AN INVITATION TO YOUR OWN JOURNEY

A reading journey into this life and the others

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Some books teach you something. A few quietly change you. You close them and the world looks different, softer, wider, lit from an angle you hadn't noticed before.

The books I want to share did that to me. They came as part of something deeply personal: a spiritual journey, an awakening I did not go looking for. It was offered to me and all I could do was say yes.

What followed has been long, and tender, and more powerful than I know how to put into words. I did not map this path; I followed it, the way you follow a single light through a dark house, one room at a time, not knowing where it leads, only that you have to keep going. Everything I do now grew out of that journey. These books walked beside me the whole way.

So, I am gathering them here and passing them on, in the hope that they might light your path the way they lit mine and help you begin a journey of your own.

I started at the place we all wonder about but few want to visit: the edge of death. Raymond Moody, a psychiatrist and philosopher, gave it a name — the near-death experience. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist, spent forty years and a thousand stories simply refusing to look away. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist, listened to patients whose hearts had stopped and who came back describing the room from above. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, fell into a deep coma and returned with a story even his own science couldn't explain. Mary Neal, an orthopedic spine surgeon, drowned beneath her kayak on a river in Chile — far too long to survive — and surfaced with a vision of heaven she has never stopped describing.

I came to these books looking for comfort. I left with something better: real questions, the kind you can't un-ask.

From one life, it is a short step to wondering about more than one. Brian Weiss, a psychiatrist, had a patient who, under hypnosis, began speaking from lifetimes she could not possibly have lived. Ian Stevenson, another psychiatrist, spent his career checking children's strange memories against records of people long dead and kept finding that they matched. Michael Newton, a hypnotherapist, gently guided people into the quiet space between lives. What moved me most was this: the most careful, clear-eyed researchers were also the most tender. 

And here I have to tell you my own part in the story because it is where everything changed. During a past-life regression, I found myself somewhere I had no words for. A vast, open, gentle place, full of sacred light and somehow, at the very same time, close and personal, as if it knew me. It felt as though every life that had ever been lived was held there: remembered, loved, with no judgment at all. When it ended, I came up like a diver from deep water, certain I had been somewhere real, and unable to say where.

Months later, reading late into the night, the pieces finally came together. What I had wandered into had a name. People had been describing it for centuries. They called it the Akashic Records — the Book of Life. Linda Howe taught me how to come close to it: not as a puzzle to solve, but as a sanctuary to enter gently, with a bowed head.

The mystics turned the whole landscape on its side. Teresa of Ávila walked through the seven rooms of an inner castle. John of the Cross wrote of the dark night, the stretch of road where the light goes out and you keep walking by faith alone. C.S. Lewis sat inside his grief and refused to pretend it didn't hurt. Richard Rohr opened the idea of Christ until it was far too large to belong to any single religion. And Julianne Stanz gathered the old Celtic wisdom of the “thin places” — those moments, and spots on the earth, where the wall between this world and the next grows thin enough to see through. None of it felt separate from the science. It was the same country, walked long before by people who carried no instruments, only their own lives, and bare feet.

Then the historians and the researchers widened the road further still. Carlos Eire, a Yale historian, looked seriously — in a book called They Flew — at stories of saints who rose into the air, not to prove that they flew, but to ask why we had grown so sure they couldn't. It loosened my grip on the word impossible. Elaine Pagels led me back to the early gospels that never made it into the Bible and showed me that my newest questions were among the oldest ever asked. Ken Wilber gave me a house big enough to hold all of it at once — science in one room, spirit in the next, neither one forced to leave. Candy Gunther Brown, a scholar of religion, took up a patient, unglamorous question: does prayer leave any measurable mark on the body? Weighing the research, including studies with the Global Medical Research Institute, she found that sometimes it does.

It was not all light. The psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina named something the other books only hinted at: waking up can be hard. Sometimes it arrives looking like a crisis — like everything coming apart — when it is really the soul stretching into something larger. They gave me words for that hard middle, and I realized, with a small shock, that John of the Cross had been describing the very same thing centuries before. The dark night of the soul and a spiritual emergency are two names for one passage.

A few more companions, if you would like them. Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist, studied near-death experiences and refused to believe the mind is trapped inside the skull. Anita Moorjani crossed over and came back and writes with the warmth of someone who has seen the far shore. Sue Morter reminds us that awakening is not only in the mind, the body has to learn to carry it too. William James, a founder of American psychology, more than a hundred years ago, took spiritual experience seriously enough to study it.

I did not come back with all the answers. I came back with something I treasure more: a softer, quieter peace with not knowing, a house with its windows thrown open.

The truth is, the deepest part of me had been asking these questions all along, quietly, in the dark, while the rest of me slept. These books did not hand me the answers. They simply taught me to stop talking, and to listen, the way you listen for a far-off bell carried across the snow.

If you have felt that same pull, that quiet question you can't quite name, perhaps one of these books is waiting for you, too. You don't need to believe any of it to begin. You only need to be a little curious and to let the first book find your hand.

This list keeps growing as the journey deepens.

If a book has cracked something open for you, I’d love to hear it.

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Further Reading

Every book above, grouped the way the journey unfolded. Each title links to Goodreads.

At the Threshold — Near-Death Experience

• Life After Life — Raymond Moody (1975). The book that coined the term “near-death experience.”

• After — Bruce Greyson (2021). Four decades of NDE research from a UVA psychiatrist.

• Recollections of Death — Michael Sabom (1982). A cardiologist’s medical study of out-of-body perception.

• Proof of Heaven — Eben Alexander (2012). A neurosurgeon’s account of his own NDE during a coma.

• To Heaven and Back — Dr. Mary C. Neal (2011). An orthopedic spine surgeon’s drowning and NDE on a river in Chile.

Many Lives — Past Lives & Soul Memory

• Many Lives, Many Masters — Brian Weiss (1988). The case that changed a psychiatrist’s mind.

• Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation — Ian Stevenson (1974). The rigorous gold standard of the field.

• Journey of Souls — Michael Newton (1994). What clients describe of the life between lives.

• Life Between Lives — Michael Newton (2004). His step-by-step guide to the between-lives state.

• Children’s Past Lives — Carol Bowman (1997). Spontaneous past-life memories in children.

The Archive of the Soul — Akashic Records

• How to Read the Akashic Records — Linda Howe (2009). The foundational guide to the practice.

The Inner Country — Contemplative Wisdom & Mysticism

• The Interior Castle — Teresa of Ávila (1577). The soul’s journey through seven dwelling places.

• Dark Night of the Soul — John of the Cross (c. 1579). The classic map of desolation and renewal.

• A Grief Observed — C.S. Lewis (1961). A raw, honest journal of grief and presence.

• Till We Have Faces — C.S. Lewis (1956). His mythic retelling of Cupid and Psyche, and the soul before the face of God.

• Surprised by Joy — C.S. Lewis (1955). A spiritual autobiography of the longing that led him to faith.

• Letters to Malcolm — C.S. Lewis (1964). His final, gentle book on the inner life of prayer.

• The Universal Christ — Richard Rohr (2019). The Christ too large for any single creed.

• Braving the Thin Places — Julianne Stanz (2022). Celtic wisdom for the thresholds where the veil wears thin.

Wider Horizons — Where the Journey Led

• They Flew: A History of the Impossible — Carlos M. N. Eire (2023). A Yale historian on levitation, bilocation, and the “impossible.”

• The Gnostic Gospels — Elaine Pagels (1979). The suppressed early-Christian texts. See also Miracles and Wonder (2025).

• Integral Psychology — Ken Wilber (2000). A framework for holding science and spirit together.

• Testing Prayer — Candy Gunther Brown (2012). A Harvard University Press study of prayer’s measurable effects, with the Global Medical Research Institute.

• Spiritual Emergency — Stanislav & Christina Grof, eds. (1989). When waking up arrives as a crisis.

• Consciousness Beyond Life — Pim van Lommel (2010). A cardiologist’s landmark study of NDEs.

• Dying to Be Me — Anita Moorjani (2012). A memoir of crossing over and coming back.

• The Anatomy of Awakening — Dr. Sue Morter (2025). Consciousness as an embodied awakening.

• The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James (1902). The classic that took mystical experience seriously.

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Born out of one journey — and offered to yours.