BEING HUMAN

As humans, we tend to believe what we are taught. We are innately curious from birth, observing and recording everything we see, touch, hear, taste, and smell. Our brains have an enormous capacity for learning. We form our thoughts and even base most of our emotions on what has been communicated to us through loving, well-meaning parents, teachers, friends, siblings, and extended family. The planet itself even programs our events and experiences through weather patterns, the rhythms of the ocean waves, the moon cycles, and the rotations around the sun that define our cycles of activities and sleep patterns. All of these outside influences are integral parts of our human experience.

This has been one of the most challenging hurdles for me on this journey of believing and sharing. Just encouraging others to actually embrace the possibility that this truly was our experience and that we all are intrinsically destined, designed uniquely to participate in a dance that was choreographed before the beginning of time. I myself have even found it difficult to believe from time to time. You would think that remembering this experience would give me a bolder sense of myself, and although I do possess an abundance of faith and what I would describe as a super-weird sense of "Everything is going to be okay and I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be; it has all been worked out for me," I'm a human. I get depressed, feel defeated, get confused, am frustrated — a lot — and experience the entire scope of human emotions that we all feel. I wish I were some sort of superhuman who was an all-knowing, all-loving being who wore an awesome cape that seemed to flow even when there wasn't any breeze. I wish I could scale tall buildings in a single bound, although that would just be showing off! And who wouldn't want to rescue all the puppies in the world, superhero style? But I am human. I am frail. I get scared. I hesitate. I make mistakes — a lot of them! So I am not a perfect human who has "all of this" figured out. Just because I have been given a rare gift of remembering what the "where" was like before I was born, it doesn't mean I have a different path from other humans. We are all connected. We all have to and get to experience this beautiful, tragic, emotional, intensely challenging physical life together.

I am not perfect, for sure. But I do have fun! I dance when no one is watching and equally in the car with music booming in front of everyone. I love to get wet in the rain and act like it isn't messing up my hair, because no one in the state of Colorado owns an umbrella. And when I fall down, I immediately look around to see who saw me because if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it?

I love deeply, intentionally, and naively. I say stupid things without thinking. I praise the accomplishments of others because I truly love the light of their existence and wish we could all share the vision of when we were created and didn't struggle so much with ourselves. I also in the past have looked for a superhuman idol who could make my life better with a system, a pill or even an e-book, like many of us. All you will find in these pages is truth told from a genuine heart that let its defenses down long enough to spew forth a secret that has been haunting it for five decades.

I didn't ask for this experience that I'm about to share. From as far back as I can remember, and even before, apparently, I knew I was different. I knew that the things I thought about, recalled, and was drawn to made me different. Weird. And it scared me. As a child of four or five years old, I would lie in bed, put myself into a deep trance, and go back for and reexperience everything I'd seen and remembered. Every night. I would lie in my bed, closing my eyes tightly, and force myself to clear my mind. When a thought popped into my brain, I would quickly take deep breaths and focus on the vision of "the others."

I wasn't sure at the time how I could possibly remember or what I was even experiencing, but I knew I was drawn to it. Like a drug that transcends the pain of the flesh into a painless, carefree, effortless existence, I was taken willingly into this place, and it was irresistible. My days were spent deep in thought. The other kids were playing, and I knew I wanted to play too. They never chose me for the team first. I was always a last choice. Withdrawn with a serious nature, I was also a very happy and carefree child: a strange mix for making and keeping friends. I could make friends all right, but the moment I began to speak of "the others" or tell them about my wonderful "dreams," they would withdraw my rights of friendship and label me as the weird kid. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be the girl others thought was pretty, but I wasn't. I wanted to be the girl whose mother worked in the classroom to help the teacher, but I wasn't. I wished for my hair to be beautifully braided with a ribbon that matched our green and blue plaid uniforms — you know those classic Catholic schoolgirl uniforms — but it wasn't. I knew that I was apart from the other human beings who surrounded me. I daydreamed of the beautiful light beings, the "others" who loved me, and I tried to remember what that was like. This world was loud and had rules. It was more difficult to be who I knew inside that I truly was: this beautiful light being without limits. I yearned to be back with the others. I cried at times because I was here on earth and desired greatly the opportunity to be back again where I felt I belonged. Sometimes even now, I realize that I don't belong here. Then I wrap my mind around the idea that this is a temporary space. That it is a privilege to become flesh and experience the beauty of the human race in this form. It is purposeful, meaningful, and lovely yet can sometimes be harsh, unkind, unfair, and brutally painful.

This world is mundane compared with the creation realm. Even with the beauty of nature in all of its glory and majesty and those manmade things that were thrust from the imaginations of the brilliant. This world has its own interpretation of beauty, but nothing compares to the infinite beauty that is felt in the place we were created. It is all-encompassing love, and every creation shares a purity of spirit. That is where we came from and where we return to on some level when we are gone from...