Creating Tremida: The Start of a Heaven

I wish I knew the exact day Tremida started. The honest truth is that I don’t… But I know how it began.

I believed in spirituality, but I was also a staunch skeptic. If it didn’t have some sort of scientific foundation, it was up for debate. I’ve been a fan of the paranormal since I was a kid, passing around photos of “ghosts” at my Catholic school and ordering books about Wiccan culture with my mom’s credit card off Amazon. Sorry, mom.

I researched the ouija board with my husband, which included transcribing my conversations with wayward souls with the stoicism of a census taker. I read heavily into lucid dreaming and astral projection, avidly watched all the ghost hunting shows, and mentally catalogued all the spiritual experiences on Coast to Coast AM. 

When I started learning about meditation in 2013, I was part of a paranormal investigations group as well as a private investigations company. By day, I watched videos of the living. By night, I was watching footage of the dead. The irony is not beyond me. 

And I hated my day job. I sat in my stress and anxiety all day, twisting inside as I listened to videos of my boss snarling perversely at the people he was stalking with his camcorder. The only thing that kept me there was the fact that I was mostly left to my own devices. I felt sick all the time, and I couldn’t escape that feeling of injustice that was constantly with me.

But every day, when I came home, I would plop down in the sun on the living room floor and sprawl out like a cat. I calmed down, letting my thoughts run aground and losing all the steam from my anger and frustrations in soft, long breaths. I remember the first time I meditated, I burst into tears. Is this normal? I thought. I decided I was getting it all out, all the nonsense that I was swallowing down inside every day. It’s like vomiting up years of poison all at once.

The next day, I cried again, but a little less. Okay, I thought. I’m getting somewhere. 

Thirty minutes a day became an hour a day. I became so good at meditating–reaching that calm, rhythmic stream of thoughts–that I started introducing new methods. One thing I had heard a lot about on Channeling Erik and through Jamie Butler was opening up one’s “3rd eye” and “awakening your Kundalini.”

Mysterious! I must try this.

I listened to the professionals. “Imagine energy running down through you, around and back, and out the top of your head.” After a few tries, I could feel it. There was a pressure between my brows, and a strange heat on the apples of my cheeks, my forehead, and the tops of my shoulders… As if I was sitting in the sun. 

Soon, I started having out-of-body experiences at night, lucid dreams, and strange sleep aberrations, such as seeing through my eyelids when waking up. Strange, I thought. I tried to understand why it was happening. How is this possible? The scientist was still alive in me yet.

There was power in imagination. It wasn’t the act of just imagining. It was the intention behind it. I had wanted something, and in imagining it, things were happening. There is a term for this that is worth researching: the Law of Attraction. Similar energy attracts similar energy. I actually didn’t learn about the Law of Attraction until much later, but in essence, that was what I was experiencing.

Okay, so what can I do with this?

I loved visual meditation. There was no form of escape more powerful to me than putting myself in a field of flowers or in a car in the rain. One if my favorite visualizations was sitting in a car in the back lot of some nondescript building in the pitch darkness of night. The orange glow of the sodium-vapor lamps were the only light. I played a YouTube video of rain hitting a car windshield, and I drifted into this world of night. 

Over time, it became so real to me that I could see the shimmery raindrops; feel the leather steering wheel of the modest, old sedan; and smell the damp blacktop through the vents. Don’t ask why I didn’t pick a nicer car. Even in my visualizations where I could choose anything I wanted, I tried to keep it true to what I could afford. Nice one, Jen.

When I started inviting other souls to join me, I created a different environment. This is the first time I gave an environment a name: the Veil. The Veil was a marble hall, cloaked in billowy white sheets like a tent high above me. I sat on a marble bench. There was a trickling pool of water at my feet. Across from me was a massive planter from which a tree grew. Its branches unfurled above me. It gave me something to look at when I was trying to open my 3rd eye. To my far right was a sheer, flowing curtain. Beyond it, I imagined heaven, with its splendid white light. 

I called out to anyone beyond the Veil who would listen. “Hello?” 

Sometimes, I would get a response, and someone I knew would step through.

Then, I started focusing on crafting more complex environments. I had done the visual and the audible. Now I wanted to focus on feeling things. I created a small room with a crackling fireplace flanked by two windows. Above the fireplace was a mantle. Daily, I would walk up to the mantle and ask myself what I was touching. The first thing I felt was a vase, so I told myself about the vase. I ran my hands over the form, trying to feel what it was like. I revisited the vase every day, and slowly, I built the room around me. There were shelves of books, artifacts, and candelabras. I even extended the room to include a balcony and a loft. 

Eventually, I placed this room in a stone manor house in a place I called “the Gloaming.” But that was after Tremida.

Then came the first seedling of Tremida. I liked the Veil, the car in the rain, and the fireplace room, but I needed an outdoor environment. I positioned myself in a wicker chair on the porch of a cabin, feet up on the railing. Rain trickled off the roof. Beyond, I saw an endless green forest and a gravel road where anyone could drive up if they wanted to.

I put a wicker chair beside me, just in case anyone wanted to join me in my silence. Sometimes, I could smell a smoldering cigarette or coffee, and I knew someone was there. Then, I would focus on the chair beside me to see who it was. 

After a particularly horrible day, I decided to expand on this environment. I went inside the cabin for once to see what was inside. First, I created a table. I ran my hands over it, willing it to be real. Then, I created a bookshelf. I began pulling books off the shelf, reading to myself a story from my own imagination. I even created newspapers that only had good news, wishing to escape the dark reality of the pandemic and the world around me. 

Slowly, the cabin began to grow and have atmosphere. It had a real sense of space and proportion. After time, I felt familiar presences, like lingering shadows around me. I didn’t speak to them at first, not wishing to engage them. I was often in a bad mood when I visited the cabin, and I found it hard to entertain guests. I would sometimes read aloud or explain what I was doing if they asked, but I tried to focus on whatever task I was pursuing foremost. 

At one point, I decided this place needed a name. I mulled over words that came and went, and suddenly, it came to my mind: Tremida.

Tremida? I didn’t understand what it was, but it sounded like a real word. I looked it up.

It is synonymous with “trembling,” “fluttering,” and “shaking.” How strange that I thought of this word that I had no sense or understanding of. I never even took Spanish in high school. 

I liked it, so it stuck. I created a lake out in front of the cabin, and out in the middle of the lake, I created a massive waterfall that trembled the shore. Tremida. 

Slowly, it all took form. I worked my way around the cabin, plotting a fireplace, a mantle, bookshelves, couches, tables, an entire kitchen… I even touched the windows, measuring the thickness of the glass and how it sounded when I tapped on it.

Other souls joined me, and I established a small team of contributors. What had started as a porch grew into a second home for us all. The interior of the cabin itself even grow to accommodate us. Through God/Source energy, Tremida was elected to be fortified as a consensus environment. Souls began sharing their stories of Tremida to me and how they saw it on the other side. They corrected my lack of logic in some areas and made special requests in others. I even helped them create their own homes in Tremida in the style of their choosing. 

I am continuing to learn about the afterlife through Tremida. It has become something of a natural classroom and not just a place to hang-out and relax. It is my intention to continue to share this place with others, and I hope someday to meet my fellow adventurers there.