When I visited a friend and congregant who had tragically lost her husband and found her filled with energy, I was astonished. She explained that a shaman had done a ritual on her and invited the energies of her losses throughout the years to come back into her being. In that moment and that space, because of words and her experience, I suddenly was totally awake.

Later that year, I met Berenice Andrews, also known as Ms. B. On the day of my soul retrieval, she asked me to lie down beside her on the floor, go into a meditation, and imagine a place inside myself that reflected the feeling of going home. As I was meditating, she held my hand to allow the energies of me to be felt by her, and a drum was playing in the background. She had asked me not to use my mind to create images because it could interfere with the work that would happen through me. If I focused on certain images, she might also pick them up in my energy field, and this would get in the way of the images that were deep within me.

During my time in the stillness and meditation, I simply kept holding the feeling of what it would be like to come home to myself. Toward the end I saw myself in my own bedroom at home, rising up out of bed, and I was covered in golden glitter—so much that I became solid, like the Oscar trophy. Once I felt this image, the drumming stopped, and the shaman helped me get up and blew energies into my heart and crown chakras.

Ms. B. invited me to come and sit at the kitchen table. She shared with me the many images she had seen and the number of times I had experienced energy loss in my body. These are a few:
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When I was five, my brother was born.
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At age five, I ate poison and my stomach was pumped.
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When I was thirteen or fourteen, my family discovered my gay relationship, and I became worse than the black sheep—I was shamed and banished. This is when my grandmother Lois was clear and stern with me and told me I would not get into heaven. My cousin Bruce also died around this time.
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When I was seventeen, my shaman envisioned, I was in a crypt with very little energy. This was the year my grandfather John Temple Hayes died. My seventeen-year-old energy was standing there, bewildered, looking over my early teenage energies and hoping that I would wake up. I had already begun to die.

The shaman shared with me many things, and at the end she began to cry and said, “Many spirits gathered around you and told me you are a great spirit, and then you were covered in gold.” She paused. “I was overwhelmed.”

That encounter changed my life, for I began to see God in a more infinite way. I had truly witnessed how two perfect strangers could tap into a universal field of consciousness together and facilitate a process that brought one of them back to life. I had personally witnessed amazing grace.