Within One Lifetime

Yellow paper ankhs hung from the ceiling and covered the walls. The carpet had Egyptian motifs. Crystals sat on every bookshelf, alongside more books than the shelves could hold. Everywhere I looked, there was something else to take in.

I learned later that many of the ankhs were arranged in sets of twelve. The arrangement had come to her in a vision.

There was a coherence to the house, though to me it felt chaotic.

I was in Dayton visiting my parents, who have a farm outside the city. My oldest brother had brought me to meet a friend of his, a woman I’d wanted to meet for years. We were also there for a sound bath. The instruments were set up in the entry room, but first we went into the living room to talk.

At one point, she had been a young man in Texas, a Bible-thumping preacher. Now, at seventy, she was a transgender woman in Dayton, Ohio, offering spiritual guidance and welcoming people into this house.

She talked about Indigenous spiritual practices from North and South America and experiences she described with extraterrestrials.

We stayed in the living room for hours.

There were things she described that I didn’t know what to make of. I listened and asked questions. She didn’t seem to be watching her words or checking how I was receiving them. The stories were extraordinary, but I never felt she was telling me more than I wanted to hear.

Often, when people talk about their past, I can sense something they’re ashamed of. I didn’t get that from her once.

Eventually, she said it was probably too late for a sound bath.

My brother and I both protested.

“No, no, no. We need a sound bath.”

We went into the other room and lay down.

She began with a didgeridoo right in my face.

I was so startled that I started laughing.

The sound bath was loud and harsh. My body vibrated. I felt tingling in places that had felt stuck for weeks.

The day before I left for Ohio, one of my hypnosis clients had given me Many Lives, Many Masters, by Brian Weiss. I began reading it the day after I got home and read sixty pages in the first sitting.

In the book, a psychiatrist describes working with a patient whose experiences under hypnosis lead him to reconsider his beliefs about past lives.

I kept thinking about the woman in Dayton. I tried to picture her in Texas, preaching from the Bible. Then I pictured her in the house where we had spent the evening, surrounded by crystals and yellow paper ankhs.

I had been aware of reincarnation for years without knowing quite what I believed about it. She seemed to have lived several lives already, all within the same lifetime.

As I read, I began thinking about my own.

I grew up in a conservative Christian home. We had the Ten Commandments framed on each of our nightstands.

When I was ten, I invited my best friend over for pizza. I knew he would say yes to pizza. My family wanted him to say the prayer of salvation.

Later, sitting in the top bunk, our bellies full, I asked him, “Do you know if you’re going to heaven or hell?”

I think about that regularly.

In the first history class of my freshman year of college, the professor lectured for an hour. Then he stopped.

“Does anyone have questions?”

No one did.

“I made all of that up,” he said. “Your job is to question everything you read and hear.”

I threw everything out. I had no foundation. I allowed myself to be tossed in every direction.

My life became beautiful and chaotic. I traveled the world and met people whose ways of living I hadn’t known were possible. I had an apartment because I needed somewhere to sleep. There was a futon on the floor. I spent all my time out experiencing life.

Then I started a business. I was tired of working for people whose businesses I thought I could run better.

I spent every waking hour at the studio. I studied interior design and customer service. I ate at the finest restaurants in Chicago, paying attention to the room, the service, the way an evening unfolded. I wanted to understand how all those decisions came together into an experience, and what I could bring back to the studio.

Now I’ve dedicated my life to music. It was always present, but I’ve never experienced it this way before. When I’m composing or playing for a room full of people, I draw on so much of what I’ve lived: what I believed, what I questioned, the people I met, the years I spent learning how to create an experience.

I’ve been thinking of those as past lives. Lately, I feel them coming together.

I’ve had room to make those changes myself, without much pressure from the outside world to remain who I was. I have begun to appreciate how much freedom that has given me.

My oldest brother, the one who took me to her house, often asks me, “Could you have imagined three years ago that you’d be here?”