Is There Life After Death?

This is part one of a three part series that explores life after death, posted over the next five days.

Part two: What happens after death and between physical lifetimes?

Part three: How the dead communicate with us.

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Clients and readers sometimes ask me ‘Do you believe in life after death?’

Life after death is one of those things I am certain exists. I don’t offer my services as a medium but I have had plenty of experiences communicating with the other side that I want to share in these blog posts.

An intuitive knowing that there is life after death

I personally have always believed in life after death. It just made sense to me, on an intuitive level, that a spirit that exists in a body would still exist long after the body has disappeared.

I remember that this belief really hit home for me when I was in my early twenties and I saw our dead cat Hunter who had just been killed by a car. Her body was empty – just a shell. It was then that I consciously realized that there was something in the cat – you could call it the cat’s “life”, it’s “essence” or “consciousness”, that had been there and which was no longer there. The people around me were talking as if Hunter no longer existed, as if she had just dissipated into nothingness. But I knew that if the cat was no longer here, she had to be somewhere else.

Then something that I had been taught in physics popped into my mind – that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transferred. To me this seemed like a good metaphor for the dying process. It seemed wrong to me on an intuitive level (the level I have operated on for my whole life) that the life that animates an animal or human just dissolves into nothing.

I later learned (or remembered) that we are all pieces and individual projections of Source or God energy. You can’t destroy Source/God, and you can’t destroy our souls. I do believe our souls can and do return to Source or the Creator and lose their individual essence, but I don’t believe they can be destroyed or can just disappear after death.

This belief that life after death was a fact actually became something I could verify when I began practising as a psychic. That was when I began to see and hear evidence of the afterlife.

Evidence of the afterlife: Talking with the Dead

I wrote about the very first experience I had with a client’s deceased relative in this article and my boss Pete wrote about it in a testimonial for me. That experience stopped me doubting my psychic abilities once and for all because the deceased spirit I communicated with told me things that were true, specific and which I could not have known otherwise.

Since then, I haven’t connected with clients’ deceased loved ones very frequently (only a handful out of 350 or so readings) but when I have, it’s been an amazing experience. Last week I had the pleasure of contacting a client’s deceased relative at the end of a past life and purpose reading. At the end of this reading, this client asked me to tune into her spirit guide team. Well, someone else showed up as well when I tuned into her guides and it was a lovely surprise.

At first, it was difficult for this spirit to communicate with me. Unlike when I talk with spirit guides, who present to me in my mind’s eye clearly, easily and quickly, I could tell it took energy and effort for this spirit to convey who she was. At first, she looked like a green and white ball of energy that was moving and whizzing really fast. I felt she was trying to convert this energy into an image I could understand and convey to my sitter. She told me her name and then this energy changed in a flash to a human appearance which I described to my sitter and then changed back into the whizzing ball of energy. The spirit, because of her name and appearance was identified as a dearly departed relative. The messages the spirit conveyed showed that this deceased relative was still watching over my sitter and being her ‘cheerleader’ in the non-physical.

Feeling the Love the Dead still have for us

One of the nicest things about connecting with some deceased relatives is feeling the love they still have for those they’ve left behind. As soon as I connected with this deceased spirit, I was hit by this overwhelming love and such beautiful energy. I think this was the love the deceased relative had for my sitter. It felt so lovely to be bombarded with this delicious love energy – quite different from speaking with a spirit guide.

Reasons for the dead to come back to us

Why is communicating with the dead so hit and miss? Why can mediums sometimes communicate with the dead and not other times? I have noticed that usually the dead have to have a strong motivation to come back to us AND actually make their presence felt, probably because it takes a great deal of energy and effort to communciate with us.

# 1: To give us peace, reassurance and comfort

Spirits who come back to remind the living of their presence do so often because they see the healing it brings. They remind us that there is not any imposed separation from those you love. The dead can be with us in spirit in a flash, when we think of them. Whether we perceive them is another matter. The Maoris – the native people of New Zealand – say that the spirits of the dead are on the shoulders of the living and we carry them with us wherever we go.

# 2: Because their path is still entwined with yours

Sometimes deceased relatives stay very attached to their living loved ones. This can be for a variety of reasons – sometimes because they want to see their loved ones succeed – like the deceased relative I encountered recently. (She was standing behind my client’s spirit guides and had a ‘cheerleader’ and supporter role.)

In another case, a spirit can stay attached because they feel a responsibility to watch over the actions of the living and warn them of certain things. This has happened before in one my sessions. A deceased spirit warned against doing something the client was considering, that would have had dire consequences. This spirit had been dead for many, many years and you would have thought he would have cut ties with the living, but he was obviously still quite attached to whether or not this person was doing the right thing, and he had vested interests also in the situation.

# 3: To say what went unsaid

If there’s something important that’s left unsaid, spirits can stay around to attempt to resolve it instead of moving on. The dead returning to communicate with us is also a reminder to check if there is anything left unsaid in your life. I have a stiff upper lip that I either inherited or picked up from my background, so the people around me rarely know just how much I respect, admire and love them because I am not good at getting it out. My encounters with the dead have taught me how important it is to say the words that can heal, reconcile or just communicate how much you care, because once you’re gone it’s harder to do. So, I know it’s a massive cliche, but make sure YOU communicate to those you love how much you love and appreciate them.

# 4: To resolve something that went undone

The spirits that are most motivated to hang around are perhaps those who left something unresolved or undone. In particular, I’m thinking of those who experienced some sort of injustice in their lifetime, like a murder which is still unresolved.

The dead can also remind us not to leave things undone for an extended time period. The biggest thing you can leave undone is pursuing your own dreams. Are you happy with how you spend your days now? Or do you live for tomorrow, planning, with your mind continually in the future, putting off life? The lesson that the dead bring to us is to live in the present moment and do what we want now, because as cliched as it sounds, there may not be as many tomorrows as we think.

# 5: When you’re reviving their memory

Sending the dead a lot of energy also brings them to you, in spirit. For example, my mother as a hobby digs up the past and reconstructs our family tree. She has uncovered interesting and scandalous stories of our family. In dreams, I have seen the bodies of long-deceased relatives turn in their graves and communicate to me that they are watching what she is doing with the family tree. So, sending our ancestors energy – studying their past and our ancestral roots can also call them to us.

The next post in this series, posted tomorrow, looks at what happens after death and what we can do in between physical lifetimes (I learned a lot about this from reading the Akashic Record!)

Do you have any thoughts you want to share on the subject of life after death? Please leave a comment!