A Message in the Music: Meeting My Past Life Healer

A few years ago, my dear friend and retreat co-host Lois K. P. and I learned about something called Art Church, held by artists Alex and Allyson Grey at their sanctuary in the Hudson Valley. We decided to go together, another one of our art adventures! Neither of us had been before. We had no idea what to expect, or what we were going to experience. What emerged in my drawing that day surprised me more than I expected, and what I learned afterward surprised me even more.

My art materials that day, colored pencils and acid-free paper. No plan, no sketch, just the intention to let something come through.

Art Church isn't really church in the way most people picture it. It's held at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, CoSM, the sanctuary Alex and Allyson Grey built in the Hudson Valley as an international home for visionary art and their own decades of exploring consciousness, spirit, and creation through creativity and art. The grounds hold a three-story museum, a bed and breakfast, a café, and walking trails. Art Church itself is simple: everyone sits on the floor while Alex and Allyson speak from the front of the room, and once the talk ends, the drawing begins.

Alex and Allyson's own visionary work is extraordinary, decades of profound, boundary-pushing art that has genuinely expanded what visionary art can be. The path they've walked to reach those visions, including the use of plant medicine and psychedelics, isn't my own path, and it's not one I've returned to since that day. I hold real respect for their talent and for the artists who walk that road. My own way toward higher states of energy and spirit comes through a different practice, through my own inner development, becoming what I think of as a higher light being, one layer at a time, without those tools.

We sat together on the floor that day with Alex and Allyson Grey in front of the room, with colored pencils and acid-free paper, no plan, no sketch, just the intention to let something come through. I opened myself to the experience with no preconceptions of what was to come. First, I had to put aside my mind noise.

Partway into the drawing, Alex put on a song about Frank Lloyd Wright. My father, an architect, trained directly under Wright and spent years of his career working at his side. I felt him immediately, unmistakably, in the room with me. My hand kept moving.

Ngangkari Healer. What emerged that day, and what I now believe to be one of my own past lives.

What emerged was a face. A woman, ancient and steady, sitting cross-legged with her hands open in her lap. Around her, great sweeping arcs of cobalt, magenta, and violet spiral outward in overlapping circles, radiating out from her like something alive, reaching beyond the edges of the page and out into the universe itself. I didn't decide to draw a healer. She simply arrived, and the energy arrived with her.

After the session, I found Alex and told him what had happened, how that one song had unlocked something. He told me something I didn't expect. He hadn't known why he felt he needed to add that particular song to the playlist that day. It wasn't a choice he could explain. When I shared my father's story with him, he understood. Neither of us needed to say anything else. It was a message, carried through a stranger who had no way of knowing what it would mean.

I sat with the drawing for a while before a name came to me: Ngangkari Healer. I didn't know the word beforehand. It simply arrived, the way she had.

When I looked into it afterward, I learned that Ngangkari are the traditional healers of the Anangu people of Australia's Western Desert, among the oldest healing traditions on earth. They work not with the physical body alone, but with the energy fields that move through and around every living being, sensing what's out of balance and restoring it. That's what those swirling arcs of color are. Not decoration. The visible signature of her healing field, touching everything within its reach, extending outward without end.

This is what this drawing has come to mean to me most. We are all surrounded by energy we cannot see, moving through us and around us, capable of being sensed, drawn out, and rebalanced by those attuned enough to work with it; energy that can heal us, and can heal others. What happened that day didn't come from a substance that altered my consciousness. It came because I sat quietly in meditation, opened myself, and let a greater energy move through me. I believe the woman who emerged also carries that gift, and that she is one of my own past lives.

There's more to learn here, both the art and the woman behind it.

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