《卡萝的前生后世》is the Chinese name of this book. Even though the idea has been on my mind since day one when the book was published in 2020, I had many excuses for myself not to get into it.
Last year, my sister came to live in Canada for 6-12 months. After learning that my second book was a sort of memoir, she wanted to read it. Reconnecting with my sister and knowing I already had a willing reader was a good enough reason, finally, for me to get onto it. Even though yes I still didn’t have enough time, yes, the conditions were never perfect enough. I found pockets of times here and there. And now, the first draft is coming to an end.
Even though I haven’t systematically used it for 2o years, Chinese is still my first language. On many pages, I found myself rewriting rather than “translating.” It’s another creative process.
As a biographic memoir, I wrote all my personal and professional secrets in an open book.
In the Epilogue of the book of Carol’s Lives, I wrote:
Halfway through the first draft of Carol’s Lives, life became remarkably busy with my private practice. For the weeks I was in Vancouver from 2016 to 2018, I worked seven days a week, with many a late night. And when I was not in Vancouver, I was travelling extensively throughout Europe, Africa, China, and Central and South America. In 2017, I stopped writing the book for an entire year. It was not until late May 2018, almost three years after I had started this autobiographical journey, that I decided it was time to finish what I had started.
But my partner Tim and I had to take ourselves out of Vancouver to do it. I always have a hard time saying no to my clients when I am in the city. We ended up in a small village on the Richelieu River in southern Quebec, nestled close to the American border and not far from New York City—a prominent location in the book. For two weeks I wrote furiously in this little haven, so that I might finally finish the first draft of the book.
The little heaven, the small village on the Richelieu River in southern Quebec has a mouthful name. It is a boating community. And it is called Saint-Paul-de-l’ile-aux-Noix. Back in the spring of 2018, I stayed there for two weeks doing not much else but writing.
Writing the last few chapte
And in an earlier chapter, Chapter 20, “Richard Miller”, I wrote:
Sitting here by the beautiful Richelieu River in Quebec, while writing these words, so close to New York state, tears flow down my face. I know, Rick, as they say, rest in peace. It is my turn now to do things for you in living a rich, fulfilling, courageous life with Tim.
Sitting at Tim’s right-hand side and behind, in a hypnotic trance, he disclosed to me most of the material in Chapter 20
A Hypnosis Q&A I recorded in this inspirational place in 2018
Currently, I am working on book number 4, a book about the soul of Thomas Jefferson. Who would have imagined? Not me.
But it all started with this young man Alex Formos who walked into my office at the height of the COVID pandemic in January 2021. Many things started to change after that.
One of the changes is that this same soul is putting up a show on April 8, 2023. We know on the soul level he is a writer, a performer, and an artist, though your impression might be more like a politician, that might just be an interesting one-off manifestation of the soul. But I’ll let you judge after you go to watch his show.
Here’s a brief introduction to the event:
Alexander Formos performs a very personal and intimate monologue play about the traumas of a female sex worker, drawing inspiration from the candid experiences he witnessed on the streets of Paris in the 1930s. Alexander will read both female and male poems, challenging the concepts of masculinity and femininity while exploring the complexity of human sexuality through of same-sex love and asexuality.
Each poem describes the traumas of two eternal soulmates and is preceded by a shamanic story of how the poem came to life. Each poem is created in collaboration with Spirits of Vancouver and Sechelt to act as a medicine song to heal the traumas of our shared Lands. During the play, the audience will participate in the shamanic ceremony of healing and female empowerment, celebrating the return of divine feminine energies.
Alex has been working on those poems for the past two years and he is now ready to share them with the world. They have healed him on his journey, and maybe they can help you too to dispel the negative energies around you?
In January this year, right after my father’s death, I wrote a blog piece Before Your Left. Grief is taking its own curious course in me. Now again, two months later, I’m sitting down to dedicate a moment to my father.
In Chapter 6 of Carol’s Lives – “Tim, Keep Her”, I had a paragraph about my father:
Maybe Tim was referring to the fact that he was over ten years older than me. But ironically, my father and I are not that close. He provided for our family and worked hard, he was physically there, but emotionally and mentally he was a distant figure. We get along well enough and interact fine when I visit, but there is often a reserve between us. It may be that we are so different that I failed to really understand my father. Or perhaps, my father has never given me an opportunity to understand him.
Since I left home at the age of 18, I only saw my father out of the context of his own life. I remember how I noticed him getting more and more silent at the dining table, especially when we went out with other relatives, like my brother’s in-laws. I came to accept that my father’s character had changed. Like other family members, we all came to peace with it. After all, it seems easier to make peace with someone who talks less.
Until, that day when we buried our mother. I noticed father drift off to the side and he struck up a conversation with two young workers at the cemetery working on some stone carving. Father asked them questions, curious and interested, engaged and light-hearted. I was observing him from a distance, surprised at father speaking with strangers with such ease and confidence.
A few days later, I accompanied father to a local bank to deposit some money. The moment we walked in, I regretted not wearing more formal clothes. Almost all the people working in the bank came to greet father. And he knew all of them by name! Father introduced me to them with pride. I couldn’t believe what I saw. My father, smiling and alive, friendly and expressive!
Noticing the unreserved side of my father helped me open up speaking with him for the rest of my stay. I realized; all it had needed was for me to open up. I wondered why I had unnecessarily waited for him to do it first.
That was August 2019. I then planned to be back in China the first part of 2020, to spend more time with father. I had my ideas of what we’d do and how I’d relate with him. I was looking forward to it.
The COVID pandemic prolonged that plan. Dates shifted, although plan was not changed.
Dates shifted again, and again…
Something couldn’t wait. Father’s situation gradually worsened, based on occasional notes from my brother.
January 2, 2023, right before China loosened its COVID restriction, my 84-year-old father took his last breath. It was lunch hour. He suddenly collapsed from his wheelchair in a care home, right in front of the caregivers and my brother. They all thought he went weak in that moment, but maybe only he knew he went dead.
They lay his body straight on the ground. CPR was performed, but it just appeared the time had come.
It all happened so quickly, or should I say, easily, that there was not much to think about or talk about. A drama-less death, just like the drama-less life he lived in his last years.
Maybe Tim had an intuition, when he was making the promo video of Carol’s Lives in 2022, he inserted the picture for my father into the tapestry of images and films in the video.
In Chapter 15 of Carol’s Lives: AreThere Fish in Your Ocean?I have written the following paragraphs:
Even though I had officially graduated from the Hypnotherapy school, and had received my diploma, I found that there was still so much to learn.
In those early weeks of my new career, I did not have many clients. I did have, however, plenty of time on hand in which to study and experiment. One day, I put Tim into a trance and invited his higher wisdom to come through. I didn’t exactly have a clear vision of what I was doing, but I decided to experiment on the idea of accessing “deeper wisdom” through a hypnotic state. As Tim’s breathing slowed, and his muscles softened, I instructed him to open his inner doorway leading to his “Inner Advisor”. Later, I would dub it TIA – Tim’s Inner Advisor.
The same voice as Tim’s spoke, but it was tempered with a calmer and more confident tone. With an unspeakable excitement in my own subconscious mind, I went ahead and presented the challenges of my new career, and asked for directions, steps, marketing, and structuring guidance. TIA answered all my questions and gave me extremely useful information about things I could start doing. To keep the objectivity of what flowed through the session, we both referred to me in the third person as ‘Kemila’. On a Soul level, TIA connected my business with my own character. It became very meaningful to me. Very soon, I had found that I had taken four full pages of session notes.
TIA really got me, understood me quite deeply, and unlike Tim, spoke my language. Significant as the messages were on many levels, they were also very practical. Soon after the session, I found myself implementing those very same ideas and steadily started moving forward in my new enterprise.
Here’s a video – my first-ever video – that was recorded in 2012, 10 years ago. I was very excited to start my youtube channel after receiving TIA’s advice illustrated in the book.
Fresh from the press, even though it has been a long time in the making, like a well-baked delicacy, Carol’s Lives finally has been delivered, by UPS (well, as if it matters.)
From an idea to stories to wordsmith to frustration to long waiting, finally the book is here. I have all the reasons to be very excited.
There’s a photo of Tim and I benching on our book cover Carol’s Lives.
Summer 2018, our photographer Silmara found us this bench in Kitsilano in Vancouver and took this picture to be used in the book cover. Of course, looking from Vancouver, to the direction of Manhattan; or looking from this life, to the direction of that life.
I consider myself a Shaumbra. If you don’t know that word, that’s okay. It is not an English word. If you happen to know what I mean, it would put a smile on my face. It probably means we had a dream together, long ago, like Adamus would say, “an Atlantian Dream”.
And Adamus would say, “Masters bench”. So I bench.
Everywhere I go, I take some time benching. Even my book cover, I felt I had to do something about benching. Like Memoir of Masterswould do.
I did a quick photo search, and here are some of my benching photos…
Benching Oregon Coast
Benching in Redwood National State Park California
A few days ago, Simon Bown from the UK – a fellow hypnotherapist, and the Past Lives Hypnosis Podcast host – interviewed me for an hour. He is an amazing interviewer in the subject, as he knows when to ask the right question at the right time.
In the interview, I mentioned this work in progress, my second book. I know there’ll be a day I’ll have another chat with Simon on Carol’s Lives.
I really tried not to sound too nervous… But you can always take it as “Kemila’s being too passionate”.
