New lease of life

I am sitting in my hotel room in Melbourne, where, outside my 8th-floor window, the light is just beginning to soften, turning gently golden, before twilight falls. The oval across the road is silent now, though seconds ago it was busy with the jagged shouts and cheers of an AFL match.

The view from my 8th-floor hotel room in Melbourne, as dusk begins to fall.

Melbourne sits serenely in my heart. It is a city I could live in, though that’s not on the cards for now, or perhaps ever. I’m content visiting when opportunity allows. I’m here this time to record my books as audio publications with Bolinda Audio, an experience I’ve loved. “Meeting” my interviewees again, “hearing” their voices (albeit it “through” me) and wrapping myself once more in stories that first hijacked my heart years ago, has been something magical.

As ever, I feel honoured that I was entrusted with these powerful personal stories, and reading them, I’m reminded with excitement how one would make a wonderful feature film, or basis for a novel, and another could be an entire memoir. It’s inspired me to re-establish contact with my open-hearted subjects, to find out what they’re up to now, learn how their lives has evolved since the moment snap-frozen within the pages of my book.

It’s also illuminating to revisit the yarns from my new perspective, since the spiritual path I’ve travelled since writing them has led me to some new perspectives. For instance, I now understand that love, forgiveness and compassion are our primary functions in life, and that our consciousness creates our reality through our beliefs. However, this doesn’t cast doubt on my subjects’ stories, on the contrary, now I see them as more profound than ever. Each experience fits, somehow, perfectly into the puzzle of each interviewee’s multi-dimensional self.

All set to begin recording the audio version of Spirit Sisters, my first book.

And I do believe we are multidimensional beings, and that there are some events that befall us on Earth that we will struggle to understand from our limited perspectives, or perhaps never understand at all (while we are still in our bodies). That’s part of the reason I love reading about near-death experiences (NDEs). The people who experience an NDE almost always say that the secrets of the universe were revealed to them. In a fraction of a second (in our terms) they understood it all … yet that knowledge was not theirs to keep for the journey “back”.

As you can see, I still love a good mystery. I still love the thrill of a spine-tingling story. These days, though, the tingles aren’t usually of the scary variety. Which brings me back to Melbourne, and part of the reason it’s so special for me. Last August, I flew to Melbourne to attend a two-day lecture by US author Wayne Dyer, which I found brilliant and life-changing (goosebumps aplenty!) A week later, I was stunned to learn that the “father of motivation and inspiration” had passed away—at his Maui home, of a heart attack—exactly one week after he’d poured out his final lessons to us. He was 75.

Seeing the late Wayne Dyer in conversation with Anita Moorjani in Melbourne last August.

For I did get a sense that Wayne was “pouring out” his final teachings, and we, the audience, were drinking them up thirstily. I felt very, very lucky to be there—I couldn’t work out why that feeling was so strong in me, until Wayne passed away and then I understood. I’m forever grateful to Wayne and his teachings, which have helped steer me on this spiritual course, which is ultimately back to my heart. To me, following a spiritual path is about finding your way back to yourself, to your own connection with the divine, and taking flight into your life from that perch.

Now I’m back in Melbourne, helping my books soar again, this time in a new way. It’s a new lease of life for the series—2009’s Spirit Sisters, 2011’s Where Spirits Dwell and 2014’s Love Never Dies—and I’m thrilled that they’re going to find new audiences. As I wrote at the end of Love Never Dies, “the path winds, and I follow.” Let’s see where it takes me next.

Love,

Karina x