During California summers, my parents invited their children and spouses to their beachside vacation home, where I experienced a transcendent event. Playing smash ball on the shore and body surfing the breakers with my brother and father always relaxed me. One afternoon after a beach day, the family met at the house and watched a sporting event on TV. I was lying on the floor nearby when my eyes grew heavy. There is a gap in my memory after that. I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

At some point, I was awakened by a soft voice. I opened my eyes, seeing a woman smiling at me as if she knew me. She said, “You don’t recognize me?” I gazed at her and noticed the other people in the room. In that moment, my name and identity were irrelevant. Someplace between wakefulness and sleep, a powerful calm carried me far away from my familiar world. But a distinct clarity remained. I was aware of my existence.   

After a few seconds, my physical world came into focus. The awareness of my wife smiling, my family in the house, the beach outside, and my identity filled my senses as if these things had always been. Of course, it all made perfect sense. I had awakened from a deep nap. But in that moment, I experienced a fantastic awareness that I existed beyond my body. Opening my eyes was like meeting myself for the first time. This is what our deeper self, our essence, can do for us every day. Our essence doesn’t rely on the world as we know it. It offers far-reaching awareness beyond our five senses. That’s a huge advantage. Connection is the greatest wonder we are capable of.

Who Are We?

Our lives begin with the first awareness of ourselves. The first time we saw our reflection in a mirror. The first time we rode a bicycle. The first time we felt love. The first time we found a purpose and contributed to the world, we were filled with the awareness of our independence and freedom of spirit. We are at the frontier of awakening to everything and everyone, including what is yet to be discovered. With every feeling and every thought, we look beyond ourselves, furthering our awareness of who, what, and why we are. We awaken our potential to greater fulfillment, happiness, and peace. The adventure is limited by the boundaries we create and the lens we focus.

Like many people, I felt I was a part of something much bigger than myself—that reality was far more than what could be seen or touched. I started taking stock of out-of-body experiences, intuitions, and dreams since childhood. To help me understand the events, I opened a dialogue with a voice that had been present in the back of my mind—what I call my higher self. This relationship offered me insights into wholeness. Wholeness is connection to our empathy, compassion, and love, which tunes us into intuition, creativity, and emotional healing. Wholeness represents our ability to access intelligent sources of information within us.

A deeper part of us knows who we are, holding the memories and knowledge of our origin. We are energy. An essence. Timeless and intelligent. The isness of us, which makes connection possible. Everything else—intellect, ego, emotions, and physical body is part of the suit we wear. Empathy, compassion, and love are feeling with our essence. Insight, intuition, and creativity are seeing with our essence. Our essence gives us the capacity to feel what others feel. To see what others can’t. It is the nonhuman self, existing without the boundaries we know. Our human experiences are moments in time. Our essence is with us throughout all time, immersing us in our life experience, helping us heal old wounds and live with greater purpose and peace. The role of our essence is connection to our spiritual identity. Our essence helps us recognize our world as a stage created by our higher selves, and we, the players, in this infinite theater.

Learning About Our Higher Self

I woke up one morning feeling a bit tired, so I lay down to drift off for a few minutes. Seconds later, I opened my eyes and found myself in a room with a mirror hanging on a wall nearby. I walked a few feet to look into the mirror, and I saw a Caribbean woman gazing back at me. She was striking, in her mid-fifties, dressed in vibrant colors, flowing natural fabrics, a madras head wrap, and talisman jewelry. She gazed at me with kindness and wisdom. I felt her love and compassion embracing me. I was filled with reverence in the presence of this majestic matriarchal being. During the event, I was aware of my body waiting for me in my bed. This lucid dream filled me with a sense of connecting to something much greater than myself.

I steadied my gaze on the woman’s face, trying to understand why I couldn’t see my familiar self. As I searched for the self I knew as Stephen, everything in my body told me she was me. I struggled to accept that we were the same. Logic told me we had to be separate. That’s when I heard a voice say, “You are me.” She had spoken without moving her lips and seemed to suggest that we were one being. I thought, “Was I you in a past life?” She just gazed at me warmly. Then, a picture unfolded in my mind, showing me that our connection transcended lifetimes. The lines blurred in my belief of separation. I finally asked, “Who are you, exactly?” She just grinned.   

Soon, I opened my eyes in my bed, puzzled. I tried to make sense of the encounter. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Caribbean woman seemed to know me better than I knew myself. Months later, I was still trying to make sense of the event when I asked myself, “Could she have been my higher self?” Suddenly, I felt a sense of relief as if I finally understood something significant. I had made a connection to a deep awareness, filling me with a profound sense of not being alone. There was someone infinitely larger than me who cared deeply, loved me, and was always there, whether I was paying attention or not.

Was the Caribbean woman really my higher self? During my life, I’ve experienced many signs that I am more than my body. What I can see and touch with my physical senses is a small part of what it means to be alive. Over the years, I’ve learned that what it means to be a human being so often comes down to acceptance. There was a time when I struggled to accept that I was an energetic being composed of microscopic particles such as photons, neutrons, and electrons. It took me time to understand that acceptance goes even far deeper than the fundamental particles that make up reality. Like everyone else, I am a spiritual being with an essence. Primarily, all humans are an essence. The body, personality, and ego are a small part of us. For years, I struggled to accept that I was an energetic being from a nonphysical origin. I refer to that world as nonphysical environments, or the worlds we come from before birth and return to someday.   

Regarding my higher self, I had grown accustomed to living without acknowledging this relationship, and for various reasons during my life, I wasn’t ready to recognize it. This relationship was one of my hardest lessons in acceptance. Eventually, I learned that, along with the higher self, acceptance plays a hugely significant role in life. Life is about acceptance. We wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Acceptance. We get into an argument with someone we care about. Acceptance. When we’re under stress from unforeseen events that make life difficult. Acceptance. Acceptance means we see reality as it is and stop fighting against it. The first step in acceptance is acknowledgment, which helps us identify thoughts and feelings we’re fighting against, reduce or eliminate their influence, and move forward. Clearing the weight of resistance offers us clarity and helps us decide what to do next. Acceptance is one of the greatest accomplishments we can achieve in our lives. When things go our way, we never question acceptance. We just accept the rewards. The work begins when acceptance demands our attention. It offers us a path forward. I write a lot about acceptance in the face of challenges. The exercises in this book are fundamentally about acceptance.

As far as accepting the role of my higher self, that was a big one for me. The support of my higher self has helped me find acceptance, even when the cards seemed stacked against me. My higher self has appeared to me in many different ways throughout my life, which I outline in this book. But why would my higher self appear as a Caribbean woman? I’ve heard many stories over the years, which has led me to the view that the higher self is many things to many people. I myself have experienced my higher self in many ways. The form of these experiences can reflect deeply ingrained beliefs or memory imprints in my inner world. Or simply be the playfulness in which my higher self engages me. The form of these experiences plays an important role in informing me what I need to know when I’m ready to know. But in the larger scheme of things, it’s not the form that matters; it’s the connection. A key tenet of my higher self is that it’s up to me how I interpret my experiences, which, like the stages in the theater, can take countless forms.

Look around. We are experiencing a moment in time on a stage from which we learn. Every day presents us with a new stage in an infinite theater of reality. Our lives have brought us to this precise moment for a reason. It’s up to us what we do with the precious moments in time we’ve been given. We, humans, have access to a vast tapestry of connections. Our physical world can mislead us into believing many things that take us away from this knowledge. Our deeper self, our essence, can reveal the greater unity to which we are connected, representing the wholeness of our being. This is the realm of the higher self, which I’m the first to admit can be tricky to understand, yet the rewards of this union are many.  Whether we realize it or not, we have agreements with our higher self that play a major role in our lives…

Published in Best Holistic Life magazine, 2025.