Regina Bogle M.D.

Life is sometimes surreal … how often do we think this when words fail us? When we are confronted with a mystery that we can’t explain? We have told stories about life’s strangeness for as long as humans could think, communicate, and gather. In truth, we embody its tale of mystery with our very lives.

As I walked toward the labyrinth’s center at Chartres Cathedral in May 2014, I realized that my life had gone through seven distinct phases: the anxious child phase; the depressed teen and young adult phase; the medical student and psychiatry resident phase; the creative and spiritual phase; the single parent phase; the blended family phase; and the energy medicine practitioner, shamanism, and teacher phase. Each segment felt like a lifetime. I found it odd to consider that I had lived seven lifetimes in the same body. Perhaps to better state it, I had lived seven lifetimes within the same stream of consciousness. Furthermore, once I arrived at the center of the labyrinth, I realized that a new life was about to begin.

Each one of those phases brought its challenges and its lessons. Each one would make its contribution to the eighth phase – that of author. My first book, Feeling Our Way: Embracing the Tender Heart, reflects the fruits of psychiatric encounters with struggling individuals as well as my personal exploration of our human feeling life. In a word, the book is about “empathy” and how it impacts and is impacted by every aspect of our lives. Feeling Our Way integrates neurology, psychology, energy medicine, and spirituality with human stories, mythology, and fairy tales to offer insights and tools for those wanting to heal their tender hearts. The process of writing, editing, and publishing that work took three years. It received the spark it needed for its eventual birthing in Chartres.

Writing my second book began the first day of the COVID lockdown. In three months, I had completed the first draft. Engagement in this process helped me manage the loss of my daily swim, a major multidimensional coping strategy for me. Synchronistically, when that draft was finished, the pools reopened. Several months and a few revised drafts later, Redemption in the Dark took form and is now on the market. While it is fiction, it draws upon my experiences during eight lifetimes – really nine or ten if I include the two past lives described in the book – and has lots of creative license and imagination thrown into the mix. In keeping with its theme of healing, shamanic journeys also tap into the mystery of what can wound us and what can heal us. During the writing of it, I realized how magical my life has been!

My third book, Chiron's Light, is totally fictional and now followed by the fourth, its sequel, In and Out of Time. I've already started my next work, which I hope will complete the trilogy. I’m surprised by how much I love to write, given how much the process scared me during my first two phases of life. Life truly is a mystery – always surprising! Having had a few lifetimes to think about it, I figure we are here to love and to heal. I hope that what I write inspires love and healing. The process has certainly gifted me a thousandfold. May it gift the reader as well!