One of my teachers says that each life is like a thread weaving its contribution to the tapestry of creation. In each incarnation, we are like a multi-colored thread that comes through the backing with birth, we weave our contribution to the greater picture, and disappear back through the backing upon death.

I’ve been reflecting on some of the major threads weaving through my life. As I’ve said elsewhere, if you only know me from my early work, you might think this guy has taken some strange turns. To those with insider knowledge, these threads were weaving through all along.

Those of us “of an age,” that is to say, old, are naturally taken up in trying to see the picture we’ve been weaving in the Great Tapestry. To the degree we can convince ourselves that we actually can see it. While my current interests are mostly occupied by the way our threads reappear to weave another life after life anew, I’m also in a place to look at the current tapestry panel I’m part of.

...we are like a multi-colored thread that comes through the backing with birth…

Some themes stand out: the healing process itself, healing the divides within, and revealing hidden patterns of wholeness.

The divide of embodiment-

I confess that my passion for understanding embodiment was driven more by my personal need for healing than by my intellectual curiosity. I was quite disconnected from my body, from myself, having no idea of. I only understood as I worked them out and then wrote about them. My first book, Body Process, was the result.

It’s said that writing is thinking out loud. Some of us overthink things. Out loud.

The divide of recollection-

In a way, Healing Tasks was part two of the same process: understanding and healing deeper into my personal divide while explicating the trauma-related divides of my clients. Healing Tasks also reflected my reach toward a sense of implicit order in the healing process of trauma, in particular, and healing in general. It also pushed me to see healing as growth rather than as the repair of damage. 

All this also helped me understand that both healing and memory itself are field phenomena. When the field conditions are right, things that were inaccessible become available, whether we want them to or not.

My personal childhood trauma had been hidden from view until the field conditions of my life could support its emergence and, eventually and fortunately, its healing. Recovering emotions and memories that I’d coped with by severing them from “me” was more than rejoining myself to them. 

Healing: wholeness, big and bigger-

It turns out that healing wasn’t what I thought it was. It was much, much more. We don’t restore ourselves to some imagined previous wholeness so much as become a new whole that is different from and greater than what we were before.

Like my hidden childhood trauma, the hidden aspects of my transpersonal being awaited their own reveal. But remember what I said about memory being a field phenomenon? The deep calling within me for spiritual remembrance required an even greater field and a great deal of subtle energy to expand my mind and meet what awaited me.

It turned out that I wasn’t who I thought I was. It turned out, really, that nothing was as I thought it was. 

For sure, it was much, much more than that so-called rational thought could encompass.

Enter the greater self-

Nonetheless, I’m a writer. And writers try to write what thinking cannot actually encompass. We are compelled to make words point to things that, like thoughts, they can’t really grasp.

I didn’t set out to write about past lives… not exactly.

I was trying to tell a story that unfolded under unusual circumstances, a story that simply would not leave me alone. Some experiences don’t sit comfortably inside neat explanations of time, memory, or identity—and I debated for a long time whether to tell them at all.

That story eventually became my two recent books, each unfolding a journey of time, memory, and healing from a slightly different angle.

About Time begins the journey—how an otherwise grounded therapist took a path that opened doors into something quite unexpected.

Past the Past follows what happened when those doors didn’t close again, and goes deeper into what it is like to pursue versions of yourself that go well beyond the identity you have in your current life. Beyond a myriad lifetimes.

Some questions are not supposed to be answered-

And, Past the Past also raised a new question: what do our many lives tell us about the “curious project of our soul?” I see this as one of those essential, but unanswerable questions, like a Zen Koan. 

Like a Koan, if I tried to answer it from my current ‘normal’ level of consciousness, it would, of course, be wrong. 

…even catching a glimpse beyond the soap-bubble limits illuminates our soul’s wonder.

Unanswerable questions are supposed to direct our minds beyond themselves. They pop the bubble of our current constraints of mind: those seemingly fixed and sure things we think we “know” but are less substantial than the film of a soap bubble. From the inside, the bubble of our current mind creates comforting limits, but those limits prevent us from seeing beyond them.

And even catching a glimpse beyond the soap-bubble limits illuminates our soul’s wonder. 

To paraphrase my dear mentor, Édouard, when you see it, it is so stupefyingly beautiful that you would believe such beauty, even of yourself.