The Life Review

Answering what a life review is, why some people fear it, why spirits experience it, and why learning about this might change how you live life now.

Mar 14, 2023

After we die, one of the most significant events we experience upon our arrival back home in the spirit world is known as a life review. This is where we (as spirits) revisit our entire lifetime from beginning to end, taking special notice of the significant events that hold important lessons for us.

This article explains what the life review process is, why it’s important to understand it, and the true benefits of this experience for people in spirit. I also tell a true story that sheds light on a common misperception about life reviews and why learning about this now might change how you live your life.

To begin, the life review will remind us of all the wonderful deeds we did to help others. If we helped an elderly woman cross the road, we might revisit that. If we volunteered at a homeless shelter, we might revisit that too. If we smiled at a stranger one day, that also might be an act we review. And if we prayed for the sake of others or gave a kidney to save another person’s life, we would most definitely review those acts as well.

The life review process also gives us omniscient reflection to observe what the people we affected during our lifetime were thinking and feeling when we interacted with them. We might feel the sense of security felt by the elderly woman as we walked across the road together, as well as the gratitude she felt in her heart. We might see how our work at the shelter affected a homeless girl by helping her to eat a daily meal or find a place to sleep. And our simple smile at the stranger might have stopped that person from completing suicide because he felt a connection with another person that he hadn’t felt in weeks.

At the other end of this life review process, we also observe how our choices, words, and actions negatively affected others. If we teased and tormented a boy in school, we will know firsthand how that affected him during that time and throughout his lifetime. We will feel his emotions or any physical pain we caused him. And if we took our frustrations out on a taxi driver one morning, we would know how our words affected his day (and possibly his life) and feel the emotions our choices ignited within him.

The life review will also show us the ripple effect of our choices, words, and actions. If the boy we teased grew up to hurt others, we will know the experiences of those people too, with the understanding that we played a part in it. If the taxi driver spread negativity to all his customers that day following his hurtful interaction with us, we will see how this affected those people and then how those people affected others and so on until the ripples diminish.

This works in the positive too. So if the person whose life was saved by our donated kidney lives on to positively affect the lives of others, we will know these effects with a deep understanding of whatever part we played in it.

There are no spiritual beings sitting in judgment during our life review, although many of us feel a sense of shame and criticism toward ourselves during this experience. Since we are beings of love, we can be harsh judges of our own behavior because it goes against everything we are as spiritual beings. Of course, this is one of the challenges of having a human experience. We discover what it’s like to live in a dimension filled with fear, stress, and anxiety, as opposed to living in the love, peace, and tranquility of the spiritual dimension.

This being true, there are people in spirit who have taken on the job of supporting us during the life review. They help us to understand and learn from our misdeeds, and they teach us how to forgive ourselves and grow from our errors. Since we also have good deeds and positive acts that balance the behavior prompting our self-judgment, these spiritual beings remind us of these kind deeds to help us heal our shame and regret about the negative ones.

I experienced a life review during what’s called a life-between-lives regression (also known as a spiritual regression). This type of regression begins with a past life and then continues after your death in that lifetime as you travel in the spirit world—the life between lives. In this regression, I remembered an experience I had in the spirit world following a human lifetime in the 1600s. I experienced this life review in the presence of spiritual guides who referred to themselves as the Council of Elders. I’ll never forget the unconditional love, forgiveness, and compassion I felt from these higher spiritual beings. The experience was immensely powerful.

I remember how much these spirit guides (the elders) comforted me as I went through my life review process and felt horrendous regret and self-loathing for mistakes I made in that lifetime. Still, I was the only person (spirit) judging my past behaviors. And while my own judgment was chastising in itself, these elders helped me turn my self-judgment around so that I learned from my mistakes and grew from them.

Give a gift subscription

While it’s clear that reviewing one’s lifetime during the life review can be quite an emotional undertaking, we shouldn’t think that it’s all bad. There are positive aspects to the life review as well. Spirits are multifaceted beings, meaning they are learning and growing from their human experiences from many different angles at the same time. I have a story to tell you that puts this into perspective.

I once had a reading with a medium where my father in spirit came through expressing regret and sadness for things he’d done in his lifetime. At the exact same moment, my wife, Melissa, was getting a reading with a different medium where my father came through expressing joy, love, and excitement regarding his lifetime.

Interestingly, Melissa and I were in the same building when my father came through to each of us. We could even see one another from across the room as my father was giving us drastically different messages at the same moment.

Since both mediums gave us compelling evidence that they were in fact communicating with my father, what this taught me is that my father was able to choose his point of reference depending upon the person getting the reading (in this case, depending upon whom he was communicating with—Melissa or me).

With Melissa, he was referencing experiences about his life that made him joyful. With me, he was referencing experiences in his life that made him regretful. He presented himself differently in order to convey the distinct message he had for each one of us. He wanted Melissa to know that she was like a second daughter to him whom he loved and adored. He wanted me to know that he had regrets regarding his alcoholism and felt sad about how that affected me.

We can learn a lot from these simultaneous readings that Melissa and I experienced. For instance, one might have interpreted my reading by saying that my father was still in a transitionary period in the afterlife because he was feeling regret for things he’d done that had negatively affected me. But when considering the two readings together, it leads one to conclude that my father is learning and growing from all the events of his life concurrently. He’s neither in a regretful and sad transition nor a joyful and excited transition; he’s simply experiencing it all at the same time—no transitionary period necessary.

In the spirit world, we are so multifaceted that there are countless parts of us that deal with every aspect of our choices as a human being. On one level, we’ll feel deep regret for doing something that hurt someone. On another level, we’ll feel fulfillment for the things we did that helped people. On another level, we’ll feel sadness and compassion for our surviving loved ones grieving our loss. On another level, we’ll feel peace for being back home in the afterlife.

We are multilayered spiritual beings, so we experience our entire lifetime from many different perspectives, bringing up a variety of emotions. What the life review teaches us more than anything, however, is that one cannot sum up a single lifetime as either good or bad. There are good people who do bad things and bad people who do good things. A lifetime that extends for twenty, forty, and especially eighty years, is a blend of all the positive acts, all the negative acts, and all the neutral acts that took place over each minute of each day of each year in that lifetime. When we die and experience our life review, we will re-experience those actions and learn from each one of them.

This is the purpose of having a human life from a spirit’s perspective, and that is the purpose of having a life review—to remember, to learn, and to grow from ALL our experiences, not just the few that are highlighted in our obituaries or one person’s memories of us.

People often tell me that learning about the life review encourages them to be kinder, more compassionate, and more generous human beings. It’s one of the ways that learning about life after death indirectly affects how we interact with one another. Almost like a positive side effect, by understanding our true nature as spiritual beings we unconsciously become better human beings.

Thanks for reading my article,
Bob Olson

Bob Olson Connect: Afterlife Investigator

Discussion about this post