Soul-Fight Club

The second time I met my soul, we got in a fight.

Partly because I went to Catholic school, I was afraid, I told the Life Between Lives facilitator before the journey to meet it started, that it was going to be mad at me. I worried that I was going to go through finding a facilitator who was trans-literate enough to work with a trans person, do the pre-session practice self-hypnoses (which didn’t turn out to be super different from meditation-app exercises), and show up to the Zoom where she led me into a state (again: like deep meditation) where I accessed my most recent time in the afterlife, and then when I got there, the whole place would be pissed that I was doing a subpar job.

In his book Journey of Souls, the clinical hypnotherapist Michael Newton publishes the transcripts of a couple dozen clients (and dozens more in his subsequent books, which I haven’t read) who he helped access this place. They all have similar trajectories. They meet their soul guides, and other members of their soul family, generally embodied as people they recognize, and there is reunion and recognition and soul-deep fuzzy healing as they put together the pieces of their life, their lives, their purpose.

I wanted that. A friend who is trans and has a habit of spontaneously appearing and saying the exact thing I need in times of needing suggested Newton’s book to me one day, and I read it. That friend and I have both done a lot of work with psychedelics, and between what we’ve experienced thusly and the consistencies in what Newton’s clients said, we both found LBL methodology credible. My friend had done a session years ago and said it was great. I didn’t have any doubt, going into mine, that I would get to be in conversation with my own soul, which the facilitator can talk to through you while you’re in this state as a simultaneous witness and mouthpiece for it. I’d given her a list of questions. A list of interview questions for my own soul. As all LBL reports would have it, our souls intentionally pick their assignments on this planet. Given some of the specifics of my life, and how awful I continued to feel in it much of the time, the majority of my questions were polite variations of Hey, man, what the actual hell?