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!
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Very good, Anna. We share much of the same rationale, even before you count the direct experiences.
I lost my Dad 5 years ago this month. A week later I allowed myself to fully grieve for him, and in that moment I could swear I felt his hand on my shoulder. Very powerful. Since then I think he has sent me several messages.
Have you ever communicated with an earthbound spirit? I would be very interested in hearing about that.
Looking forward to the next installments – and of course anything else you decide to post. I’m an Anna groupie…
I have a question –
I suffer from mental illness, and as a result I have an obsessive personality. I am almost always afraid that my dead relatives are reading my mind and disapproving of what they see there, causing even nastier thoughts I don’t believe in or condone to crop up to the point where I feel physically sick.
Of course, it’s ridiculous, but it seems to have focused on my poor great-grandfather in particular (who actually, if it was indeed him, once told us through an angel “not to suffer on my account”) and while I know it’s ridiculous, it’s still very, very scary. And learning that I ping him just by thinking of him makes it worse, because I really don’t mean to do this, it just happens and I battle with it every day.
Do you have any advice or reassurance on this subject?
Hi Zora, All energy is moved by desire and intention. Without true desire you can’t create change, energetically or even here in 3D, right?
So, your deceased relatives will only be pinged if there is some real interest, desire or intention to connect with them. If it happens compulsively, it won’t even reach them because there’s no real desire pushing it – it’s more like a record on repeat.
Deceased spirits really are not interested in reading our minds or judging our thoughts – energetically they’re never with us unless there’s a really good reason!
Hi, Michael! Interesting. My grandmother swears she felt a hand on her when she was grieving for my mum’s sister.
I do have a lot of experiences with earthbounds, especially when I was living in London. I’m not even third order! That is a whole different chapter.
Thank you, Anna. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted.
Here is a kind of life after death you can be sure of…
http://www.whatwasdone.com/Age.php?&Age=-1
Just came to read about this, and I ended up spending 20 minutes reading your other stuff too
hi i have a question
can you communicate with my father? its going on 11years since he has been deceased. i would like to know if hes around me? or is it my mums ex partner tony that has past on ( 1year ago). i have had signs such as two fantail birds being around and i became or was pregnant at that time and some one trying to tell me something via text mesgs?
and will my dad be waiting for us on the other side when it is our time?
My uncle died 3 weeks ago from a suicide/murduer no one really knows but i wanna know if he’s okay and that he knows im sorry for what i said before he died and that he was the only person who really understood me
Hi Sam – talk to him out loud, (like you would pray, if you’ve ever done that.) & tell him what you wrote here – he will hear you. I’m sorry for your loss. Anna
hi Anna im here to ask if you can tell me how to communicate with me dead grand father that died in January 2011.Its not for personal reasons i just want to ask him how it it and if hes okay and stuff.By the way you do an awesome job keep it up.He was smiling in the coffin at the funeral so that means he is okay right?
hello, i year ago my husband died he was young to me 56 i am so wanting to cmmunicate and i do not see signs of him visiting me. how oh how do i get intouch and notice him?
Dear Anna. almost 2 yrs ago my husband passes away. iam a very spiritual person and after he passed away me and my 17yr old son had a aray of sad things happen in our life. my husband passed on oct. 18th as we were really grieving and on oct. 4th our home burnt down needless to say we were renting from a family member my husbands motherd home and they let the home owners insurance laps we lost everything i only had my pjs i wore for 2 days then i got sick from the fire i had cancer of the lung which landed me in the hospital for 4 months. what i need to know is how can i communicate in a dream with him. i have tryed so many times just to get anything across through dreams i talk to my spirit guides and i pray i so wish i could get a respond. my life is still so unhappy i live with my daughter who is 28 her husband and 3 little girls with my son there is 7 of us in a two bedroom duplex i cant afford to move. iam so happy iam alive for my love ones yet iam so sad for me and my life every night i love to sleep because i can dream about a little apt we live in me and my son and iam decorating. dreaming is my escape i do everything in my dreams i really live happy in my dreams. can u help me find away to get across anyway at all to my husband mike. thank u anna. any respond would be great.
I recently had an encounter with my mother. She passed away on February 20, 2011. Her brother passed away in February of 2010. Right before I woke up, I guess I dreamed I was talking to my mother, just chit-chat. She said thank goodness, but hold on, there’s someone who wants to talk to you. That voice said, hey, hon, do you know who this is? I said, uncle and then woke up soaking wet. It was so real, their voices, everything. It was like I was talking to them on the phone, but I could see them. I’m afraid I’m going crazy. Let me know if you’ve every heard of such a thing before.
Thanks,
Vickie D.
my partener died suddenly,and being a maori man,his family believe that he is surpossed to pass into the light on the 7th day after death.but they believe that he wont leave me until he knows me and his kids are going to be fine,he was a very strong man physicaly and menatly,they say that he has to go and i have to let him go.not sure how to do that as he had amazing bond with me and his kids and he has come to me in the last couple of days and im not sure what to make of it,but we were having issues at the time of death and there are somany things that never got resolved
I lost my beautiful husband and best friend after an argument and he jumped from our truck, it was not going that fast but he struck his head. I feel I died as well. I feel very alone and have nobody close to talk to, my question is why do I not feel him around me?
Hi Anna,
I read your articles and comments of others. My elder brother passed away just before one and half month uncertainly. There were very unsaid things left between him and me. Can you please tell me how I can make contact with him?
Nilesh
Dear Anna, :0) Hope your doing well!! My father just passed January,10 2012. He left behind four live children, including me ( the baby of the family)My parents had 5 children however November, 1997 my 31 yr old brother passed away. :0( My mother is still living. I had a dream a few hours ago that I glanced over to my left and saw my father sitting a leaning over, I began rubbing his back and at that point he looked at me and said: I am sorry, and he started to cry, he continued bto talk to me but cant remember what else we spoke about. I spoke to him as well, I just cant recall what it was. Then it was as if i went into another dream and again my dad and I were looking at each other and this dream seemed a bit different, it seemed strange and I felt uneasy in the dream, my dad didnt seem like he did in the dream I had early, well my father began telling me ” I can come back through one of my grandaughters” I recall getting upset with him and telling him no I will not part with one of my daughters just so he can come back to life. I then woke up very upset at my father for what I thought he was asking me to allow one of my t daughters to die to bring him back. As Ib woke up I began to think maybe he didnt mean that, maybe he meant that years down the road when my daughters have kids he would reincarnate himself as one ofmy daughters, but i was still very unsure and frightened of that dream. I tried and tried to go back to sleep but couldnt. My 8 year old daughter woke up very upset telling me she just had a bad dream of someone shooting. Her with a gun in the chest. I am starting to wonder and get even more worried about the dream i had and about what my dad had asked me. However in my dads living life my children were his life he would never harm them, so in my dream why did i feel so uneasy as if it were not my dad even though it looked like him band why would he want me to allow one ofmy daughters to die to bring him back….im frightend please help me with any type of advice you may have for me pleaseee. Im really scared after my I yr old told me about the dream she just had as well. Thank you soooo much for your time. PJB.
Sorry misspelled a few things in my last post im sending from my cellphone. I meant that I began thinking that my father may of meant that he wanted to reincarnate himself later in life when one of my 5 daughters grew up and had kids maybe he was asking if he could reincarnate himself with one of his greatgranddaughters, cause in my second dream he said he could come back through one of his granddaughters. In the dream i guess i could of interpreted it the wrong way, im not sure. And another misspelling it was my 8 year old daughter that had the dream about being killed by being shot, she apparently the same time i was having my dreams. Sorry my autocorrect is stupid. Thank byou again for your time. I really need your advice about this. Bless you