PREFACE
There was a time when a well known Brisbane Brisbane Spiritualist Church
On the first Saturday in July, I woke thinking I might actually want to go back! The more pragmatic part of myself was having none of that so I got up to consult my Tarot cards. I was still shuffling when one flew out of the deck and landed upright on the table in front of me. Death – the most misunderstood card in the Tarot.
Some people live in dread of this card popping up in their readings for they believe it foreshadows physical death. This is not the case, but it does warn of change and transformation, which for some people is much the same thing. The trouble was, accurately interpreting the cards was never an easy task for me back then. There were too many variables and too many levels of interpretation. For instance, in addition to change and transformation, the Death card can also represent Scorpio people. Steve was a Scorpio. Throughout the month I had copped an earful about people (like me) who put people (like Jason) put on a pedestal. So on top of change, transformation and Scorpios, the Death card also provides a negative answer to a Yes or No question such as the one I was asking. Still smarting from what had happened in June, or rather didn’t happen, I was only too happy to accept the card’s dramatic appearance as a definitive ‘NO!’ Several hours later, I was to learn a very valuable lesson: personal bias and supposition have no place in the Tarot.
At 9.35am, on the first Saturday in July, Steve surprised me by asking if I wanted to go to Jason’s and see if anything was happening. We were on our way home from doing the weekend shopping and as far as I was concerned, the day was half done. Ordinarily, he should have been the last person to suggest something so radical, but ordinariness was not a feature of that day. In the next few seconds I was thinking how I might have been a tad presumptuous. Drat those Scorpios! In bowing to the wisdom of the Universe, I arrived at Jason’s shop just before 10.30am, having stopped to collect Kristen and Tianni. By the time we got to Nundah the queue was so long it had snaked its way down the street and up the other side. As the then end of the queue was directly opposite the shop it was patently obvious nothing was happening. At the very instant I turned to go the door opened and Jason himself stepped out. He was holding a chair. I don’t know who he was going to give it to. There must have been one hundred and fifty people there! As he put the chair down he promised everyone they would get a reading.
Two hours later, I was sitting across a table from him and the conversation went something like this: “When are you going to start doing this work?”.... “I’m not ready.”… “You’ve been ready for over a year. You can’t keep hiding behind your fears.”…… “I am not.”…“Yes, you are. This is what you have come here to do. You owe it to yourself.” I had heard it all before. But then he said something I had not heard before and it shocked me out of my complacency. With a wave of his hand to indicate the many people still waiting, he said: “You can help me with all this?”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Skill, confidence and experience may be important attributes in a reader but clearly, dependability was more so. I couldn’t say I hadn’t been warned, although I was thinking the wrong card had jumped out. It should have been The Tower! As it turned out, I wasn’t needed until the first Saturday in October, the one day of the year circumstances conspired to ensure I could not be contacted. I was never given another chance.
I would be less than honest if I said I didn’t have mixed feelings about that. Nine months later, though, I had reason to be grateful. In July 2000, I gave my first readings to people I didn’t know. My good friend, Leigh, convinced Jason was right, arranged for me to read for a couple she knew. The husband seemed hell-bent on undermining me at every opportunity; the wife clearly had a ‘thing’ about readings. She loved having them, but was fearful of what she might hear. He had plenty to say, most of it not very helpful; she refused to confirm or deny anything. It was exceedingly frustrating, and on every count, the proverbial ‘baptism of fire’.
When I thought my ordeal was over, the woman handed the cards back to me, insisting they remain unshuffled for another reading, and then another. I was left wondering what awful thing I had done to her in a past life. Still, throughout it all, I had the strangest feeling she had been sent to test me. Before she left I asked her to rate me on a scale of one to ten. She unequivocally refused. As Leigh, who was as shocked as I at her friend’s behaviour, saw the couple off I paced her kitchen battling my old demons of fear and self-doubt. When she returned I knew my life had taken a sharp turn off the highway.
Being able to hone my skills in the comfort of Leigh’s home, with her family, friends and workmates as ‘clients’, was the best thing that could have happened to me. Except for the lady from that first day who, incidentally, kept coming back for more, there was no pressure, no expectations, and most importantly, no queues. By the end of the year, the people attending Leigh’s ‘Tarot Teas’ were more demanding and knowledgeable; more likely to seek out a professional clairvoyant than attend a casual day of work experience for the apprentice. However, by then I was seasoned enough to handle it. Unfortunately, the success of these days brought Leigh and me to our only contentious issue – this book. When she first suggested I write it, I told her it would have to wait until I got a computer, then a most unlikely state of affairs.
Twenty years earlier I entered a ‘book-writing’ competition conducted by a national newspaper. With no spare room or writing desk at my disposal the kitchen table had to suffice. This meant my ever-growing pile of pages, mostly consisting of crossed out paragraphs and illegible margin notes, had to be gathered up every time we sat down for a meal. I toiled away on that project for months despite knowing I had no chance of winning. For my trouble I received a very nice letter urging me not to give up. I did. My children were getting older and their lives got in the way. By the time they reached adulthood I had discovered computers.
In February 2002, the first pages of this book were written on a library computer. It wasn’t planned. It just happened. I had been at the library to update my husband’s résumé. As the person booked in after me didn’t come I kept typing. By the end of the month, I was making two-hourly bookings, the maximum I could have, three times a week. This was in addition to my thrice-weekly email bookings. In July 2003, a friend gave me an old printer that didn’t work saying it represented the computer I would have. What does one do with a printer that doesn’t work? One looks into repair costs, of course, even when one has no computer to hook it up to. That was the effect Gaele then had on me. In less than a month I did indeed have my own computer.
My original intention had been to document the remarkable events that had touched my life since embarking upon my spiritual odyssey in 1996. However, once I was seated at my own computer, with no library clock to restrain me, it became something very different. The more I wrote, the more I remembered, and the more I remembered, the more entangled in the web of the past I became. Eventually, I came to an inescapable conclusion. My life was not the assortment of isolated events I had assumed it to be. It was a finely-tuned and precisely executed project. Leigh was proof of that.
Thirty years after bidding farewell to each other on the last day of school our paths crossed again. Our current friendship, though, did not develop until 1998, three years later. In all those years I was never able to forget her. When my children turned ten I allowed each a one-off party with their classmates, something children of the 1980s took for granted. This was because I could still see my mother walking me to Leigh’s door on the day of her tenth birthday party. When I closed my eyes I could even see the dress I wore and where the presents were put. Had I been asked to explain why I felt compelled to make my children wait until they were ten before giving them a party I would not have been able to answer. Other than a ‘rite of passage’ it made no sense, not even to me.
With my mind wandering the corridors of time I couldn’t help but remember a book I had read several years earlier – Journey of Souls by Dr. Michael Newton. I decided it was time I re-read it. Dr. Newton was a clinical hypnotherapist who, while trying to help a patient control a lifetime of chronic pain, inadvertently uncovered the man’s former life and death - thus eliminating the man’s pain. This led Dr Newton into the unchartered waters of past-life regression. During another session he stumbled across a fascinating account of a life between lives which this led him to embark upon a quest to discover what happens to us, or rather to our souls, in the time between lives. His conclusion was that each of us belongs to particular soul groups, and that before each incarnation, we make pacts with other souls in our group, and sometimes with souls from other groups. These pacts are designed to ensure we gain the most from each life experience and to help us master lessons unlearned from previous incarnations.
Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives by Michael Newton Ph. D.
ISBN: 1-56718-485-5 (Paperback). ISBN: 978-1-56718-485-3 (Hardcover).
Llewellyn Publications
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