I closed the audio file and opened another one.

That first Akashic records reading had resonated with me so much that six months later, I had another one done. The second reading was from a different woman whom I'd never met before. I bought it for myself as a reward for all the growth I'd achieved during the year, both personally and in my business. I felt very happy with my life, and wanted to set some big goals for the year ahead.

I pressed play on the recording. The reader, Cheryl, began talking about the origin of my soul.

Like, do you feel like you belong on planet Earth? [...]

What they’re showing me about the origin of your soul is that you took a little bit of a different path than a lot of people. A lot of times a soul will pick a home planet or home environment of some kind, and you didn’t do that. I would say the first… oh God, we’re talking about time that is so beyond linear time and it is so hard to put a linear quantity on it but… I don’t know… maybe the first ten, fifteen, twenty thousand years of who you are as a soul, if we were going to put it in linear time… which, they’re saying, in terms of the length of your soul is not all that long, but to us it sounds like a long time. You spent that time as pure light in different environments. You went as light to different locations. What’s it like to be light in a world of all light? What is it like to be light in a world of no light? What is it like to be light in an environment like ours where there’s physical bodies?

So you were exploring all of your ‘lightness’ and what you could experience and understand, because in the moment of your soul’s origin, part of your awareness would be to take in the creative nature of light and how most physically manifested worlds like ours begin because light is creative. There’s a way in which our manifested form is a whole bunch of photons put together. In a lot of ways what you were doing was exploring the whole nature of what a photon is. It’s more than just that, but in our physical world that’s how we talk about it. We talk about photons and the motions of energy.

So then, after that experience, what you started doing, and have done more or less since then (there have been other things you’ve done at a soul level)... a lot of what you started doing was exploring the nature of how light is manifested. For us, using English, we talk about light like "turn on the light" and we mean the physical bulb, but it can also mean understanding. When we're in the light we see better and understand better.

So, in other words, what you started investigating was the spiritual expression of light. In a world where there is no religion versus all religion versus only one religion. All the various combinations of all of that one could get to. Then you were also pulling together experiences about the physical components of light and the spiritual components of light and integrating them.

This woman knew nothing about me. How did she identify my source of passion and curiosity so specifically? I'd been working on this riddle — unraveling the fundamental nature of reality — for years now, and my favorite part was integrating the physical components with the spiritual ones.

I continued listening.

It's interesting because it’s like your soul had a second ‘I Am’ moment that is really important to who you are. The way I would explain this is… if you think about a wheel, and you have the center of a wheel with all the spokes going out, there’s something about the wheel and being the center of the wheel that really caught your imagination. It’s not about balance so much as it is about integration. So think about a car, and the car’s got four wheels, and there are axles that connect the wheels to the car. You were really, really, really taken with the whole concept of the axle — the center of the wheel and how everything turns around that, literally and figuratively. It’s not that balance isn't important, but it's about how the axle is integrated into the experience of the wheel. And how the axle ends up being a clearinghouse in a funny way, because the wheel is dependent upon the focus or weight in that point and without it it's like the wheel could just fold in on itself. It doesn’t have enough power and strength at the center to maintain itself.

Essentially, you explored all of that. In part, you were off exploring light. And on the other hand, you were off exploring this experience of being the central point for something that revolves around it, and also the clearing house. Your soul's original intent was to follow, as best you could, the concept of light in all its iterations and what it means to be a wheel and an axle and a clearing house — a central gathering point for power and strength.

That idea of the axle resonated with me on a deep, intuitive level, but I couldn't figure out why.

Hmm...

I skipped ahead to when she talked about the intention of my soul.

You've chosen to be here. I don't think you've been on Earth for a while. You've been to other places. You've chosen to be here now because you know that the shift in the planet that's happening is going to require the deepest understanding possible of what light is on all the different levels and essentially the idea of being a clearing house. It's almost like you're standing at the crossroads, answering questions for the travellers as they come by.

Again, this struck me on a deep level. Was that the mission I'd taken on? Was I supposed to help humanity understand itself?

Good luck with that, I thought. I barely understand myself, let alone all of humanity.

Except that Jiayuh had said the same thing in my first reading: "But your records want you to actually have this understanding... what you are doing and the way that you're doing it, is actually pretty valuable… This is part of your mission, in terms of what you are going to be sharing with other people. You have accepted that this is going to be a part of the knowledge that you're going to spread and share when the time is right for you."

I flashed back to the day I wrote that viral story about failure when I was twenty-two. I'd never experienced such effortless success. I simply articulated the truth of my life experience, posted it on Facebook, and it instantly struck a chord with people. There was no struggling or striving for it. It was just pure flow.

I pressed play.

There's a very interesting part of your soul that doesn't need to share, doesn't really like to share. You're happy to do things by yourself. And so you meet resistance when something really needs more than one person. I don't know if they have these in Australia, but do you know what a children's teeter-totter is? You've got to have two kids for the teeter-totter. One kid on the teeter-totter, they're not going anywhere. They're going down, and when they go down, they stay there because they need that other balance.

Part of it is that the balance comes from seeing that you have two natures. One is like a studious monk, a scholarly monk that wants to hide themselves in the abbey library and just delve into all the knowing that's there, and just research and learn and research and think and ponder. And if you get up and go anywhere, it's to go halfway around the world to a special location that's got the secret code for whatever book you've just found. In other words, there is this part of you that just wants to be in your own world of understanding and concern.

But then there is another part of you. And it's in your soul but in this lifetime it's also coming very much out of who you are physically (and they say they're going to talk about that later)... it's that you also have a very friendly personality. And when you're not worried about your library and whether you're going to get enough time to study, you can sit in the coffee shop and enjoy just hanging out with people. And people are coming and going and talking to you, and you get up and talk to someone else, and come back and order another cup of coffee or whatever. And so for you travelling is very much that process. In fact, you like travelling because you can get out and have some exchanges with people but you're going to be moving on, and they're going to be moving on, so it doesn't require a long-term commitment. And that's all good. But what they think you're missing is the idea that you can protect the library, even while you're having all of these conversations with people.

Nailed it, I thought. That is scarily accurate.

I continued.

The other reason why you may feel light-headed or spacey or whatever, is you basically agreed to take on enough physical form to be here, but not anymore. It's not that you aren't grounded and centered, or that you can't be grounded or centered... it's sort of the difference between grounding a big rock and grounding a huge boulder. So instead of coming in with the boulder you came in with the rock. And that's your choice and you can do that because you know the rules of the game, you understand how this all works. And because you've had such an incredibly intense experience as photon, as light, so you understand what it is to ground and center light with a minimum of physical weight. You don't have to have the big boulder. Most of us have to have the big boulder. But it does mean, at least occasionally, that you're a little bit not here.

Me: Yeah, my parent's call it The Nikki Bubble. "She's off in the bubble again."

Cheryl: Oh, that's funny. My daughter used to call it Never Never Land. "Oh, Mom's off in Never Never Land."

But that's what you agreed to. You have that ability because of the age of your soul to make that request. It's not that you're not here to learn things, or that there aren't things that are going to be problematic for you, but this life isn't about finishing karma or something like that. You did that a long time ago. Been there, done that, got the certificate. You don't need it anymore. So this life comes with a different perspective and a different set of priorities.

Well that explains a lot, I thought. Zac is always calling me a savant. I'll say something intelligent, then walk straight into a wall.