Love After Life

What a day I had yesterday.  So sorry I wasn't able to post, but I by the time I got home I was really too drained to do anything with my brain other than eat, walk the dogs and go to sleep early. We had a meeting with an attorney over some of the issues that came crashing into our lives earlier this week and that took longer than expected.  I can't get into any of it here, but let's just say it's something that would ordinarily be very, very stressful, even though it didn't directly involve me.  I never really felt stressed, although my mind was more on those issues than anything else, and I kept having to refocus on our happy frequency again and again.  It did keep me feeling centered and really rather removed from the situation. Also, driving tends to wear me out and I ran other errands in town, so I'm sure that contributed to the draining fatigue I felt yesterday evening. Other than that, though, I felt great mentally and emotionally - I didn't crash...

There was a healthy debate in the Afterlife Topics group about the nature of relationships and existence when someone said something I've heard time and time again - that relationships don't last forever and there there is no such thing as an "eternal", committed, romantic soul mate relationship. I started wondering about why someone would say that or believe it.  I don't see that there's a logical reason why such relationships cannot exist.  It seems that many people are committed to the idea that all relationships either boil down to the individual and god, the individual and the universe, the individual's relationship to everyone else as a whole, or just everyone and everything as "one", either in constant eternal fluctuation or, at some level, some form of unified, pure bliss where there is no sense of individual identity. I remember before I met Irene I had utterly dispatched the idea of "true love", or any "soul mate...

Update 7-22-2018 On Friday, July 20, 2018, we achieved our goal of having a completely real astral visitation with each other. It was amazing!  I never lost consciousness transitioning from this dimension to the one where we are together.  The conversation we were having telepathically in our bed here flowed seamlessly into my actually being in a room, sitting next to her, having that same conversation with her.  Although I was conscious when my experiential scene flipped from lying in bed to sitting on a couch in a room next her, it took me several minutes to become fully cognizant of the fact that I was actually feeling the couch, actually seeing her and everything else (including my own hands when I gestured while talking).  I could hear her voice and mine. You can read more about it starting here. (Updated 12-18-2017 - WJM - New Sequential Post Archive Started & Book Now Available on Amazon) I have posted my book,  "Love After Life," so it can...

Yesterday I went out around 5:30 to smoke my 2nd cigarette of the day.  The air was really warm - I think it got up around 95 during the day, but weirdly I actually enjoyed it.  Maybe it's because I have the AC in the house set at 70.  Usually, though, that just makes me dislike the warm air all the more. It felt great, though.  I lit up and started talking to Irene and when I drew in the last of the cigarette, I realized something about restraint and moderation ; controlling how much you do a thing has a great impact on how much you can enjoy it and how that enjoyment is incorporated into your life.  I used to smoke many years ago and gave it up entirely until a couple of weeks ago when I started and then began enforcing a two-a-day strict limit.  Back then, I was a chain smoker, smoking sometimes up to four packs of ultra-lights  a day .  I got into the habit of smoking while I worked on the computer and then while I played games on the comput...

Watching that "You're Still The One" video by Shania Twain got me to thinking about some of the structure of our lives and how improbable it all was.  That song came out in 1997 and we immediately adopted it as another "our song", seven years after we got together.  We never watched music videos so we never saw that video. We also never even thought much about the beach, much less living by the beach.  Twenty years later, after Irene passes, it comes to me that our place in the astral is by the beach, that it would be the perfect place for us given what I think our astral lives would be like.  It just clicked, even though in this life I've never really been much of a beach or ocean guy.   Then yesterday, when I saw that video for the first time, when she sings "Looks like we made it," at the beginning of the song, the image is a house by the beach, and the whole song is about "finally making it" together, and the whole thing looks like...

Yesterday when I meditated and pursued my new "irene" dialogue (imagined or pretend responses), I did get some surprising, specific and emotion-laden moments.  I also noticed that her side of the conversation isn't really totally neutral sounding - it's of a slightly different tone, than my own in my head. It's slightly closer to Irene's voice than neutral. In one image Irene was dressed like an island girl in a sarong and had white flowers in her hair.  The sarong was white at the bottom but had color at the top. She was tan and had very long, rich dark hair and a really beautiful smile on her face.  She was on the other side of the main pool of our "island home". Seeing her really made me catch my breath and made my heart start racing.  Now, I've seen images of Irene many times in my mind but only a few times do they cause this reaction, and it's always when an image just pops into my mind. I certainly wasn't trying to picture her thi...

No confirmation so far on the stuff I was talking about the other day, but I guess I didn't need it. Or maybe I was just supposed  to make my own decision on it.  I guess I had really already made my decision about it and just wanted support in making it. Anyway, the guy in the video from the other day was talking about how he opened up his ability to speak to the dead.  He was a highly skeptical person and didn't believe that talking to the dead or even spirit guides was possible, so he just pretended to be talking to them in his mind.  If you've ever had a pretend conversation with someone in your mind, you know what I'm talking about.  I would often have long conversations in my head with living people, but it was really just me basically trying to sort something out in my own mind.  Come to think about it, they really weren't "conversations" as much as me, in my head, trying to explain to someone (usually my brother Reed) what I was thinking, and by ...

I can't believe how great I feel today. I feel chemically transformed, like I'm someone new. I feel like a young man who just fell in love, like I did when Irene and I first met.  Thinking of her and joining her in the astral world fills me with such excitement and anticipation!  This is the feeling I had for those two weeks just after she died - the time of grace I was given to show me what our relationship could be like even with us in two different dimensions. I just didn't know what it was at the time or how it could possibly come to be real. Yet, here I am, feeling absolutely like the luckiest guy in the universe - I know who the love of my existence is; I know where she is; I know I'll be with her soon; I know we'll be able to spend eternity living our ideal life.  Unbelievable. It's really an amazing feeling. I had no expectation I could actually get to this point.  I don't know if it will last, but to be here and know it is a reality can, I think, ...

8:30 A.M. I woke up at 1:30 this morning after having a dream that had Irene in it.  She was only in it a few seconds, but it was more than any previous dream.  We were at a store and I had just bought an item of clothing and she took the bag and walked off while I looked at some cheap computers (I have been thinking lately about buying a cheap chromebook laptop).  A salesman was keeping an eye on me because he thought I was acting suspiciously.  He told me that he had a cheaper version of the computer I was looking at because they had to repaint it and it was in the back, and wanted to know if I wanted him to go get it. I told him yes, but while he was gone I decided to leave and walked away from the computers and looked for Irene.  She was sitting down in a waiting area and leaned forward when I looked her way.  She must have known I wanted to leave because she got up and walked up to me.  I don't know if we spoke but I realized I didn't know wh...

Today was a decent day.  Got to badly missing Irene a couple of times, but I'm sure that will continue as long as it takes to see her again.  I don't mind it, I embrace it.  Nothing wrong with missing the woman you love.  I tell her not to worry, that it's just the way it would be regardless of the situation if I didn't get to see her or hear her voice for months.  Most of the time, though, I talk to her and the others just as normally as I would talk to anyone here, only there's no responses you can hear. It would probably seem pretty crazy to most people, but actually I think it's what has made the situation as good and livable as it is.  I would really like to have some more experiences, though. I guess I'm the impatient one now.  Throughout our time together here she was always the impatient one, wondering why what we intended and affirmed didn't happen sooner or faster.  Now I feel her advising me that we will be back together soon enough...

I read the past few entries and here's something weird I noticed.  One day I have the best meditations I've had in a long, long time; two days later I'm writing that "for the past several days, I've been having trouble meditating". Okay, so that was literally not true, but yet that is actually what I remembered at the time. Remembering when I was experiencing grief, even then I noticed that when I was experiencing it, at the time it seemed utterly real to me that I had always felt that way and always would.  I would, at the time, be thinking it had been forever since I felt good, that I had been feeling miserable for days. I'd go back to the journal and discover to my shock that the day before I had felt great.  The grief also made me believe that even if I had wrote down that I had felt great, that I must have been lying to myself. This is so odd. I wonder if people who keep journals notice this kind of thing - a disparity between what they are thinking...

Well this hasn't been the greatest of days, but if this is my new "bad day", then I'll take it as huge progress. For the past few days it's been very difficult to get meditation in.  Here and there a really good one, but overall I've noticed it becoming more difficult, not easier.  They've been deeper when I am able to get into it, but it's been a challenge.  Today it's late and I haven't had a single good meditation today. Plus, I've felt totally out of sorts, moody and whiney.  My brain felt like it was someone else's all day long.  Maybe because of the weather lately? Who knows. Woke up with something irritating my good eye and that lasted all morning.  When you only have one functioning eye that kind of thing can be quite unsettling. Now my vision has been blurry all day. Just great. I threw some stuff out for trash day tomorrow and did a lot of crying over it, but it wasn't really all that bad - I think I just wanted to c...

Another good day.  I had to run into town to do some errands and had a nice talk with Irene about our lives on the other side. I'm thinking more in terms of what I imagine life would be like considering some of the circumstances I believe to be true about the astral worlds. I was also thinking (and talking with my spirit team) about the idea of "spiritual advancement" and how that idea doesn't resonate with me in the least. When I was younger and felt discontent most of the time, I looked to spiritual "enlightenment" or advancement as a means of quenching that discontent.  As I've mentioned, I used to meditate quite a bit and was doing so when Irene and I met.  I was also a vegetarian, complete non-drinker and non-smoker and used no recreational drugs whatsoever. However, it was actually being with Irene that gave me what I had always been looking for - complete satisfaction and fulfillment.  We talked about this often, how utterly satisfied and comp...

Today has been a really great day so far. I woke up feeling fantastic - whole, complete, totally connected to Irene, happy, enthusiastic with our progress and confident we will soon be able to actually visit with each other.  I did my morning meditation on the loveseat instead of the couch and it was immediately more comfortable than my couch position, my legs and feet did not go to sleep, and it was a very deep meditation.  I was able to visualize a very good intention of visiting Irene with good emotional quality.  It felt like I would, at some point, simply find myself with her in perfect clarity. This confidence in us and our ability to make our reality come into being feel so good and is so different from what I was feeling before I got the answer to my "why am I here" question.  I'm so very appreciative of my situation where I can pursue this goal to my heart's content without significant interference.  It's really amazing that when you think that it's...

I went to sleep last night thinking about sleep and how it is the perfect vehicle for astral traveling and projection. You are already going into a deep, relaxed state prone to altered forms of consciousness; you are in a perfectly relaxed position where your body is safe for hours to come; and I've read where you actually do astral travel almost every night to speak with your spirit guides - but you don't remember it.  Also, in my case, I've already had a couple of fully conscious vision events after falling asleep. This morning I woke up feeling great, happy, and like I was perfectly balanced.  I could feel the emotion and appreciation in me again.  It's perfectly normal to miss Irene; I don't want that feeling to disappear.  I like the feeling of anticipation and excited longing to see her, hear her and hold her, and my appreciation for when we are together, just like any time we were apart in life.  My angst and rebellion is gone about why I'm still here...

Today has been pretty strange.  I think I must have picked something from somewhere - either a cold or someone's weird emotional condition.  My voice was deep like when I get sick, and there were times when I felt like I was getting some nasal stoppage, but so far that hasn't materialized. One thing after another kept interrupting everything I tried to do so at some point I just decided I wasn't going to fight against it - just take a day of and not try to analyze anything.  I think some days are just "take the day off" days, and this is one of them. Took a nap and going to bed early. Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow. Even though today wasn't all that bad, it was just a strange day to get through and I'm just too tired to parse any of it.  It feels like maybe yesterday and to day were just days to let things percolate under the surface, let the universe do its thing, and don't worry about it.

8:25 a.m. I just posted in the FB grief support group a message reflecting what I've been doing the past couple of days.  Part of that post was about my envisioning session last night where I envisioned myself visiting Irene. I wrote in the group that Irene had shown me our house over there and that nothing was ever lost or destroyed, that we could recreate anything from our life here to our home there. I wrote that she showed me some of what she had added to our home there from our life here.  I also wrote that she told me that we could pursue any of our heartfelt desires there - creative arts & crafts, learning, adventures, etc. When I was done writing the post I felt very good about it, but before I posted it I went to use the bathroom and asked Irene if she thought it was a good post and if she was okay with it.  I walked into the kitchen and saw a couple of things lying on the floor in front of the refrigerator; one was a colored piece of paper cut out in the ...

Yesterday was a really good day - especially considering the day I had before.  I had really thought those kinds of grief attacks were a thing of the past.  I know I've got grief in me - I can feel it in my heart and throat at certain times every day. It's not like I've been trying to suppress it; it just flashes for a second or two, then subsides. Yesterday I had firmly in my mind what Irene said about overthinking everything, and assuming too much personal responsibility in trying to astral project and get to her.  I stopped thinking that outcomes to my efforts were in my hands - that I could figure them out or even help or hinder them. All I'm supposed to do is what is in front of me to do, and whatever I've signed up for here will unfold.  I set my intentions, say my affirmations and let it go, do what is in front of me and let go of everything else. As yesterday progressed I continued praying/affirming walking around with my hands on my chest and praying ou...

A week or so ago I moved everything of any kind of value downstairs - so I could stop air-conditioning it - since I never have a reason to go up there anymore and none of the kids ever spend the night up there There's plenty of room downstairs. I moved the stereo into my office and set it up this morning so Irene and I could listen to her country oldies at noon. I turned it on to make sure everything worked and put it on her station to see if the remote worked while I sat at my desk. After I got everything working I asked Irene to play the next song, and it was one I never heard before by Kane Brown, "What Ifs", and the chorus lyrics jumped all over me: "What if I was made for you and you were made for me, what if this is it, what if it's meant to be..."   Irene always told me that God made me just for her and that we were meant to be - she said that exactly, so many times I can't count. She even wrote it down in her journal after we met. I can alway...

8:00 a.m. So, after writing up this whole post about how I'm going to refine my technique and set up a schedule, I just did a visualization meditation where I visualize interacting with Irene and she let me know I'm overthinking it again.  I'm always trying to fix things that aren't really broken, always trying to improve things that are really working just fine.  Just let go of expectations and do what feels right. 3:00 pm. I think the summer heat and humidity is really doing a number on me - it does every year.  I am really messed up today. I've been battling fear and doubt and confusion all day long.  I don't understand these emotions or where they come from.  I'm thinking all sorts of things that have never even entered my mind before - negative and hurtful things.  I've already meditated sitting and lying down several times just to try and get a handle on it.  It's weird because it's nowhere near as hot today outside - I should be better...