About Sharmaine
There was a time when I thought I knew exactly where my life was headed.
Then I died.
During COVID, I had a near-death experience.
On the other side, I was enveloped in the energy of love and supported by warm lights. Never in my life had I experienced such a sense of peace, calm and wholeness. Being held in an energy so complete made leaving the last thing I wanted to do. But I had a nine-year-old daughter.
So I begged to return. I fought to come back. And I was allowed to return as my soul reached an agreement with Spirit. My new mission and purpose would be to return and do this work.
There was one thing I would discover without a doubt:
we are never, ever alone.
I also knew I could not simply return to the life I had been living as though nothing had happened.
But knowing your life needs to change and knowing how to change it are two different very things.
I did not have a five-year plan.
Slowly over that next year, I began unhooking myself from a life and career path I had spent decades building. I sold my house and quit my job.
I was learning how to live a different kind of life—one shaped more consciously by Spirit, my intuition, and a calling I could no longer set aside. A year later, I moved to Sedona sight unseen.
I had to learn how to listen differently.
I have always had strong intuitive abilities, even in childhood. After my NDE, they intensified. My psychic senses moved into overdrive. Knowledge poured in, ancient and earthy, from another lifetime or the other side.
The deeper I went, the more important discernment, boundaries, spiritual protection, and grounding became.
As my relationship with Spirit has continued to deepen, so has my understanding that spiritual practice asks us to stay open without losing our way.
Making Meaning of a Life
I believe our experiences have purpose—especially the difficult ones.
We may not understand that purpose while we're living through them. Sometimes meaning comes later, as we have the space to look back, see the patterns, and understand our experiences differently. Helping people make meaning of their experiences is central to my work.
My life has not followed a straight path.
I have faced darkness and come through it again and again—sometimes because I chose change, sometimes because life left no other way forward, and sometimes on nothing more than pure faith.
But there has also been extraordinary joy.
Serendipity that revived my hope. Abundance I could never have planned. Experiences that were nothing short of miracles. Moments of grace that arrived quietly and carried me through things I could not have carried alone.
Both the beauty and the difficulty have taught me the same thing:
keep your heart open.
Teacher. Writer. Storyteller. Guide.
Long before I started A Light Grows Brighter, I was interested in understanding how people exercised power in their lives.
For years, my work centered on culture, identity, justice, and social change. I pursued those questions through a PhD in Sociology, a law degree, and a BA in Women’s Studies.
Over time, my search for the seat of power led me somewhere I had not expected:
inside.
“ I believe each of us has the capacity to consciously create what comes next. ”
Sometimes we come to this work because something extraordinary has happened and we want to understand it. Sometimes we come because something hurts. Sometimes life has changed without our permission and we are trying to understand who we are now. And sometimes there is simply a quiet knowing:
There must be more.
I believe there is.
That’s what I mean by soul growth.
It’s not a destination.
It’s the ongoing work of understanding who we are and the power we carry.
It’s learning to recognize divine love within and around us, and align our power with it.
It’s the practice of bringing that understanding into how we live.
It’s the work I have been gifted, and I am grateful to keep learning, growing, and returning to it—again and again.