Kudos to Clint  Eastwood  for his new film, “Hereafter” where he takes the age-old question of man-kind, “What happens after we die” and brings introspection of the afterlife to the screen in a way that doesn’t overly exaggerate its ordinariness. Because Eastwood doesn’t create a lot of misrepresented sensationalism about the afterlife in his film, critics fail to see the film for what it is: a solid reflection of our speculation of the ultimate metaphysical issue  - survival after life as we know it. After seeing the trailers for the movie, I’m eagerly joining the ranks of those movie goers with an insatiable appetite for the supernatural.

In an almost eerie cosmic prelude to the movie, my husband, who is on the road, called to discuss his own encounter with the inexplicable. Let me preface this by saying my husband lovingly tolerates my fascination with things the mind can tune into that are beyond the ordinary. And while he agrees we certainly don’t use the full capacity of our mind and what I do through hypnosis certainly assists people to do so, he stops short of believing that we create our own reality and reality as we see it is an illusion of our own projection. I know this projection keeps us safe and comfortable and so for most people encountering the paranormal is uncomfortable and, therefore, abnormal to observe. For him, the world is of solid matter. What you see is what you get. There’s nothing more.

Until yesterday. Apparently, he had a visitation of the ghostly kind while he was spending the night with his brother. The encounter prompted him to call me and inquire as to the etiquette one uses when telling their host that one has encountered a ghost in their house. Apparently, he awakened in the middle of the night and in a lucid theta state he became “acutely aware” of a taller male presence sitting at the end of the bed. The light in the room was such that he could see a depression on the bed where the figure was sitting. And almost to make sure that my husband knew he wasn’t just seeing things, the being stood up and sat down, not once, but three times, jarring the bed each time it  sat down.

As I listened to him retell his encounter, I became secretly ecstatic. Finally, he would quit rolling his eyes when my sister and I talked about the spirit boy who inhabited our house as we were growing up. “Do you think my mind was playing tricks on me?” he questioned. Like a hunter fixing his target through the scope of his gun, I carefully measured my response. “Your brain wave state coming out of a deep sleep could cause some cognitive confusion as to whether you were dreaming or actually seeing something.” His silence told me he was still trying to digest either the incident or what I was saying.

“So you think I was dreaming? How about the vibration of the bed? I felt that.” I suppressed my rising delight that he might be joining the ranks of the believers. Instinctively, after several years of marriage I know how to put him just where I want him. I also know if I join him in his opinion, he may retreat so I remained silent. “I could feel something in the room. Like someone was there. It was so real. It was a presence. I wasn’t scared. What do you think I should say to my brother? Should I tell him?”

“Tell him what?” OK. This was a little cruel, like a cat playing with the mouse before the inevitable pounce.

“Tell him there is a presence in this house…. you know a ghost.” Concerned, he continued, ” What will Alyson think?”

Alyson, our sister-in-law, is the author of the best selling young adult series, “The Immortals”, which has been on the New York Times Best Sellers list since her first book in the series, Evermore.  Somehow I didn’t think she was going to have any problem digesting the idea.

I’ve wrestled with a similar question whenever I work with a client who has a spirit attachment. There is just no easy way to tell someone they are host to a ghost, whether that ghost is in their home, or attached to their energy field.

“Do you think Nancy would know?” he asked referring to our dear friend Nancy Matz, an amazingly gifted psychic medium.

I had him. He was now one of us. He wanted me to call Nancy not to confirm his encounter, which she did as you can read here. But he wanted me to inquire about the etiquette of telling someone their house has a ghostly guest.

I obliged. What more could I do for a husband who, once again, conceded that his wife was right?

Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation…
                                                       - Carl Jun

 Often, I think about “unusual things.”I don’t think they are unusual. I take it for granted that everyone thinks like me, but my husband assures me they don’t.  I wonder about the nature of things. For instance, last week as I was clearing kitchen cupboards I wondered where the ritual of spring cleaning began. I mean really began. Did our cave dwelling ancestors use the spring time to dust out the caves? Change the straw bedding?  

Regardless of where and how it started, spring is a traditional time to purge, clear and reorganize your life. Science tells us nature abhors a vacuum. Therefore vacant space leaves an opening for something else to take its place. Spring is the time of new beginnings, and a perfect time to make room new opportunities to come into your life. 

But are you ready for them?

And as Jung suggests in the above quote, you can tell a lot about the condition of your inner world by examining your outer world. What does the condition of your garage, your office, your drawers, your closets reveal to you about the condition of your mind?  

Just like we need to release old clothes that no longer fit we need to release outdated ideas, beliefs, and ways of being that no serve us. Comfortable as they may be, some thoughts are serving us about as effectively as those bell bottom jeans hanging in the back end of the closet. Scarier is the idea that we just may have been holding on to the thoughts longer than the jeans!

We can file this under “odd things to think about.”  But someone has to think about them and who better than me, right? Here’s my latest thought.

But before I share it with you, let me preface this by saying I’m living in a bit of a fog lately. I believe the clinical term for it is “stress”. Its tax season. We’re in the middle of moving to a new city, and I’m traveling quite a bit for business. Some days I don’t know if I’m coming or going.

Those observing me may think I am losing my mind. In fact my brain did this a little trance flash the other day as I was driving down the highway. You know what I am talking about. You’re driving, listening to the radio, deep in thought and suddenly you look at where you are on the highway and simultaneously you can’t remember quite how you got there, or even if you passed your exit. All thoughts collide into one and seriously, if I didn’t know about highway hypnosis I could have sworn I was about to lose my mind.

When I was about six or seven years old I frequently worried about losing my mind. The onset of this fear fell on the heels of witnessing my beloved Granny one day going through the house obviously looking for something and mumbling that she was losing her mind. Her brows furrowed and her lips pursed, she looked very distraught. Losing one’s mind, I concluded, must be extremely serious.

Soon after she got in the car and drove off ,presumably, to the last place she had been to see if she could find the missing grey matter. Or that is how my six year old mind processed what I was witnessing.

I began to ponder her dilemma. Your mind must be very important if Granny had to leave to find it. There had to be some urgency to recover it. If it was gone from your head too long you wouldn’t be able to find it, because there would be no way to think about where you might of lost it. In a bit of comical cosmic orchestration  it seemed a long time before I saw Granny again, and I was really worried. I worked my brain into a tizzy over these sordid thoughts.

The study of the brain, the mind/body connection has me revisiting the question of what happens when you lose your mind.

Do the new studies in neuroplasticity imply that if you were to lose your mind you could create a new one?

As I said. Let’s file this under “odd things to think about”.