Déjà vu has always felt less like a quirk of memory and more like a gentle nudge from a life I’ve already lived. My earliest unforgettable brush with that knowing came in a health food store in the Palm Springs area, nearly twenty years ago. I was living between places then, and a woman named Nancy from Minnesota—visiting her sister—walked up as if she’d always belonged in my orbit. We shared an immediate recognition, a quiet certainty that we had known each other in another lifetime. That first spark of familiarity became the seed of a network of encounters that would shape the next chapters of my life.
Over the years Nancy traveled back and forth from Minnesota, and we traded healing tools and modalities like old friends passing along familiarly worn maps. Through her voice on the phone I met Steve Hoffmann. Our conversations ranged from prayer and healing to practical ways of working with people. Those early phone calls felt like tuning to a frequency that had always existed between us. When I decided to move to the Sedona area of Arizona, leaving Seattle where I’d been close to family, I asked Steve to fly to Seattle and help me drive a load of my things to Sedona in a moving truck. We had never met in person. When he came off the plane, I knew him immediately; and he knew me. That instant recognition—no introductions, just an unspoken confirmation—was déjà vu made human.
Life in Sedona unfolded like a tapestry of intertwined lives. I worked for a company that sent me across the U.S. demonstrating and selling massage chairs, which only widened my circle of encounters. My sister moved out with me briefly, but it wasn’t the right fit and she returned to her own path. Steve and I became involved with events and people who felt, again and again, like echoes from someplace beyond this life. We brought Barbara Hero to Sedona for lectures and experiences with her Lambdoma keyboard—a whole other lifetime of music and healing.
I met Paul Winters through Seve, another soul whose presence resonated with a familiarity I couldn’t explain. I helped with his website and taught alternative cancer methods and modalities, learning through teaching and teaching through learning. Community formed around shared practices and mutual recognition. Steve and I traveled to many different places, East Coast to North Platte, Nebraska, to work with clients, and I met many people who, over time, passed on—yet their influence remains a living thread in my present.
The strange, unavoidable truth of my life is how often pathways diverge and then circle back. I had a near-death experience when I collided with a deer on the highway; that brush with mortality pushed me forward into a new chapter. Steve and I eventually parted ways, each of us moving in different directions for nearly two decades. Yet now, after seventeen or eighteen years, we’ve reconnected on a new level—different people, same souls recognizing the continuity between past and present.
Déjà vu, in my experience, is not just a momentary oddity but a reminder that life is layered. People come into our lives as teachers and students interchangeably; friendships become classrooms; departures become necessary migrations to the next lesson. These encounters reaffirm my belief that we never truly die—we merely advance to another dimension and, from time to time, travel back through memories and meetings that feel like home. I cherish the acquaintances and relationships that have shaped me. They remind me that everything happens for a reason, and that the thread connecting us all is both timeless and immediate. I give gratitude that I have made the connections I have and that I can reach out either in a dream or intention and still communicate at different levels.