I had just woken up from a midday nap.

I don’t even like to nap. But I was wrung out in a way that only certain seasons of life can produce — the kind of tired that lives in your chest.

I had been checking in on my family in Lebanon, making sure they were safe. I had dragged myself out of bed early enough for a 7:00am Pilates class. And there was the Blood Moon Eclipse rippling through the cosmic field, that quiet but unmistakable hum that those of us tuned to these things can always feel. So when 30 minutes opened up between work and meetings, the universe seemed to be insisting I close my eyes.

I did. And then, barely presentable from the waist up, I opened my laptop and hopped on a Zoom call to meet Puma Singona for the second time.

Puma is a Peruvian shaman who has done profound work with The Shift Network. I’d only spoken to him (briefly) once before, but his name had a way of arriving in conversations followed immediately by the same three words: “He’s so great.”

Even through a screen, I understood why immediately. He radiates warmth the way certain people do — not performed, not polished, but simply present. It travels. You feel it without being able to explain where it landed.

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We were in a development meeting, mapping out an upcoming free online event he’d be offering, and at some point the idea of reading coca leaves came up as a possibility. His face lit up. Without missing a beat, he reached into what appeared to be his pocket and pulled out a handful of dried leaves.

“I always have them with me,” he said, as though this were the most natural thing in the world.

What followed was one of those unexpected gifts that only arrives when you’ve stopped looking for it. Puma gave each of us on the call our own reading, one by one, blowing gently on the leaves before letting them fall out of his palm and speak. And then it was my turn.

“For Bruna…”

He held the leaves. Blew. Let them scatter.

“Open your heart. Especially for love. There have been a lot of fears, or maybe doubts, and it’s not letting you open your heart completely, because there is love. There is abundant love.”

Less than 30 seconds, and somehow, the entire last decade of my life compressed itself into that moment.

I held it together for the rest of the meeting… barely. The moment I closed my laptop, I was somewhere else entirely.

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Roughly 10 years ago, I arrived at The Marrakesh House in Culver City to experience my first soundbath.

I was sitting on a mat in a lavish backyard. The air was thick with incense and Palo Santo, and I watched as strangers began claiming their chosen space for the journey, writing their intentions for the evening on white index cards. I didn’t know what to expect.

I’d arrived quietly desperate — yearning for something to believe in beyond the visible edges of my life. That hunger had launched me into an exploration of all things spiritual, and I’d been following each thread wherever it led.

That night, as the shamanic drumming deepened and the room fell away, the first of what would become many past life visions arrived. It came with a clarity that startled me — not dreamlike or hazy, but vivid and immediate, the way a memory feels when it’s yours.

Suddenly, I was sitting beside a fire. The night was dark and open. Across the flames sat my partner — I could feel him completely, the specific gravity of his presence, though his face remained just out of reach. We were Indigenous people living simply, quietly. And then men on horseback broke through the darkness.

I ran. Hid the children. Through the sliver of a cracked door, I watched one of the intruders moving toward my husband with unmistakable intent. I didn’t think. I grabbed a dagger, and I made sure he never reached him.

The vision lurched forward in time. Quick flashes of unclear images that led to the final image — the one that has never left me.

My husband was gone. I don’t know how. I only felt the weight of it, the absolute and irreversible wrongness of a world without him in it. I watched myself walk out into the night, barefoot, naked, a dagger still in my hand. The stars above me, indifferent and ancient.

And I took my life.

That life ended. But the grief — the grief didn’t.

~~~

Love has always felt like something just beyond my grasp. While the people around me moved through dating and flirting and the ordinary rituals of romance, I’d walk into rooms scanning for a face I couldn’t describe, carrying a sense of longing I couldn’t name. I didn’t know who I was looking for.

But I knew the feeling of him — the particular frequency of a presence I’d loved so completely that it had worn grooves into my soul.

The love wasn’t lost. But the terror of losing it again? That never left, either.

I felt it again in Egypt, in 2024. I was visiting Saqqara — the sacred burial site that holds a different kind of silence than any other place I’ve known.

Something pulled me toward a particular wall. When I raised my hands and pressed them to the stone, I wept before I understood why. The grief came first. The knowing arrived after. Another life, another beloved taken. The same ache, wearing a different face.

All of the healing work I’ve moved through in this lifetime has circled back, again and again, to the heart. To what I call the bridge between our humanity and our divinity, that tender and terrifying place where we are most ourselves.

Puma’s words did what the best spiritual encounters do — remind me of something I already knew but had stopped embodying.

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I often share with my shadow-work clients that everything has a polar opposite. That the intensity of any darkness is always a precise measure of the light it mirrors. And so the grief I’ve carried across lifetimes — that still-raw, still-present ache — is not evidence of damage. It is evidence of depth. Of a capacity for love so vast it left marks on the very fabric of who I am.

The question has never been whether I’m capable of that love.

It’s always been which wolf I choose to feed: the one who knows that love and runs toward it, or the one who has felt the loss of it and can’t stop bracing for the next one.

For a long time, I’ve been feeding the wrong wolf.

The truth I keep returning to is this — we will never have enough time with the people we love most. That’s not a tragedy to be solved. It’s the very nature of love. It exists in bodies, in lifetimes, in the specific and irreplaceable texture of moments that will not come again.

All we can do is be present inside them. All we can do is choose, again and again, not to let the fear of loss be louder than the call of love.

And maybe — just maybe — the most radical thing any of us can do, especially in the world we’re experiencing today, is to love so completely, so without armor, that it writes itself into the root of our souls.

So that it travels.

So that it echoes forward through every lifetime there ever was and ever could be, and whatever version of us arrives in the next one already knows, somewhere beneath language, that this is what it’s here for.

There’s a lot of fear. But there’s abundant love, too.

Bruna Nessif, also known as Mystic Bru, is a writer, psychological astrologer, and shadow integration-focused intuitive guide for people who are deeply self-aware yet still feel stuck in repeating emotional and relational cycles. She is a certified professional coach for high-conscious living, author of Let That Shit Go: A Journey to Forgiveness, Healing, and Understanding Love, and founder of Return to Self, an online publication devoted to storytelling and guidance around shadow work, self-trust, and the art of balanced embodiment.

For a long time, I thought being a good person meant being agreeable and pleasing.

Being loving meant being accommodating.

Being kind meant overriding my feelings.

And being successful meant not rocking the boat.

I was very good at that version of life. I built a respected corporate career where I succeeded and did well. I did what was expected. I made responsible choices. I became a wife and a mother, and from the outside, everything looked solid. Stable. Shiny.

But inwardly, I was slowly disappearing.

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I had learned long before I could name it to silence my own needs. To over empathize. To shape shift for others’ approval. To prioritize harmony over honesty. To override the quiet voice inside me that knew when something wasn’t right.

I told myself that was strength. That was kindness. That was maturity.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was practicing self-betrayal. Deeply and fully abandoning myself.

The first wake-up calls were subtle. A heaviness in my chest. A constant sense of being “on.” A quiet grief I stuffed down with sugar. A sadness I couldn’t justify. A feeling of “not being enough.”

I ignored it. I started having children, and this was not a good time to question anything.

But intuition doesn’t operate on our preferred timelines.

The soul has a different plan that runs on divine time, not human time.

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As my marriage became increasingly misaligned, with two children under the age of two, my intuition decided it was time for my cosmic wake-up alarm to go off.

My body began to react to the years of not listening. I experienced a terrifying panic attack. I was exhausted in a way sleep didn’t fix. My mind felt foggy. My spark dimmed. Eventually, my thyroid stopped functioning properly.

I now understand the symbolism clearly, but at the time, it felt overwhelming and daunting, yet also eye-opening. Figuratively and literally, I felt my (third) eye open.

As well as my throat and my voice. The place of truth and expression. I hadn’t been speaking mine. I had shoved my voice way down into the ground, but now she was ready to emerge in the light.

One day, while on vacation, shopping with a friend at a Target in West Palm Beach, Florida, my body made the message impossible to ignore. I passed out and saw myself lying on the concrete floor, disoriented and scared. I had a moment of clarity that cut through everything: I cannot keep living this way.

That was my shift.

I finally admitted what wasn’t working and felt an inner, loving presence that was guiding me beyond my understanding.

In the months that followed, I began listening differently. Not to fear. Not to obligation. But to something quieter and steadier inside me.

I started asking new questions like: “What is being asked of me now?” and “What is the most loving thing I can do here?”

The answers required courage. And massive trust. I left my marriage with two very young children in tow. I became a single parent at a time that felt impossibly hard. Divine timing, I learned, has a way of arriving when it feels anything but ideal, yet it is often leading us toward something more true, aligned, and right.

I also felt called to understand the deeper connection between the mind, body, soul, and inner wisdom. I returned to school to earn a master’s degree in health and wellness coaching, with an integrative focus on mind-body science.

What I was learning intellectually mirrored what I was discovering intuitively: the body never lies, and intuition speaks through sensation, emotion, and inner knowing long before the mind catches up. In fact, my body had been signaling to me for years, and I had used my thoughts to rationalize and push those signals away.

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I made a vow to myself. I would never abandon myself again, to the best of my ability. I would live and teach these seemingly magical, yet deeply innate, principles that had saved and transformed my life.

The more I honored my truth, the more my life flourished, my relationships shifted for the better, and my health began to stabilize. The more I listened inward, the more alive and connected I felt.

Eventually, another intuitive nudge arrived audibly, clear as could be, this one even more daunting. I was being asked to leave my corporate career and step into the unknown.

I had no business plan, no safety net, no trust fund, and no guarantees. What I did have was a growing trust in a higher wisdom, one that had already guided me through loss, healing, and profound change. I also had a master’s degree, and a few wonderful clients I loved working with. That work lit me up from the inside out.

So 12 years ago, I took the leap.

Julie explores how to communicate with your Intuition Language™ in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Julie Reisler is founder and CEO of Empowered Living, Inc. She is an author, TEDx speaker, and holds a Master’s degree in coaching, with more than 15 years of experience. She has also completed advanced training in yoga, HeartMath, and Positive Neuroplasticity. She founded the Intuitive Life Designer® Coach Academy, a board-certified, soul-centered certification program for heart-led coaches and spiritual seekers. She’s the creator of the INTUITION Framework™ and Intuition Language™ — powerful systems that help people awaken their inner guidance, trust their soul’s wisdom, and live with divine clarity and confidence. Find her at www.juliereisler.com

While I’m a relatively new course host for The Shift Network, I’ve been a participant and follower for some time.

I’m no stranger to the topics of spirituality, expansion, and consciousness, and I enjoy holding space for a variety of faculty and learners in my current role in this community.

I’ve quickly realized that I cannot possibly begin to implement all the specific rituals and knowledge from the skilled Shift faculty. And I know at some level, many of them are having an impact on my consciousness as I’ve seen an uptick in synchronicities.

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The Shift Network course, Making Miracles With the Beloved Dead with Perdita Finn (author and co-founder of The Way of the Rose), has had a profoundly impactful effect on my personal spiritual journey. Each week, Perdita shows up with sincere vulnerability, accessible wisdom, and encouragement.

As someone who has been deeply exploring connections with my unseen angels and guardian team through oracle and Tarot decks, I was fascinated to learn how to extend this practice to include those who once lived — by inviting them to become helpers from beyond.

Perdita taught us that we can assign these beloved spirits specific tasks when we’re facing challenges, whether it’s finding a new car or seeking support for a health issue.

These helpers can be people we personally knew or even figures we never met, like Elvis, who struggled with an autoimmune disorder. In that case, we might call upon Elvis to assist with healing or to help summon the right doctors and support for our wellbeing.

Perdita shared stories of proof that we are supported beyond measure — and encouraged us to ask for our desires to be granted by specific supporters from beyond the veil.

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For example, she told us the story of her old, worn-out couch that held many memories for her family and was ready to be retired. Not having the financial means to buy a new one, they searched for a used one at thrift stores high and low, to no avail. In a final push by her daughter to make a turn into a thrift store they didn’t usually visit, a chance meeting in the parking lot with a man dropping off a couch was the perfect fit.

Perdita’s methods make the esoteric a reality. Prayer comes alive with validation of signs from beyond — like the story of the couch.

Now, I think of walking as a pilgrimage, instead of only exercise.

Walking as a pilgrimage in petition or gratitude has shown me evidence that I am not alone — from the feathers I see on the ground, to the hummingbird that startles me as it buzzes into my view, to the crows loudly announcing themselves to show me the baby coyote that stopped in its tracks to look at me.

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The validation of looking at the world beyond the 3D has impacted my daily life. It roots me in knowing that I can ask for help from the other parts of the universe and that faith is the opposite of fear.

I meditate in front of my altar where I often speak aloud to my teacher, Ram Dass. One day, in a moment of despair, I left my space to clean instead of sitting to move the energy. I found a random talk of his from the 1980s to find solace and listen while I cleaned.

Within seconds, he declared that he was sitting in Palm Springs, California, where I currently live. He clearly stated it twice. The goosebumps lit up my back in agreement that his spirit was right there with me. He then proceeded to tell a joke in the typical Ram Dass fashion, that was exactly what I was in sorrow about. What validation that the dead are still with us when summoned!

The dead are our teachers, the heart is the guide, and we can see guideposts in everyday messages our angels leave along the way, like breadcrumbs on the trail.

When we become practitioners of mystery, we find humility in everything we do. I know I will continue to learn from Perdita, and I look forward to tracking the evidence of more miracles along the way.

My Own Shift tells stories of personal moments of transformation. If you have a story of your own to tell, send it to TheDailyShift@TheShiftNetwork.com

Shelley Karpaty is a course host for The Shift Network. She earned a Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach and is currently in their Mindfulness Mentoring program. You can connect with Shelley on her Substack, Spicy Soul Mama, where she writes about self-care, personal growth, spirituality, parenting, and mental health.

The title of my book, Through God’s Eyes, reflects a pivotal moment of personal enlightenment. At a 1998 weekend workshop, spiritual healer Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe shared a life-changing story with his students. He said that after watching a TV nature program in which a lion savagely ripped apart a gazelle, he had been distraught.

Retreating into meditation, he implored God. “How could you allow such carnage and tragedy to exist?” He told us that the response he received humbled him and restored his faith in Divine Intelligence.

“I felt and saw through inner revelation how this incident was experienced from a higher level as pure love and that it was beautiful beyond description.”

Ibrahim explained that this world may appear cruel and harsh to our unenlightened eyes, but even the brutality inherent in the animal kingdom has meaning, purpose, and a stark beauty all its own. Indeed, looking through God’s eyes, we see that simply by living our lives, we all serve each other in ways both simple and profound.

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From that day on, I challenged myself to see the world through God’s eyes — to the extent that I could, of course — so that I too could witness every moment unfolding with beauty, love, and perfection.

Granted, that is much easier said than done, especially on days when I am the gazelle. Yet, I’ve found that the more I train myself to view the world in this way, the more peaceful and grounded I become.

On the final day of the workshop, Ibrahim demonstrated his healing method on a few of the participants. One woman he brought up to the front of the class had sustained injuries in a car accident that restricted the use of various parts of her body, including her hands.

After only a minute or so of working with her energy, Ibrahim, who is clairvoyant, stopped and gently said, “You could be healed right now, but you’re not ready for that, are you?”

To my astonishment, she agreed.

She explained that she had obsessive-compulsive disorder and was actually thrilled when she could no longer use her hands because that meant she didn’t have to touch doorknobs. She said that the thought of being healed was such a foreign concept to her that she was afraid of it, that she wouldn’t know how to think or act in the absence of her maladies.

I was dumbfounded. For the first time, I realized that some people would prefer not to be healed.

Her confession affirmed that the best outcomes occur when healing the mind and spirit precedes the curing of the body, and that if the underlying reasons for the body’s ills are not addressed, the same problems may resurface after the body is repaired.

That day, I understood that healing is a choice, and the more consciously we make that choice, the healthier we will be.

My Own Shift tells stories of personal moments of transformation. If you have a story of your own to tell, send it to TheDailyShift@TheShiftNetwork.com

Phil Bolsta is a senior editor and manager in product marketing at The Shift Network and author of the book, Through God’s Eyes.