The Meaning of Life

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There is a question that lives underneath all the other questions.

Beneath the career anxiety, the relationship patterns, the late night restlessness, beneath even the therapeutic work of naming wounds and building new neural pathways, there is something deeper asking to be acknowledged. Not a problem to be solved. A mystery to be met.

Why am I here?

I have been curious about this question my entire life. Not casually curious. The kind of curious that led me to meditation, to clinical training, to Bangladesh with the Peace Corps, to sitting across from thousands of people over twenty years and listening to what keeps them up at night. And what I've discovered, through both rigorous clinical practice and experiences that my clinical training had no framework for, is that there is a reason for living. There is meaning in your life. Not the manufactured, motivational-instagram kind. The kind that is woven into the fabric of existence itself.

This is the reason I named my practice Journey Mindfulness. Because we are all on one.

What I'm about to share with you is not something I arrived at through theory. It arrived through experience: mine, my clients', and eventually through the documented work of researchers and practitioners whose findings mirrored what I had already encountered firsthand. I'm not asking you to believe any of it. I'm asking you to stay curious as you read, notice what resonates, and give yourself permission to sit with whatever comes up.

The Moment My Framework Cracked

For years, I operated within the boundaries of evidence-based clinical work. I was trained to be skeptical, to think critically, and I valued that orientation. I still do. But something happened in my practice that I could not file neatly into any clinical category.

One of my clients went to see a psychic medium, not on my recommendation, not something I would have ever thought to suggest. In that session, the medium discussed me and our counseling relationship in detail. Specific, accurate, private details that this person could not have researched, guessed, or inferred. My client returned and told me that their spirit guides had communicated that they should take our counseling work more seriously, that it was genuinely helping them.

I sat with that for a while.

This client was honest, grounded, and not someone prone to magical thinking. I ran every rational explanation I could construct and came up empty. So I did what any clinician worth their salt would do when confronted with data that doesn't fit the model. I went to investigate. I booked a session with the medium myself, fully prepared to walk away calling it nonsense.

That is not what happened.

The medium knew details about my life, my relationships, my children, my work, the interior architecture of my personal history, that no amount of research could produce. When I asked questions about my past, the answers were specific and insightful in ways that startled me. I learned that I had what are called spirit guides, that we all do, that they are always present and often communicating through our thoughts, intuitions, and the synchronicities we tend to dismiss as coincidence. I learned that we have free will operating within a larger design, and that certain experiences we encounter are ones our soul agreed to before arriving here.

My worldview didn't shatter. It expanded.

Following the Thread

That session created an opening I couldn't ignore. Not because someone told me what to believe, but because my direct experience had outgrown my existing framework. I was compelled, and I use that word deliberately, to explore hypnosis. Not as an intellectual exercise, but because I understood it could become another tool for helping people heal, which is one of the core reasons I'm here.

I found a mentor and learned inner child regression therapy. Through that work, I was introduced to past life regression, and eventually I did my own. What I discovered through that process was that I have lived before. Not once. Many times.

If that idea is new to you, or if it triggers resistance, I understand. I simply ask that you hold it lightly and keep reading.

What I Experienced on the Other Side

Of everything I've encountered on this path, one experience stands apart. It is the moment that reorganized my understanding of life, death, and what we are.

During a past life regression, I moved through the death of a previous life and entered the space beyond it. What some would call the spirit realm. Heaven is an easier word to reach for, though what I experienced was more vast and more intimate than that word typically conveys.

I observed the funeral of that life. It was difficult. I watched the people I had loved grieving for me, though it had been a good life and I had lived to old age by that era's standards. Then I was guided forward, into what came next.

What came next was a homecoming.

I was welcomed by everyone. Family and friends, those who had already passed and those who were still living in that timeline, all present, all there to receive me. I felt no pain. No fear. Only love, warmth, and a joy so complete it's difficult to translate into language. The sense was unmistakable: you are home. You have always been home. You simply forgot for a while.

The time between lives was blissful. And it occurred to me, both during and after, that it would need to be, because the experience of being human on Earth can be extraordinarily challenging.

Finding Confirmation in Newton's Research

Some time after that experience, I encountered the work of Dr. Michael Newton, a counseling psychologist and master hypnotherapist who spent decades documenting what happens between lives. His books, Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls, are based on thousands of hypnotherapy sessions in which patients accessed the same realm I had experienced, independently, across different backgrounds and belief systems, with striking consistency in the details.

What excited me most was not the evidence for reincarnation, though that was significant. It was the description of the meticulous planning that occurs in the spirit realm: the life reviews with our teachers and guides, the careful selection of lessons, relationships, and circumstances for each incarnation. The picture Newton's research paints is one of extraordinary intentionality. Nothing is random. Everything serves the growth of the soul.

In one of Newton's sessions, the higher self of a patient offered these words about what it means to come here and fulfill our purpose. I share them because they say something I have not been able to improve upon:

"Coming to Earth is about traveling away from our home to a foreign land. Some things seem familiar, but most are strange until we get used to them, especially conditions which are unforgiving. Our real home is a place of absolute peace, total acceptance, and complete love. As souls separated from our home, we can no longer assume these beautiful features will be present around us. On Earth we must learn to cope with intolerance, anger, and sadness, while searching for joy and love. We must not lose our integrity along the way, sacrificing goodness for survival and acquiring attitudes either superior or inferior to those around us. We know that living in an imperfect world will help us to appreciate the true meaning of perfection. We ask for courage and humility before our journey into another life. As we grow in awareness so will the quality of our existence. This is how we are tested. Passing this test is our destiny."

-- Dr. Michael Newton, Destiny of Souls

Read those words slowly. Let them settle. Notice whether something in you responds, not in your thinking mind, but somewhere deeper.

A Different Doorway to the Same Room

My path to these understandings came through clinical curiosity and direct experience. Suzanne Giesemann's came through grief and military discipline, a completely different doorway into the same room.

Giesemann is a retired Navy Commander and former aide-de-camp for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Before the death of her pregnant daughter, the spiritual world was not simply unexplored territory for her. It was out of bounds. Irrelevant. Certainly not something that belonged in the disciplined, empirical world she inhabited.

Grief changed that calculus entirely.

With the determination of a military officer trained to solve problems, she set out to answer a single question: What happened to my daughter? That search led her to an evidential medium, where her daughter connected, along with the soul of her unborn grandson. Both were alive and well on the other side.

Giesemann has since become one of the most studied and respected mediums in the world, in part because she has opened her work to scientific research. In her book Messages of Hope, she channels her spirit guides, known as Sanaya, who offer this:

"All of the universe exists for your enjoyment. You are here to play and create, for who are you but a focus of the consciousness of the great creator. It is through your experiences that God experiences God's creations. How else would God be able to play? Go forth each day with an attitude of playfulness and joy, knowing that all is in perfect order always. Let this be a mantra that falls from your lips at every moment as you see things you question. Say this important phrase again: all is in perfect order always. As this phrase becomes part of your creative consciousness, sit back and watch the perfection unfold. Laugh with joy as you see what happens as you go through your day in harmony with the flow of the universe. A small coincidence is no longer luck, but a living example that you are in the flow. Part of creation itself, helping to create the perfection that is life."

-- Sanaya, channeled through Suzanne Giesemann, Messages of Hope

(If the concept of God does not fit for you, substitute whatever term resonates: the universe, source, intelligent infinity, consciousness itself.)

Two entirely different people. One a clinician, one a military commander. Two different entry points, curiosity and grief, arriving at the same fundamental truth: we are here on purpose, we are never alone, and the love that awaits us on the other side is the love that is holding us right now.

What This Means for the Life You're Living

To be alive is to experience the full spectrum: bliss, joy, love, and the searing polarity of fear, doubt, grief, shame, and suffering that makes the light comprehensible. This is not a philosophy I arrived at from a comfortable distance. I experience and must work through many of the same things my clients bring into our sessions. The path of conscious growth is not a path away from difficulty. It is a path through it, with greater awareness and deeper roots.

What I have come to understand, through my own regressions, my clinical work, and the converging evidence from researchers like Newton and practitioners like Giesemann, is that every experience serves the expansion of consciousness and the growth of the soul. The painful ones may serve it most of all.

This does not mean suffering is to be romanticized or endured in silence. It means there is a larger architecture to your life than what is visible from inside the difficulty. It means you are not broken. You are not behind. You are not doing it wrong.

You are safe. You are held. You are loved and supported by something far more vast than you may currently perceive. And everything, all of it, is happening for you.

Take what resonates. Leave the rest. We are all on our own path, and no path is better or worse than any other.

You are here for a reason. And the fact that you are reading this is not a coincidence.