Rewind a bit, back to my Soap-’n’-Shine Infinite Blackness of the Soul Car Wash. After I was done and was just sort of floating around, starting to get a feel for my new spirit body and senses, more spirits showed up. They weren’t the same ones who’d guided me through my life review; I felt that they were different and here for a different purpose. They led me to this table in the middle of another white room. The table was really smooth and made from a material I don’t think we have on Earth. There were three spirits to my left, four to my right, and one in front of me who was doing most of the talking by transmitting thoughts directly into my head, which is how most spirits communicate. Even though things’ physical appearance are really fluid here, it was as if my heart knew who they were and that they were okay. I felt safe.
These spirits said they were going to help me purge some things from the life I had just left. I thought that we’d gotten that all taken care of with the spiritual car wash, but I was wrong. There’s a lot of stuff you need to sort out when you cross over, and there’s no rushing things.
The spirit at the table who did most of the talking was named Cawli. It’s kind of silly of me to try to describe her because it’s only my perception of her. Even calling her female isn’t entirely accurate because that’s not really how gender works here, but she felt female, so I referred to her that way. I knew she wasn’t human, but I was more comfortable seeing her as one. She’s really just this light energy, but in my perception, I saw that she had long bright blond hair pulled back from her face, and her eyes were blue. She had no makeup on, and even though she looked like someone around my age, she spoke like she had the wisdom of someone who’s a hundred.
Cawli had this sweet calmness about her, and her movements were slow, relaxed, and confident. She was like a gentle river that constantly moves, and I felt comfortable with her. She looked at me and asked me how I felt, but somehow I could tell that she already knew the answer. I told her I felt okay but that I was a little confused and nervous. She assured me everything was going to be fine.
First Cawli walked me through what happens at the point of death. She told me to imagine a hand filled with these glittery granules of salt, and these granules are sprinkled into the physical body when you’re born. That’s the life force, the soul. While the granules are in the body, they can make it move and react like a puppet. Then when you die, it’s like shaking all those granules out. She said that I’d had my “Erik salt” shaken out of me, and I remember thinking that was a really funny metaphor.
Cawli helped me adjust to my death because she knew I had a problem grasping everything that had been happening to me since I passed. She began by throwing some questions at me.
“What is the definition of ‘real,’ Erik?” she asked.
I didn’t have an answer for her, so she continued.
“As long as you are observing something and participating in it, it’s real, whether there’s a physical body attached to that observation or action or not.” She knew I thought that she was super attractive, so she went on to say, “You look at me, and I’m pleasing for you to look at. Would you define how you look at me as real?”
“Well, fuck yeah!” I said, because I figured I might as well be honest.
“Okay, then,” she responded, “it’s as simple as that. You see something; you have a reaction to it. Then it’s real.”
She went on to tell me that just because a body dies, it doesn’t mean that you no longer exist. That helped me accept that I truly was still “real” even though I’d shed my physical body. In other words, she helped me understand what the definition of real is, whether you’re a human being walking around on Earth or a spirit like me. Cawli then confirmed something I’d been wondering about ever since I transitioned—that I was made up of some sort of light energy now and that the body I had left was just a shell, a car I’d driven around to navigate my way through all my experiences as a human. She also explained that soon after I died, I traveled through different dimensions: first after I left my body, then when I crossed over, and then when I went to my life review.
Because I’d taken my own life and on Earth that was considered a bad thing to do, I wondered if Cawli would fuss at me about it, so I was anxious about what she was going to say next. She must have sensed my concerns because she went on to tell me that there’s not a term here for suicide. That’s because the way you get to the afterlife isn’t important. It’s just a death like any other. Actually, it’s more like a birth. Whether you come in headfirst, by cesarean, or feetfirst, it’s still a birth. What matters most is how you carried your emotional heart when you were alive. She explained that this meant how emotionally honest you were with yourself and others in your life. One of the things she praised me for was that when I was alive, I was honest about who I was and how I needed to be, even if it pushed other people away and even if it caused me pain. Because of that open honesty, I carried my heart on my emotional sleeve, even when those emotions were hard to carry.
Cawli spoke to me with no judgment—only love. She never once used words like “good” or “bad” with me, and it didn’t feel like she was trapping me in some word game like I felt some of my human therapists sometimes had. I guess the main thing that made me feel like I wasn’t being judged was that she didn’t treat my suicide as a taboo like many religions do on Earth. She didn’t treat it as if it were bad; she just treated it like a fact, and that was very freeing for me.
Next, Cawli helped me answer some of the “whys” of my time on Earth and what they meant. We talked about why I’d chosen to come into the life I had.
“That’s a complicated word, ‘choice,’ ” Cawli said. I remember her smiling kind of like the Mona Lisa—like she knew a secret that I didn’t and she wanted to share it, and I’m really glad she did.
I learned from Cawli that choices here are, in many respects, the same as the ones that humans make, but in other ways they’re really different. We all make choices. We can choose an apple instead of an orange, a yes instead of a no, one career over another. You know what I’m getting at here. But there’s also a form of choice that souls make that’s kind of above the concept we understand on Earth as “choice”—the choice to be born into a loving family or an abusive one, for example. This isn’t a “choice” that any human child could ever make for itself, obviously. You don’t choose to be born with a certain hair or eye color; you don’t choose to be born with a genetic predisposition for high blood pressure or addiction—but your soul does choose certain paths that you may or may not be aware of when you’re alive as a human.
Say a child is born into a loving family but also grows up struggling with bipolar disorder, like I was and did. That’s because my spirit chose to walk that particular path, and then as I lived out my life, I was presented with various choices I had control over that were influenced but not predetermined by my soul’s path. That may seem like the absence of free will, but it really isn’t. I had the freedom to live my life, and I also had the freedom to end it, but it all led to the place I am now because that’s what my soul needed.
You can learn from joy or pain—frequently both. Some learn compassion by being exposed to terrible hardship, and others learn it from being exposed to nothing but joy and ease. Some never learn from life’s experiences at all until they’re done living. I guess I was a little bit like that. I’m glad I now have this opportunity to give back some of what I’ve learned, though.
After Cawli explained to me how choice works, she went on to tell me what my soul had been searching for during my time on Earth and why that mattered.
“Erik, your soul wanted to learn about relationships,” she said. “Relationships are the richest and most important things souls can experience on Earth, and going through everything you did with the people you went through it with helped you understand human life more, which will be invaluable for you here.”
Man, was she right about that.
We also talked about why I’d picked certain people to be a part of that lesson. I’d chosen the parents I had because they would help me understand my lessons better and provide me with a safe and loving environment to do so. I could have chosen parents who were assholes, but that wouldn’t have helped me personally understand human relationships as well. It would have discouraged me from forming connections, not only with other people but also with myself. That wouldn’t have helped me understand love. I also chose to come into a bigger family because that presented me with more varied relationships to learn from.
In that same conversation, I also started to understand the separate roles I played with my father, my mother, and my siblings when I was alive—the lessons that they learned through me, I guess. For example, with my mom, my death was supposed to help her accept the fact that she couldn’t heal me. Life with me as her son was hard for her because all my issues were dumped into her lap. What made things worse was that, in spite of her being a doctor, she couldn’t heal her most important patient: me. My death was a hard lesson in grief and separation, but it also set her on her own spiritual path of healing and acceptance.
Cawli talked about how my mom’s healing and spiritual growth would help me find my own feet in the afterlife. I didn’t know what Cawli was talking about at the time, but she said that together, my mom and I both would become the best versions of ourselves. That’s what we signed up for. Of course, what Cawli meant was the fact that my mom and I would start communicating with each other through spirit translators and go on to do awesome shit like help heal the rest of our family, aid lots of other people with their journeys from skepticism to belief and from grief to joy, and even write this book.
Cawli also showed me how my bipolar disease helped me learn about relationships. The stigma of having a mental illness had made it hard for me to have relationships with other people. It scared them. They couldn’t understand me. They didn’t want to, and that pushed them away, so it was hard for me to make friends. This helped me understand why people react the way they do. During therapy with Cawli, I felt their fear, and through that, I developed compassion for them.
Cawli showed me how being mentally ill also created a wall between me and other people because I was holed up in my own little cage, trying to deal with my feelings. Being alone in that cage made my family try to find the key that would set me free, even though ultimately that was not in their hands, and that was okay. Their efforts showed me how important and healing some relationships can be and that you can’t go through life carrying your burdens on your own.
Another thing I learned from Cawli was that I wasn’t supposed to connect to anything strongly on Earth. That’s another reason why my soul chose for my body to have bipolar disease. It helped me maintain the distance I needed to detach myself. One foot in one world, one foot in the other. She told me I had chosen that kind of existence so that I would have the courage and strength to leave early.
We talked a lot about why I had died so young. When you take your own life, it’s often viewed as one of two things: cowardice or negligence. Either you’re a coward for not “trying harder” or whatever or the people around you weren’t with it enough to notice the signs and stop you from going through with it. I guess that both these things could be true in certain circumstances—no judgment; that’s not what I’m here for—but for me, it wasn’t about that stuff. It’s not like it was my destiny to take my own life or anything like that, but the way I took my exit did have a lot of impact on many levels for a lot of people—and not all bad—so in a way, it was the right choice for me.
When someone young kills themselves, it’s looked at as particularly sad, and that attracts a lot of attention and makes people ask a lot of questions. My death made people—including my family—ask things like, “Why couldn’t he have been healed?” “Why couldn’t he have gotten older and wiser?” The answer to that is simple: I didn’t need to be wiser. I needed to get out. My brain wasn’t working the way that I needed it to in order to participate fully in an earthly life. I’m now living a much fuller life than I ever could have when I was in my body. Again, this isn’t to say that people shouldn’t fight to live with everything they’ve got. They totally should, and man, I did. I’m just saying that I’m okay with how things turned out for me personally.
Cawli also told me that my early death was supposed to have a big impact on my family by showing them the true value of relationships and love. It taught them that they can’t assume that if people they love are young that they’ll have a lifetime together. Now they know that everyone needs to nurture their relationships with those they love because you never know how long they’re going to be around.
My death was loud. It was like a scream, and that made it even more painful for my family than it would have been otherwise. It made me realize how much I could hurt other people, and it made me want to do the opposite of that, which is, I hope, what I’m doing now.
One of the most interesting answers to the “why” of all the pain and suffering I experienced in my life as Erik I didn’t figure out until much later, but Cawli planted the seed of it during our first therapy session. Eventually, I figured out that I was supposed to be a guide and help humans, and the compassion, empathy, and listening skills I gained during my life were important for me to become a better one.
When I crossed over, I didn’t really find out that that was going to be my job here right away. No one tells you when you cross over what your job will be. Cawli didn’t tell me out and out that I’d be a guide, but, like I said, she gave me clues. At one point, she said, “You are such a blessing because the experiences you’ve had can be a guiding light for others.” That was the biggest seed that would help me put two and two together down the road. Every answer to my many “whys” came down to the spiritual contract my soul had picked for itself, and that was to learn from my own relationships and experiences and then use those experiences to come here and become a better spirit in the afterlife.
At one point in my therapy, Cawli said, “Erik, now we’re going to look at your other lives.”
Um, what the fuck? My one life was more than I could deal with. There are others?
It turns out that I did have other lives, and not only did we discuss those other lives in detail but she also explained their connections to the life I knew as mine. The one that influenced my last life the most was when I was a monarch butterfly, because I had these stages to go through: larva, caterpillar, cocoon, and then a butterfly in flight. There were transformations in that life, both physical and emotional, that taught my soul a lot about growth and change.
It was such an incredible journey exploring my life as a butterfly, flying from one country to another—the struggle, the excitement, and the community. In my life as Erik, I wanted to have that but couldn’t. I was stuck. My body and my mind were broken. I think that when I was human in my last life, my soul wanted that same energy from my butterfly life, but it just didn’t shake out that way. Revisiting that life helped me understand a lot of feelings I experienced during my life as Erik.
In another life, I was this woman in France in the 1400s. In that life, I didn’t have a lot of money or anything, but I was wicked smart, especially when it came to growing plants for food. I found out that the best way I could help people was to teach them how to save seeds and exchange them for crops. I worked with the local monks outside Paris who knew that the soil had certain properties and that some plants grow better when they’re planted after other crops. Because of this seed-sharing thing of mine, I was able to help so many people who couldn’t grow food for themselves. That life was so awesome to explore. In it, I felt good in my body, and I helped others in a way that I had wanted to in my life as Erik, especially people who were having a really hard time. When I look back, I see how that life was meant to influence my existence as a spirit guide whose job it would be to plant the seeds that humans need. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself; I’ll tell you guys about being a guide soon.
Revisiting these two lives and so many other ones and being shown their connection to my “Erik life” gave me a sense of wholeness I’d never known before. It helped me see the common thread between all my lives—and that was my emotional pain. In most of my lives, I developed compassion for others through that pain. I knew that if they felt the pain that I did, then they needed as much compassion as they could get.
In some of my lives, the pain was a product of my being given more responsibility than I could handle, and that almost always resulted in disaster. In others, it was because of the death of someone important in my life, like one of my children. Those really made me sympathize with my parents and gave me a better understanding of their grieving process and their emotions and thoughts in general.
I think the biggest source of emotional pain came from those lives when I was disappointed in myself and in my relationships. That often made it hard for me to let people in or it made me push people away. Either way, learning what a relationship shouldn’t be helped me learn what it should be, and because each relationship is a mirror of the one you have with yourself, every one of them helped me understand why I was the way I was as Erik. Knowing that the people and my relationships with them made me “me” dissolved a lot of the mystery that made me feel incomplete. At the end of my first discussion with Cawli, I was left with a sense of relief because I knew that all that pain served a good purpose.
My therapy with Cawli caused me to have a lot of epiphanies. One of the biggest was that I’m an amazing person and I have a really big heart. I think that when you’re on Earth, living your human life, revelations like that are sometimes viewed as self-centered or egotistical. No, man, love yourself! I wish I had been able to tell myself, “Dude, you’re fucking awesome!” more when I was alive. Another big aha moment: Cawli told me that I was more in control of myself than I’d ever imagined when I was a human. My bipolar disease made me feel like I wasn’t in control when I really was, but now I know that even that was my choice. I wasn’t some pawn on a chessboard. I was in control the whole time. I wish I had known that before I fucking died. Still, putting things in perspective sort of healed a part of me, even if it happened after my death. I found out that I wasn’t powerless. I had the power in me all along, and I just had to find it.
In all our conversations, Cawli never used words like “hardship” or “struggle.” By showing that my soul had picked to live the life I did as Erik for a reason, she reminded me that there is no right or wrong. Everything is just a lesson—one that, even after death, I’m still learning.
There was one thing Cawli said that I had to figure out for myself, though. It seemed like I could only stand by helplessly as I watched my family on Earth cry and grieve, and I didn’t know how to comfort them, heal them, and tell them it was going to be okay. I would eventually figure out ways to help, but Cawli gave me the emotional support I needed to get through those feelings of frustration and confusion in the meantime.
At the end of my session with her, Cawli told me that most of my therapy was finished, but she wasn’t going to leave me stranded. She said I could call on her anytime I needed her, and that was a relief. I met with Cawli from time to time after that first therapy session, mostly to just go over stuff that we talked about the first time in more detail or whenever I was feeling like I could use some clarification or a reminder. I know Cawli and I will always be friends. Here, each time you connect with someone in spirit, you merge with them more and more. Relationships get a little bit deeper and broader as you become more intimate with their energy, so my connection with her gets stronger and stronger. It’s nice knowing that someone’s there for you when you need them, and Cawli’s one of those someones for me.
Cawli still helps me when I have trouble feeling something with my heart. Sometimes I need a little coaching. She shows me how to tap into a wealth of information, using my heart instead of my head, and that takes learning how not to think. Whenever I start to think with my head, she says, “Erik, focus on your heart. Look at what you’re trying to process as emotions, not thoughts. Every experience comes from an emotional place. Emotions create the thoughts, and thoughts create experiences.” I remember one time she said, “The cup that holds knowledge is the heart, and the mind is supposed to take sips from it. Everything starts from the heart. Everything starts with a feeling.” I think that that’s one of the most important things I’ve learned from Cawli. I also think that that’s probably one of the most important things people living on Earth should know and pay attention to. It’s definitely something I wish I would have done more of when I was alive. Listen to your heart because it knows what it’s talking about.
Even though I don’t have a physical heart anymore, I still listen to my heart as a spirit. That was a huge takeaway from my therapy with Cawli. With the information I get through that process, I can continue to grow, but the growth that happens here is not about learning something new. It’s about reconnecting to the information that was there all along but that maybe you couldn’t see or access when you were alive. My growth now is more about how I’m going to absorb the knowledge and experiences I already have. It’s about whether I’m open to a new perspective and whether my hands and heart are big enough to hold it.