Pondering Past Lives

Have you ever thought about your past lives?

I know past lives are an edgy topic. If you are a highly intuitive person, you have probably pondered them, maybe had some flashbacks, or perhaps you have been to a regression therapist and have seen some of your lives. If you are a more logical person, chances are, this topic strikes you as pretty far out there—the fluff stuff of junk magazines.

I’m the former. I discovered late in life that I am strongly intuitive, and I’m still learning what that means. Past lives are one of my fascinations in the world of intuition, and I have done some past life regressions that I’m going to share here along with my questions and even some skepticism. So fasten your seat belts, and let’s take a life journey!

Before I get into my experiences, let me share a light article that explains why knowing about past lives can be helpful even if you don’t believe in them. The article points out that a regression can be emotionally therapeutic. After visiting one especially joyous life that ended in a terribly traumatic way, I realized I had brought some of the grief of how that life ended into this one, so visiting that life helped me work through my otherwise inexplicable grief. It was a very beneficial way of seeing an underlying emotional pattern in my present life and releasing that trauma.

Experiencing lives may also fulfill psychological needs. In my case, I tend to have powerful emotions and strong connections with others. Perhaps the past life experience is a way of expressing my feelings about my friends and loved ones and the desire for close connection. I do experience these visions as cathartic in some way, so they could very well be a way that my mind expresses and heals itself. Here’s an additional article describing the emotional benefits of a regression.

Another reason to know about past lives is simply soul growth. Our souls appear to be on a mission to mature emotionally and spiritually. Making the lessons of past lives conscious in this life can answer many of our questions and propel us forward psychologically and spiritually.

In my case, inquiring into my past lives revealed to me my strong intuition and capacity for visions. Going through the process with a therapist opened some kind of intuitive door within my psyche. I started having spontaneous visions in meditation, some of which taught me things, others revealed new lives, and still others added scenes and details to lives I already knew about.

This intuitive growth has also made me “magnetic,” drawing information and people to me who can guide me into developing my intuition and spiritual understanding more fully or who I can help in that way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pondered a topic, only to have exactly the right book, article, or podcast synchronistically pop up within a day or two. (Maybe this is what people did before Google! LOL) Even more wonderful, many of my current friends are people with whom I have a strong psychological and spiritual bond and with whom I often exchange important information for our growth.

Another effect of opening my intuitive ability has been to experience an increasing sense of connection, empathy, and oneness. I feel a strong connection now with certain people, animals, and nature that was only an occasional vague experience previously. I mentioned the powerful personal bonds, and I often feel it also with some dogs I meet on the hiking trails being walked by their owners, and with plants, birds, and other life in the forest. I can’t explain it, and I know it sounds strange to the logical mind, but it’s a pleasant side effect of growing intuition that I can connect meaningfully with spiritual friends, acquaintances, and surroundings.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

You may be curious about how a therapeutic past life regression is done. I already had a relationship with a therapist who could do them, so she gave me some brief instructions about how to prepare. She needed to know what questions I wanted to ask about my past lives and if I wanted to inquire about previous lives with certain people in my current life. I gave her a list of people and questions to ask about them. Then on regression day, she had me lie down, and she guided me in a meditation that helped me enter a quasi-hypnotic state. I say “quasi” because I don’t believe I was fully hypnotized since I was fully conscious but clearly in a different state of mind from normal consciousness. The scenes I began to see when she asked me the questions I had given her had a dreamlike quality, but I was fully conscious while seeing them, and they were linear like a story, not jumpy or nonsensically jumbled like a dream. Later I fully and vividly recalled everything I had seen.

So what about those past lives? I’ll be necessarily vague here because most of them involve someone I know, and I want to protect their privacy. Some of these lives came to me during my formal past life regression, and others either came spontaneously or while I was following a recorded regression guided meditation.

In one life, I was a boy living in a small rural community in the 1920s and 30s. I saw myself growing up, playing with a girl with whom I went to church, being friends at various ages, then marrying in that same church, going on our honeymoon, and returning to live with her parents as we started our life together. In a separate meditation later, I saw us together with an infant daughter. We lived in a fairly large cabin on a little piece of farmland, and I saw myself walking to a job at a nearby sawmill. This life was an especially beautiful and fulfilling life that ended tragically when I was drafted and killed in WWII. My wife in the regressed life is known to me in my current life.

I saw a scene from another life in the 1800s in which I had a family and was working a larger farm by hand with a mule and plow. My wife was hanging out laundry while our three children played outside the house. I could see the details of my family, the house, and land very clearly. My wife was someone I know in my current life.

Another life was a brief scene at a ball at the court of one of the French Louis kings around perhaps 1700. I was in my early 20s and dressed like a nobleman, and I was dancing a minuet with a lady friend who was also dressed in the very fancy costume of a young noble woman. The lady friend is a friend in my current life.

For another life, I saw myself as a Native American boy who was apprenticed to a shaman as his helper. The shaman was a friend in my current life. I saw us gathering plants in the forest. He was telling me what each one was called and what its purpose was and leading us in a little ceremony as we respectfully harvested each plant. We spent the day boiling the plants into a drink for a ceremony that night. At the ceremony, I saw us with a small group of men seated around a fire inside a large hut. The shaman passed a bowl of our drink to me and instructed all of us to take one long sip. I took a drink and passed the bowl around the circle so each man could drink. We sat staring into the fire, waiting for the drink to take effect. When it did, we had a powerful group psychedelic experience in which we saw ourselves far out in space observing galaxies in the center of the group instead of a fire! For me it was the first time, and the shaman looked at me and exclaimed, “Now you understand!” The impression I have now is that we were seeing through the eyes of our souls which are one with the divine. Essentially, we saw the universe from a divine perspective. The shaman was a friend in my current life who confirms resonating with this life.

In another life, I was a young girl holding my father’s hand as we walked through the streets of ancient Jerusalem. My father was someone I know in my current life who confirms believing this was a real life together. We sat on the dirt at the back of a large crowd waiting to listen to someone speak. The speaker rose and began talking about how to live a life of love and godliness. It was Jesus. After the talk, we walked home to an adobe house with an awning out front where my father had a blacksmith shop, and I walked around the back and went in through the back door.

In my most recent regression meditation, I saw myself on the streets of a large city, possibly New York, possibly around the year 1900. I walked up to and entered a large building and found my way to a classroom where I sat down among my peers who were all boys. We were all Jewish with curls of hair at the temples, round black Jewish hats, and wearing black knee pants and jackets. The instructor came in and began teaching, and I recognized him as someone I know in this life. Later, after dark we were still in the building and he lit a candle and was leading us in a ceremony. I am not sure, but we may have been boys who lived at the school, like an orphanage, and the teacher may have lived there also.

That’s it for the lives I’ve experienced so far. Some were just brief scenes, and others were very detailed with multiple scenes. All were vivid, and I recognized people important to me in my current life as key characters in the past lives. The lessons I take away from this are that it’s all about loving, learning, and growth. In every case, I felt I was learning valuable insights that my soul would take with it into future lives. I also felt that some souls are especially beloved to us and are intertwined with ours. We apparently agree to keep meeting each other in life after life. I believe we do this so the souls we love and are close to can grow together. We learn together how to struggle through the difficulties of human life until we master it, psychologically and spiritually. Most importantly, we learn to love one another in a profound and perfect way as part of our connection with the divine. Undoubtedly there is much more to know about the purpose of this process, but I’m still working on it.

Questions? I have many! Are these lives real or just the product of an overstimulated imagination? Are they like dreams, allowing us to process and understand situations and emotions? If they are real, and they occur in the past, how does that work with Einstein’s statements that time is an illusion? Are we actually living in multiple lives simultaneously in different time-space dimensions, and these are glimpses beyond the curtain? Or are all lives and all of these “realities” just illusions, including the current one, and we are simply souls residing in the soul realm and having dreams together—or alone? Is the point to mature to a level where we can permanently leave earthly life and reside forever in the soul realm or “heaven”?

On a practical level, why am I connected to certain souls, what agreements do we have at the soul level that keep bringing us together, how do I meet up in this life with the souls I am close to? I think “magnetism” and synchronicity have a lot to do with it. These processes bring us together, life after life, but I am still learning to understand and cooperate with that mechanism. At the very least, when it happens, I know it. I feel a powerful draw to the souls with whom it happens. The power of the drawing seems to depend on how important we are to each other as souls, how significant our spiritual mission is together. In every case, it feels loving, amazing, dramatic, pre-destined, and kinda wonderfully spooky, and also cathartic and in some way psychologically fulfilling or meaningful.

Before closing, I want to mention an essential source for any discussion of past lives. Dr. Brian Weiss is the foremost authority on life regression. As a psychotherapist, he stumbled into past lives when his clients told him about past life experiences while under hypnosis. He was at first highly skeptical, but after seeing many cases, he became convinced these experiences are real. He has now worked with thousands of clients to do regressions. I have not read his books yet, but they are on my book list.

Let’s wrap it up there. Do you resonate when you consider any of the above? Are there thoughts you’d like share or questions you’d like to ask me, or each other, or put out there for the universe to answer? Please feel free to share your comments. I can’t wait to read them!