothing but white underwear when I realized it. My parents were in the living room, rehearsing a familiar scene in which my dad was the perpetrator and my mother the victim. I heard the scene play out from the other room. It felt good to have the protection of the thick oak table over my head.

I distinctly remember gazing upon my half-naked body, the body of a child. Funny—I did not feel like a child. In fact, I felt ancient. This was not my body. It must belong to someone else. Nope, I was in it. That I knew. These emotions of fear, anxiety, and anger at the situation were not mine either. Those emotions belonged to this human body I inhabited. Another lifetime. I have been here before. Many times. More than my four-year-old brain could count. Not in this exact time and space, but with these same souls, playing out these same roles. Only the scenery had changed. This was but one of the realities I existed in.

The realization of the I EXIST calmed me instantly. I was the fixed point in the many realities swirling around me. I could expand from the I EXIST: from the single point in the body of consciousness into the experiences of the human before contracting back into the single point where my soul resided. My arguing parents, the unpleasant emotions—they were all simply human details, a tiny drop in the bucket of the vast experience of the soul. I realized none of my current so-called reality mattered. All that mattered was the I EXIST. There was the first clue, the first truth that was going to get me through this.

I almost forgot the I EXIST but found my way back to it in the face of imminent disaster. Life crises tend to have that effect—sending us back into the knowingness of who we truly are, what we are made of. The childhood memories I had worked so hard to bury flooded back into my awareness, serving as the proverbial breadcrumbs leading me back to the path of the soul—the one I had avoided for all these years.

As a four-year-old child sitting under the kitchen table, I wondered why all the people around me were so intent to live in just one reality when the possibilities were endless. Like me, they dreamed at night, existing in other realms, only to watch it wash away with the daylight. Those dreamlands were no less real than this one. If we existed in so many realities, why were adults so intent to focus only on this singular human life, which to me seemed more of an illusion than the others? Why could they not see what existed beyond?

At the age of seven, I decided to test my theory that realities—or dimensions—could intersect. At the time, turtles fascinated me. My bookshelves were lined with figurines of the mysterious creatures. In true child form, I begged and pleaded with my parents for a pet turtle. I wanted to experience the real thing. They would not budge, so I decided I would call one into my life. That night I entered a vivid dream in which I spoke to a turtle who introduced himself as Mortimer. I noticed he held the demeanor of a professor.

In the dream, I asked if he would like to come live with me. He said yes and that he would like to visit but did not want to live inside the house in a cage. He gently explained to me that turtles were meant to live in the wild. I agreed to his terms, and he told me in the dream he would arrive in three days’ time. Three days for a child can feel like three weeks to an adult. Time drug on until it was the day Mortimer was going to show up.

That summer morning, after eating cereal in front of television cartoons, I walked outside with my dog, a dopey blond cocker spaniel named Loopy. Together we rounded the backyard. Loopy used his nose to search.

“There he is!” I yelled at Loopy. He gazed at me in confusion.

A six-inch box turtle slowly made his way through the lush Saint Augustine grass carpeting the backyard, stopping to chew on a blade every now and then. I curiously watched him and wondered if the turtle existed in my imagination or as an actual creature in physical form. I found it terribly difficult to tell the difference at this age; the lines between the realities were too faint to decipher.

I crept up behind him to see if I could touch his patterned shell. When I pressed my finger down, it was hard, and I traced along the ridges of the shell’s patterns. The turtle quickly retracted his head and feet when he felt the vibration of my touch. Full of anticipation, I held myself still, holding my breath and waiting for his head to come back out again. I needed to see his eyes to tell if this turtle was Mortimer. Eventually, his head and feet came back out. His golden eyes seemed to glow as he stared directly at me.

“Mortimer!” I was ecstatic. As I yelled, he retracted into his shell again. I scolded myself for scaring him. I left him in the backyard and ran inside to tell my mom.

“Mom. Mortimer is here. Can I keep him?”

She shrugged her shoulders. If it seemed weird to her, she did not show it. After some thought, my mom guaranteed Mortimer a spot in the small, gated backyard garden. I liked the garden because it contained a large, smooth rock, which served as a perfect perch for a seven-year-old girl. I lifted him carefully by the shell to place him in the garden, where I would refresh his water bowl and feed him apples and the fat trimmed off dinner steaks. He had a buffet of plants to choose from as well.

Each day, I went into the tiny garden and perched on the rock to converse with Mortimer. Mainly, he talked while I listened, and I only stopped him to ask a few clarifying questions. One day, Mortimer explained to me that turtles—not just land turtles but sea turtles as well—were the keepers of wisdom here on Earth. He said turtles stored the wisdom of the ages in the patterns of their protective shells, and the mother and father turtles passed down sacred codes of wisdom to the baby turtles, so the information remained on Earth. Mortimer said ancient cultures knew this and, as a result, highly regarded the animals.

I wondered when and where that bit of knowledge had been lost between then and now. It was 1988 in the suburbs of Houston, Texas; we lived in one of the boxes lining our neighborhood street. As Mortimer told the story, I felt a long way away from home. An overwhelming homesickness caused my stomach to churn. The feeling made no sense to me—I was sitting on a rock in my own backyard.

I reverted back to the safety of my imagination. Delighted to learn of turtles living in the ocean, I imagined them playing in the waves and gliding through the currents of a clear blue sea—something I must experience in real life one day.
Mortimer cleared his throat several times to gain my attention back. Later, adults told me my inability to focus was some sort of human disorder called attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Once Mortimer pulled me back into the present moment, he became serious, explaining that I, too, held codes within me containing long-forgotten knowledge.

“Just as turtles are the keepers of wisdom on Earth, you are a keeper of truth,” he said, attempting to simplify so I could understand. I stared at him, confused.

“Truths kept secret for thousands of years,” he added.

Then Mortimer began to speak with me in images and sensations, which were much easier for me to understand. He showed me certain truths existed inside me, in my soul. In my third-eye vision, I viewed swirling patterns of numbers and symbols, light made of colors most human eyes could not identify and therefore had no names, and energetic vibrations I could only sense and not see, which expanded in all directions from the center of me, from the I EXIST. Whoa. I felt dizzy and steadied myself on the rock.

“Lauren, one day you will share these truths,” Mortimer said.

On some level, I believed him. This was the wise Professor Mortimer speaking. I trusted him but was reluctant to claim I held any sort of knowledge. I was only a child. Who was going to listen to a child? What did I really know anyway? I felt overwhelmed—almost panicked on the human level. At the soul level, I felt myself sinking into his words and images, swimming through the energetic currents Mortimer tended to radiate like I imaged sea turtles would in the ocean.

Then a question popped into my head. If the mom and dad turtles passed on codes containing wisdom to the baby turtles, where were the parents who passed on the sacred codes holding these truths to me? It wasn’t my human parents, to whom I felt no real connection at the time. And why was this all a secret? Had it not been safe to share? I wondered this but did not ask; I knew Mortimer was not going to tell me.

“Some things we must realize on our own,” he told me many times during our visits.

The intense reluctance to exist in this physical world I felt before Mortimer showed up ran through my body again. My imaginary world felt more welcoming and natural. I felt freer outside the physical body. At times, I felt ashamed to be living in human flesh, which seemed icky. I pushed the current thoughts and confusion aside. I really wanted to go swimming with the sea turtles. That night in a dream, I swam with them through a bright blue ocean filled with reefs of neon-green kelp that we dined on.

One morning, I walked outside to see Mortimer. He was gone. I imagined him carrying a stick with a red bag tied on the end, like the ones hobos carried in cartoons, as he moved on to the next blond-haired, blue-eyed girl to spread the wisdom of the ages. Keeping good on my word, I didn’t go out to search for him.

None of my childhood experiences seemed strange to me. Sensing my soul and dreaming turtles into life, imaginative play and interacting with energies without physical form felt more natural than the flat mental logic and heavy emotions I witnessed around me. I engaged in long conversations with trees seemingly holding more knowledge than my parents. I played with energies appearing in every color of the rainbow and beyond, colors that danced with me around the backyard. When a “color” would show up, I communicated back to the color with images rather than words, speaking to it in its native language. The language of imagery contained so much more information and sensations than limited human words—words in which I often switched the letters around as I tried to write them on paper.

I don’t even think my parents noticed any of my highly engaged interactions in our suburban backyard. They most likely wrote it off as childhood play, and because I was an only child, they had nothing to compare it to. They were too busy playing a strange game. My dad went to a place called “work” early in the morning and came home late at night, grouchy. He often left with a suitcase during the week, and when he returned on the weekends, he brought me little shampoo bottles from the hotels where he stayed. Later I learned he sold safety supplies to corporations so their workers wouldn’t get hurt.

My mom was like a cat: sleeping most of the time. As I got older, I realized she found life disappointing and most of the time feared her own shadow. I watched her try to make peace with being a housewife despite her affinity for writing, reading, and teaching literature. Regardless of her sincere devotion to being my mother, I sensed she never quite got over feeling her gifts and her life were being wasted. I understood, but her forced smiles made my insides hurt nevertheless.

I didn’t mind that my dad was always gone and that my mom slept so much. I disliked it more when they were together, the anger, sadness, and disappointment between them palpable. Their absence afforded me hours alone with the oak tree that shaded more than half the backyard. I often buried pennies by its roots as tokens of our friendship. Beings assuming all sorts of shapes and forms would come to visit with us as well. They all spoke the language of images and sensations. I found comfort in that. I especially liked the fairies appearing in flashes of light.

It wasn’t until I was eight years old that I learned I needed to hide who I truly was from the people around me—not only the adults around me, but also my peers at Wilson Elementary School. In third grade, Mrs. Banks asked us to stand in front of the class and share what made us special or unique. Some kids talked about their dogs, siblings, or favorite television shows. When I stood up to speak, I had nothing planned. It just poured out of me.

What made me different and unique, I explained, was I truly cared about the evolution of Earth—both its inhabitants and the nature I loved so much. I actually cared about things beyond my own situation and myself, I added. It was honest. I had noticed for quite some time people around me, adults and children, seemed completely absorbed in their immediate, physical surroundings and preoccupied with their current human thoughts and emotions. None of them seemed to see or sense the interconnectedness of everything, and it bothered me immensely. Why could they not see what I saw? Why could they not hear what I heard? Why could they not sense the way I could sense?

As I shared this, I began to cry and felt a massive expansion in my energetic field. It filled the classroom. I was used to having these experiences in my own backyard or talking with Mortimer—but in front of a classroom of eight-year-olds…fuck. The teacher and my fellow students were speechless. There was no applause from the audience like there had been for Billy, who before my turn had shared he was special for playing first base. I made my way back to the rug where the other children were sitting cross-legged and hung my head in shame.

“Why couldn’t you pretended to be normal?” my human self asked my soul self, who was beginning to identify herself by the name Sar’h, which she said was the Hebrew version of the American Sarah. I usually only spoke with her in private, but I was raging, and it couldn’t wait.

“Please don’t do that to me again,” I said firmly. “You don’t know how hard this is!”

I wanted to curl into a ball and disappear. An awkward silence that felt like it lasted an eternity loomed over me. The teacher called on Courtney next. She stood up confidently and said, “I am special because I am adopted.” The entire class erupted in laughter because everyone knew she had two older brothers, and they all looked alike. I witnessed the energy of the room around me shift, and I felt better. Then it occurred to me I might be the only child in the classroom—probably in the whole school—who physically saw laughter dissolve discomfort, the only child aware of the energetic dynamics of the classroom.

As I witnessed the energy of the classroom shift, feeling entirely alien and alone, I vowed then and there to never share from the soul space. I never wanted to feel that kind of shame again. It was better to pretend to fit in, although I knew how bad I was at it. This was how I was going to survive in this cruel world. I learned in that moment that as a human you were expected to conform to a set of predetermined social norms. You were allowed some wiggle room to be different, but it couldn’t be too far out there. As a human you were expected to adhere to a pattern of goal setting and accomplishment. I did not understand the rigidity of this behavior. Creation was not a linear process; it did not come from thinking and hard work. I had proved that with my turtle experiment. It made me furious that I was expected to operate in such antiquated ways, that I could not show who I truly was at the soul level. The world around me was maddening. I hated everything. The damage of the experience firmly taught me never to speak of things that did not exist in the physical world again. I cried myself to sleep for several nights after the event.

In hindsight, of course I was wrong about being alone in my abilities and experiences. I found two other former classmates later in life with similar childhood stories. Surely there were many more who never shared with me. But I was eight. I found physical life difficult, especially in the sterile, rule-driven environment of public school, so I easily fell into the illusion of exclusivity. I did not know any better. No one around me spoke of such things.

Shortly thereafter, I asked my parents for a pet gerbil. After I launched a full-lobby strategy with handwritten notes and a presentation, they agreed. My mom and I picked out a soft, brown female at the pet store. I loved the way her whiskers and nose twitched when she stood on her hind legs to look at me from behind the glass. Together, my mom and I picked out a cage, toys, and food and brought her home. I found my mom really loving that day and noticed I was enjoying her company too. We were laughing and joking. She felt like a best friend who never judged me, and it made me smile. Maybe she was not my “real” mother, but she could be an excellent friend.

“What would you like to name her?” my mom asked when we got home.

“I’m going to name her Sar’h,” I said, using the Hebrew pronunciation, which sounded like sa-RA.

“Oh, after your new friend, Sarah?” my mom asked, referring to a new girl in school I was desperate to make friends with.

“Yes,” I lied, knowing she would not understand.

That night I placed Sar’h, the voice of my soul, into the gerbil and that gerbil into a glass cage.

“I’m going to try to be a normal child,” I told her. “I’m on the verge of making new friends, and I cannot risk another embarrassment like I had in Mrs. Banks’s third period. It’s social suicide.”

Sar’h understood and wished me well. I didn’t consciously hear my soul voice again until I was eleven years old, when we put the gray-haired, long-toothed Sarah the gerbil to sleep. The vet explained to me, as tears rolled down my chin, that Sarah’s three-year life-span was much longer than most gerbils’. I didn’t tell him I was not only crying for my gerbil but also because I knew it was time to bring Sar’h, my soul voice, back into my life. It worried me to have to live in two worlds once again. By this time, I had established a tight-knit circle of girlfriends whom I did not want to lose, yet something inside me told me I was ready.

These childhood memories began to light the way back to the path of the soul—my child self educating my thirty-year-old self. There was the memory of the I EXIST—the fixed point of the soul within the body of consciousness. With the memory came the understanding that all human pain and suffering was only a drop in the bucket of the vast experience of the soul, although it might hurt like hell. There was the inner knowing that there were parts of myself I would have to get to know again. The human self was one voice in a complex web that made up SELF. The other major voice, for me, was that of the soul—the wise master within all of us.

I understood, at age thirty, that I needed to invite my soul voice back into the conversation of my life to move forward. The memories brought back the awareness that imagination and dreams were two senses, tools I could use to mold and shape my reality. I held an inner knowing that many more sophisticated senses existed inside me if I could find my way back to the soul. The memories reminded me I possessed an innate ability to work with and interpret energies. As I remembered these abilities, I realized I used these gifts daily—I hadn’t lost the abilities, only the awareness of them. In the memories, I also learned I spoke the language of images and sensations fluently as a child. Like any language you don’t use enough, the translations move into the back of the file folders of awareness. The knowledge does not leave but must be dusted off, and atrophied muscles must be flexed for it to return.

​I also realized every human had access to his or her soul or master voice within, just as I did. It only required consciousness or awareness of SELF to realize the expanded nature of the soul. Everyone had access to these same senses and abilities if they opened themselves up, if they allowed them to flow inward, unfiltered by human thoughts and emotions. That was why it was so maddening to me as a child to learn that people could not see the potentials and possibilities dormant within them. I continued my search for other truths to help me through the impending flood—scanning my memories for any hints, even the slightest, tiniest clue.

​
With the onset of puberty, my awareness and experiences with energy intensified. When I became a woman, the prophetic dreams and visions strengthened, much to my discomfort. I found myself more sensitive than ever to energies, in addition to the mood swings common among teenagers. I was empathetic to the extreme. If a classmate was sad, I felt it in every cell of my body. I absorbed his or her pain and suffering as if it were my own, and then I reflected it back to the person involuntarily, which made me no fun to be around. I found no reprieve at home. Sad mother. Angry father.

I could not distinguish where my energy field ended and another’s began. I could not discern where my teenage human emotions ended and the consciousness of my soul began. It was confusing and exasperating. As a result, I ate. I ate when I was sad, stressed, angry—anything. I ate when those around me felt discomfort in any form. My house happened to be filled with copious amounts of junk food and soda, which was available to me at all times. In seventh grade, the school nurse weighed me in front of the whole class; it was some Arnold Schwarzenegger fitness program that made it into the public schools.

“One hundred and twenty-seven pounds,” the nurse called out as I turned a deep shade of red.

I had not realized how fat I had become. I weighed a good thirty pounds more than most of my classmates. I searched inside for an answer as to how this had occurred without me realizing it. The truth I discovered was that my soul was not inside my body. Instead, she hovered like a nebulous cloud above it. It felt too painful to stay in the physical body while it absorbed the feelings of the moody teenagers and unconscious parents surrounding me. The weight served as an ineffective barrier to the emotions of others. I retreated into my imagination, into the nonphysical realms, which is what I did when things became intense. I tried various things to connect my soul back with my body but couldn’t quite figure out a lasting solution. My body continued to feel like a shell—a separate being walking around empty and on autopilot.

Throughout junior high and during my freshman year in high school, I created a small group of trusted friends. Music was our common denominator. I grew up listening to Carol King, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Paul Simon, Motown Records’ artists, and the Beatles. I loved listening to and interacting with music as it transported me to the place of no time and no space. It was also a place where I felt understood by my friends on the spinning vinyl records. The first time I heard the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows,” I was blown away. When John Lennon sings the opening lyrics, “Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream. It is not dying, it is not dying,” I could feel consciousness in the words. Later in the song Lennon sings, “Listen to the color of your dreams.” It wasn’t just drug talk, as those around me said; it was what I had been doing my whole childhood, sober.

In seventh or eighth grade, I heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time. The way he played guitar, the energy flowing from the amplifier, was all soul voice, and it stirred something inside me I could not quite describe at the time. It was the sensation of stuck energy inside me being freed. This music was the first time I experienced art in a way that moved me at both the human and the soul level. My new friends could relate, and it was amazing. For the first time I had something to talk with my friends about that created an authentic connection. For years I longed to have a deep connection with my peers but had never found the right frequency to ride into the conversation on without it seeming awkward or forced. I didn’t feel like an outsider for once, or at least less of one.

After school, my music friends and I convened in one of our bedrooms, locked the parents out, and listened to the greats like Jimi and Led Zeppelin and the new stuff like Nirvana and White Zombie. I dyed my hair black and wore combat boots with dresses or jeans and flannel, imitating the style of Courtney Love. I spent my spare time in garages with teenage boys with long hair, learning to play instruments. We hid in the neighborhood park bushes, smoking cigarettes and swag weed and eating psychedelic mushrooms we had picked from cow patties.

In an altered state, I read a book aloud called Das Energi by Paul Williams. It was a collection of poetry that fused rock and roll with Eastern philosophy and New Age consciousness. It was the only book Jac Holzman published through Elektra Records, which had introduced Jim Morrison and the Doors to the world. My new group of friends and I enjoyed the magic of immersing ourselves into the world of rock music. It was a lovely escape from the sterile, florescent-lit box that was our school.

When I wasn’t with my friends, I studied. Not schoolwork—I completed that before I left the school building. I studied any book with esoteric knowledge I could get my hands on. This was pre-Internet and Amazon, so I was limited to what I could find in the library. We lived in suburbia, so there wasn’t much selection beyond major world religions. Growing up, my mom read me Bible stories, and I attended weekly Catholic education classes. I felt a strong connection with this Jesus man my mom always talked about, yet I knew something was missing. The people around me used their minds to interpret the stories of his life, when these stories were intended to arouse something in the soul. Additionally, half of the Bible seemed to be missing because it only showed a male perspective. When I quickly hit my limits at the library and church, I convinced my mother to take me to the large Book Stop in the city.

I remember I lit up like a Christmas tree when I walked the aisles of the New Age section for the first time. Despite her strict Catholic upbringing, my mom understood me enough to let me pick out any book I wanted. She believed in Jesus, but she encouraged me to learn about other schools of thought. It was a true childhood luxury. I rabidly digested anything I could get my hands on. Astrology, tarot cards, runes, Wicca, witchcraft, psychics, metaphysics, ghosts, mediums—I read it all, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. Eastern philosophy and yoga, which has currently taken the West by storm, hadn’t made it to the suburbs of Houston, Texas, in the early 1990s. The only Eastern knowledge available to me was basic books on Buddhism and Hinduism—both felt entirely too masculine and too mental. I knew it wasn’t what I was looking for. I gravitated toward books that allowed for moving beyond the mind rather than going into its inner workings.

Many of the books were interesting, but one lit up in my thirteen-year-old hands--The 21 Lessons of Merlyn: A Study in Druid Magic & Lore by Douglas Monroe—the copy I still have on my bookshelf today. It was a dense, scholarly book with more than four hundred pages. The cover depicted a young blond boy sitting on a rock while a wise, silver-haired teacher wearing a long robe taught him something under a grand oak tree. The picture stirred something inside me. It looked an awful lot like me perched on the rock talking to Mortimer in the garden some years ago. “That’s really strange,” I thought.

When I started reading the text, it wasn’t the words but the images that transported me to a time and place where I lived completely connected with nature—where magic, dreams, imagination, and the bending of time and space existed as common knowledge.

With my eyes closed, I smelled the fresh dampness in the air. It was cool, springlike. Everything around me was bright green and new. The snow had recently melted, and it seemed as if the forest was vibrating with celebration. In this time and space, I was a young woman, an adult. I wore a long, flowing white dress and walked barefoot on a carpet made of moss. My long, dark hair was the color of my father’s, and it turned a shade of red in the sunlight like my mother’s. In this place, my gifts for working with energy—my ability to create things seemingly out of thin air and to feel others at such a deep level—was not only normal but highly regarded.

It felt so real. I was there, and yet I felt thousands of years and thousands of miles away, simultaneously. I went so deeply into this transformative experience simply holding the book in my hand that hours passed as I lay on my bedroom floor with my dog, a black cocker spaniel named Kacee, who never veered too far from my side.

Some of the words in the book spoke directly to me. In the introduction, the author suggested that if you could read the book with the open-mindedness of a child, you would receive more from it. Monroe understood that children were open to the nonphysical world, as I had been. He also said Druids were called tree people--Druid literally meant “men of the oak.”

An image of my relationship with the great oak in my own backyard popped into my third eye. Furthermore, the book mentioned the soul, a word surprisingly missing from other texts, and the soul’s ability to take various human forms through the reincarnation process. I made the leap without thought. My soul had lived many lives, many incarnations, and I was here once again. Sar’h was not just me, but also the dark-haired woman in the woods. Whoa. If I tried to wrap my brain around it, it felt too confusing; on a sensory level, it made perfect sense.

Besides the Druid philosophy, spells, and rituals (most of which were too mental for me to digest), the book featured the story of an orphan boy named Arthur, who meets a teacher he calls Merlyn who shows him, like any great teacher, where to look, not what to see. In the book, Arthur undergoes a series of experiences or initiations facilitated by his merlin—merlin is actually a title, not a person—before realizing at the end that he is, in fact, destined to be king. Merlyn never shares this knowledge directly with Arthur; instead, Arthur must figure it out for himself.

“Some things we must realize on our own,” Mortimer had said.

Instead of the literal story, I focused on the energy between the words, reading the book with the consciousness of my soul rather than within the confines of my human mind. I saw how Arthur’s story serves as a parable for self-realization, what some call enlightenment. I understood Arthur’s noble status wasn’t about ruling over a kingdom of people but rather being the ruler of your own kingdom—SELF.

At thirteen years old, I knew that was what I was here on Earth to experience, but I didn’t have the words for it yet. At the time, the concept was only a sensation that felt real and true, more so than the world I happened to be living in. My soul voice reminded me that Sar’h was Hebrew for “princess”—not a ruler over people but over SELF. The information was beginning to click within the density of my human mind, emotions, and physical body.

The book also confirmed some childhood experiences for me. In the book, Monroe said the Druids knew that the nonphysical or other world was every bit as real and tangible as the physical world, and one affected the other constantly. It was the first time I saw in writing something that I knew so clearly. Additionally, Merlyn speaks to Arthur about a universal picture language—communicating in visual imagery, a language in which I was fluent. After all, it is how our souls communicate important information to the human part of ourselves. My soul rarely, if ever, spoke in words, choosing images and sensations instead that I would then translate into words as necessary. The information came in packets I had to unravel with gnost, or inner knowing, rather than with my mind.

The book also distinguished between the truth of mass consciousness and the truth of the soul—confirming my experience in the classroom at age eight. Even though I knew I did not make these things up, it was a comfort to read about how other people saw and experienced the same things as me. I realized there were others like me out there somewhere. I knew I would meet them someday when I left the suburbs of Houston to travel the world. It excited me to no end.

However, the book had its limitations. It was sexist at its core and implied only celibate men could experience authority over SELF or enlightenment. It talked about enlightened beings Jesus, whom I now call Yeshua, and Buddha, yet I knew there were women who had accomplished mastery over SELF as well. I knew that celibacy and a dick were not requirements, although I could see why most would forgo children during the time when it took place.

I would have to reclaim my feminine authority another way. It showed up in a book called The Witch in Every Woman: Reawakening the Magical Nature of the Feminine to Heal, Protect, Create, and Empower by Laurie Cabot, which I discovered at the age of sixteen. The dedication of the book simply stated, “To Sovereignty.” The word sovereignty rolled around my tongue like a marble. I realized it was another way to talk about the self-governing nature of the soul or the authority over SELF as I read in King Arthur’s story. Cabot also talks about femininity and sex in a way that resonated in harmony with my soul voice. Cabot writes,

"A woman’s entire existence is sexual, her every move a sexual expression. If she decides to enjoy sex with a partner, she should understand it is an enhancement to an innate sensibility she already possesses and enjoys. When it comes to sex, a modern woman must say to herself…'I am sovereign.'…Sexual loving is an integral part of her nature." (83)

I wanted to write Monroe a letter and tell him to shove his bullshit back where it belonged. I also found that the spells in many of the books I read, especially ones that affected the lives of others, did not resonate with me at all. I checked in with Sar’h, the ultimate authority on my SELF. I found these answers inside: To be sovereign you must also recognize the sovereign nature of everyone. Sex should be an act of self-love. It seemed so much easier to go to the source within.

However, the stories contained in these two books—not the spells and exercises, but the parables—helped me confirm and reclaim pieces of myself at an impressionable age, pieces I might have lost in the confines of the modern, mind-based world I lived in, and I am grateful to have found them.

My esoteric studies relieved the awkwardness of my early teenage years. Magic and nature were the saving graces in a flat, mind-based world. I never shared too much with my friends. If they happened to see one of my books, I showed them some spell to distract them or buried them in stories so complex they would lose me. I certainly wasn’t going to bring up self-realization; I’m not even sure I could have spoken about it in a way that would have made sense. Music was the perfect way to connect, as talking during it was highly discouraged.

As I relaxed more into my true nature, I eased back into my physical body. I found it uncomfortable to be overweight. My parents were also overweight, especially my dad. He had a round Santa Claus belly to match his silver hair, which he said turned from black to white when he jumped from a plane in Vietnam. When I told them I wanted to lose weight, he insisted it was in our DNA or part of our ancestral heritage.

“We’re big-boned,” my dad told me, but I knew better.

I held an understanding that no one was ever bound to his or her DNA or ancestral lineage, and it could be changed with consciousness. My mom saw how serious I was, and after talking with a friend, she found the name of a personal trainer in the area. He owned a gym in Katy, Texas. I had never taken to group sports or any after-school activities really, so I went to see Michael while my peers ran track, played soccer, or rehearsed plays. Over the next two years he changed my concepts of health entirely. He not only showed me how to work out but also how to eat. I found it so much easier to connect my soul with my body, both through physical exercise, which moved the stuck energy that caused the extra weight, and through creating a less toxic environment within the body for it to reside. Yet as quickly as I discovered this, the realization was thrown to the side as well as my soul’s voice—once again.

It took some years, but by seventeen years old my ugly duckling turned into a swan. I had muscle and a size-two figure. I let my hair grow back out to its natural blond. The guys who had made fun of me and called me Shamu, the whale, now drooled over me, and I was happy to play my new role. With all the attention and new friends, I left my esoteric studies and my music friends. I was popular now and didn’t have time for such things as enlightenment, merlins, rock and roll, and certainly not my soul. My parents bought me a cherry-red convertible. Instead of Jimi and Zeppelin, I blasted Tupac and Timbaland from the tape deck.

The summer before my senior year, I met a high school soccer player who was now a freshman at Texas A&M University. He was a notorious philanderer, and I didn’t want to touch him with a ten-foot pole. It took some heavy convincing before I gave in, but soon we spent every summer day together, smoking weed, drinking beer, swimming, and playing cards with our friends, who also had nothing to do. He introduced me to sex, but it was his cocaine I fell for. The first time I did a line of coke with him, I knew I was hooked. It made me feel like I was all human, all the time. I was confident. I was not empathic to the people around me. I did not see or sense energetic designs anymore. I couldn’t have cared less about anything but my immediate surroundings and myself.

“This must be how humans feel every day,” I thought. The notion was absurd, yet it fit into my experiences perfectly.

By eighteen years old, I had hit full-blown addict status, and it timed perfectly with my freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin. When sniffing coke wasn’t enough, I spiraled out of control into the designer drug buffet readily available across the UT campus. If I was going to allow myself to experience the darkness of addiction, I was going to go all in. Three years, a felony drug charge, and a rehab stint later, I decided to get clean, trading one addiction for another—a socially acceptable disease called success.

In my early twenties, I dove into the deep end of the American dream. I finished my undergraduate degree in journalism and graduated with honors at age twenty-one. I went on to work for a US senator in Washington, DC, and for award-winning newspapers in South Carolina, Georgia, and back home in the Houston area. By the age of twenty-four, I’d made my way back to Austin, serving as the press secretary for a state senator. At twenty-five, I met my future husband. After earning my master’s degree and graduating in one of the top ten slots, I married my husband, and I started my new career as a nonprofit lobbyist for the Lance Armstrong Foundation, where I was quickly being promoted up the chain of command. I was so convinced of my belief in success as a path I even fooled myself.

At thirty years old, I looked at myself in the mirror and realized I was living the singular human life I had found so offensive as a child and teen. There was no magic, imagination, or play in my life. My soul voice was nowhere to be found, and my human brain and body were preprogrammed goal-setting and accomplishing machines.

So where had I lost it, this sense of SELF? Where and when had I exited the road to self-realization? When I felt into it, I realized it—the soul or master voice had never really left. It was shelved, stepping in only in times of major crises and then returning to the shelf, waiting for me, Lauren, the human, to recognize her. The soul is so patient with the human expression of itself. The soul has such unwavering passion and unconditional love for the human—so much so that if the human says, “Hey, I’m going to have the experiences of doing drugs, partying with the cool kids, becoming a wild lobbying success, whatever,” the soul says, “OK, I’ll be here when you get back.”

In some cases, this can take lifetimes. For others, all it takes is a crack in the human self for the soul to return. It can be an actual physical trauma or an emotional one. What the human views as a tragedy is so often an opportunity for the soul to seep back in through the cracks. “Bump and fill” is what I heard it called later. My tragedy or opportunity—however I chose to view it—was quickly approaching.

At thirty years old, my life changed in an instant—with a phone call informing me that my dad had slipped into a coma and would probably never wake up. Those childhood memories resurfaced, and my soul jumped at the opportunity to come back into my human’s field of awareness. I realized I could no longer hide behind the facade of success. The dam I had built to shut out the chaos of consciousness—the awareness of who I truly was—was crumbling, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

​I was unaware of the details while completely aware that my life was about to change entirely. Between the summers of 2011 and 2013, I lost everything that mattered to me and, as a result, my identity. My father. My career. My husband. And more importantly, I was about to flush an entire set of beliefs down the toilet. I would be left with nothing but the I EXIST and the few fairytale breadcrumbs back to the path of the soul that I had collected from childhood and adolescence. And I was going to need a stiff drink.

I spent the extreme heat of August and September 2011 in a frigid room at the Saint David’s Georgetown Intensive Care Unit. In hindsight, it must have been bizarre to see me driving between Austin, Texas, and the neighboring community, Georgetown, twice daily in the triple-digit weather wearing a sweat suit. I was too tired to care. It took all my energy to swipe my greasy blond hair into a bun. Makeup was out of the question, despite the dark circles that pooled like sinkholes under my eyes.

I felt like the walking dead, like the heroin addicts I saw on Hastings Street during a vacation to Vancouver. Yes, they were technically alive, but you could see their souls disassociated from their bodies. I saw the same soulless face looking back at me in the mirror each morning before I made the drive to sit next to my father’s half-alive, half-dead body.

The nurses and doctor—if I could ever fucking find him—probably thought I was in my early twenties, maybe a student, which in their defense was exactly what I looked like. I never took the time to tell them otherwise. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that I had skipped a grade; that I had overcome a severe drug addiction; that I had moved to Washington, DC, with nothing but a suitcase and dream; that I had worked for eleven dollars an hour at my first job, living in a four-hundred-square-foot housing project; that now, at the age of thirty, I had successfully led a team that lobbied the Texas government for more than $1 billion in cancer-prevention and research funding. None of it mattered now that my dad was dying. If it had been a week ago, I would have been compelled to tell them how important I was. Even in the face of death, I found I could laugh at my own absurdities. I had been collecting my successes like I collected the buffet of drugs I dined on in college. An addiction is an addiction, no matter the substance.

The thing is, I knew my dad was going to die. I woke up one morning a few months before he ended up in the hospital. I think it was around April that year. I remember shooting straight up into a seated position in bed when a voice said loud and clear, “Your dad is going to die.” I began to cry, and then I remembered a strange voice with no physical body telling me that something so important was crazy, forgetting all about Sar’h and our previous conversations. I stuffed the information back down where it belonged—buried with the other facts I did not want to face. I’d heard the voice before—it didn’t come from within; it was external and usually came from my left side. I was so far into the singular human experience, it never occurred to me that it was my soul speaking.

The last time the voice spoke with that much conviction was in the height of my drug addiction. It was 1999, twelve years prior. I was eighteen and living in an apartment in Austin’s West Campus neighborhood. My house was a carousel of drugs, dealers, and addicts. In a rare moment, I found myself alone and coming down off the latest three-day coke binge. The voice said, “You need to get everything out of your house.” It meant the drugs, paraphernalia, and the cast of shady characters. I heard it loud and clear, yet I chalked it up to being severely tired and strung out. Instead of cleaning out the apartment, I took a sleeping pill and went to bed.

As I was starting to drift off to sleep, police, some dressed in all black and with large guns, broke down my door and ransacked my house. They could have knocked. They found all sorts of things to hang over my head, the worst of which was a tiny plastic baggy with a bit of cocaine residue, which carried a felony charge in the state of Texas. The police and the beer-bellied detective wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt took me to some sort of facility, an office building in north Austin, where they explained to me after hours and hours of questioning that I could either be an informant or go to jail.

That day I agreed to be an informant, yet I ended up going to jail and then serving three years of probation after changing my mind. I did not need to have the experience of tattling on drug dealers with Mexican cartel connections and small arsenals in the trunks of their cars. My boyfriend, who was busted in his apartment the same week, did become an informant for the Austin Police Department. The detectives there were so smart that my boyfriend ended up busting a major drug dealer who was actually an undercover Drug Enforcement Agency officer. APD ended up ruining years of DEA work. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.

I remembered the voice played a part in my whole life, even though as an adult I often ignored it or was too fucked up to listen to it. It wasn’t until I was in the hospital with my half-dead father that I realized it was the voice of my soul—the one I had discarded to party with the cool kids and later in the name of success. In these instances, the voice existed outside my body, but it was about to reenter through the cracks of my human self, created by the immense grief I was experiencing as I watched my father die a slow death.

***

The day before I got the call that changed everything, the “why-I-mattered” list was what kept me going. I told myself that I was the definition of American success and living the dream. Like some cheesy self-help guru, I listed off my success superpowers when I became anxious over things like discovering a typo in a company-wide e-mail or gaining three pounds on vacation. I could work my Blackberry in my sleep, convince legislators to vote my way, work sixty-hour weeks, and still have the time to run and diet myself into a size-four designer dress. I reminded myself of all the things that created the undeniable proof that I was a wild success. After the call, I couldn’t fathom that I’d ever actually cared about these things. I was dumbfounded at how much can change in any given moment.

The day of the call was like any other day for me. I walked out of work, got into my car, and called my dad on the way home like I did every weekday. Yes, my dad told me he was having a minor procedure that day, but he insisted I not take off work for something so minor. My dad had recently learned that scar tissue in his throat had built up so much, he was breathing out of a hole the size of a pen tip. The doctor speculated it was from exposure the Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, something he had volunteered for, but no one really knew for sure. My dad was also overweight and tended to ignore his diabetes, another thing he had picked up in Vietnam, where he ate and drank too much while running the post office and operating the ham radio so soldiers could talk to their loved ones back at home. The procedure was described to me as simply placing a stint into his throat to open it back up. It only took a short time to complete. We were not aware of the risks. When my dad picked up the hospital phone, he sounded OK.

“Better not to visit,” he said. “Doctor says I shouldn’t talk much. I’ll be out tomorrow.”

“OK, Dad. I’ll come tomorrow and pick up dinner.”

The next morning I received the call from his girlfriend, Nell, to come quickly to the hospital. She couldn’t tell me anything except to hurry, so I did. The shock in her voice told me something was terribly wrong.

“The surgery didn’t work,” Dr. D said flatly when I arrived, desperate. “His throat has closed up and cut off oxygen to the brain. We have induced a coma. He may not wake up, Lauren.”

It felt as if someone had put a pitchfork down my throat and into my stomach, where they began to twist it. I doubled over in pain. I may never get to say good-bye. I couldn’t control my agony. Then I couldn’t control my fear. Then I couldn’t control my anger. My feelings oscillated wildly.

“When will he wake up?” I asked again. “I have to tell him I love him!”

“Maybe never,” Dr. D replied flatly.

“Give me a percentage,” I said. It’s something my boss always asked about the chance of passage of the legislation I was working on at any given moment.

“Fifty,” he said. I could tell he felt it was much less by the look in his eyes.

Right then and there, time stopped. I felt my heart turn to glass and shatter into a thousand tiny shards. I watched them helplessly bounce and scatter across the cold hospital floor. Nell was beside me, but I felt completely and utterly alone in the world. Even though I had a husband and a mother, I’d never felt a connection to them the way I did with my dad, and where were they now?

My parents had divorced when I was twenty-one years old, and they never spoke. Brian was my husband, but he only knew parts of me, the ones he wanted to see. Besides, he seemed to always be at work during this whole ordeal. Neither of them ever quite got me the way my dad did. No one did. At the time, he was my one connection to this world that did not feel forced or surface level. And I knew I was about to lose him—in this form, anyway—forever.

It’s true my dad and I hadn’t been close when I was growing up. But when I was sixteen years old, my dad went into the hospital for triple bypass surgery. The doctors said he would be in for a week. Eight months and many near-death experiences later, he finally came home. Something had changed in him, opening me up to getting to know him. He had connected with his soul too.

It held the opposite effect for my mom. After he got back onto his feet and retired from the job that took him away at all hours, my mother left him when I was sober, twenty-one, and a senior in college. It was for her reasons, and I understood completely. That’s when my dad’s and my true friendship began. Something was different. No longer hard as nails and overbearing, my dad became a gentle giant. I was able to share myself completely with him in a way I’d never shared with anyone before. He was present with me in a way he never had been when I was growing up. I found, much to my surprise, that I really liked him both as a person—he was quite funny and a rule breaker—and at the soul level.

I found when I looked at his gray-blue eyes, identical to mine, that I felt a connection to where I’d come from—not as a human but as a soul. He reflected back to me something I did not yet see inside myself—a strength and ability to make big things happen in this physical world. He also reflected back to me a way of being—an existence. My dad was not only a large man physically, but you also could feel his presence radiate from miles away. He taught me to never dim my shine and to never shrink myself to fit into situations. Instead, he suggested allowing situations to adapt to my expansiveness. Later I would learn I chose my parents for specific reasons before I came back to Earth in this life. I chose my father for his connection to my angelic or soul family and my mother for a connection to the bloodline I had been born into for so many lifetimes. As a child, I didn’t understand what brought them together; it seemed to make no logical sense. The more I remembered who I was, the more the dots connected.

If I had the choice to be friends with anyone in the world, I would choose my dad. I often chose him over nights out with friends. I knew having Robin Hutton as my father was something special on this strange planet. I would have lived in an ice fishing hole if he had asked me to, and the ICU room didn’t feel too far off. My dad’s lifeless body was covered in ice packs in an effort to freeze his organs to preserve them in the rare event that he woke up. The room temperature was kept in the fifties. It felt even colder as air seeped out of the ice packs covering his six-foot frame. It was a new technique and the first time the nurse had tried it. “Great—an experiment,” I thought.

I discovered that holding the coffee the silver-haired volunteers made each morning in my free hand while holding his frozen, swollen hand in the other kept my teeth from chattering. My human self was breaking into pieces, yet something else was happening too. After the first week or so, I felt an energy building at the base of my spine. The electric current it produced began to fill up my womb and pulsate up into my stomach area. It wasn’t so much in the physical body as it was active in the lower center region of my energetic body. I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it or the knowledge to make any sense of it. I didn’t have the time to research it because I was focused on my father and his current state. Later, I realized it was my soul or spirit returning to the body, yet at the time, all I knew was that something major was happening inside of me. I tried to tell Brian about it. He simply shrugged, patted my head, and said it was stress and grief.

I stayed sober during the day, both to witness what was going on inside me and as a fierce advocate for my father’s well-being. As soon as I went home, I self-medicated with a bottle of wine followed by an Ambien or two from Brian’s prescription. I binge watched Mad Men until the drugs kicked in. I woke up to an alarm at 7:00 a.m. that told me it was time to go back to the hospital. This went on for weeks and weeks. I thought I’d only drink this much wine and take the Ambien to get past the initial shock, but it would become a habit as wave after wave swept the life I had created away. There was nothing left for me to do but watch it get drug out to sea.

One day, not unlike the rest, my dad squeezed my hand when I repeated for the hundred thousandth time, “Dad, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand.” I squeezed back, grateful, and felt warmth return to my body. The endless summer sun poured through the room’s single window. For the first time in more than three weeks, I noticed it. Was it September already? I had to check my phone. It was the first day I even wondered about the date, thought about work or my husband, or wondered about the last time I had washed my hair.

It’s strange to think I was married during this period. I slept next to Brian when he was home. His work took him to all sorts of places, Ukraine and India mainly, yet there seemed to be no difference whether he was there or not. He did his best to comfort me, make sure I was fed, and take over some of my household responsibilities. Yet there was a wall between us, and I’m not sure who built it. The real and only comfort I found was from my dog, Ollie, a fifty-pound golden doodle. My dad and I had picked him up from the breeder in east Texas right before my thirtieth birthday. Ollie was, and still is, an amazing presence in my life, exuding love and joy at all times. One of the rare things Brian and I ever agreed upon was that Ollie was the perfect dog.

Several days passed before my dad could open one eye, and after several days more, he could open the other. Each morning I would rush on my drive to the hospital, optimistic for news of progress. More days passed, and he wiggled his big toes. Each day brought a small but new hope-filled movement. The sky outside continued cloudless; translucent waves radiated off the asphalt parking lot, a demonstration of the triple-digit temperatures and drought the newsmen endlessly discussed on the small television in my dad’s ICU room.

Then the day came when my dad was conscious enough for me to tell him the surgery had failed. I explained to him a hole had been cut in his throat to open the airway. He could not talk now as a result. He might not be able to talk ever again. The doctor didn’t know. My dad would have rather heard he was dead and in hell than hear he might not talk again. It was the worst thing I’ve ever told another human being, even worse than telling my husband that I was going to leave him.

My dad’s life was about communicating. He was a salesman who had worked his way up to CEO. He gave speeches, mentored, and held court at the Whataburger in his retirement community or on his back patio each morning over coffee. He was Texas’s best inappropriate joke teller. The man made telemarketers want to hang up, and I had signed the papers approving the tracheotomy that had left him speechless. I’d had no other choice, I told myself on repeat. It had been the only option.

On my way into the hospital the next day, I stopped at Target for a dry-erase board and markers, hoping to bring some optimism and an ability to communicate. But he couldn’t make words, only scribble. His eyes welled up with tears, and I was mad at myself for embarrassing him as his girlfriend, Nell, stood by his side. Nell was a faithful and loving partner to my dad. She showed up to the hospital each and every day to support him, and I knew she loved him. Yet when it came to making health decisions, paying bills, and the host of other tasks that needed to get done, let’s just say she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. She did what she knew how to do—she prayed to God.

God—some high-and-mighty man in heaven involved in my dad’s health—it was a completely outdated, limited concept to me. Something inside me knew the choice to stay or go was my father’s alone, a decision of his soul. But if prayer made her feel better, who was I to say anything?

As my father’s medical power of attorney, I was there for one job—to make sure his wishes were being honored in that freezer of a hospital. I consider myself a smart person, but nothing short of a medical degree would have qualified me to make the decisions I was forced to make. I felt completely overwhelmed and inadequate. He was a “do not resuscitate,” or DNR, and I had to fiercely protect his right to die. And let me tell you, that was no small task. Everyone in the hospital wanted to keep him alive at any and all costs. Was this the kind of thing I’d spent the last five years lobbying for, sacrificing my health and time to make these drug companies and medical suppliers richer? It was something I would have to revisit later; there was too much on my plate already.

Eventually, my dad gained enough control of his motor skills to make fists with both hands. Still without a voice, he used the opportunity to communicate through sign language. I watched him place the thumbs of each fist together and pull them swiftly apart over and over—a high stakes game of charades. After several wrong guesses, to which he violently shook his head no, I realized it was the motion of a plug being pulled from the socket. I realized he desperately wanted me to end his life. The discussion had occurred years prior during one of our weekly lunches. He had pulled out a red binder containing his will and medical power of attorney.

“Kill me if you have to, Lauren,” he’d said. “Don’t let me live like that.”

My dad placed his hand on my wrist and looked into my eyes, the same gray-blue eyes as mine. Soul family. Lifetimes and lifetimes together. I nodded yes.

“I’ll take you out,” I’d said, and we’d laughed together.

I played out the situation in my imagination. I would rip out all the cords hooked up to his body, unplug every machine, and wheel him outside into the hospital parking lot, where he could die looking into the sunlight in the triple-digit temperatures, not in this horrible, cold place. Then I saw myself in a jail cell. The situation was ridiculous. He was ready to go. It was illegal to help him but perfectly legal to pump him full of drugs and hook him up to machines against his will. What kind of world did we live in? With nothing to do, I crawled into his hospital bed, with all the tubes and monitors, and wrapped my arms around him the best I could. We lay in silence. I cried hard and tried to keep the sobs from ringing out.

“I want a second opinion,” I told the nurse the next day. “I want to hear from another pulmonologist. I want to get his regular cardiologist in here.”

The shock wore off. I saw red. We were not a priority here.

“Dr. D is the only pulmonologist with privileges in this hospital,” she said. “You’d have to hire an ambulance to transfer him elsewhere, and he’ll never make it.”

“Screw purgatory,” I replied. “We’re stuck in hell.”

There are more politics in a hospital than in the fucking Texas State capitol.

Each day Nell and I waited for Dr. D to make his rounds, and I got angrier and angrier with him. Some days he never came, or a substitute doctor was sent who knew nothing, and I would have to fill him in. I sat in that arctic hospital room, a rabid advocate for the best treatment for my dad, until the sun went down and the nurses asked me to leave when visitor hours ended at 8:00 p.m.

Yet through some miracle and with the help of a small group of amazing nurses, my dad got better. His tenacious will proved stronger than his illness, likely fueled by the desire to die at home with dignity rather than in this gray, depressing, maddening hospital with no answers. He harnessed his great might and spoke his first words.

“Get. Me. Out,” he gasped, finger over the hole in the tracheotomy tube protruding from his throat. He followed it up with a dramatic gesture, mimicking a racecar driver making his final left turn. The relief at hearing him speak again after so many weeks of silence rapidly turned into sorrow at seeing him in so much pain, with so much fear. But we couldn’t leave yet. The man who was so fiercely independent now could not walk or even hold himself up to go to the bathroom, so we headed to the third floor for rehab, thankful to be out of the waiting room of death and thankful that he had his voice back for the time being.

When my dad was released from the rehab floor in two rather than the prescribed four to six weeks, the nurses were surprised. I was not. When I was sixteen, I’d seen him do it before when he was a lot sicker. My mom and dad had still been married at the time, and the decisions that had kept me up at night were hers. I held a new respect for what she’d gone through. Taking care of a sick husband and a cocaine-addicted teenage daughter was no way to live. My mother had been forced to raise her youngest brother at age fourteen when her own mother was checked into a mental hospital. No wonder she had left us both when my dad got well and I got sober; she had to save herself. I get that now in a way I never did before everything changed, and I’d be forced to do it myself in two years’ time.

After this last resurrection, my dad went back to holding court at the Georgetown Whataburger, albeit he was slower moving and thinking. I dove back into my job at the Lance Armstrong Foundation headfirst. No drugs, no problem. Work addictions are much more socially acceptable and even highly encouraged in our current global economic conditions. By this time it was October 2011. Two months had passed. I forgot all about the soul experiences I’d gone through while my father had been in the coma. Human amnesia is a real bitch.

That’s when Brian received his call. Doctors had diagnosed his mother, whom I loved deeply, with stage-four colon cancer. She said there was no cure and nothing to do but try to slow it down. Shortly thereafter, we got a call from our fertility-treatment nurse. Despite pumping myself full of hormones and being artificially inseminated, I was not pregnant, again. Yes, during this whole mess, my husband was pressuring me for a baby. I was too messed up to fight it. The baby boy carrying Brian’s name was the only thing we had left to check off the list of evidence of our perfect lives.

Brian was upset. I felt a huge wave of relief and then guilt for feeling the relief. After all, I’d told Brian I would have children with him when I’d accepted his marriage proposal. But things were different now. Everything would be different when my father died. I didn’t know much, but I knew I needed to wait to see. There was absolutely no way I could be a mom right now, especially not with Brian taking off on planes every other week across the world.

I remember I did not have the energy to put up a Christmas tree that winter, something I usually did with gusto. That year I wrapped a string of white lights around a rosemary bush I’d purchased on sale at the grocery store, opened a bottle of wine, and called it a day. That New Year’s Eve, I leaned into Brian’s chest and whispered so our dinner party guests could not hear, “Surely 2012 is going to be a better year; it can’t get worse.” He hugged me tightly but didn’t say anything.

The next call came from my mom.

“I have breast cancer,” she said. “But they caught it early. No need to worry.”

I was relieved to hear the doctor had caught it early. With complete removal, my mom could avoid radiation and chemo, which she said were poison. I agreed.

A couple of weeks later, my dad called in tears. His stepson had died unexpectedly in his sleep. He was in his forties and had multiple sclerosis but was seemingly getting better with a different cocktail of medications. He and my dad were close, and Nell, who was now his wife, was beside herself with grief. My dad worked way too hard for someone that sick to put his stepson’s affairs in order and physically clean out his apartment. In hindsight, I think he came back from his near grave just to clean up the mess and support Nell before it all became too much.

Then in April, my dad told me he’d have to have another surgery. This time he was going to try something else to help with the scar tissue in his throat and remove the tracheotomy tube. He looked absolutely terrible; his skin was the color of death, and he smelled like it too. In my gut, I knew it was the end. The surgery was experimental, but he told me he could not live with the tracheotomy tube one more day. I wanted to protest, to argue with him, but then I looked into his eyes. There was no changing his mind. He either wanted death or to get better. The tracheotomy hole in his throat represented purgatory, and I forced myself to respect the decision. He told me over our usual weekly lunch, and when I hugged him in the parking lot that day, I lingered, knowing it could be the last time. It was.

That day at lunch, my dad told me that he was satisfied with his life. He loved running a company and especially loved all the people he worked with and his hundreds of friends. His regret was that he did not take the time to travel when he had been healthy.

“Don’t do it,” he said to me. “You’re on the same path.”

He was right. Brian and I both worked entirely too much. I promised I’d make more time for fun and travel. I had no idea that what lay ahead of me was so much grander, and neither my father nor I knew we would be able to experience it together, after he was gone.

My dad’s surgery was scheduled for three days before my mom’s double mastectomy, his in San Antonio, hers in Corpus Christi. I had to choose where to go and who to support and attend a couple work strategy meetings in between. My dad insisted I not attend his surgery.

“You will not,” he said. “You take care of your mom.”

My dad came through the surgery fine and was discharged the same day. I talked with him and Nell on the phone, and they sounded ecstatic, so I ignored the feeling in my gut to go to him instead. My mom created a story where she made it sound like I had no choice but to be there, to choose her surgery over his. I know it doesn’t matter now, but for a solid year
I lambasted myself for ignoring this gut feeling.

After my mom was wheeled into surgery, I checked my phone. Seven missed calls from my dad’s house. I called back in a panic. Nell handed the phone to a neighbor at the house. She couldn’t even tell me herself.

“Lauren, your dad died,” said the minister’s wife, flatly. No emotion or sympathy. Only facts. “He was sitting in his chair and didn’t wake up. I’m sorry.”

I doubled over in grief in the hospital parking lot, yelling, “Fuck,” and, “I knew it,” over and over again to the minister’s wife. I did not give a damn who I was yelling at. When I see it now it’s like I’m watching myself in a slow-motion movie. I see myself walk back into the hospital waiting room. I see myself tell my mom’s boyfriend at the time, “My dad died. I have to go.” And I see myself walk back to my car. I was not in my body. It hurt too much to be in my body.

I called Brian. He did not answer.

“In a meeting,” he texted me. “What do you want?”

Did he not remember I was juggling two sick parents alone?

“My dad died,” I texted back.

The movie continued in slow motion. Was this man really my husband and texting me at a time like this? I was as work obsessed as him, I reminded myself. From outside my body, I told it we did not have energy to be mad right now. We needed to drive four hours to get to my dad’s body. I’m not sure why I was in a rush. He was dead, but it wasn’t even an option not to go right that minute. The decisions we are forced to make in life are inconceivable. The things we worry about are trivial in the face of what happens out of our control.

“I should have been there for him. I should have been there when he died.” The thoughts repeated over and over. I’d sat by his deathbed off and on for sixteen fucking years, and I was not there when he fucking died. I hated myself. Brian was smart enough to call my longtime best friend, Teresa. She talked me through the drive, telling me funny stories, keeping me occupied, and, most importantly, keeping me from driving my Infiniti G35 into the concrete highway divider. The love and appreciation I have for her—there are no words.

After my father died, his body was immediately taken to the funeral home for cremation—my dad thought caskets were a waste of money. I pulled out the infamous red binder, which now lived in my car, and turned to the funeral tab. I found a blank page. It included a will, a medical and financial power of attorney, a list of all bank accounts, all the bills I needed to pay, a life insurance policy, and details I didn’t even know I needed. But for a funeral—the pages ran blank. Fuck me.

With no direction, I simply did my best to honor his life. I planned a service in Sun City Georgetown, Texas, where my father had spent his last five years. Dozens of people showed up to pay their respects. A front row of seats was reserved for family. It sat empty except for Nell, my husband, one girlfriend, my uncle’s ex-wife, and me. That’s it. I relied on neighbors and friends of my father’s to pull it off. I can’t even remember their names now, but I am extremely grateful for the strangers who reserved rooms, helped order food, and kept things running while I was falling apart.

I gave a short speech, and when I got back home, I chased the grief I’d swallowed with a yet another bottle of wine and an Ambien. More Mad Men binge watching. Thank you, Don Draper. Later that week, I held a happy hour—much more my father’s style—in Houston, where he had run a company. One hundred or so of his rowdy friends showed up, telling crazy, wild stories about my father. They drank and ate so much, the bar tab was around $6,000 when we were done. It’s the best money I’ve ever spent. I heard stories about my dad and his wild adventures I had never heard before, and the joyful mood of the crowd was so fitting for the boisterous man he was. Afterward, Brian and I went to Rockport, Texas, to see my mother, who was recovering from surgery nicely. After a week, I was expected to go back to regular life. What a fucking joke. I couldn’t fathom going back to the same life. I was an entirely different person. About that time, a random check arrived in the mail addressed only to me.

“This is your ticket out. Go,” Sar’h said energetically.

The communication from my soul voice came from within this time. After years of patience, Sar’h itched to get back on our soul path. I told her it might take some time to untangle myself from this mess. I quit my job that September, four months after my father’s death. I told my husband I was not sure I could be married that October, and packed my bags for India that November.

The strangest thing of all is that none of this seems that big of a deal to me now—simple human-life details that did not matter much in the context of the expansive journey of the soul—but at that moment I was getting pounded by one wave after another. Waves don’t happen in singles. They roll unforgivingly in sets, growing in power and speed. I was only able to capture a few shallow breaths before the next wave punched me back down to the ocean floor.

I needed more oxygen, more space, to save myself or I was going to drown. My survival came signed, sealed, and delivered in the childhood memory of the I EXIST. The I EXIST was my surfboard. If I could find a way to get back onto the eight-foot board, paddle hard into the next wave, and pop to my feet, I could ride the wave into shore. I could wake up from this strange dream turned nightmare.

In all this mess, my soul seeped back into the shell of a human I had become, into the cracks created by the shattering grief. The more my soul seeped in, the more my human life unraveled, and I found that—much to my surprise—I did not want to put it back together. Something greater was bubbling up under the surface, yet I could not find the words to describe it. Could it be that the self-realization or enlightenment experience I had been so quick to discard in my teens was a real possibility? It was too soon to tell.

Perhaps my journey to India would provide some much-needed insight. It would at least provide the time and space needed to figure out what was next. Regular yoga classes served as my sanctuary throughout all this. The yoga studio was the safe space to allow my emotions to flow, let myself unravel, and pull myself back together. I reasoned a month on my yoga mat at the source of the practice would afford me some answers. It was worth a try.

Sure, I had traveled a lot before but never in search of answers to questions that I could not yet articulate. It was mid-November 2012, six months after my father’s death and six months before I filed for divorce. I had quit working at the Lance Armstrong Foundation about two months earlier and was still detoxing from the Blackberry addiction it had created. My human self was a hot mess. Sar’h was beside herself with excitement. Together we were on the verge of something so grand, my human self could not have imagined it.
​
Before my journey to India, I realized I was not in connection with my soul the way I had been as a child. It was going to take years to get back. I needed to relearn Mortimer and Merlyn’s universal picture language and Sar’h’s way of communicating in energetic sensations. All those years in university classrooms, newsrooms, capitol buildings, and office cubicles beat my soul’s voice to a pulp. Human thoughts and emotions are like muscles, gaining strength the more you use them. After the last fifteen years, it was near impossible to silence the beasts. As a child, it had been as simple as turning a light switch off and on.

Despite my efforts, I couldn’t remember shit about communicating in images and sensations. The amnesia created by human thoughts and emotions created a situation in which my soul experiences felt like a thousand-piece puzzle I must put back together. It certainly wouldn’t be boring, I reasoned. Besides, there was no going back. If I tried to stay in the singular human experience, I would die like a houseplant no one watered. My human self panicked and tried to understand what was occurring. Yet the more it tried to comprehend through limited human thoughts and emotions, the more internal knots it created.

The only thing to do was relax—to allow—but true relaxation is not the human forte. The human brain wants goals, plans, security, answers, and rigid categories to keep messy things like emotions organized. Experiences of the soul? Forget it. Total brain malfunction. The soul, the master senses, the I EXIST—all of it is beyond comprehension of a human brain’s local linear thought patterns.

On a human level, the most pressing matter I had to decide was if I was going to stay in my marriage or not. The thing is, I knew deep down, at the soul level, that I was going to leave. Yet my human thoughts—the kind that skip like broken records and keep you awake at night—and my husband’s incessant yelling and crying were so loud, it was near impossible to hear the inner voice. At the time, all I knew was that I had to get out of my current hurricane of a situation to be able to view it from an expanded perspective.

Then the opportunity arose. A friend of mine and another yoga teacher were hosting yoga teacher training on a tiny island in the Vembanad backwaters of Kerala, India. Please note that the irony of two white American women hosting yoga teacher training—in India of all places—was not lost on me. However, it was, at the time, a husband-approved and socially acceptable way for me to find peace for a month, get sober, and hopefully dig some more clues out of my soul and reconnect to the experiences of expanded awareness I had had as a child and a teenager.

The Rumi poem about the lost camel came to mind: “You have lost your camel, my friend. And all around you people are full of advice. You don’t know where your camel is. But you do know that these casual directions are wrong.” I was off to look for my camel, and somehow I knew the compass was inside me and that these people who showed up in the chaos to point me in the so-called right direction seemed more lost than me.

Yoga had come barreling into my life in 2006. I was a total stress ball, attending graduate school and teaching indoor-cycling and weight lifting classes at 24 Hour Fitness on the side. I was completely and totally body obsessed. I tallied how many calories I expended and ingested the way an OCD person washes his or her hands and checks to make sure a door is locked. Injured and overexercised, I found myself in the yoga studio by my home. The instructor talked me into pigeon pose, which was no fun for me at the time. Yet something strange happened as I eased my body forward into the deep hip-opening stretch. I began to cry, not from pain but from an almost orgasmic emotional release. It was if I had stored a giant emotional knot in there decades, if not lifetimes, ago, and I finally let whatever it was go. After the experience, I was hooked, reading everything I could get my hands on and practicing as much as possible.

***

“Welcome aboard Emirates flight 1304 Dallas to Dubai. The estimated flight time is fifteen hours and twenty-five minutes,” the captain said. His voice boomed from the overhead speaker as he read the flight message in English, Arabic, and something I did not recognize.

“Hi, I’m Mark,” said the man in the window seat. “This is Bill, my father-in-law.”

He gestured to the man who sat between us.

“I’m Lauren. Where are you headed?” I asked to be polite. He clearly wanted to tell me.

“To Mumbai for a mission trip,” Mark said.

“Good luck with that,” I thought.

“We’re all from Oklahoma City,” he said.

Bill gestured to five men who sat in the middle section one row up and named their mutual church. I couldn’t tell if it was Baptist or Church of Christ, but I didn’t care enough to ask.

“Where are you going?” Mark asked.

“To an island in Kerala to practice yoga for a month.”

“By yourself?”

“Well, I’m meeting some friends there, but yes.”

Then it occurred to me that their group included no women. They must have stayed home to tend to the children back in Oklahoma, where morality was safe.

When the plane leveled in the air, the attendant made her rounds. Her crimson pillbox hat and tailored suit were a far cry from the sweatshop uniforms American attendants wear. She was young, beautiful, and appeared to be from the entire continent of Asia.

“Ma’am, what would you like to drink?”

“Two Bloody Marys, please.”

I needed one for each Ambien. I wanted the wheels of the plane hitting Dubai concrete to wake me up. I certainly did not want to spend fifteen hours brooding over the mess I had left in Austin, Texas.

“Also, please don’t wake me up for food. I just ate a huge meal and will be fine.”

“As you wish, ma’am.”

The two men looked at me in horror as I opened the tiny vodka bottles and dumped the entire contents into the bland tomato juice. I downed them back-to-back for the sake of show. I was snoring and drooling in about twenty minutes and only remembered waking up to go to the bathroom once. When I got off the plane, Mark and Bill confessed that they hadn’t slept at all. I felt like a spring daisy. God would have wanted it that way.

After passing through several security lines, I wound through a labyrinth lined with women covered head to toe in fabric, who tended to children and pushed carts stacked high with all their worldly belongings. They walked behind their husbands, whose hands remained free. I located food and wine and watched movies on my computer to pass the time between flights. An hour before takeoff, I parked my backpack and single rolling suitcase at the gate, keeping my eye out for the friends who would accompany me on the next leg of the journey.

It wasn’t hard to spot my friend Liz, the lead yoga instructor at the one-month training. Her wild, curly hair seemed bigger than normal, and I wondered how the good people of Dubai felt about a braless woman in a tank top with unshaven armpits. She introduced her boyfriend, the one she had left her husband for, whom I had heard a lot about but had never actually met. Robby looked like a juggler without clubs. His floppy hat and pirate smile were friendly, and his harem pants completed the look. They both gave me hugs, and I felt myself exhale for the first time in what seemed like months. It wasn’t so much their company that relaxed me as much as the reality of finding peace for one month setting in. I was a long way from home and the life I’d been living, one of Neiman Marcus suits, Prada heels, and lobby strategy meetings. Somehow, the funny Polaroid picture the three of us would have made told me I was going in the right direction. I had found a pause between the sets of breaking waves. I had time to breathe.

The four-hour connecting flight from Dubai to Port Cochin was uneventful until we landed, when the passengers emptied the plane in order of who could shove harder. I put my elbows up and shoved. Never fuck with a Texan woman. It was surprisingly easy to get through customs and retrieve our luggage, which wasn’t much for a thirty-day stay. You don’t need much for practicing yoga in triple-digit temperatures; and with no audience for hair, makeup, and high heels, I was down a suitcase.

An older Indian man with a sign that read Soma Kerala Palace waited as we walked outside. A damp heat slapped us hard on both cheeks, and it felt good to me compared to Austin’s November chill. This man was not the cabdriver. His role was simply to point at the car we should get in, while the driver, who appeared to be no older than fourteen or fifteen, strapped our luggage to the top.

The teenager drove us through the empty streets of the dark city, veering from lane to lane wildly. Hello, India! Liz sat in the front seat, hand over her stomach, attempting not to get carsick, while Robby told me about his sun sign, Capricorn. I rolled down the window, allowing the thick, humid breeze in. I sensed the energetic feel of the country. It was the first Eastern country I had been to, yet it felt unexpectedly familiar.

A memory surfaced like the one I’d experienced holding the book of King Arthur and Merlyn in my thirteen-year-old hands. I saw a figure I knew was my dad. I was a small child, and he was telling me stories about studying in India. He described the long journey he took to get there from his home miles and miles away. I realized it was Sar’h’s memory of another lifetime, not Lauren’s. Or were they one and the same? Past lives were beginning to run simultaneously, one leaking into the other. It made sense at the soul level. If time were not linear, how else would they run but concurrently? It confused my human self beyond its limits of comprehension, creating another emotional knot inside of me.

About an hour later, we came to a tall iron gate, and two guards opened each side enough to allow the tiny car to pull through. The gate shut immediately with a thud that felt like the nail on the coffin of my self-induced, month-long sobriety. The dark curtain of the night began to lift, but the sun was not yet visible. We climbed aboard a small boat, and yet another Indian man loaded our luggage. A thatched roof covered one side of the boat, which was made of wood and featured a basic motor slapped on the back. Another Indian man drove the boat, and yet another guided at the front with a flashlight. He used a long spear to move the copious lily pads covering the surface out of the way, and I noticed he was careful not to damage them.

As we approached the island, the hum of the tiny engine combined with the chorus of what must have been thousands and thousands of birds. Daylight approached, and I stood awestruck as the thick, tangled, flower-blooming lily pads coating the lake moved in unison with the current. The sun broke with the coconut tree line into the curried sky. If I had not known it was the same sun, I would have sworn it was different. I looked at Liz and Robby to confirm that I was there and that this was not a dream. I could see them memorizing the colors and lines of the horizon like me, perhaps to tuck the image away for future gray days.

The entire staff of Soma Kerala Palace, which at one time had served as a hospital and now served as a refuge for the overworked and untreatable by Western medicine, seemed to be waiting on our arrival. Gold, merengue, and saffron flower petals covered the grand entrance where we stepped off the boat. I reached for my luggage, but a young Indian man beat me to it. Another man who looked to be about forty years old introduced himself as Babu, and you could tell he was in charge because he was the only one in Western clothing. His lilac button-down shirt was tucked into heavily starched eggplant slacks, belt drawn tightly around his thick middle. The women wore saris in various jewel tones, and the men wore loose, white linen pants and kurtas made of the same material on top.

Babu rattled over the basics, and his head bobbled when we asked questions. I was unable to tell if the head bobble meant yes or no, and later I would learn it meant both or neither and that a question was just a way to declare what you wanted and they would try to make it happen, God willing. It was the Indian version of the Arab world’s inshallah and was just as reliable.

A skinny, attractive young man named Salu struggled with my luggage as he led the way to my room. On the way, we passed a hissing fountain with three blooming white lotus flowers. It was the first time I had seen them in person, and I noticed they appeared to be growing from a pond of muck, which smelled strongly of shit. The combination of the birds, insects, and chanting from a neighboring village made the island feel as if it were vibrating under my feet, like the vibration kept it afloat—and if it were to stop the whole island, perhaps the whole country of India would sink into oblivion, maybe taking the rest of the world with it.

I drug my jet-lagged, somewhat drunk, and somewhat hungover body up a spiral, narrow iron staircase. Behind me, Salu panted while dragging my forty-eight-pound suitcase, two pounds below the airline limit. There was a bed with stark white sheets, an antique armoire the same color of the rich wood floors, and a bathroom covered in tiny sea-foam-green tiles. I handed him a five-dollar bill, and he smiled so big, he showed the bottom row of his white teeth. His head bobbled furiously, and it occurred to me I’d likely just paid him a month’s salary. I witnessed a thought form through the look in his eyes, and he autocorrected to Western speak and manner. He worked to hold his head steady and said slowly, “Thank you, ma’am. Please let me know if you need anything.”

“Please call me Lauren,” I said and smiled. He seemed to loosen up a bit.

I quickly traded my travel clothes for my yoga clothes and joined the eleven people who were already deep into their morning practice just below my balcony. The yoga shala was a concrete slab with a thatched roof. Bamboo blinds hung from three sides of the rectangle and served as a playground for the many lizards that flipped and twisted up and down the rungs. I unrolled my mat and joined in the middle of the practice. I exhaled through chaturanga dandasana, inhaled into urdhva mukha svanasana (upward-facing dog), and exhaled into adho mukha svanasana (downward-facing dog), completing my first vinyasa. On the last and seventy-second vinyasa in the practice, I surrendered to where I was and made peace with what I was here to experience. I lay in savasana, the ending relaxation pose, raw and unguarded. The critical human brain flexed its well-developed muscles. I wondered if I’d be able to make the thirty days.

I didn’t have to worry much about anything. It was all laid out for me. Wake up at 5:45 a.m. and silently make my way to the yoga mat in the moonlight. Practice the ashtanga primary series, an ancient Indian asana (physical yoga practice), which takes about ninety minutes to complete. Follow it up with a thirty-minute pranayama, or breathing, practice. Finally, meditate. Make my way silently back to my room to shower, and hand-wash the yoga clothes now drenched in sweat. Dress in loose-fitting yoga clothes, braid my hair, and slide into the flip-flops resting outside my door.

Finally, at 9:00 a.m. there was breakfast—a major event. I started off with freshly squeezed mango juice and two eggs from the neighboring village. A buffet was set up with pancake-like breads, stewed okra with indescribable spices, and a freshly baked fruitcake that was nothing like the Christmas variety back home. I finished it off with a pot of coffee and hot lemon ginger water for digestion over conversation with the eleven other students who represented six different countries.

Next, the twelve of us would move back to the outdoor practice area and pull up a chair for theory. In these sessions, we voraciously memorized everything we could so we could regurgitate it in a written exam, which would be graded along with our ability to teach a yoga class at the month’s end. Yes, it felt a bit ridiculous, but it was actually lovely to give my brain something to do while my soul began to seep back into my body.

Because I had denied the soul for so long, basically operating as a human shell by walking around with no inner guidance and governed completely by external expectations and societal norms, it felt foreign as the soul began to return. It could be painful at times, creating a dull cringe-worthy ache over my entire body. My feet hurt especially. The nerve endings felt like live wires. As it was occurring, I began to witness that almost everyone denied the existence of his or her soul too. I could see their souls hovering outside their bodies on many occasions.

An Episcopalian priest named John A. Sanford said it quite well in his book The Kingdom Within: The Inner Meaning of Jesus’ Sayings. In it, Sanford states,

"The soul today is an orphan. Her ancient parents have abandoned her; she languishes alone and forsaken in a rationalistic world that no longer believes in her. Philosophy, her father, long decided she did not exist and cast her aside. He hardly noticed that in doing so he turned himself away from the pursuit of wisdom…The church, her mother, fell unwittingly into the clutches of the extraverted, rationalistic materialism of our times and so she also abandoned the soul; she did not notice that in losing the soul she lost her ability to relate the individual to God." (118)

I’d argue that the soul is also missing from modern-day spirituality. In all my three hundred hours of yoga teacher training, two hundred in India and another one hundred in Peru a year later, I never heard the mention of soul even once. Instead, I learned why eating tamasic foods like mushrooms, onions, and meat was bad for your spirituality. Every single bit of information on the chakras was covered. Yet when living in alignment with the soul, all the chakras align into one. There is no separation. There is but one chakra—the I EXIST.

Like everyone around me, I had read all the books on mindfulness, brain-focused meditation techniques, the law of attraction, and heart-centered living, but again, the soul remained the orphan. Everyone else could sit around trying to make their limited human brain work better, to control their emotions and perfect their bodies. I, on the other hand, was headed to the orphanage to pick my soul up—bust her out of that joint. I knew better than to share that bit of information with anyone around me. I found myself back in Mrs. Banks’s third-grade classroom, angry as ever, but I would not make the mistake of oversharing again.

In the training, we learned that ashtanga translated directly from Sanskrit to mean “eight limbs,” which served as guidelines for living. Patanjali, a sage who lived sometime between 200 and 500 BCE, laid out these tenants in a text called the Yoga Sutras. The eight limbs run in order of accomplishment. They started with the yamas, which are universal practices that deal with one’s ethical standards and sense of integrity, such as nonharming and nonstealing. Basically, it’s the Ten Commandments—Patanjali style. Niyama, the second limb, covers self-discipline and spiritual observances, much like saying grace before meals or taking contemplative walks alone. I’ve never been the biggest fan of goals or disciplining the human aspect of SELF. The third limb, asana, includes the physical postures practiced in what Westerners call yoga. The fourth limb, pranayama, covers techniques designed to master breath control with the recognition of the connection between the breath, mind, and emotions. Again, no mention of soul is included anywhere.

The first four limbs cover awareness of the human part of the SELF, which I’ll admit is a great place to start. My problems lay in the rules to control the human self, rather than the simple awareness of it. I wasn’t really interested in improving my human self. The human was and is, by definition, imperfect. It ate cheeseburgers and drank too much wine. Why could we not simply let the human be human? I understood living a perfect human life was not a requirement of the self-realization process. In fact, I thought it probably wasn’t possible to perfect the human. If it were possible, it would be awfully boring.
I wanted to stand up, stamp my feet, and yell, “It’s the soul, stupid!”

And then I wondered why I had such strong thoughts about it. I realized my condemnation of those around me was really a condemnation of myself. I was mad at myself for taking so long to recognize the soul voice, the God within me. I realized that everyone around me was going through a soul evolution too, but the words were not spoken out loud. I knew I wouldn’t be ready to share or teach anything before I moved beyond the desire to condemn. My human self, what some call ego, was still playing too much of a role in everything in my life. Keeping silent was the best choice. Because I could not ask the question aloud, I asked Sar’h internally, “What is the soul, anyway?”

When I sensed into it, I received my answer—the soul is the part of us that does not change from lifetime to lifetime or in between lives. It is the wise master within our human physical form that retains information from any and all experiences from the beginning and throughout the soul’s existence. The knowledge the soul retained from all lifetimes and in between lives was available to the current human expression of SELF at any time.

“That’s how you know the language of images and sensations,” Sar’h said to me energetically. “You learned it well before coming into this life. To remember you only need to connect with that understanding.”

I flashed back to the long conversations I’d had with Mortimer in the backyard garden of my childhood home. In that moment of openness, it became overwhelmingly clear to me. It was not some external God or the Universe we were seeking, but the God living within all of us—what lay beneath our “turtle shells.” Every human, myself included, wanted to grab at something external for answers. Yet the intense craving for external answers and support from above was really a deep desire to get to know the God inside all of us—the soul—a desire to experience our inner divinity, to know that at the soul level we are God too. It’s what Yeshua, or Jesus, meant when he said that the kingdom is within; he was here to show us how to find the Christ within ourselves, not be worshipped as a guru or worse, a twisted religious icon. Later I realized Yeshua was not a souled being but instead held a consciousness—the Christ consciousness. It’s something I will explore in depth in the next book.

Because of my Catholic upbringing I understood why the notion of a God or master self living within all of us was blasphemous in religious communities—that was a given—but wondered how it had become taboo in spiritual, New Age, and yogic communities. How could one be awake without seeing, sensing, and knowing their inner divinity? Didn’t namaste mean the God in me recognizes the God in you? It seemed to me that namaste was about honoring one another at the soul level; it was the recognition of the master selves living within all of us. And if they did recognize the soul’s true creator nature, why did they continue to deny it by constantly referencing this Universe character as the creator or cocreator of their reality? It seemed to me the Universe had replaced the religious God in the modern spiritual conversation. It held the same status as a wiser, external being, which existed to guide you from outside yourself. Anytime someone said “the Universe,” I realized it could be replaced with “God,” holding the same concept. The people around me were looking from signs from the Universe (God). They prayed to the Universe (God) and yelled at the Universe (God) when their lives did not go according to their human plans.

In my realizations, I teetered on the tip of awareness that my soul, my spirit, could completely embody human form, which I sensed was a form of mastery in and of itself, before quickly falling back into the limits of my human awareness. The moments of clarity tended to quickly fade, giving way to the heavy human thoughts and emotions consuming me at the time. Like the lotus flowers in the hissing fountain, the shelf life of the bloom was short, and then I closed back up again, returning to the muck from which my human self came.

In our lessons, I was told the fifth through eighth limb dealt with attaining a higher state of consciousness, and my ears perked up. Yes, this is what called to me in this yogic experience, not all these rules governing the human, the quest for a perfect handstand, and especially not the perfect yogi diet. Instead, the teachers, who had no direct experience climbing those tree limbs, glossed over textbook definitions we were expected to memorize for the test. I was read the following.
Pratyahara, the fifth limb, is an effort to draw awareness away from the external world and direct attention internally. OK, now we’re talking. Internal, that’s where my soul voice resided. The sixth limb, dharana, is the ability to concentrate on a single point, and the seventh limb, dhyana, is meditation or being keenly aware without focus. Aware without focus—that sounds and feels a lot like consciousness, which can only be done when we move beyond the limits of the human mind and its emotions. It was getting better. Finally, samadhi, the eighth limb, is the ultimate goal. Patanjali describes this final stage of ashtanga as a state of ecstasy. At this stage, the meditator transcends the self completely and comes to realize a profound interconnectedness with all living things.

More so than interconnectedness, which I had felt so deeply as a child, in India I was sensing my sovereignty, the self-governing nature of the soul, the soul’s ability to solely create its reality without the interference of an external God or the Universe—or as the boy King Arthur learns, authority over SELF. I understood that deeply recognizing the sovereign nature of the soul was synonymous with recognizing that we are the creators of our reality, not God or the Universe character everyone around me was so intent to reference.

We spent about ten minutes tops on this, and as a greater reflection of the American yogic community, it was implied that these stages were limited to holy men who sat in caves in Nepal and mountains in Tibet. Bullshit. It was the same limits I had hit in The 21 Lessons of Merlyn book. I realized the teachers had lost their camels too, so I went inside for answers.

The whisper was faint, but it didn’t waver. It said once again that mastery over SELF was available to me in this lifetime, to hundreds—maybe even thousands—of others who were coming to the end of their human experiences as well. I wouldn’t dare say it out loud because it would be enough to have me completely kicked out of the figurative yogi village, and at the time my human still cared about appearances. Yet as the seed of my soul began to sprout through the cracks the grief had created, I knew one thing for sure—if I chose to experience it, self-realization was available to me in this lifetime. I had not made it up as a teen. I was not a faker or a pretender. It was not some crazy childhood dream. I knew that this life, if I chose it, held potentials for grandness if I could move beyond all the noise and distractions.

I thought of Mortimer and what he’d told me. Was I really here on Earth to share some sort of truths? If so, I knew there were others too. Where were they? Could I allow my human self to believe him? Was that completely insane? Sar’h’s voice was buried deep, and her language of images and sensations were still hard for me to decipher, but I found if I became really still and deeply allowed myself to open to it, the voice would come through clearly.

“Sar’h, was Mortimer right?” I asked. “Do I contain these truths?”

“Only if you have the will and the courage needed to peel back all the layers that buried them,” she replied. I didn’t know my answer. Was I willing to change my relationship with the human experience to experience the path of the soul in human form? I realized I stood at the crossroads once again. At age eight and again at age sixteen, I had chosen to drop the soul off at the orphanage, trading her for a normal human life. Would I do it again? Staying in my marriage was saying good-bye to my soul for as long as it lasted; leaving would allow her to return. It was a decision I did not take lightly.
As quickly as the conversation of clarity occurred within me, my human self shoved it back down into the depths where uncomfortable things are hidden. My human yelled, “Focus! Our security is being threatened! What are you going to do? Get a divorce? Stay married and suffer for the sake of security and propriety? How are you going to make money? Don’t you know that’s just ego talking about all this enlightenment stuff? Give me a break.” Wah-wah. Wah-wah. My brain was beginning to sound like the teacher in a Charlie Brown cartoon.

Post–theory lessons, we’d break for a dip in the pool and have lunch, which was equally as spectacular as breakfast. Then we’d try to keep our eyes open in the afternoon heat while we learned to teach each posture in the ashtanga primary series. I’ll admit it: I loved this part. Being in a human body can be a killer experience. Feeling it twist and turn into yoga postures was and is a real joy for me, and for Sar’h too. Next we’d practice teaching and adjusting postures on our fellow students and finish up just in time for meditation, which was followed by dinner, the grand food finale for the day. It often left the group clapping and cheering for the kitchen staff. Finally, we’d chant, meditate, sing kirtan, or watch a video before drifting off to sleep in our private bungalows to the vibration of the night’s nocturnal birds, including a large owl family.

Meals were not only for sharing food but also for sharing stories, and I love a good story. What Texan doesn’t? I learned early on that I was not the only one on the vibrating island in major conflict or experiencing tidal wave–level grief. One of the teachers was also painstakingly deciding whether to work on or walk out of a marriage. Another’s boyfriend had recently died from cancer in his late twenties. That woman and I shared the pain that someone can only comprehend when his or her best friend in the world has left a physical body. A young man’s lover had been married off in an arranged Muslim marriage, where she was miserable and plotting her escape. A Scandinavian actress had just lost a baby, and the father of that child had disappeared.

These stories weighed so heavily upon me that I remember waking up one morning and writing down in my journal in big, bold letters—TO SUFFER IS HUMAN—and I felt it all so intensely. Suddenly, I was back in junior high, absorbing the energies around me, but somehow it was starting to feel different. I realized if I expanded from the I EXIST, the fixed point within my body of consciousness, and made my energetic field larger in every direction, I would not absorb others’ emotions and experiences at such a rate. In this expanded state, I realized I could choose to observe rather than engage. Conversely, I realized that instead of receiving input from my environment, I could radiate from the I EXIST and affect my reality instead.

At this time, the realizations would come in quick moments of clarity, which were often followed by the muddled and muted experience of the human. I was starting to notice a pattern. As soon as I would have a soul realization, my human brain would jump in to discredit it with logic and reason almost immediately. As my human voice came in, it would twist the soul experience into a story, often strangling the soul’s truth beyond recognition. It was a confusing time, and with all this internal dialogue, I probably appeared a little bizarre to my new friends.

But it wasn’t all suffering. My new friends knew how to laugh and celebrate too. On the evening of November 27, 2012, my thirty-second birthday and the first since losing my father, I was surprised with an American-style chocolate cake that read Happy Birthday in pink icing. As the Indian kitchen crew presented it, the candles lining the tables beneath the coconut grove illuminated their bright white teeth, which formed giant goofy grins in genuine celebration of me. Their head bobbles of joy seemed to vibrate in unison with the island, and I knew they’d gone to great lengths to get this cake to our tiny, remote island.

My new friends sang happy birthday to me as Salu lit the single candle on the cake. A plastic lotus flower began to spin, opening its petals. Once it stopped, I made my wish for clarity and blew the candle out. Tears of gratitude for the overwhelming love and support poured down my face. I was happy to receive and absorb all the energies of the moment.

It was a birthday I will never forget. In so much pain and suffering there is always a silver lining, and for me, the most treasured experience in all of my human existence is that of friendship. I don’t think there is any more pure form of human love than that of a good friend.

I pulled the plastic lotus from the cake, and in true vibrating-island fashion, we all stuffed our faces so much, it took ten pots of lemon ginger tea to digest it. I went to bed that night with a full belly and a full heart. I would wake up to a husband screaming at me on Skype the next morning, but tonight, I was thirty-two, and the world was full of love and possibilities.

***

When we make major decisions in life, we often search for a voice from above, for clear direction from God, a sign from the Universe, from anywhere outside ourselves. The real answer is but a steady whisper from deep within that we can only hear if we are still enough to listen. Sometimes it takes a friend to translate or reflect back to us what we already know at the soul level but can’t see yet. For me, that friend was a tall, thin Indian man who no longer inhabited a physical body and no one else but me could see. My merlin. Mentioning him brings tears of gratitude to my eyes.

My Indian friend appeared to me in my third-eye space during mediation one steamy afternoon toward the end of the month. As I lay there in stillness, open to receive whatever he had to share, my right hand lit up. I was told to write through energetic sensations and images. It was the same picture language I had been fluent in as a child; it was coming back to me. My soul found this soothing; my human protested.

“Write what? What the fuck do you want me to write?”

“Your story. Write your story,” the Indian whispered calmly.

“Oh, sorry.”

I wouldn’t know his name until October of the following year, but I sensed his presence daily. He wasn’t there to give me answers. He wasn’t there to give me advice. He was simply there. It’s not so much that he was holding space for me; rather, he was honoring my soul’s journey. His presence was a reminder of why I was really here on Earth. It was not to be a wife, a mother, or a lobbyist—all great human experiences, but they were not what I really wanted at the soul level. Instead, they were expectations that came from outside me. That I knew. But beyond it, I could not form words. I only felt a sensation telling me more information would be revealed around the corner. What I must do became undeniably clear. To see what was around the corner, I was going to have to untangle myself from the human life I had built in its entirety, even if it meant hurting a man I loved but could no longer live with.

“Start to come back into your body,” I heard the teacher instruct at the end of the meditation. The Indian vanished, and I made my way back to my physical reality. Before I had the chance to sit up, Sar’h’s voice came in clearly. She said through images and sensations that my father’s death was the loose thread in the sweater that was my human life, and he had timed it perfectly before there was a child brought into this world. Instead of sewing it back into repair—and my human wanted to do that so badly—the voice of the master within said pull it. Pull the thread hard, and let the whole sweater unravel.

I had already walked out of my job at the Lance Armstrong Foundation. In India I was offered another position lobbying for the March of Dimes. It felt like a test. If I were going to leave my husband, this job would provide financial security. Was I really ready to be who I was, or did I want to play the human game a little bit more? I turned it down, realizing choice was a master’s sense of its own, like imagination or dreaming. Each choice we make, no matter how small, determines our reality. Choices direct us toward our mastery or to another limited human experience, yet there is no right or wrong answer. I quite liked all my past human experiences, but now I was ready to go grand.

I was going home and moving through the motions over Christmas and New Year’s Day. I would honor Brian, who had been a major part of my life and whose mother was now dying. We would spend our last Christmas as a family, and I would figure out how to leave somehow. I was going to appear insane and evil to everyone around me, and I had to let that go as well.

When my thirty days of sobriety, yoga, and friendship on the vibrating island were up, I hesitantly packed my bags to make the long journey home. The human part of me did not want to leave the comfort of the island’s vibration, the glorious colors, the stifling heat cooled only by the milk of a machete-cut coconut, the song of the birds, and the dance of the lizards. My soul assured me that what was around the corner would be so amazing, my human imagination could not even fathom it. I shuddered to think I would never again see Salu’s bright white smile greeting me each morning as he handed me the newspaper and my coffee.

I boarded the plane and ordered a beer. Funny, it didn’t taste as good as I remembered. Maybe a month of yoga and meditation did not answer my questions, but it sure as hell allowed the space for me to reconnect with my soul. Maybe I was a bit disappointed in the limits I’d hit in the yogic community, but the experienced paved the way for what lay ahead. I was grateful for the experiences the teachers had created and for the new friends I had made as well.

As I drifted off to sleep on the red-eye flight home, a vision of my fellow students and a teacher I had bonded with entered my dream state. We all bore wings featuring swirls of neon paint, our faces unchanged. Like butterflies, we spun and spiraled through the darkness. Then everyone began to glow from within, burning bright and illuminating the surrounding darkness. The vision was so real and so beautiful. I realized I was awake, not dreaming. I felt a deep love for my friends but also an honoring of each of their unique soul journeys, something I was beginning to see so clearly not only in myself but in everyone around me. The soul expansion was setting in, and I felt wonderfully whole.

It all came to a screeching halt when I landed back on American soil. Somehow being back in Austin sent me back into that familiar state of amnesia, in which my human self forgot all the soul clarity we had experienced on the vibrating island. My human sank back into the drama. It took me another six months to summon the courage needed to leave my marriage and return to the path of the soul—once again.

About a month after my father died, I vividly recall sitting on a barstool drinking a cup of coffee in Brian’s and my home, the one we had moved into on our first wedding anniversary. My elbows were resting on the granite countertops. I looked around the room at the perfect Austin home and into our backyard bordering Shoal Creek, which runs through the city. Anyone I knew at that time would have killed to live here, including me two years prior. I should be grateful and shut up, I told myself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was a stranger in my own home.

It wasn’t just the home that felt foreign; it was the whole life—the one I had chosen, the one I had thought I wanted to live. I walked through the long hallway of the house into the master bedroom and then through the master bathroom and into my closet. I skimmed my fingers along all the beautiful clothes lining my closet walls. Even my clothes did not feel like they belonged to me. This was not me. None of this. Not the husband. Not the house. Not the job. I felt like a stranger in my own life.

I looked down at the diamond that overwhelmed my left ring finger, and I wondered, “How did I get here? Why did I choose this, and why does it feel like someone else’s life? Is this not what I wanted?” And, better yet, how was I going to get myself out of here? I was overwhelmed and terrified of the changes occurring inside me. My human stressed that if we were not going to live here and be with Brian, what were we going to do? What was the plan?

***

Brian and I had met for the first time on one of the coldest nights in Austin. It was December 9, 2005, shortly after my twenty-fifth birthday. I was wearing cheap jeans, heels from Payless, a black shirt, and a rainbow-striped scarf that had cost me $1.99 from Forever 21. I worked as a newspaper reporter for thirteen dollars per hour after being let go from the state senator’s office while waiting to see if I was going to be accepted to graduate school at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. I’d covered the cheap outfit with a nice black pea coat I had purchased, a huge splurge at ninety-nine dollars on discount, for an impending trip to New York City to see a girlfriend.

When I walked into the Italian restaurant my date had chosen over e-mail, I told the hostess I was looking for a man named Brian. She pointed me in his direction, and I wove through the crowd, full of nerves. He was sipping a glass of red wine, and I noticed a nice bottle of Pinot Noir sitting next to it. He had beautiful green eyes and dark, curly hair, just long enough to rest on the back of the collar of his cream-colored sweater. His eyes were kind and his touch gentle. Brian exuded the rugged good looks of a bearded REI model. I remember thinking, “Wow, he is stunning!”

Brian had saved me a seat at the bar and an empty glass, which he promptly began to fill like a French waiter—to the curve and with a twist of the bottle at the end to prevent a spill. We had met on Match, a dating site I had signed up for when I had been laid off from my position as the press secretary for a state senator. That same week, I’d found out I had a cyst in my left ovary threatening to blow itself up. As a result, I had begun to think about kids as the threat of infertility loomed. Months had passed. I went on crappy date after crappy date. This man was different. I knew instantly I had known him before—his soul, not in this body. The familiarity comforted me, and conversation flowed easily. I had not yet learned about karmic relationships.

Brian ordered the veal. I had the fish. We laughed and chatted while he sipped an after-meal cappuccino. At the end of the date, we walked out to his car, a black BMW he had purchased when the start-up company he worked for was acquired—something he would do over and over again, building wealth and his name in the start-up software world. He hugged me respectfully and made plans quickly to see me again.

Brian and I stepped on the fast track. We were seeing each other all the time, even traveling together to Spain. I moved in eight short months later, right before I started graduate school. But I knew something was off. It was a gut feeling, and it was confirmed by the voice—the same one that had told me my dad would die and that I was going to go to jail if I didn’t do something soon.

One day before I moved in, we were kissing on his couch. The voice came in loud and clear once more: “He’s manipulating you!”

“Wow! I must really be losing my mind,” I thought, and like the times before and after, I buried the words, but the voice had been clear and direct. After we had been living together for about two years, a deep feeling arose in my gut that said I needed to get out of the relationship. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being controlled from behind the scenes. It was too intense to ignore. I tried my best to leave. Found an apartment. Told Brian I was leaving. But he talked me back into staying, like he would the first and second times I tried to leave our marriage. Instead, his grip on me became even tighter, and he proposed to me right before Christmas in 2009 at the same restaurant where we had first met.

I said yes. This was what I was supposed to do next. That was what people did after graduate school and landing their first big job. I was supposed to get married to an attractive businessman who liked to travel, a man who would take care of me, who wanted a weekend home on the lake. Then I was supposed to produce an heir. Brian fit seamlessly into the check mark on the list society had handed me when I moved out of my parents’ house at the age of seventeen. He was not perfect. No one was, I told myself, and I loved him in the best way I knew how to at the time—a time when I did not even know how to love myself.

I had at least a dozen friends who cried themselves to sleep because they couldn’t find a husband. At the time I began dating Brian, I lived with a woman six years my senior. At thirty-one, she had become the old maid. She even had the two cats to prove it. She would come home from date after date, crying, claiming, “I am never going to get married!” And the thought of turning into her terrified me. I had no idea other options existed.

We live in a world where freedom and choice are illusions. We are told we can grow up to be anything we want to be, marry whomever we want to marry. We can have anything off the menu put in front of us, but you couldn’t order off the menu. The option to not get married and to forgo children did not appear on the menu. That wasn’t something you would choose; that’s where you ended up if you lost the game. Those kinds of women were pitied and labeled as damaged goods. It wasn’t as pronounced as it had been in the 1950s, but the taboo still existed all around me.

According to society, I was one of the lucky ones. The menu handed to me was one of a Michelin-star restaurant. Marriage afforded me the opportunity to live in an impressive cage—one I could decorate in any way I wanted to. I was given a fat diamond ring as a consolation prize and financial security. As a wife, I felt like an attraction at the zoo, an exotic animal. It was a picture-perfect life as long as you stayed in the cage and behaved, as long as you were pretty and smart, as long as you birthed some beautiful children to seal the deal.

I know many people would gladly cut off their right pinkies to have these options. Before I had it all, I would have too. After being let go from the senator’s office and before I found another reporting gig, I was barely scraping by on unemployment checks totaling $800 per month. In that place of scarcity, I told myself that if I had a partner, a savings account, vacations in exotic locals, nicer clothes, and a better career, the dull ache that whispered, “Something is missing,” would go away. It didn’t.

It wasn’t until I actually had it all that I realized the whole thing was an illusion. The veil covering my eyes was lifted, spurred by the death of my dad. I understood that whether you’re in a fancy cage or a dilapidated one, it does not matter—a cage is still a cage. The security the cage provides is yet another illusion. It’s as false as the notion that you have to work to earn money, allowing energy to support you instead.

When my dad died, I saw that everything in my human life was temporary, and the rug could be pulled from underneath me at any time—not only by death, but also in my career and my marriage. Nothing was a given anymore. All of it, all of the life I had built, could change with one phone call. And once you see the truth—that everything is constantly shifting, security is an illusion, and nothing is really “safe” for the human—once you stare it in the face, there is no unseeing it. There is no pretending. You can pop some antidepressant or antianxiety pills to make the bars of the cage less visible. You can drink wine to numb knowing that you are only half living, but it is always there—the familiar dull ache that won’t go away.

I know because I tried it all. Shortly after my dad died, I went to see a doctor for my own sleeping pill prescription. Brian was tired of sharing his. The doctor handed me a questionnaire about depression and anxiety. I was honest but also let him know that my dad had recently died, and it had been traumatic. I explained it was totally normal for me to experience grief and anxiety in this situation. I told him I was seeing a therapist weekly. He filled a sleeping pill prescription and wrote me another for an SSRI, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which is a class of drugs used to treat depression and anxiety. He didn’t tell me anything about the drug, and I honestly cannot remember the name of it—only that it smelled rancid, of chemicals and sulfur, and made me extremely ill and disoriented.

I was such a wreck and so confused that I tried the drug—completely ignoring my gut instinct that it wasn’t necessary and would, in fact, negatively impact my ability to hear my soul or master voice within. My therapist recommended I stay in the marriage for at least a year after my dad died; she didn’t want me to make any rash decisions. Well, I reasoned, if I listened to that soul voice, I would walk out of this marriage today, at that very moment. If I popped these pills, maybe I could make it through the year, following my therapist’s advice. “Maybe I am the crazy one after all,” I thought. People had been telling me this through their energy and behavior for years.

This was not my first SSRI rodeo. My mom stuffed Prozac down my throat when my father became ill for the first time when I was sixteen years old. She was on it too. It made me feel unlike myself, and my behavior changed quickly. I felt like a robot. Suddenly all those unwritten rules society placed on me seemed reasonable. Suddenly it was me who was the problem rather than mass consciousness. I was the insane one, the world outside me the rational one. Maybe they were right. I was so messed up in the stories I was told about myself, the soul voice I had trusted so much was now labeled a voice in my head—one that needed to be ignored or, worse, eradicated.

At sixteen, it had never occurred to me, because my mom and my doctor had been so sure, that it was quite normal to feel sad and anxious while my dad was in a hospital for eight long months. Now, at thirty-two, after the childhood memories came back into my consciousness, I knew a sad situation warranted sad human emotions. Maybe it was no so bad to allow myself the time to feel them. What if instead of pumping myself full of drugs, I could return to the I EXIST, the inner knowing human situations were but tiny drops in the bucket of the vast experience of the soul? What if I could see from an expanded point of view that my dad’s health issues and his death were part of his soul’s journey and mine as well? What if I could honor that instead?

After a week, the disgusting, filthy, chemical, stinking SSRIs went into the trash can where they belonged. As I threw them away, I realized that those little pills were the modern version of mental institutions, where you didn’t even know you were being locked up—institutions with invisible bars. I realized that society wasn’t any freer than it had been, say, twenty years ago; society was simply much more sophisticated at hiding the bars on the cages in the zoo.

I wish I had done the same at sixteen, tossing the Prozac into the trash can where it belonged, but it had drowned out the soul voice almost immediately as I began taking it. Also, I don’t think it was any coincidence my drug addiction kicked in shortly after I began taking the Prozac daily. The authority figures around me told me both with their words and behaviors that if you experienced so-called negative emotions you were supposed to numb them immediately, to push them aside as quickly as possible instead of feeling them and allowing them to flow. To me, it didn’t matter if the drug was legal or not. The law is and never has been mine. My father taught me that; he knew when to bend the rules and when to break them. And let me tell you, cocaine makes you feel a hell of a lot better than Prozac.

Prozac numbed me to a point where I felt I was barely living. Coke made me feel full of life, even if it was a total illusion. In hindsight, I was trying to balance out the numb feeling, the dull ache, with something that made me feel alive. I could have found my solace in nature, in the magic of the trees and in connection with other realms and beings like I had as a child, but those worlds were shut off with the swallowing of the pill my mom handed to me each morning. That green-and-white pill seemed to pull a veil over my eyes through which I could only view the physical reality, and it blocked out all the others that I had discovered as a young girl.

Brian supported the doctor. He read articles online and diagnosed me as bipolar. In his defense, a soul awakening can look a hell of a lot like the symptoms for bipolar disorder, especially to someone living a singular human experience.

“I’ll help you get through this,” he told me, trying to hold my hand.

His words sent shivers down my spine. “Like hell you will,” I thought. He wanted to control me; he had been for years. He told me I was too sensitive, repeatedly, words I had heard all my life, discrediting me at the soul level and my unique abilities and experiences. Brian was too late to the game; my soul had already seeped in through the cracks the grief had so artfully created during my dad’s coma. It probably happened while he was on one of his business trips.

The inner knowing, or gnost, was undeniable: I was not insane, not too sensitive, and Brian was the one stuck in the illusion, under some sort of hypnosis like the rest of mass consciousness. My master voice was there inside of me, and I was going to let it roar like a lion. And that’s why I had to leave. One person living the illusion cannot coexist with another who knows it’s all fake. And they certainly cannot have children together. In the human world, what Brian had to offer was appealing. He had a nice cage in the zoo. I knew he would immediately find a woman to replace me. He did quickly; she was lovely, and I was happy for him. Later I understood where he was on his soul journey and the experiences his soul sought in this life.

Although easier to leave than my marriage, my job was the same. I experienced the realization I was leaving one well-decorated cage each morning only to arrive at the other well-decorated cage where I worked. The pattern of work, wife, and workout felt like the movie Groundhog Day. The foundation boasted stellar benefits, bonuses, unlimited vacation, a gym, showers, and free yoga classes. If you were going to work, this was a great place to do it. If I was going to have a white-picket-fence life, Brain was the one to do it with. It wasn’t the foundation or Brian that I despised so much; it was the institution of “should” and “supposed to.” It was the bars on the cage that I could not unsee.

After my dad died, I started to notice how the foundation hid the bars. On-site you could get your car washed, have lunch delivered, drop off dry cleaning, and get massages. We had happy hours and social events. Four years into my time there, I learned at least one-third of its employees attended regular therapy sessions over how the foundation was run. I watched people working themselves into the ground daily. As I talked with friends in other organizations, I learned this was common and to be expected. It’s just the way things were, I was told repeatedly.

The limited menu of human experience became even more pronounced when I quit my job. I was asked the following: Was I pregnant? Had another organization swiped me away? How much did they offer? They could beat it. Was my husband being transferred? Did I need to take a sabbatical? All of a sudden the promotion in title and salary I had asked for for months before my dad got sick was offered. We’ll make the cage prettier. The people at the foundation could not even fathom that I simply was not going to work anymore. Ever. I wasn’t going to have a baby, and soon I would not have a husband. It was time to order off the menu.

Once I realized it for myself, it became so obvious to me that everyone around me was living in a cage at the zoo too. These were wonderfully decorated and adorned cages, but still cages nonetheless. The illusion of freedom was so artfully designed that people did not even know they were in one. They even pitied and raised money for the so-called oppressed in situations where the bars on the cage were more pronounced.

After I noticed the cage I lived in—that everyone around me seemed so happy to live in—I was floored. I was as angry as I had been at eight years old when I felt I was so different from my peers. I couldn’t understand why no one else could see what I was seeing. I felt insane, yet I knew I was not. I wanted so desperately to show them. Like anyone else who becomes aware, the desire to educate felt heavy. Please excuse my barrage of enlightened, anti–status quo Facebook memes while I blow up your feed. I went through what almost everyone goes through when they awaken to something new. I believed it was my job to educate everyone around me, the human twisting the story of the soul into oblivion.

In an energetic conversation with my soul, I realized that the people around me did not want to see what I was seeing. Before my dad died, I would not have wanted to see it either. I was perfectly happy living in the illusion, under the hypnosis. It seemed easier and more comfortable to have your life laid out in front of you in a ten-to-twenty-year plan in which you choose between the chicken, beef, fish, or vegetarian item on the menu. Not knowing what was next was unpleasant to the human. It could only be tolerated, or even embraced, in a state of awareness only found when in alignment with the soul. The soul journey wasn’t for everyone. Had I not experienced many human lives living in the illusion before getting to this point? Was that not a valuable experience? Could I simply honor and respect the choices of others instead?

In this conversation, I realized true compassion is honoring everyone and every situation around you—and here’s the kicker—without trying to change them or it. The desire to educate or enlighten those around me was coming from the human part of myself rather than from the I EXIST. The soul never needs to force the people around it to change using illusory power. The use of energy does not require force. Simply living my life was radical enough, and I did not need to shove my realizations down other people’s throats.

As quickly as the realization had occurred, my human self forgot it. There was that amnesia again, the one experienced repeatedly in the density of the physical body. I continued to try to explain what I was going through to others, realizing that the illusion of freedom was very convincing. When I did try to discuss it with others, their brains would be sent into instant overload—if they could handle listening to me for more than a minute. If they did take the time to hear me out, their eyes glazed over as they quickly labeled me as either a grieving person who would soon recover or as mentally unstable before excusing themselves as quickly as possible.

I’ll admit it. I didn’t make much sense at the time. Everything was muddled in the constant and incessant mediation between the voices of the human and the soul. As in India, my soul voice came in clearly, and then it would go through the filter of the human mind, which would distort the wisdom beyond recognition. After repeating this pattern several hundred thousand times, I finally realized that I needed to reroute the soul communication away from the human filters of thought and emotion and declare the soul voice the sole voice. No more negotiating with antiquated human logic. It would take years of practice.

In a last ditch effort to stay with Brian, my human self proposed he quit his job too and that we live in a van, travel around, and surf. Maybe we should try freedom for a change. Maybe we should put off having a baby for a little while longer.
He looked at me like I had lost my mind, his bipolar wife making an insane suggestion. “I can’t do that,” he said, rattling off a list of reasons why not, all of which included attending to the home and work cages in the zoo. About a month later, he told me, “You either have a baby, or I will find a new wife.” That was the nail in the coffin that was our marriage.

“You should find a new wife,” I said definitively. For me, having a child felt like an eighteen-year prison sentence. About a year into our marriage, I found myself driving past the West Austin Youth Association, where I saw the line of cars full of exhausted moms waiting to pick their kids up from their sporting activities. In that moment my stomach churned, and I began to sweat with anxiety. It was not what I wanted for my life. I saw my friends having kids with so much love for the experience, but no matter how hard I tried to change my feelings, I knew it wasn’t for me. In my third-eye vision, I saw another blond woman rolling down a conveyor belt from the wife factory for Brian—one much more suited for the traditional experience he so desired.

After we split up, I realized Brian was not a bad person for demanding I have a baby. I was not a bad person for not wanting one. We both behaved in ways others would find offensive. While the fight was ongoing, my human self was keeping score. One blow by Brian was met with another blow from me. Once I moved out of the house and could see it with fresh eyes, I realized the concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, and positive and negative were all human creations. When I moved beyond the dualistic constructs, I saw that everything—and I truly mean everything—is good and bad, and neither good nor bad. It was the human brain that wanted to label it one or the other. Brian was doing his best to love me and support me, and he was an asshole. I was going through a massive transformation, and I had broken the promises I had made to him, all while acting totally insane. Nothing is as black and white as the human tries to make it.

The more I connected with my soul, the more I could see the and in everything. I saw and sensed that my soul didn’t operate in or really even comprehend dualities. It operated in experiences and expressions without labeling them as positive or negative. It took a while longer for my human self to get it. My brain desperately wanted to keep everything in nice, neat categories—to label Brian as the villain, to blame the doctor for my dad’s death. Instead, Sar’h, in her deep, sensual voice, reminded me that my marriage had been an amazing experience and had taught me many things, including how to love myself and listen to the soul voice. Instead of blaming someone for my dad’s death, my soul took an expanded perspective. My dad parted with this world at the perfect moment. His death spurred an awakening inside me before I brought a child into this world. His death allowed me the freedom to do what I had set out to do at the soul level, and he had left me some pocket change to get me going. His death was a gift that afforded me the time and space to breathe into the awareness of the soul and what a relationship with it had to offer me—true freedom. No menus, no cages, no pills.

I had no idea what my life would look like outside of the cage. I didn’t even know what I was going to order; I only knew it would be off the menu. Freedom is scary as fuck. When people say they want freedom, what most actually mean is they want a little bit more—a little bit more money, a nicer car, more vacation days—a bigger, nicer cage in the zoo. Freedom is a different beast entirely. It’s what exists beyond the walls of the zoo. It was uncharted territory, and I didn’t have much to go on, only the sense and the inner knowing that I could not stay inside its walls.

​I finally busted through the bars, filing for divorce in June 2013. The human part of me felt lost as fuck, barely keeping her head above water in the chaos of consciousness. Inside me, fireworks were going off in celebration of the soul’s return. I was two people at once, and it felt completely natural. I felt more myself than I had in years. I was the four-year-old under the kitchen table again. I EXISTED, and fresh out of the zoo, I needed somewhere to live.

After I began divorce proceedings, I needed to find a place to live, and nothing seemed to be working out. It took a good, long while for my human self to realize that the soul doesn’t worry about human things like where you are going to live, and sometimes you have to tell it, “Hey, soul, I know you’re doing your thing and all, but this human needs a place to call home. If we’re going to do this thing, I need to be comfortable.” In my new state of awareness, I was not praying to God, begging the Universe for signs or answers, getting angry with God or the Universe, practicing the law of attraction or creating a vision board. I was searching inside myself for a creative solution—a soul solution.

Simultaneously, my human self desperately tried to come up with a plan. Brian was out of the country, and I had four weeks to vacate what had once been our home. I had not yet come to a place where I trusted my inner voice in the complete way that I do now.

“Ha! You want a plan?” I imagined my soul lightheartedly laughing. “There is no plan. Only creation.”

Eventually—I am a slow learner—I stopped wasting energy on plans. Letting go of plans, goals, budgets, and expectations for myself was one of the hardest parts of moving from my human aspect controlling my life to living a soul-driven life. And it did not happen overnight. It was a long process with many steps forward—only to fall back down to the bottom of the stairs sometimes.

As a conscious creator—one who is aware of the true creative nature of the soul—goals, plans, and linear time become completely obsolete—something I had known so intensely as a child, for example, when I brought Mortimer into my physical world. When the soul creates, it is not to meet the definition of success that comes from an external source. The soul creates to express itself, simply for the joy of creation. It creates for the experience rather than the outcome. It’s totally different from how our parents, teachers, and coworkers showed us, where metrics are the norm. To authentically create, we must throw out the metrics.

I learned—the hard way as usual—the reason it is so imperative to let go of goals, plans, and the fear of so-called failure is because so often our soul’s creative solutions are beyond the imagination of the human. Our human selves cannot even fathom the possibilities and potentials. So when the human sets its eye on the prize, the goal, it narrows our vision so much, we cannot see the much grander possibilities and potentials our soul is presenting all around us.

Unaware, my human self drove around desperately from apartment to apartment, and nothing seemed to be working out. The last apartment I looked at that day denied my application because of the drug charge on my record from 1999. Embarrassed, I went back to my car, Ollie sitting in the passenger’s seat. I was hysterically crying when the phone rang. It was the realtor that my soon-to-be ex and I had worked with before. I wiped my tears away and answered the call.

“Are you still interested in an investment property?”

“No, I can’t do that right now,” was my human thought. It was a plan I had made with my husband when I had a job—to invest in something besides the stock market—and I no longer had a husband or a job. Then I heard a deep voice from within. It was not words. It was not a feeling or emotion. It was a deep, sensual, inner knowing that this was my creative solution.

“Yes, I am.” I tried to sound sure, but I wasn’t.

He explained the owners of the house wanted to sell it quickly for a low price because it needed work. What did I know about fixing an old, dilapidated house? What if it was in total disrepair and I lost money? I could be out tens of thousands of dollars. Yet the soul voice told me to go take a look and see.

I wiped my tears away and took a few deep breaths. I typed the address into my phone and drove to the house. The tenants still occupied the house, so my realtor and I could not go in. He climbed under the pier-and-beam foundation to check it out anyway.

“Lauren, I think we can make some money off this house,” he said.

Jimmy was also a recovered drug addict who had a real knack for Austin real estate. He was a father figure to me, and I trusted him. I looked at the house. It was a fucking mess, even from the outside. A broken chain link fence rimmed the backyard. When I peered through the window, I saw that a washing machine from the 1980s sat in the kitchen, which looked like no one had cleaned it since they put the washer in.

“Where do you put the clothes dryer?” I asked Jimmy. He opened the garage door, which was covered in termite holes, and pointed at the dryer inside. A family of cockroaches ran across the floor. And yet my soul said, “This is it. Buy it.” With Jimmy’s help, I made the offer. I went to the bank for the loan; it was approved instantly.

The situation reminded me of a woman I once knew. She had no credit, two children, and needed to get away from an alcoholic husband. A bank loan was one of her last options. She told me she met with a banker who said there was no way she could get the loan. Then something changed in the banker’s eyes—like someone hit the reset button on his brain. He shuffled through her paperwork once more and then asked to be excused for a minute. He came back with a loan check for $10,000—exactly what she needed to make a new start. She knew enough to know that when what you want shows up on your doorstep, you don’t wait around for people to realize what’s going on or that they made a mistake; you take your check and get the hell out of there.

I had the keys to the house in one week. Everything seemed so easy. That’s when I was able to convince my human self that this was not crazy. When things flow, when things fall into place with such ease and grace, that’s where the magic happens. When things get plugged up, it’s time to step back and reroute. Jimmy, his wife, and I somehow coordinated a plumber, handyman, tile guy, and electrician. There were a few hiccups, like opening the refrigerator and discovering it was completely covered in black mold spores, and a few triumphs, like fitting a brand-new stackable washer and dryer in place of the water heater so it wouldn’t be split in the kitchen and garage. I also had to kick out the tenant, who had been given a year’s notice yet still had the personality of the Unabomber. Regardless, we had the house up and running in six weeks, and I wasn’t too bothered I spent $15,000 on the renovations rather than the budgeted $10,000 because the price of the house had been so low.

We painted the shutters and the doors outside the seven-hundred-square-foot yellow house a vibrant orange. With no family to help me move, my girlfriends stepped in. When Teresa came over to unpack my belongings and decorate, she dubbed it the Sunny Shack. It was the perfect name. Little did I know the Sunny Shack would serve as my home base as I traveled all over the world for the next two years, my new reality exceeding any human expectation I’d ever had for my life.
When I hit the two-year mark of owning the house—to avoid taxes you must occupy a home for two years before selling it—I called Jimmy and said I might be ready to sell it. No problem, he said. Within one week, he sold that old shack in June 2015 for a mighty profit, funding my adventures for yet another year. It was totally above and beyond anything my human self could have planned for—the same person who could not rent an apartment because they were addicted to drugs in 1999, the same one hysterically crying in the car.

Had I operated solely as my human self—ordering off the menu handed to me—I would have gotten another job to simply pay rent and make ends meet as I worked a full-time desk job and looked for the next husband all my friends kept saying was on the way any day now. Instead, I listened to my soul voice. To the human, it looked like a big risk; to the soul, it was the creative solution I had asked for. I funded my adventures without compromising my true soul’s desire to allow instead of work. Sure, people thought I was nuts, including my human self, but fuck them and their advice. When you’re in the flow, the last thing you need is to listen to human, fear-based advice from your mind or the minds of people around you. Today, when my human screams that we need a plan for a storm that may or may not come, my soul flashes the image of the Sunny Shack. Its canary-yellow walls and sunset-orange shutters remind me once again that the grandest creations come from the soul and the fountain of creativity that flows from within.

***

Somewhere in between leaving my marriage and moving into the Sunny Shack in June 2013, I was out with my former college roommate. We had just arrived at an Austin music venue called the White Horse and were standing outside, beers in hand, when I heard someone yell, “Lauren-fucking-Hutton!” I couldn’t tell where it came from. Then he emerged from the crowd. It was Chris, one of the long-haired boys with guitars who had been in my junior high crew. I was over the moon to see him. About sixteen years had passed since I’d last seen him.

“Chris! No fucking way!” We hugged, caught up, and reminisced. I’d probably smoked my first joint with him and his best friend, Kevin, but I’d lost touch when I started hanging out with the cool kids. Seeing Chris instantly opened some sort of door for me, and all the memories came flooding back in—not only of our days attending concerts and smoking cigarettes in the bushes of suburbia, but all my esoteric studies. His presence alone was enough to take me back to that place of eleven-to-fifteen-year-old Lauren, who was so in touch with her soul voice. I desperately wanted to reclaim her. I also wondered where along the path to success I’d lost my love of music and the effects it had on me at both the soul and human levels. It was time to bring both the music and the magic back in.

I ended up seeing Chris many times throughout the summer of 2013 before he moved from Austin to Baltimore. In a strange twist in my newly single life in the Sunny Shack, I made a friend who was also single. Lisa had recently met and begun dating a guy named John, who lived in Houston but came to his Lake Travis home on the weekends. I went out to the lake house with them one weekend only to find Chris and his best friend, Jerry, hanging out too. It was all too designed to be a coincidence. The strange crew we formed spent the summer playing in the lake like teenagers with bigger budgets. We would swim, blast the radio on the boat, and dance away the day in our bathing suits, cocktails in hand, watching the sun set every Friday and Saturday night. I felt like a teenager again, totally free from responsibility and the unwritten rules placed on adults.

***

Around the same time, I began seeing another friend from my teenage years who now played bass in several Austin bands. We connected on Facebook. He’d also moved from suburban Houston to Austin after high school graduation. He often came over to the Sunny Shack after a gig. We would listen to old records, like Jimi, and make love until the wee hours of the morning.

For the first time in my life, I was actually interested in sex. Now that it was so free and informal, the experience felt more expansive than restrictive. There was no energetic feeding or expectations from one day to the next. It was the informality of friendship I loved so much with the added bonus of a sensual experience. During the week I had another lover—a Harley-riding man in his forties who wore a leather vest. While definitely not a GQ model, he was hands down one of the best lovers I’ve experienced. We rode his Harley around on hot summer nights and made love afterward.

It was a summer of love, wine, dancing, sunsets on the lake, motorcycle rides, and rock and roll, and I was having a great time. I felt younger than I had in years. The weight of a career, marriage, and being my father’s caregiver melted off me. When I looked in the mirror, I appeared younger and more beautiful than ever. I was falling in love with the freedom of this new life, and most importantly, I was falling in love with myself for the first time.

As the end of summer grew near, I felt the pull from my soul to return to the path I had veered from in my adolescence. With the final release of the human responsibilities I had so fiercely hung onto for so long, the path didn’t feel so far away this time. I understood on some level that all this fun was about allowing my human expression of SELF to be fully human, to have the maximum experience of what it had to offer. There was no family, husband, or job standing in the way—no rules that I was trying to live by.

The summer ended on cue. There were no more weekends of debauchery at the lake on the weekends as John packed up and headed to Houston to be with his children. Lisa and I wrapped up the summer nicely with a weekend at the Austin City Limits music festival. That Saturday after the last band played, we got on our bikes to ride home to our north-central Austin homes. A quick rain shower made the roads slick. Flying down West Fifth Street, my front bike wheel slid, and I came crashing down, hitting my bare head on the concrete so hard I could feel it bounce.

I lay in my front bedroom of the Sunny Shack for three days after the music festival, unable to move much—my entire body aching from the accident. As I mentioned before, so often accidents are an opportunity for more of our souls to seep back into our physical bodies. Bump and fill. I had not thought much about the incident at the time. A somewhat drunk girl in a bike accident after a music festival was not abnormal. However, my behavior after the incident tells another story.
​
The Texas version of fall was approaching. In the winds of the changing season, I felt the internal pull to shift directions. Suddenly, I had no interest in bass playing, Harley-riding lovers, or weekends of debauchery. Intuitively, I turned inward, and by October and November it would manifest in such a way, there was no way to deny who I was or what I was here to experience.

The human self tends to think everything is happening in linear time—like the human is a little black dot moving along a timeline in a history book. However, the experience of the soul expands in all directions. Instead, the soul, or the master self, is the fixed point with many lines extending from its central point. The soul can expand in one or more directions for an experience and contract back into itself at will.

For the purpose of this book, I aimed to write my experiences in layers, keeping some sort of linear timeline. However, often too much occurred at any given moment to put into one chapter designated for the point in time. This chapter goes back to the time when my father was in a coma, his death, and my marriage falling apart to describe what was going on in my soul evolution, rather than being focused on my physical human reality as I did in the previous chapters.

***

My consciousness began to expand inexplicably and uncoaxed when I sat next to my comatose father as he hung onto life by a thin thread. His soul hung outside his body as he made the decision whether to live or die, and it thinned the veil between the physical and nonphysical realms so much, I found that I existed in both again, like I had as a child.

It was then that the life force energy some call kundalini—others simply call it spirit—began to stir in the base of my spine and fill my womb with a pulsing electric energy. It felt as if someone had hooked an electric cord into my uterus and the base of my spine and turned up the voltage to high. What a strange scene to think about now. Me, sitting in the most unsacred of places, holding the swollen, freezing-cold hand of a near-dead man who was hooked up to every machine possible, having a metaphysical experience.

At the time I had no idea what it meant or what the feeling was, and I was too exhausted from trying to take care of my father, be somewhat of a good employee, and fulfill the bare minimum of my wifely duties to figure out what was happening to me. The intense electric pulse would come and go over the coming months and years as I watched my human life unravel.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the then-unknown force was driving my decisions, which seemed entirely insane and reckless to the outside world and the human voice inside of me, which was almost completely unaware of what was going on. I only knew what I could not do. The longer I stayed in situations not in alignment with my soul, the sicker I got. It made me ill to go to work. The last four months of my marriage, I was swollen, lethargic, and appeared to be allergic to everything I put into my mouth. I saw doctor after doctor, and none could say what was wrong with me. I avoided gluten and then meat. I drank only juice, and nothing seemed to work. Eventually, when I moved into the Sunny Shack, my health dramatically improved without medical care or the box of supplements I took during the last months of the marriage. I could eat again without it swelling me into oblivion. The nearly twenty pounds I could not lose no matter what I tried suddenly fell off my small frame. The daily patterns of my marriage and my job had been making me ill—this energy activating inside of me seemed to act as a repellant to things not in alignment with my soul.

As I began to clean up the rubble of my wrecked life, snakes—or the proverbial serpent—began to impose physically in my life. On a walk with my dog in October 2012, right after I told Brian for the first time that I did not think I could be married anymore, I came across a thick, solid-black snake coiled tightly on the sidewalk. I had lived along Shoal Creek in central Austin for six years and never seen anything like it. I would have shrugged it off as a coincidence, but snakes continued to appear in record numbers.

​A week later a snake slithered through my fingers while I was gardening. The next day a snake fell out of a tree and wrapped itself around Brian’s arm. A silver snake would cross my path on trails, and then a water moccasin would swim across the surface of the water where my dog swam—all within the same week. By April 2013 Brian was so used to my snake attraction, he did not even bat an eyelash when a six-foot rat snake came into my mother’s house through a dog door on Easter Sunday.

The following month—May 2013, one year after my father’s death—Brian and I headed to Big Bend National Park with friends. Once again, a six-foot-long, black-and-white-striped snake slithered across our path. The last night of the trip I experienced a dream that would change everything. Over the last eight months—or the year of the snakes as I jokingly called it—I dreamed of snakes nearly every night in addition to seeing them while awake.

That final night in my West Texas dreams, I found myself in some sort of shamanic Native American ceremony. The drums rhythmically pounded while the people danced and sang. In the middle of their circle, a mythic, almost cartoon-like cobra began to uncoil. At the height of the drumming, the cobra reached its full height, and its hood reached full width. It stared directly into my eyes, stuck out its split tongue, and hissed with an indescribable intensity. I woke up in a panic and a sweat. I knew undoubtedly it was time to leave the marriage. As much as my human did not want to, I knew the natural and undeniable soul evolution I was experiencing could not take place within its walls. It timed exactly with Brian telling me I either needed to have a baby or he was going to find a new wife. No joke.

By late summer and early fall 2013, I was finally living on my own in the Sunny Shack. Brian and I had almost finalized the divorce. Freeing up the energies I’d needed to work in an unfulfilling job and exist in an unfulfilling marriage, I was able to redirect them to my soul’s evolution. My human self continued to be pretty much blind as to what was occurring, yet that was all about to change.

On October 11, 2013, I attended my regular Friday night yoga class, as I often did before going out drinking with my friends. At the end of class, I sat in silent meditation with the others when I began to feel my spine move involuntarily, slithering and spinning clockwise. The electric current was no longer active only in the base of the spine and the uterus but was slowly, yet with increasing intensity, creeping up my spine. Once it reached the base of the neck, I began to experience a high like no other—and I’ve done a lot of drugs in my life—yet felt completely sober, aware and observing.

With my eyes closed, I saw every color in the rainbow and colors I didn’t have a name for. Time and space no longer existed. My human self was aware enough to be thankful to be sitting in a dark room where people could not see my jarring movements. Even though my eyes were closed, I felt as if they were open, and I was seeing the world for the first time. I felt my third eye open to a 360-degree view, expanding like the hood of the cobra that had visited me in the West Texas dream. I observed the experience both from inside my body and outside it. This was not like observing my body from outside like after my father died. It was an expansion of SELF. I expanded so much from the point of the I EXIST, I could see in all directions. My soul was not detached from the body. Everything was in alignment—soul and human as one.
The yoga instructor began talking again, something about controlling the fluctuations of the mind, which made me want to laugh out loud and flip him off at the same time, and just like that, the experience was over. My body, led by my spine, spiraled counterclockwise as the electric current swirled back down into the base of the spine, exactly like that tightly coiled black snake that had first appeared to me one year before.

One month later—November 2013—I found myself in a beautiful retreat center in the Sacred Valley of Peru, where I was completing an advanced yoga teacher training. This time the training was not to find answers, but rather to enjoy the experience of new friends and lots of physical practice in a beautiful location. On a break between sessions, I sat in a lush, green garden meditating when I heard some fellow students playing music—various drum and tambourine beats accompanied by guttural sounds of the women dancing and chanting wildly in a circle. I stood up from my meditation and went to sit in the middle of the dancing women, who were uninterrupted by my presence. The electric current begin to rise up the spine as my body moved rapidly in a clockwise motion. This time after my “hood” expanded and I came into my third-eye vision, the energy shot up through the crown of my head for the first time, rather than becoming stuck in my neck like in the yoga studio.

With it, my consciousness followed. I was in a snake’s body as it jetted into the gardens. I was clearly seeing out of the eye slits of a snake. At the same time in my body, I felt an incontrollable urge to allow the spine to create a wavelike motion, mimicking the slither of a moving snake. Then I moved my awareness back to the snake I simultaneously embodied, slithering and writhing through the grass outside the room where the music was taking place. Again, time and space were suspended as I traveled through the lush gardens in my snake body. It was as concrete as I describe, and the only thing I have to compare it to is a psychedelic-drug experience, which I will add is completely subpar to this completely natural one. After what seemed like hours but was really probably about five to ten minutes, I came back into my slithering human body and felt the electric current slowly recoil back down into the base of the spine.

Later, I learned the experience was what some call a kundalini awakening—I had never heard the term before, and it was not covered in my yoga teacher trainings. Kundalini is a Sanskrit word meaning “coiled one” and is often represented as a sleeping serpent that lies at the base of the spine, waiting to be awakened. In yogic theories, when kundalini or primal Earth-force energy awakens, it moves up central channels along the spine to the crown of the head through energy centers called chakras. A kundalini awakening is often considered part of the spiritual enlightenment, or self-realization, process in many cultures.

While this is a gross oversimplification of kundalini in the context of yogic theory, I must state that while it is one way to describe my effortless and unplanned experience, my views vary widely from those of the yogic community’s members, some of whom try to activate this energy, when to me it is about allowing it to awaken. Now I understand the experience as simply an infusion of energy—a massive integration of my soul, my spirit into the physical body. Really, the label on the experience didn’t matter; the effect it had on my reality did.

Running parallel to this infusion of serpent energy, I became aware of the name of the tall, thin Indian friend who had been with me in on the vibrating island, and when I sensed into it, I felt his presence in India had not been the first. Before I can take you forward, I have to take you back to October 8, 2013. It was three days prior to the energy releasing in the base of my spine in the dark yoga class, and that was certainly no coincidence.

Knowing I was devastated after my father’s death and the collapse of my marriage, a longtime girlfriend of mine, Alison, recommended I speak with a medium named Lori. Lori was the family friend of Alison’s good friend. She had the gift of being able to talk to those who had crossed over or left the physical body. In other words, she saw and spoke with dead people. It took me months to get on her busy schedule, and finally the day arrived. We held the meeting on Skype.

I’ll admit I was skeptical of this Lori woman and careful not to give her too much background information as a test to see if she was really, in fact, able to communicate with my father. I’d visited with my dad in a dream in January, eight months prior, after pleading with him for help on one of the worst days in my marriage. Afterward, I felt his presence intensely. A few times I saw a white orb hovering around me, but I felt blocked in being able to communicate with him. My human brain still had muscle and continued to place doubt in the ability to see, feel, and know beyond the five basic human senses.

The medium started out our Skype session by welcoming my angels to appear. Immediately, she informed me my father was present, as was my great-grandmother Helen, whom I’d never physically met in this life but who had been close to my mother as a child. She was the mother of my maternal grandfather, Spud. Finally, there was a third being who introduced himself as El Morya. When Lori said his name, I felt a tingle shoot up my spine. In my third eye, I saw a man with a thin face, dark beard, and large brown eyes. His energy felt entirely different from my dad’s and Helen’s, who were chatting with me in the near-Earth realms. They felt human; he felt wise, expanded. My intuition allowed me to trust him instantly, and I was excited with what he had to share with me.

My father had much to say as usual. He cleared up some details around his death, such as why Nell, his wife, had acted the way she had in the weeks after his memorial service. Dealing with her and her family had been a total nightmare. My dad indicated that outside forces out of her control strongly influenced her behavior, something I understood all too well. I forgave her and myself for reacting so poorly and would call her in the next few days to make amends. My dad sounded so much like himself, and Lori indicated as she translated his words that he talked with his hands in broad gestures. My doubts about her ability to communicate with him completely faded away. Additionally, I felt his unconditional love wash over me like it had in his physical presence. It was a specific sensation, like his love for me had its own frequency on the radio dial, and I knew it was him.

The medium explained to me that my dad had one foot in this world and one in the spirit world, and he was laying stones for me. He would be traveling with me to Peru, where I was headed in November. Also, for the past month, a blue jay had been ever present on my daily walks and in my backyard. I did not bring this up to the medium, but in the reading my father communicated to me that this represented him visiting me. This knowledge brought indescribable comfort to me at the time. I had felt so lost without him, only to learn he had been there the whole time.

Helen had an earful about my love life and was very displeased on how my soon-to-be ex-husband had been treating me. She explained that it was a karmic relationship and said I would find love again. My dad showing up in the reading made sense to me, yet I wondered what skin Helen had in my game. I would not figure it out for some months. In this moment, I was simply overjoyed to hear that my dad was well and enjoying his experiences on the other side. He told me he and his father, Cecil, went sailing—it was confirmation of the January dream where he bobbed in the ocean, beaming his giant, trademark smile at me back on shore.

My dad and Helen also had a mouthful about my near future. They told me through Lori that I would meet the love of my life within the next year and have two kids. My human self loved to hear this, and my soul sighed heavily. Sar’h explained to me that people in the near-Earth realms didn’t know any more about the future than me because it wasn’t written in stone. As sovereign, self-governing beings, we choose what our lives will look like. On some level, I was angry with them for sharing this. Dead people are not any more psychic because they are dead. My father and Helen saw no more clearly than me. If they were, in fact, psychic, the only thing psychics have the ability to see is future potentials and possibilities, often through a limited lens.

At the time, the aspect of myself that believed in the Prince Charming fairy tale still had an active voice within me, and it was annoying as fuck. For the next year, the damsel-in-distress aspect would desperately look for her prince everywhere we went because my dad, an authority figure, had declared it so. Let’s just say he never came; my dad was wrong. This was the beginning of my understanding that in addition to the soul and human voices, there were also the voices of many aspects coming into play. I learned later from the Crimson Circle materials that “aspects” were identities our souls created in the past to answer the question, “Who am I?” Note to self—stop asking that question! They often take on their own voices and cause chaos and confusion in our lives if we are not conscious of them.

Sometimes we create aspects to fill roles in certain situations, like daughter, wife, or business owner. Additionally, past-life aspects or identities come into play, even ones created in dreams and other realities. I once dealt with an aspect in my bedroom whose face morphed into another, changing every second. That was interesting. When we are unconscious of them, the aspects can drag us in all directions. They can literally haunt us. On most occasions, when I thought I was dealing with a ghost or Earth-bound spirit, it turned out to be my own aspect haunting me. It would take me another year and a half to figure out what these rogue voices were and that, most importantly, instead of running them off by burning sage and wrapping myself in white light, I actually needed to invite them into the soul for integration.

This being named El Morya remained silent and patient as my dad and Helen went back and forth about the human details of my life. I could sense that he was going to share some wisdom when it came to the path of the soul, the walk of the master, which was what I was really interested in. El Morya—the name even seemed foreign to me as I jotted it down in my notebook, not knowing how it was spelled. Yet when he spoke, I knew it was time to listen carefully, and there would be no garble about my human love life.

First, he told me I had a very awakened third eye. “No shit, Sherlock,” I thought. I already knew this, but then I realized there was more to his words. Suddenly, it brought up a memory from December, when I’d returned from India. I was Christmas shopping for the last holiday with Brian and his family. I was in Barney’s when I saw a tiny gold necklace with a third eye hanging from it, a tiny diamond forming the pupil of the eye. It called to me, and I asked the sales clerk to pull it from the case so I could try it on. I loved it. The price tag seemed a bit steep for something so trivial when I needed to be spending money on gifts.

“Consider it a gift from me, a reminder of who you are.”

The words had come from my tall, thin Indian friend who had sat next to me on my yoga mat the previous month. In that moment, I finally connected the dots through the unrelenting density of the human mind. Holy hell. El Morya was the friend, the merlin, possibly even the Mortimer, who had been with me all these years. Now he was talking to me through a medium on a computer. It was an experience beyond my wildest human imagination. You couldn’t make this shit up. It was undeniably true; this was happening. As a child it had seemed so natural to have these experiences, but the world around me pounded the magic of my childhood experiences into oblivion. I could feel the magic of life returning, and it was going to have nothing to do with Prince Charming and the two rug rats my dad and Helen spoke of.

Second, El Morya told me people would be drawn to me, and I should not be scared. He repeated it: “People will come to you, and you should not be scared.”

“OK,” I thought. I couldn’t fathom what he meant at the time, so I wrote it down to examine later. What people? Yet I wouldn’t have to wait too long for the answer. A slew of professors, like Mortimer and El Morya, were already gathering in my living room.

Next, El Morya said I was very wise and on Earth to teach. Then he was silent, allowing some time for it to sink in. I thought of Mehtab, an adored Austin yogi and Vedic astrologer whom I received readings from and developed a friendship with. He also told me repeatedly that I would teach, but this information puzzled me as much as it did when Mortimer told me so many years ago that I stored codes of truth within me.

What in the ever-living fuck did they all want me to teach? What did I have to share? I didn’t feel equipped to teach anyone anything. I’d spent the summer making love, drinking wine, listening to music, and dancing on a boat deck. What did I know? The only thing I had been teaching was yoga, on occasion, and that wasn’t it. Who would be coming to me for answers? Yet his words passed my gut check. I trusted him and the fact that the details were going to fill themselves in as usual. The final thing El Morya told me was that he knew I liked to be active, but I needed to be still and listen.

“I’m supposed to sit still.” I shuddered. “Not my best talent.”

My human self wailed like a toddler throwing a tantrum and then quickly surrendered. The human in me was beginning to realize some fights with the divine will of the soul to know itself weren’t worth it. When my hour with Lori was up, I thanked everyone before signing off Skype, thinking to myself how strange it all was.

Now I really wanted to know who El Morya was and how he knew so much about me, but the medium had simply shrugged her shoulders when asked. After our session was over, I did what anyone would do and hit up Google. Now equipped with the Indian’s name, I typed it in various configurations. Then it popped up. He was an ascended master. My human self had never heard the term before. It took me some tries to figure out that an ascended master was someone who had completed their cycle of lifetimes on Earth, becoming self-realized or enlightened like Buddha or Jesus. “Or King Arthur, my childhood hero,” I thought. I learned there were many others like him, some better known than others. Today I believe there are fewer than ten thousand human beings who have made their way through the enlightenment/ascension/self-realization experience, whatever you wish to call it.

Through my research, I learned El Morya received his name in his last human incarnation as El Morya Kahn, who lived in India and ascended in 1898. The website listed that his other incarnations on Earth included Abraham; Melchior, one of the three wise men at the birth of Jesus; and King Arthur—wait, what? King Arthur? My mind was about to explode, unable to handle the infusion of energy shooting through my body. Later I would learn that El Morya was also the teacher of Helena Blavatsky, the Russian occultist, spirit medium, and author who cofounded the Theosophical Society in 1875—a detail that would become important later on as I remembered more.

After the reading with the medium and in the following days, I began to go through a series of initiations, trainings, or experiences in remembering with El Morya and other ascended masters. As it turned out, I no longer needed the medium to translate. My human self was floored. Fuck, was this what I had been doing as a child? I felt oddly familiar, and not just from childhood. I had an understanding that this was not a new ability. This was something I had been doing for thousands of years. I forgot it in the density of the illusion the physical world had created. My human voice finally admitted that it did not seem so crazy that I’d quit my job and left my marriage. There was so much more to life. I was reeling.

After the medium reading, many experiences began to rapidly unfold. I received communications from beings not yet identified while I was driving, meditating, and often while sleeping in the middle of the night. My new friends would lead me on Internet searches at 3:00 a.m. I was happy to jump down Alice’s rabbit hole, no matter how mad it made me. During one of the 3:00 a.m. sessions, I landed on a website with an audio recording in which a woman was channeling El Morya while being interviewed by her husband in a radio-show format. It felt as if El Morya was talking directly to me, and I realized that the interview had been recorded on October 6, 2013—two days before my reading with the medium. At the end of the interview, the husband of the channel said, “If this recording called to anyone, they should contact Karen, who is a channel in Austin, Texas.” Holy fuck. Austin, Texas. I had to call.

The next morning I called Karen. Her husband, Chuck, answered the phone and passed it over.

“How’d you hear about me?” she asked.

“El Morya sent me.” I felt ridiculous saying it, but it was true. Her voice did not even waver. She suggested the afternoon of October 15, 2013, and I agreed, writing down her address.

Before I got to Karen’s, Master Morya appeared on the afternoon of October 14. Adhering to his advice to be still and listen, I was sitting in the back bedroom of the Sunny Shack, which was the designated meditation room where I taught my few yoga clients. My eyes were shut, and I was sitting cross-legged on my yoga mat when he appeared. He began energetically—not with words but in the universal language of images and sensations—leading me through an experience. Ollie rested by my side.

It started off as what I can only describe as waves of unforgiving, unrelenting forgiveness, which built in intensity and washed over my body. Then Master Morya asked aloud if I could allow forgiveness for every perceived wrong in this life and others, including all the guilt and shame I had carried for so long for simply being in a human body. He did not ask me to ask God for forgiveness, but rather requested that I allow forgiveness from myself, at the soul level. I knew internally that it was unnecessary to go into the details of any so-called wrong, and I should be allowing the energy of forgiveness into my being. It was not like the Catholic confession I had been forced to give in my teenage years. Through my conversations with Sar’h, I knew that these were only perceived wrongs because there really was no such thing as right and wrong, only experiences of the soul. With each wave of unrelenting forgiveness that swept over my body of consciousness, my physical body felt lighter—so light I wondered if I might be levitating, yet I did not open my eyes, which remained tightly shut in case opening them might have interrupted the experience.

Next, Master Morya asked if I wanted to be a vessel for the will of God. It wasn’t what you would think. He wasn’t referencing some old man in the sky and his Ten Commandments. The will of God is really a deep desire from Spirit for humans to know their own soul, to witness and experience their inner divinity. In a trance-like state, my human self repeated over and over, “I am a vessel for the will of God.” My spine twisted clockwise in its serpent-like motion. Then I felt an overwhelming compassion for every human being, every animal, every plant, every mineral, and every single cell on planet Earth. The movie played internally. It started with a picture of Earth from space, zooming in on the green forests and blue oceans, even down to a microscopic level. The unconditional love I felt for every tiny bit of Earth brought me to tears, and every single cell and the spaces between the cells of my body lit up with passion.

Then, in a dramatic turn, I began to deeply feel the pain and suffering of the collective human consciousness. I was taken through a historical timeline of the pain and suffering experienced by humans since the beginning of time on Earth. I realized it was a review of the collective pain body of this planet. Rape. Murder. Wars. Slavery. Witch-hunts. No stone was left unturned as I spun through time, feeling everything. With it came the knowledge that I had experienced all this both as an individual soul incarnated thousands of times and as a consciousness outside the physical body. For a brief moment, I remembered that I had been shown this evolution before. It had been 2006, and I had been tripping on mushrooms on an Amsterdam houseboat. I realized it was one of the many times Master Morya had tried to contact me over the years, and I had failed to get it. How had I missed it so many times?

Master Morya then asked if I wanted to help this planet evolve. I had already answered the question in Mrs. Bank’s classroom at age eight, but I answered again.

“Yes, it sounds like a hell of an adventure,” I said.

Then I was shown, in the universal picture language I knew so well, the potential for the evolution of the collective human consciousness—a place and time where everyone lives in the true creative nature of the soul, rather than in his or her head, where people manifest with pure intention—no jobs needed—and where the human concepts of suffering and scarcity of resource do not exist. This brought tears of joy to my eyes, and every cell in my body activated. Homo luminous. I am a body of light.

Then I was taken back to the beginning of time. El Morya seemed to step away from leading the experience to witnessing it. I was drawn deep into my soul, and I felt like I turned soul side out, human side in. The message came in the form of an illustrated story, like a children’s book. Souls were created in an energetic surge of expression from the Spirit for two purposes—to create and to experience those creations. I watched fireworks of light multiply against a dark sky. Eventually, some of the souls grew tired of creating “out there” and decided to give it a whirl on this blue-green planet called Earth. I saw a vision of souls in space, shooting down through a tube connecting to Earth. The only trick was that, on most occasions, the souls forgot who they were when coming into the density of the physical body, forced to try to remember it all over again. There appeared to be no bookmark, and the soul lost its place in its own story, starting over once again in a baby’s body.

When Spirit created the souls, it was in its image. These souls had the same creative abilities and the same authority to self-govern as Spirit. Never wanting to control, govern, or impact the outcome of these souls, Spirit’s only desire was to create and experience the creation, to allow the souls to realize they were creator beings as well. With the images came an intense understanding that Spirit, also called God or the Universe, did not care about the details of our human lives. In fact, it did not give a shit, yet it was not as callous as it sounds. Rather, this creator left the souls to create and experience at will, to allow the souls to eventually understand they were the creators of their realities. By staying neutral or even appearing uncaring to the human eye, Spirit allowed these souls to experience their inner divinity, to understand that the God they sought so desperately actually existed within. I could strongly sense that Spirit/God/the Universe held extreme compassion for the souls it created—true compassion, like Sar’h said, is honoring the path of every soul without trying to change it.

My soul then showed me in images and sensations, indicating a record number of human souls were beginning to feel into the chapter where they had left off. They were remembering. No longer did this human life feel like a solitary experience to them. They were realizing that they had been around the human block a few hundred to a couple thousand times. Then, in the images, I saw a million different ways to wake up, a million different ways to crack the limits of human awareness—no one way better than the other. I was shown that for me it took my father’s death to wake up to return to the soul’s natural evolution, but it would be different for everyone.

A funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment; I lost everything, said one master to another.

I could see through the ever-shifting pictures that the cracks created by human-perceived tragedies allowed waves of consciousness, or awareness, to flood in. Through the cracks in the eggshell that made up the density of human awareness, the light of the soul could seep into the physical body—embodied consciousness. I could see the more that humans tried to resist the waves, the more lost and sick they became, often resulting in them pumping themselves full of prescription pills or insane amounts of supplements, trying to treat the sickness like I once had. They would yell to God or the Universe—“Why are you doing this to me?”—like I once had. They would give up because they felt insane and lost in the modern world, too exhausted from the rat race to continue on the soul’s journey, like I once had. In that moment of surrender, in that moment of unbelievable pain and suffering, the consciousness would roll in through the cracks, like it had for me, if they could allow it.

“We have to remember the act of being human is wildly courageous in and of itself.”

I heard the words from Sar’h so clearly. I was shown that there were many souls “back home” who’d never dared to try human life and were watching us from the safety of their cosmic couches, some trying to give direction with no firsthand experience of what it was like to be human. I realized that there were many of us, like me, who forgot how to create outside the confines of society and the limited human mind. Many, like me, abandoned the soul in pursuit of a singular human experience, where we tended to play it safe and stay in our cages, where society told us we belonged. Like me, many forgot that human existence was actually a grand adventure in which we forget our true nature in order to have the amazing experience of realizing our divinity, remembering that we are God, and reclaiming the true creator nature of our souls in this physical human form. This experience was one of the grandest adventures in all time and space, and I was on it. So were many others, and even more were ready to awaken at any moment.

After the experience was over, I was so spent I collapsed in a heap on my yoga mat. Disoriented, it took me another hour to get up. I walked my dog outside to go to the bathroom, took a steaming hot Epsom salt bath, and climbed into bed. Tomorrow I was headed to Karen’s house for a reading, of which I had no expectations because there wasn’t anything to pull from.

***

Walking into Karen and Chuck’s house, I felt instantly comfortable. After talking with Chuck, who had been a Methodist minister before his awakening, Karen and I went into her office. She sat in a recliner with a digital recorder and then pulled the side lever to lie back. She tossed me a blanket, explaining that it got cold when masters and archangels entered the room. I told her about my experiences over the past few weeks. She shared about when she began talking to masters at age forty. She now appeared to be in her midsixties, beautiful, and full of light. Karen said she had been in meditation when she felt every cell of her body activate, after which she was able to communicate with the unseen. Raised Baptist, Karen said it had been quite a shock. She mainly spoke of her relationship with Archangel Michael. Unlike ascended masters, archangels have never been in physical bodies but hold a consciousness and an interest in the evolution of Earth, she explained. In my awakening, I naturally gravitated toward beings who knew what it was like to be human rather than ones directing from the outside, yet archangels have been so involved on Earth for so long, they tended to get human life more so than the others who weighed in with no actual experience.

I told her I wanted to speak to El Morya again, and I thought I had been speaking with him on my own, but my human doubts still lingered. I was so unsure of myself at the time. I would have such expansive experiences, only to go back to the insecure human who consistently doubted everything. If anything, hearing Karen’s story was of more comfort than anything else. She and Chuck seemed to have their heads on straight. They understood business and felt grounded. They didn’t wear white robes and cover themselves in crystals. They felt like a regular couple in retirement, and yet they did not think my story was strange at all. At the time, my human self still wondered if I was crazy, and their presence gave it some much-needed relief.

When we started, Karen seemed to go into some sort of altered state. Like Lori, she invited my angels and guides into the room. I preferred to call them my friends. The words angels and guides made me cringe. It felt too New Age, but why bring up a nuance in words? Master Morya came in quickly, speaking through Karen. He explained what I’d already understood in my childhood, adolescence, and even in India, but needed to hear again. He said that if I completed what I needed to in this life, I would fully self-realize or ascend. I would have the choice of never incarnating back on Earth unless I wanted a specific experience. He said that during my ascension, I could choose whether to leave the physical body or stay in it. He implied that this was a rather new choice. Most find it hard to stay in the density of the physical body, but as more masters did this, it would became easier for others.

Of course, my human self wanted to know what I had to complete in this life to ascend while staying in the body, and it wanted it delivered in nice, neat bullet points. My soul chuckled at the thought, and he gave no steps. Some things we must realize on our own, a box turtle had once told a little girl. Master Morya reinforced that I needed to be still and listen.

“Be, be, be—not do, do, do,” he said through Karen.

Once again, Master Morya said other masters and archangels would be visiting me, and I should not be scared and should be open to what they would share. Besides being still and open, he said, most importantly, I needed to learn discernment. Being that open would attract many visitors, both in physical and nonphysical form. I really needed to do a gut check on their intentions and determine truth for myself at the soul level. It scared me a bit, but I also understood what he was saying. As a child playing in the backyard with various beings, I had learned that, for some, fear was food.

If you didn’t give off fear, they would go away to eat elsewhere. I had also learned at an early age that not all my visitors were who they said they were, and my soul voice was the best compass in these situations. Yet the word discernment was new, and it held a certain frequency I needed to sense into more. Soon after I realized that the greatest place to practice my discernment was in deciphering my soul voice from the voice of aspects within me. Which internal voice was actually Sar’h and which ones were aspects of myself that no longer served me? This proved to be a challenge that I would eventually master.

El Morya finished the session by saying I was here to assist others in their ascension process. He said it so casually, like it was a trip to the grocery store. A bell rang inside me.

“This is what I am supposed to teach!” my human screamed internally.

Instead of allowing the words to resonate, my human self grabbed greedily at the information and twisted it all around. It saw me as some talking head, spreading wisdom in a series of lectures. My soul strongly—but gently—came in.

“Absolutely not. The way to teach ascension is to be it. Gurus are obsolete in this New Energy (what comes after the New Age). The soul’s or master’s voice is the only guru. The kingdom is within. Remember that true compassion is honoring everything and everyone as is, without trying to change it,” Sar’h said energetically.

“Don’t go home and start putting together PowerPoint presentations and webinars, Lauren,” she joked at my human’s expense. “Your human self has to catch up.”

I remembered El Morya showing me the pain and suffering on Earth and asking me if I wanted to help. I realized then he did not mean through activism, prayer circles, holding healing energy for Earth, or anything of the like. He only meant through self-realization. When a human realizes who they truly are, when they realize their mastery, the effects ripple through the rest of the world exponentially, and more so than any other action. There was nothing for me to do, no one for me to help. The only thing was to be and to allow the transfiguration to take place inside me. I was here to live my story rather than lecture it.

The human fought a bit—not just then but many other times. Of course, we needed to gather our swords and rally the troops. But Sar’h was no longer outside me. Her voice was rooted deep within my womb through the infusion of kundalini or spirit. Sar’h was me. I took a deep breath and relaxed. That’s all there was left to do.

When I got home from Karen and Chuck’s, I remember lying in the hammock, rocking back and forth for hours, experiencing what I can only describe as samadhi, a state of pure, undiluted bliss. The sensation lasted three solid days. On the fourth day, I felt a crash beyond comparison to my drug-fueled days. I hit rock bottom and could barely get up to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t understand what was happening to me—the contrast in consciousness too staggering for my human to keep up.

​***

DON DRAPER: What happened to your enlightenment?
ROGER STERLING: It wore off.
--Mad Men, Season 5, Episode 1