Theresa Dominguez Weiss’s “Deathwalker”

“Not many would be brave enough to venture inside the Great Pyramid to be in complete darkness for 3 hours, where allegedly Napoleon Bonaparte spent the entire night and refused to ever reveal what he experienced. Most of us spend our entire lives avoiding these mystifying places. For author and retired Family Nurse Practitioner Theresa Dominguez-Weiss though, the veil between the spiritual and physical realms has usually been thin. Growing up in a Mexican-American family with seven siblings she knew of Dia de los Muertos and her grandmother always taught her to have a listening ear to the subtle, secret buzz of the invisible.

But all this still didn’t prepare Theresa for what happened when her beloved Grandma Rosie called on her at the moment she died. This mystical supernatural encounter shook Dominguez-Weiss to her core and she completely suppressed it in her mind. The memory started bubbling up seventeen years later. One afternoon she sat down and the entire memory came pouring out as the now first chapter of the book. Once this was penned, the rest of her book, “Deathwalker- Journeys of Life, Death & Beyond,” seamlessly came together.

This fascinating book chronicles her shamanic spiritual experiences and includes Dominguez-Weiss’ travels to Power Places, a term she and her late husband Toby coined, denoting locations that are man-made or nature sites holding a special feeling or mystique to them. These experiences, she affirms, have been paramount to her transformative, personal growth.

How did you find your voice as a writer?

With “Deathwalker” I feel like it was thrust upon me, and I became sort of obsessed with it. I’ve loved to write ever since I was young, kept a diary, a journal that sort of thing. However, I would never say I was an author or a writer. But I always loved to write whenever I was inspired or by something I was experiencing at the moment. I’d write on napkins, pieces of scrap paper, whatever I could get my hands on at the moment. Remember this was pre-mobile phone days! However, even now I enjoy writing on paper instead of typing on my laptop or my mobile.

In 1999, seventeen years later after my experience with Grandma Rosie, I was running our Power Places conference in Crete with the theme of “Life, Death & Beyond.” One afternoon the memory of what happened the moment when she died bubbled to the surface. I went to my hotel room and the first chapter came out.

I was extremely close to my beloved Grandma Rosie growing up. The moment she died, my spirit met her spirit and I walked her to what I call the OtherSide, the first place we go to where we die. And then I came back. Thus, the book title, “Deathwalker-Journeys of Life, Death & Beyond.” ]