My Journey

As a child, I used to sit in an earth cave created by the upended roots of a fallen tree on the bank of a slow moving river, and watch the water flowing. It was like being in a womb, the roots around and above me feeling like veins. An intense warmth would flood my body, starting in my upper legs and gradually spreading throughout my whole being. Back then, I called it ‘the hug,’ I always felt like there was something I knew, but couldn’t quite remember. It was as if everything around me was alive, that it could talk to me, and that I was a part of it. That I was someone I should know, but had forgotten.

Years later, as a spiritual seeker familiar with such phenomena, I now know that this ‘hug’ was an experience of merging with the greater mind, the consciousness that is called by many names, a profoundly visceral experience of communication with what I would now call Oneness. And that the ‘someone’ was my Soul Signature’ – who I was and am beyond time and space.

And in the years following, I forgot. Just as we all do. Life happened. Pain, loss, trauma, fear, shame – the dust and rubble of living a human life fell on top of that beautiful knowing. This time/space illusion, in all its relentless brutality, became convincingly real.

Years ago, Plato coined the word ‘anamnesis’ – a remembering of all we knew before birth. Children are great rememberers, I think. They are not so long into incarnation that they have lost touch with the Oneness out of which they emerged. They stand in their cot, delightedly watching and pointing to phenomena we can no longer see; they talk animatedly to guides here to ease them from one reality to another. They talk of what happened before. And, because we have forgotten, we call it imagination, pretend play.

As a psychotherapist of 30 years and energy worker, I’m familiar with forgetting. We incarnate eagerly, up for the adventure, still remembering we are not alone here. Then trauma hits, life becomes real, and forgetting sets in. Only as we are close to returning home, nearing death, does the veil lift once again. Even then, just as with children, we are met with scepticism, ‘logical’ explanations from those who have still forgotten.

As that same psychotherapist and energy worker, now a spiritual seeker also, who continues to experience transformative mystical experiences, I have found myself pondering this process of forgetting and remembering.

Why does it happen? Are we meant to forget? Does it serve a purpose? Since I believe that nothing is accidental, within a Universe I know to be conscious, there had to be meaning and significance to this universal process.

My search for an answer has led me to read and discuss widely, considering the latest research in neuroscience, transpersonal psychology, studies into the nature of consciousness, mystical and spiritually transformative experiences, energy and quantum physics, and the nature of ‘reality’ itself. In the process, I have encountered the most amazing minds, thinkers outside the box. And I have become convinced that we are on the cusp of the greatest paradigm shift there has ever been.

That shift is one that is moving away from the prevailing world of materialistic reductionism with its rigid tunnel vison and resistance to any ideas which fall outside its narrow framework. Human consciousness is expanding to accomodate a new reality, that of a conscious, creative, expanding Universe in which everything is interconnected, the very fabric of which is composed of love.

How does forgetting and remembering fit into this paradigm? I believe that this conscious Universe expands through experiencing itself in an infinite variety of forms. I believe that we – as souls become form for a while - are part of that process; and that the only way we can fully immerse ourselves in a human experience is to temporarily forget all that we truly are.

Three years ago, a mainstream publisher, Welbeck (now Hachette), contacted me out of the blue saying they'd come across my work and loved it. They wanted me to write a book about healing. Not how to heal from this, or from that, but from a much bigger perspective. Simply how to heal.

The resulting book, YOU CAN REMEMBER WHO YOU WERE BEFORE LIFE MADE YOU FORGET' invites the reader to explore their own human journey through those eyes, and the lens of that awareness. The many tearful messages of recognition I have received, and the amazing reviews, would seem to confirm that its message and the healing it offers is timely.