The Returning: A Soul’s Journey Through Many Lives
Part 1 — The Soul That Remembers
Hello friends,
How is your Wednesday unfolding? I hope there is something gentle in your day, something steady. All is well here, and I wanted to share something that has taken me years — truly, years — to understand.
I was raised one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. For nearly five decades, I was taught that reincarnation wasn’t real. When you die, you die. You become a memory to God, and if you are among the fortunate, you may be resurrected in a future no one can predict. Until then, you return to dust. Final. Silent. Done.
John, my other half, has always believed something different. He believes we return — that we come back to finish the lessons we didn’t learn the first time. He says life is a classroom and our souls are eternal students. For a long time, I listened with a mix of curiosity and discomfort. Not because I rejected the idea, but because something in me recognized it… and that recognition scared me.
Over time, though, I began to understand reincarnation in a way that felt less like contradiction and more like expansion. To me, it isn’t about becoming someone else — it’s about continuing. We leave this body, but the soul keeps moving, keeps learning, keeps becoming.
And then my daddy passed.
That’s when everything shifted. I see him in butterflies now — not metaphorically, but spiritually. As if the veil thinned just enough for me to feel him, not as memory, but as presence.
Around that same time, I discovered Laura Lynne Jackson.
Listening to her felt like someone opening a window in a room I didn’t realize had grown dim. She didn’t argue or persuade. She simply spoke from a place so full of love that fear had nowhere to stand. Her words didn’t challenge my upbringing — they soothed the parts of me that had been afraid to ask questions.
What struck me most was her relationship with timing. How she trusts it. How she listens. How she follows the nudge.
She once shared a story about being guided to change a dinner reservation — not for convenience, but because spirit was orchestrating a meeting she didn’t yet know she needed. And she went. She listened. She arrived at the exact moment she was meant to meet someone whose life would be changed by that encounter.
That story stayed with me.
Because it made me wonder how many times spirit has tried to guide me too — but I was too conditioned, too obedient to old beliefs, too afraid of being wrong to hear it.
Now, in midlife, I feel a calling rising in me. A calling to help others feel what I’m beginning to feel: that death is not an ending, that love does not disappear, and that our souls are far older, wiser, and more connected than we were ever taught.
Maybe that’s Laura’s purpose. Maybe it’s becoming part of mine too.
Because if even one person reads these words and feels their fear soften — even a little — then this series will have done what my soul came here to do.
Reflection Corner
What belief about death or the afterlife have you carried your whole life — and is it still true for the person you’re becoming now?
A Sanctuary Whisper
If you’re reading this with a little ache in your chest, a little curiosity, a little remembering… trust that. Some truths don’t arrive on time. They arrive when you do.
An Invitation to Return
When you’re ready, come back for Part 2: The Purpose of Returning — where we’ll explore why souls choose to come back, what they’re learning, and how this long arc of becoming stretches far beyond a single lifetime.
Your evolution is welcome here. Your questions are welcome here. Your soul is welcome here.
Evolving in grace,
Dawna‑Rae
🦋 may your heart return to itself again and again
Have you evolved today? 