Did you know you can win a free ticket to the Jung Society of Utah’s special event with psychic medium Lisa Williams?

Read one of the featured entries in our contest, then find out how you can enter by sharing your experience of The Other World in Everyday Life!

Did I just hear that?…Was that a voice?

I have been on a journey to climb up and out of a dark and lonely place for most of my adult life. Addiction has been my constant companion since I was about 14 years old when I started using drugs and alcohol to turn off the sounds of the world. It all overwhelmed me and I felt that I just wanted to live underwater so I didn’t have to hear it all. My ‘underwater’ was numbing out with substances…it worked very well for a while and then it turned on me.

I had decided that being sober was the only way that I could live. I knew that stopping all the substances would be incredibly difficult yet I had no idea that stopping the booze and drugs was actually going to be the easy part. When the buffer to the world….to life…to just living life on life’s terms–when that buffer began to break down and I was faced with the chance to grab a hold of life again and just feel it all…my emotions. Love. Anger. Fear. Excitement. Vulnerability.

I knew that this was the way I wanted to live. It’s the way I wanted to live for my whole life and now this was on the table for me and I needed to decide if I wanted to grab it.

One night, I was home alone and I had stumbled onto a documentary about people who had died for minutes. The stories ranged from individuals who had died momentarily on the operating table, or in an accident or a drowning. The people all were telling their stories about what happened to them and how they felt so different after they were brought back into their bodies…usually by the emergency medical workers that revived them in every scenario.

All these people who had experienced a near death experience said that after the experience of dying and then coming back they all had a profound clearness of mind and body that we are all here on this earth to just connect with each other. To love. That’s it.

As I lay there on my couch with a small candle lit, I was crying a little bit because these people were saying some profoundly simple things. We all want to connect. It’s what I have always wanted. What human doesn’t want to connect to others?

Then, I heard a voice. It was in the room with me, yet it wasn’t. It was inside my head and yet it wasn’t. It was a woman’s voice. An older woman and she said, “Good work, sister.”

It was so strange. I wasn’t afraid at all because I realized that it was the voice of my mother’s mother…my grandmother. She had been an alcoholic in her life and had later become sober and she died before she ever got to see me get clean.

I just laid there on my couch with tears slowly dripping into my ears as I wept. I had been on a bad binge when my grandmother had passed away years ago. I was in a hotel room drinking for two days and I knew she was in the hospital getting close to dying and yet I chose to be drunk and take the coward’s way out because I couldn’t deal with the hospital scene with a dying grandmother. I didn’t get to say goodbye to her.

So. There I was. I felt like she had forgiven me and had come to me to tell me that she was happy for me being sober. It felt that way.

I shared the story with my mother and when I told my mother the words that I heard that night…“Good work, sister.” My mom just cried. She said to me, “That’s exactly how your grandmother talked. She would call women ‘sister’ when she liked them.”

This was the first time I had been visited by someone that had passed on. It was a lovely and tender experience that bathed me in calmness and peace.

It opened my mind and heart to the idea that people we love that have passed on can and do come back and help us through tough times.

~ Erin Empey-Baxter

 

Contest: The Other World in Everyday Life

The Jung Society of Utah is excited to welcome Lisa Williams on April 21 and 22. In anticipation of this great event, we want to hear about your experiences with the Other World.

Have you ever had contact with a loved one who has passed on, had an experience of synchronicity that profoundly affected you, received a message from the other side, or any similar type of experience?

Tell us about it for a chance to win a free ticket to Lisa Williams: A Night with Spirit on April 21.

Describe your experience in one of the following ways:

• Write about it in a 250-500 word personal essay
• Write a poem about the experience
• Create a piece of artwork about the experience

Submit your entry via the Jung Society of Utah Facebook page before April 14.

One winner will be chosen in each category listed above, and all entries will be displayed the night of the event.

We look forward to hearing from our creative community about experiences with the Other World!