My Path to the Other Side and to Him

My path to the other side, and to him, I paved first with knowledge. From when I was a child, I had the ability and an affinity to travel to a place I called across the bridge. Now it was 2010. In my adult life, I was seeking a spiritual teacher. There was so much  I sought to understand about life and about myself. About loss and about love. I knew instinctively that I would not find that understanding in my immediate earthly surroundings. So I began to research the art of astral travel, or astral projection, as it is sometime called.

By that time, I had already trained in self-hypnosis and had explored past life regression. So astral projection come quite naturally to me. I learned it is best to eat clean, natural food, soak in a bath of sea salts, and to be at peace with my thoughts before each take-off.

Equally important, I learned to ground myself when I returned from my travels, ensuring that my energy came completely back into my body and through the bottoms of my feet, like roots planted into the earth. On occasion, I would forget this step, and would feel spacey during my-day to-day life, finding it difficult to function.

Each time I traveled, my body was left behind in the comfort of my Zen-style pedestal bed. Even with eyes closed, I could observe the wispy, smoky, mirror image of myself drift away from everything I knew, and onto a cement stairway that would lead me to the other place.

The first time I set foot on the other side of that stairway, I knew I was home. Instinctively, I knew he was there waiting. It was all so ordinary.

I crossed an expansive lawn, wearing only a sheer white bed sheet, the only reminder of my earthly launching pad. 

My bare feet drifted through the grass, soft, like kitten fur. A large white house, simple and ordinary, presented in front of me. Surprising. All those images of gold and glitz and royalty must have still encapsulated my thoughts about how heaven might look. Is that what this place was? In that moment, I let those images go. That release would be the first of many preconceived notions about that other place, about myself, about what's real, and about love that I would be forced to let go of over the next many months.