I have never, never considered reincarnation a possibility before, not even when Carl Jung started talking about it at the end of his autobiography. I know there are literalist Buddhists who rant about it, just like the many literalist Christians who drive me crazy by ranting about Satan and God's Laws.

It's an interesting thought. Suppose God wanted to become a family. Suppose we were all made as eternal pieces of him but something about freedom in the law of love required that we start out as single-celled forms. Over the course of time and history, through choice, struggle, and learning, we grow into unity with him. Suppose the earth will keep turning into something new, with more and more heaven in it as each of us grow closer to the saint version of ourselves - something that can only happen as a result of all the love we give and receive collectively.

Reincarnation stuff that strikes me as definitely distorted: "In a past life I was [insert dead famous person's name here]" or "You will be a dung beetle in your next life because of karma."

We've certainly got a ways to go as a collective, but there are great sweeping areas of love progress. No world wars have been fought or atomic bombs dropped for the last seventy-five years, and nonviolent change movements spearheaded by people like Gandhi and Martin Luther Ling Jr. have swept through multiple nations. There are always new wounds and crises arising, smaller genocides are still taking place - Rwanda, Cambodia - and the potential for destroying the earth through our technological advances is a pressing problem to solve. But maybe over thousands upon thousands of more years of growth and love on a spiritual level, and scientific progress on a care-for-nature level...

The Jewish tradition and Christian Bible talk about seven layers of heaven. After-death experiencers seem to allude to something similar, different levels once you leave the body. Maybe we touch the first heaven layer sometimes in our dreams, and the next few layers are places where, after we die, we get to be who we were on earth alongside everyone we loved (though if we have multiple lives here, I guess that would mean we would move in and out among all the various love connections we've had, with different family from different times?), and maybe the layers above that are where we experience no self and total oneness with God.

Who the hell knows. It doesn't matter too much to my current experience as Bethany Patchin, age 31, lover of Nathan, mother of four great kids, from Wisconsin and Nashville. It's weird to get too literal with it, kinda like getting literal about drinking a crucified man's blood. My grandma died two years ago, so would a reincarnationist believe that when I have another baby with Nate, conceivably it could be her in her newest body? Dr. Who keeps reincarnating, and there's something profoundly sad even in fiction about losing the actual features and characteristics of an individual you love.

"Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The 'newness' in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components." (Carl Jung) Maybe reincarnation is a clunky way of getting at something mind-boggling about our interconnectedness. Maybe I'm both Bethany and parts of my grandma already (epigenetics certainly points to this in the body), maybe we're all parts of each other.

Reincarnation is a possibility to me, in a lesser way than examining the Shroud of Turin makes the actual resurrection of a man named Jesus a probability to me. I'm fine with the Mystery - but it feels good to be open-minded and respectful of the held beliefs of millions of my human relatives half a world away.

The moral of all these stories is, do your part - be a healer and lover, to the extent you are able, in the place and body you've been given. Whatever we become aware of after we die, right now is always the most important moment.

..................

Along these lines, I am really, really interested in reading this book. I couldn't stop reading the Amazon reviews of it. ("It's no-nonsense, it's not pretentious, it's not 'new-agey,' and yet it isn't overly scientific in a materialistic sense" - that's the mark of a spiritual writer I trust.)

After a (necessary) period of great confusion and reductionist perspective, I've come back around to the supra-natural. I believe everything is magic, in a sense; we just lose our ability to see it as such because of hedonic adaptation. There is a "spiritual" part of being alive that I think soon even the most burned skeptic will be able to accept and relax about. Exploitative charismatics and exclusivist religions have almost ruined such ideas for regular folks, but it's time to take them back.

The spiritual part of being alive involves connections between living things, dreams, and life energy. There is a powerful web of love we're all woven into. The scientific phrasing is "the physics of subatomic particles in communication with each other." We didn't even know about subatomic particles when I was a kid, and now we're well on our way to explaining the "how" behind things like:

- my friend Megan dreaming in college that she was with her parents running away from a swelling ocean, the night before the tsunami hit half a world away.
- my sister's friend who wakes up crying, knowing lots of humans are about to die somewhere, before tragedies like 9/11 and earthquakes.
- how I frequently think of my heart friend Jenny 30 to 180 seconds before she calls me, no matter the time of day or night.
- my great-grandma knowing her previously-healthy son had died before her other children came to tell her.

(from Rupert Sheldrake:)
- a British woman's cat who always knew when her son was coming home on leave from the military, despite him never telling her ahead of time. The cat would go to the door and meow a few hours before his arrival, and his mom began to depend on it for her cue to start getting his room ready and cooking his meal. This behavior is shown by thousands of household animals.
- a British mentally-disabled blind boy who dumbfounded his opthamologist by being able to read - but only when his mother was looking at the letters.

(the power of sonic resonance:)
- why bacteria grows faster when a lab plays Mozart
- how Tibetans can have success using harmonic bowls for healing with sound

How to stay tuned to these realities? Read good spiritual books, take ten minutes of your day to be still and quiet, get out in nature, pay attention to your dreams. Pretty simple stuff that humans have done throughout most of history.

With dreams - yes, many are a kind of garbage disposal for your daily life events, but according to shamans in many different cultures, "Big Dreams" are ones with strong color or strong emotion (especially emotions that stay with you upon waking). Those are the ones to trust, and make decisions based on.

A few nights ago I was meditating before falling asleep, after getting acupuncture for the first time. I had a waking dream image that was very vivid, both visually and emotionally. There was a large, bright leaf to my left, unearthly alive-green, and I removed a piece from it that was the size and shape of a microscope slide. As I did so, lightning flashed around me revealing close, dark clouds. I felt elated. The darkness was not frightening, just beautiful, and the light and dark felt fused to each other.

It felt like a visual depiction of the learning about nature, science, and spirit I've been doing lately. I described it to my sister and brother-in-law, though, and Kevin responded, "I think it's more than that. To me it feels like the leaf is you, and the microscope piece is your examined life in the Now, and the dark and light are God."

I've been mulling over God and suffering for a long time, and the only perspective that has been remotely, consistently comforting has been: God is in us, as us, experiencing everything through us. There's an interesting verse in the Christian scriptures about Jesus as the "first fruit" of a harvest, implying we are the next fruit - our suffering, healing, and loving are all part of God's journey, if you will.

I am a leaf on the tree of God's being. Everyone I meet is, too, no matter their belief system. We can numb ourselves off from that vivid aliveness, and devolve into the shittier parts of our animal nature, but the potential for it never leaves us.

I feel like there are two versions of almost any religion, or religious figure. There are two Christianities. One is composed of fear-based actions and rigidity. One is love. Most practitioners are a meld of the two, hopefully continually shedding the rigidity for more love. There are two Jesuses; one is a conglomeration of everything disturbing projected by the fearful. The other could well be someone that no one would react to - who wouldn't want a gentle divinity who takes on unspeakable suffering just to understand and help the world?

There are two Buddhisms; one is persecuting and killing Hindus in Bhutan, and the other is spreading love to the west through the Dalai Lama.

The good Buddhism and good Christianity (and good Hinduism, good Islam, good Judaism, good Atheism!) are very, very close to each other - they all have mysticism at their core, they all cultivate empathy and compassion in their practitioners, and they seem to be swapping ideas, teachings, and love at an ever-increasing rate. (Yes, I believe atheism can cultivate empathy and compassion, not least the forms that arise from a painful religious childhood or interactions with off-putting religious perspectives later in life. "From the wound comes the gift" - the healthy desire to flee an oppressive, nearly abusive god of impossible expectations frequently flowers into a strong love of nature and humankind.)

Parts of all of our paradigms may die off as we intertwine and move forward; that is a scary thought to many but a freeing one to me. The intersection of science and death (something almost impossible to study before we learned how to resuscitate hundreds of thousands of humans starting in the 1960s) is going to shake out many superstitions, in all camps, and again I say bring it on. Carl Jung once had a patient come to him and tell of a dream he had wherein he visited a city of gold being built underground by citizens of every nation and tribe. Jung responded, "Oh yes, I've been there a few times. It will be finished in five hundred years."

How to deal with the literal claims of each group is tricky, and I don't know how to figure all that out right now. But I know a lover of humankind when I meet one, and I have met them in all labels and forms, and that experience is the truth I trust. Any system that blinds us from recognizing this in another, or requires us to coerce "outsiders" into becoming "insiders," is the lesser, falser version of itself.

After having officially tried just about everything possible to aid my depressive tendencies, which stretch back to childhood but have been exacerbated by a lifetime of Wisconsin winters, four postpartum seasons, emotional and sexual abuse, divorce, filing bankruptcy, and sugar near-addiction - here is what has worked best for me, in order of least to most helpful. Keep trying until something works for you! Never give up, never surrender!

5. Essential oils: neroli and frankincense. Applied directly to the wrists, 2-3 drops plus 1-2 drops of lavender (make sure the bottle says "lavender angustifolia" for the botanical name) which works as a driver to help it enter your bloodstream. Do it in the morning and at lunch. Original Swiss Aromatics carries the best oils available online; if you live in an urban area, see if these Veriditas Botanicals oils are carried anywhere near you. They are phenomenal. If you're really strapped financially, give Mountain Rose Herbs' essential oils a shot.

4. 5,000 IUs of Vitamin D3 in gummy form a day, from October 1 to March 31. That's usually five gummies, which taste great. I hardly missed a day all winter because of the built-in reward aspect. My doctor checked my blood's D levels and these work, unlike some vitamins with absorption issues when they're cheap. For those of you on high-dose prescription D2, print out this article for your doctor and switch thee to D3 ("D3 is approximately 87% more potent in raising and maintaining serum 25(OH)D concentrations and produces 2- to 3-fold greater storage of vitamin D than does equimolar D2.")

3. Talk therapy with a gentle counselor who you sense and feel legitimately cares about you and your well-being.

2. SAM-e, a naturally-occurring substance in our bodies that many of our bodies don't make enough of. Dr. Andrew Weil was recommending huge doses of it in Prevention magazine, but for me and many people I came across in reviews of SAM-e online, much much less is needed. I have a bottle of NOW brand tablets at 100 mg that I split in half to take 50 mg a day of. Just get a cheap pill splitter at a drugstore or grocery store pharmacy, and they may have other brands of SAM-e carried there. Get one without mannitol listed in the ingredients because it can cause stomach cramping.

Start with 50mg a day upon waking, 30 minutes before you eat. I felt a little testy and snappy the first week, but did feel markedly more energetic within a day or two, and have been on it for over two months. I'm exercising without much mental effort expended over having to do it, and instead of feeling so low-energy that I just want to stay inside with a book, I feel much more inclined to call people, set up friend dates, and get out and about. In other words, I feel greatly helped with my social anxiety on top of my depressive tendencies.

Some people need more, so you can try upping your dose every week by 50mg. If you are consistently testy and angry a few days in a row after that initial adjustment period, you've probably already reached your ideal dosage.

Check out Amazon reviews of a few different brands - they're very fun to read; I love hearing about other people's lives markedly improving.

1. Testing for neurotransmitter deficiencies through Pharmasan Labs. They test your urine to check your levels of serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and GABA. (GABA and serotonin deficiencies affect anxiety levels, serotonin and dopamine deficiencies affect depression, and so forth and so on...) The report shows where your levels are compared to optimal or healthy levels, and they have top-quality amino acid supplements you take to balance them out. Then you are re-tested a few months later to see where your levels are, so there's no guessing about whether or how the supplements are working for you. The test has to be ordered by a doctor, so I'm guessing you can call Pharmasan to see if there is a doctor in your area they can recommend. It's not cheap - about $150 per test and $30 per bottle of pills, of which you may need 2-4 different kinds - but if you're miserable, it's worth it.

I'm only two weeks into treatment, but I'm having vivid dreams every night (some of them unfortunately related to sexual trauma, but that's just part of healing), I find funny things really funny (also have noticed this from the SAM-e), and the supplements for GABA make me deliciously sleepy. I wake up feeling really good in the morning, probably because sleep is when your body makes neurotransmitters. Ideally we would get the amino acids we need for the making of those neurotransmitters from our diets, but eating healthy is tricky in our culture and even trickier when you're depressed and have no energy to research or change your eating habits. Even with the healthiest diet in the world, you might still need supplementation due to genetic factors creating deficiencies.

If you are at the end of your rope, can't get out of bed, have lost your job - TMS treatment might be the way to go. This was a great testament to its powers.

And last but not least... If you're in a soul-killing situation, like the wrong job for you or a destructive relationship, none of these things will ultimately help you (excluding number three assisting you on your way to more truth and freedom). Thomas More's Care of the Soul has great insight into this.

Good luck, lovies. Have hope. I'm living proof the dawn is on the horizon.

P.S. If you are a fella struggling with depression, Google "Gary Wilson TED talk" for a great, science-based video about porn's effects on it.

P.P.S. Alcohol is a known depressant and cutting back as much as you can will help.

"All religious traditions grew up in a prescientific era. The sciences have revealed far more of the natural world than anyone could have imagined in the past. For example, only in the nineteenth century were the great sweep of biological evolution and aeons of geological times recognized, and only in the twentieth century were galaxies outside our own discovered, along with the vast expanse of time from the Big Bang to the present. The sciences evolve, and so do religions. No religion is the same today as it was at the time of its founder. Instead of the bitter conflicts and mutual distrust caused by the materialist worldview, we are entering an era in which sciences and religions may enrich each other through shared explorations." - Rupert Sheldrake

Cinderella is a great archetype for moms. Through refusing to give up hope, she transforms herself from a servant who is always cleaning to a beautiful, loved woman. I've got a curly metal pumpkin-shaped doormat in honor of this transformation, which I go through on an almost daily basis, and a two-way hologram on my fridge of this moment, when she raises her arms.

I was meditating the other night and had a memory of crying once, in a way that surprised me, while watching the Disney movie seven years ago. It was the scene when the pink dress of her mom's has been ripped up and she finally gives up. She's crying on a bench and then her fairy godmother appears.

As I thought back on it, the pink dress felt like a symbol of my first attempt at marriage. It was torn and ruined, though I wouldn't figure that out on a fully conscious level for a few more years.

An hour after meditating, still feeling old stuck emotions, I came across this video and thought, "A fairy godmother," talking about a way to heal your heart tears. (The science behind EFT seems to be a combination of acupuncture points and bilateral brain stimulation; it's supposed to have been really helpful for Vietnam war vets.)

A day later, I picked up a very old copy of a Cinderella picture book at an estate sale; at some point a child had colored just the sparkles throughout the book - a fitting symbol for healed energy.

Here's to new and better emotions, dresses, and marriages.

From the college textbook Nate got me for Christmas, Managing Stress by Brian Seward. These are game-changers that deserve much more publicity than they're getting. Also check out this Wall Street Journal article about the Navy using acupuncture in Afghanistan with wildly successful results.

Science and spirituality are getting SO CLOSE to each other...

(in the meantime, Nate and I are also SO CLOSE to getting engaged... Jubilant times around here.)

I love hearing about them from others, and have fun sharing mine, so I'll just keep 'em coming. If you have any of your own to add, put them in the comments.

They've been clustering around my still-frequent remarriage hypervigilance lately. Last week I came across a pair of shoes that looked like glass slippers on Etsy, just my size. After trying out some similar heels on my soggy lawn, I determined I would be able to walk on a beach in them (where we will be married), so long as I put my weight on the balls of my feet. I bought them.

That afternoon I noticed this magnet on my dear friend Linda's fridge.