PART THREE — WHAT I CAME TO BELIEVE

At times throughout this journey, I found myself asking a question I could not shake. After thousands of years of religious teachings, prophets, scriptures, wars fought in God’s name, and generations raised inside churches and temples… why does the world still remain so divided, so fearful, so deeply at war with itself?

I did not grow up with an answer to that question. I grew up largely sheltered from religion, politics, and mainstream influence. A quiet observer who rarely looked up long enough to question the bigger picture. After my awakening, that changed. I began seeing everything differently. And the more I saw, the harder it became to stop asking.

What I came to believe did not arrive from a book, a doctrine, or another person’s certainty. It arrived through experience. Through silence. Through suffering, surrender, and the kind of inner stillness that strips away everything you thought you knew. This part of the book is my attempt to put that understanding into words, knowing full well that some of it will resonate with people, and some of it will not. I am not asking for agreement. I am only asking for openness.

Between the wormhole experience and what I later came to call being “zapped back down to Earth,” I did not realize anything unusual was happening. At the time, it simply felt like I was living my life. Only years later, as memories surfaced and experiences began connecting together, did I begin to understand that something profound had been quietly taking place.

There were beautiful moments during that time. One day in the desert, a swarm of insects suddenly came toward me, sending me retreating back into the house. Later, I heard a quiet inner message telling me not to be afraid. So I walked outside again, this time around the opposite side of the house. The swarm found me anyway. To my surprise, they were baby dragonflies. They swirled above me, shedding their delicate wings upon me like a gift. It felt magical, as though nature itself was trying to communicate something I could not yet fully understand.

Not all of the moments were beautiful. I was barely eating, and the stomach pain was intense. At times, I felt as though I were dying in a hundred different ways. There were moments where it felt difficult to breathe, as though I were drowning despite not being in water. I lived in near-complete isolation. Aside from my children, whom I only had part of the week, and occasional interactions with a grocery clerk, I spoke to very few people.

The birds became my friends. I watched them daily. I listened to them. Somehow, they brought comfort during a time when I felt disconnected from nearly everything else.

Then something shifted.

I reached a state of peace unlike anything I had ever known. I had forgiven everyone. I had forgiven my past. I had even forgiven the church. For a time, all I felt was love… for people, for nature, for life itself. Unconditional love for everyone and everything. I felt completely at peace and one with God.

Then, suddenly and without warning, I felt myself descend back into my body.

What surprised me most was that I had not realized I had been taken to the clouds until I returned. Only then did I become aware that something extraordinary had happened. It was as though I had briefly experienced the destination before fully understanding the journey required to reach it.

In that moment, I was shown both the chaos of the world and the possibility of something far better. I saw humanity struggling. I saw systems that were no longer serving people. I saw suffering, division, and disconnection… and yet beneath all of it, I sensed the possibility of something more. I realized I was not yet fully at that place of complete peace and that there was still inner work ahead of me. I remembered asking God to show me myself healed. What I received was a glimpse of what was possible. Not only for me, but perhaps for humanity as well.

Looking back now, I can see that I was shown some of the road ahead. Not every detail. Not every lesson or every challenge. But the light at the end of the tunnel.

Many of the experiences and realizations that unfolded during the seven years that followed seemed to mirror things I had sensed or felt during those eight months. At times, life has felt like one long moment of déjà vu.

Since the fall of 2018, I have spent every day working toward the level of healing, peace, and wholeness I touched during that time. Only later did I understand that I had been given a glimpse of the destination… not a map of the journey. And so the journey became the teacher.

What followed those eight months was years of isolation, questioning, loss, and slowly rebuilding from the inside out. My relationships changed. Money became scarce. There were times when simply putting food on the table felt difficult. Those experiences opened my eyes to a reality I had never fully seen before. Many people are carrying this same weight, quietly and alone.

They also deepened something within me. The longer I lived close to the edge of what survival actually feels like, the more I understood what truly matters and what does not. The soul does not care about status. It does not measure a life in possessions or appearances. What I found in those stripped-down years was a clarity I could not have reached any other way.

I began to understand the soul differently. Not as a religious idea, but as something lived and felt. I came to believe it is a form of living energy, a light that enters the body and remains connected to something far greater than any one lifetime. As humans grow, many of us become disconnected from that light through fear, trauma, conditioning, and the relentless pressure to perform, consume, and survive. We forget who we are. And then, often through pain or loss or some quiet moment of breaking open, we begin to remember.

That remembering is what I would call awakening. And the strange thing about it is that most people do not realize they have been asleep until something wakes them up.

I also came to understand energy in a way that permanently changed how I moved through the world. Everything carries frequency… thoughts, emotions, words, environments, and the people we surround ourselves with. I began noticing how certain places felt heavy and others felt light. How certain conversations left me depleted and others left me feeling more alive. Energy is not a mystical concept. It is something the body registers constantly. Learning to pay attention to it was one of the most grounding and clarifying shifts of my entire journey.

The more I explored consciousness, the more I came to believe that love is not simply an emotion. It may be the highest frequency a human being can actually embody. Every truly profound spiritual experience I encountered, whether my own or those shared by others who had brushed the edge of death and returned, was rooted in that same thing. Not doctrine. Not ritual. Love. Compassion. Forgiveness. Unity. The message kept coming back the same way regardless of the tradition, the background, or the language it arrived in.

I also came to see Heaven differently. Not as a destination reached after death, but as a state of being. A state of peace, balance, and alignment with the Divine that is available here, in this life, when we do the inner work to reach it. That understanding made certain verses feel far more personal than they ever had before. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” “Be still, and know that I am God.” To me, those words stopped being religious instructions and became something I had actually felt. The inner room Jesus described was not a place. It was a state of consciousness. And I had briefly lived inside it.

One of the clearest things I came to believe is that the Divine exists both within us and beyond us at the same time. Yes, we carry creative power. We have free will, consciousness, and the ability to shape our lives. But there is also something greater… a current beneath everything, a presence that I can only describe as love itself. I came to understand it not through theology but through direct experience. And once you have felt it, no argument against its existence fully satisfies.

I began seeing Earth differently as well. Not as a punishment or a waiting room, but as a kind of spiritual school. A place where souls arrive with different lessons, different challenges, different opportunities to grow. Some paths are incredibly painful. Some people endure suffering that I cannot pretend to fully explain. But I came to believe that even the hardest experiences may carry a deeper purpose in the growth of the soul, even when we cannot see it from where we are standing.

That perspective did not make suffering easier. It changed the way I held it.

Healing, I came to understand, is not a single event. It is a long unraveling… of childhood wounds, of trauma carried in the body, of grief and shame and generational patterns that most of us never even realized we were holding. The hardest part is that before awakening, many people have no idea how much they are carrying. The weight feels normal because it has always been there.

During the years I explored different religions and traditions, sitting with Buddhists, listening to Indigenous elders, watching debates between atheists and Christians, encountering Mormons and Catholics and those deconstructing everything they had ever been taught, I found one thing to be consistently true. The labels were different, the rituals were different, the histories were different. But the longing beneath all of it was the same. Every tradition, in its own way, was asking the same questions. Why are we here? What happens when we die? How are we supposed to live? What connects us?

I also found that every tradition carried both wisdom and shadow. Some teachings helped people become more loving, more grounded, more connected to the Divine. Others, shaped by centuries of human fear, politics, and control, seemed to create separation where there could have been unity. I stopped seeing this as a reason to reject spirituality altogether and started seeing it as a reason to look more carefully. Not at the institution. At the fruit it produces.

I came to feel that many of Jesus’ teachings pointed inward rather than upward. Toward inner transformation, direct communion with the Divine, and the kind of radical love and forgiveness that challenges everything ego and fear would prefer to hold onto. The verse that stayed with me most was not one of thunder or judgment. It was quiet. Profound. “Your Father knows what you need before you ask.” To me, that says everything. You do not need perfect words. You do not need elaborate ritual. You simply need connection. The door was never locked from the outside.

One of the things I came to grieve as I explored history was how often the feminine had been diminished, silenced, or erased from spiritual traditions. Again and again, across religions, cultures, and centuries, the feminine voice grew quieter. Medicine women became witches. Goddesses disappeared. Ancient texts were excluded. What once appeared in many traditions as a balance between masculine and feminine principles became centered almost entirely on the masculine alone. I came to believe this imbalance is one of the deepest wounds humanity is still carrying. Real healing requires honoring both. Not one above the other. Both, in harmony.

The more I looked at the systems shaping modern life, financial structures, food systems, educational models, the relentless pace of survival most people are locked inside, the more I saw how far they had drifted from anything resembling human flourishing. Most people are so busy surviving that they never have time to ask why. And the divisions we are taught to focus on, religious, political, racial, cultural, often serve to keep us looking at one another instead of at the systems themselves.

I want to be clear. My intention in saying any of this is not to attack anyone’s faith. It is to encourage people to ask deeper questions. To think for themselves. To look within before looking for someone else to hand them the answers. I am not here simply to make people comfortable. I am here, as I once said, as your Sister. And sometimes love requires us to examine what we have inherited… not to destroy it, but to decide what to carry forward.

Perhaps that is what Jesus was doing when He overturned the tables. Not attacking truth. Challenging what stood in the way of it.

As I look back across everything… the wormhole, the dragonflies, the years of isolation, the birds, the forgiveness, the long walk through silence… I can see a thread running through all of it. My healing was never only mine. The deeper I went, the more I understood that it was connected to something much larger. To the healing of the people around me. To the healing of patterns carried for generations. To a question humanity has been circling for a very long time.

I believe we are living through a collective awakening. Not a religious event. Not a political revolution. Something quieter and more fundamental than either. More people are questioning what they have been handed. More people are choosing to heal rather than simply cope. More people are recognizing, across every difference, that they are searching for the same things… meaning, connection, truth, and a world that actually makes sense.

Awakening no longer feels isolated. It feels global. And that gives me more hope than I can fully express.

Real change, I believe, begins internally. When people truly do the work of healing themselves, forgiving themselves, learning to love themselves, regulating their nervous systems, finding their way back to peace, it begins reflecting outward in ways that no external system could manufacture. Awakened people often recognize this light in one another without needing words. It is something felt before it is understood.

I believe humanity is moving toward a great remembering. A time when more people awaken to love, to unity, to their own deep connection to the Divine and to one another. I believe future ways of living will eventually center more around human well-being, community, sustainability, and care for the Earth. More rest. More presence. More connection. Less survival. Less division. Less fear.

We depend on clean water, clean air, healthy food, and a living planet. We were never meant to be this disconnected from nature, from one another, or from ourselves. The Earth is alive. Conscious. And humanity is part of it… not above it.

Since the day I returned to my body in the fall of 2018, I have been searching for ways to help others remember. Not by convincing anyone of my experiences, but by sharing them honestly and trusting that what is meant to reach someone will. I believe I chose to come back. To awaken. To heal. To unite. To help create the kind of change people have been singing about for as long as I can remember.

Despite everything… the isolation, the loss, the years of surviving on very little, the moments of feeling completely unseen… I remain deeply grateful.

Grateful for the awakening that broke me open. Grateful for the healing that required me to fall apart. Grateful for the wisdom that only arrived through experience. Not through books or certainty or someone else telling me what to believe. Grateful for the people who stayed, for the lessons that came through those who did not, and for every moment that pushed me further inward until I had no choice but to find what was there.

Grateful, above all, for love. Because in the end… after all the searching, the questioning, the unraveling and rebuilding… love is still the only thing that consistently remains. It is the ground beneath the ground. The truth beneath the story. The thing that every tradition, in its own imperfect language, has been trying to point toward all along.

This book is a reflection of the path I have walked and the understanding I gathered along the way. I do not claim to have arrived. I am still learning, still questioning, still growing… and I hope I always will be.

But this much I know:

You are not just a body. You are a soul. You are part of something far greater than what we have been taught. And the world you are hoping for… a world rooted in love, in balance, in healing, in truth… is not out of reach.

It begins within.