Capítulo 8. Sanar.

CAPÍTULO 8. SANAR

Healing

Every human being is the author of his own health or disease.  SWAMI SIVANANDA SARAWATI

Although I am specifically focusing on clients with health issues in this chapter, nearly all clients experience some aspect of healing. Even people who undertake a regression out of curiosity can reap the healing benefits of their experience. Paula, who you met in an earlier chapter, received confirmation that she was on track with her life. Although such a change is subtle, she was healed of any doubts about her direction, enabling her to approach her life with renewed vigor.

Some people, however, do suffer from pain or serious health issues. Usually they want to know why they have these health issues, and what they can do to reduce their suffering.

Here are some cases of people who were facing a range of health challenges. I have also included more general information and suggestions that the Council of Elders have given to people with health issues.

Mauricio

Mauricio is only in his thirties but he has already experienced a rare cancer. He had undergone several rounds of chemotherapy and the cancer had gone into remission. However his doctor was still concerned, and Mauricio was about to have more tests. His doctor had flagged the possibility he might need another round of chemotherapy. Mauricio was not sure if that would be wise.

For his current life, Mauricio had chosen a sensitive body that was prone to illness. In the chapter, Body Selection, you will discover the reasons behind his choice.

During his session, Mauricio asked the Council of Elders for advice on how to manage his body. He was told he had two choices. He could remain incarnate, or he could leave. The Council advised him of the steps he needed to take if he wished to heal.

Be careful with toxins and make sure you detox regularly. You need to detox emotionally, spiritually and physically. This means keeping the energy flowing. Beware of emotional and energy blockages.

Your body is sensitive to illness and also sensitive to healing. You can heal yourself. You need to meditate and tap into a higher consciousness. If things haven’t gone too far, the body can be healed.

All healing is possible but if the body has been damaged [such as cartilage destroyed in a joint] then you need a stronger intent. You need to believe in your healing one hundred percent. You have to have no doubts.

Meditate, visualise, feel the healing, feel healed, bring the healing into being. Whether you use medicine to reduce the pain or not, the main thing is to not get into the fear.

Those who act healthy and feel healthy are healthy.

When the Council referred to toxins, they were not just talking about unhealthy food or poisons (such as chemotherapy) taken into the body. The Council was also referring to toxic people. Around the time that Mauricio had developed the cancer, he had experienced a year of conflict. This conflict occurred within his extended family when a relative embarked on a path of fraud and deception. Some members of the family were taken in by this man, while others were not. The conflict split the family apart. Mauricio and his wife had recently emigrated to get away from all the tension.

Xelu

Xelu is in his sixties. He is a health professional who has helped many people. Sheer curiosity led him to seek out a regression. He mentioned that he was on dialysis for kidney failure. He was generally very accepting of this physical challenge, saying he had found ways to get on with his life in spite of the illness. He was not seeking a cure but he wondered why he had fallen ill. During the session, he was given his answer.

I chose my kidney failure. I get the feeling I had to clear out all the shit I was carrying. I had cruel parents. Even though, through their cruelty and pain, I learned about love. The kidney failure has made me more patient and tolerant. I have to go on dialysis every few days and sit for hours. It is an interesting disease. You know you are terminal, but not yet. I am being told that feeling unwell will come and go. My journey is to experience many possibilities. It is just another experience. The most important thing is to enjoy the journey. I will not let [my illness] bother me.

At a soul level, Xelu chose his illness because it presented a challenge. It seems that many souls choose such challenges. What he learned during his session confirmed this for Xelu and helped him make peace with his illness.

Elisa

Elisa was very depressed and sometimes indulged in self-harming behavior. She wondered what she needed to do to change her unhappiness.

Early in our discussion before the regression, I noticed the rigidity of her views. During the session, her rigidity turned to resistance. She kept saying she thought she was making it all up. Somehow, this notion filled her with fear—a fear that knowing she was making it up would only deepen her depression. But as we proceeded further into the trance, she was given information to help her change.

I create my reality. I know that is true. I have to give up my limiting beliefs to be able to create a better reality. I am very negative. I don’t think I am good enough. This is coming from my thought patterns. My father’s treatment of me is part of it. My father was a blamer. His father was a blamer. My mother’s family was full of blamers. This victim attitude has come down the ancestral line.

One part of me wants to change and another part doesn’t. The resistant part wants to stay as it is because it feels familiar. I can feel it in my body. My neck is tense and painful.

I am being told to open up, make space, expand and allow the feelings to be in my body.

Elisa started crying quietly and continued to cry for some time as she worked through those generations of blame and grief.

I can see that sad little me that I was. I can feel her sadness... I am giving it space... Now I am holding her hand. I feel at peace with this reconnection.

I am being told I am to be much more gentle with myself. I need to be less negative. I can do this by accepting the negativity and giving it space. I am to do what I sense is right for me and not to worry about what anyone else thinks.

Elisa felt greatly drained after this session, but she was on her way to increased self-acceptance and reduced negativity. She could heal her depression and self-harming behavior if she continued to practise what she had been given.

Xabel

Xabel was extremely overweight and suffered a number of other illnesses due to this. His doctors pointed to his weight as the main problem. He wanted to know why he struggled so much with food and what he could do about it.

One of his past lives is described in the chapter, Do Our Past Lives Affect This Life? In that life he lived as a noble, using food as a weapon to control his peasants. He hated the injustice of some people having more than others, even though he was born into wealth.

He experienced a previous life in a Nordic country around 800 A.D. where food again was an issue.

In this Nordic life, he was a woman who struggled to find enough to eat. She built up a lot of anger over the injustice of a few having so much and the peasants having so little. She and her husband intended to steal from a wealthy man. However, their intended victim failed to arrive at their carefully-chosen place of ambush, and so their plan was aborted. She never tried to steal again, even though starving remained a threat throughout this life. She had children and sometimes she went hungry in order to feed them.

In another past life, Xabel was an intelligent man who rose to great power. He governed a large area of a third world country and did as much as he could to support the masses. But he died disillusioned. He felt he could have done more even though the people were grateful for what he did.

The theme of injustice for the poor and underprivileged ran through all of these lives. In his current life, Xabel still harbours a strong sense of injustice. He is certainly not privileged in this life as he struggles financially, mainly due to limited work opportunities and his poor health.

During the session, Xabel remembered a time when he was six years old and attending a birthday party for one of his friends. Even though he was only six, he had been putting on weight. He had recently started cutting back on fattening food. At this party, he refused to eat chocolate, lollies or ice-cream and was quite at peace with his choice. He overheard one of the mothers commenting positively on his ability to be so strong and determined. This was a powerful memory. The Council of Elders referred to this memory when advising him how to heal his relationship with food.

The Council said that fundamentally his problem lies in his tendency to see food as offering something other than sustenance. Xabel also uses food to fill his deeper emotional needs, such as the need for punishment, rebellion, comfort and so forth.

He is told that healing is difficult because there are many subtleties involved from many past lives. However, the Council tells Xabel that if he wishes to heal, he needs to use food purely for sustenance—even though he is not fully aligned with that idea yet. This is an area where he needs to continue to challenge himself.

His body is very confused. His appetite is distorted and his stomach doesn’t know when it is full. He doesn’t know what he really needs to eat. Over time, however, as he eats healthily his body will learn these positive new habits, and the old symbolic connections will disappear. There are many resources available that will help him know what to eat and what not to eat. It may challenge him but it is the correct way to proceed.

Cecilia

Cecilia has a brain tumor that is being treated with radiation and chemotherapy. She wants to know why the tumor formed, and how she can help heal it.

When she regresses to her past life, Cecilia discovers she was married to a physically abusive alcoholic. She has carried over hurt and anger from this life. In her present life, her alcoholic father neglected her, paying more attention to his sons than his daughter. Then her husband left her a couple of years before she was diagnosed with the tumor. This compounded the trauma.

Cecilia takes this knowledge into her life between lives. She encounters some wise beings, who explain that tumors represent ‘an accumulation of dense energies’, including the hurt and trauma experienced over many lifetimes.

Cecilia connects with her grief, crying deeply for several minutes. She forgives her father for his neglect, realising he didn’t know how to interact with a daughter. He was rough with the boys but kept his distance from her, because he didn’t want to injure her.

The wise beings explain that illness is useful, because anything the body does is useful. It is a feedback mechanism that tells us what is going on in our psyche. Tumors represent an opportunity to evolve, ‘a gift of lifetimes,’ they say. I ask what is meant by ‘a gift of lifetimes’ and the wise beings reply:

Tumors accumulate from lifetimes of experience. When they manifest in your life, you are given the opportunity to understand the path you have taken. Then you can heal the trauma and let it go.

With any illness, you need to identify the space and time when the trauma was locked in the body. Sit with the ill part of the body focus on it, talk with it and listen so you can understand what it says. Then to help heal illness, visualise it, sense its essence and make peace with it, while at the same time being non-judgmental and accepting.

Fighting the illness, fighting anything that the body creates, is not useful.

Efrén

Efrén is disabled. When he was young, he had an accident that left him a paraplegic. Before this happened, he was an athlete and into extreme sports.

After his accident, Efrén didn't grieve his loss, not for long anyway. He distracted himself from grief and loss by focusing on what he could achieve, rather than on his disability. As he felt comfortable playing sport, he became a wheelchair basketball player, and worked his body hard. Everyone admired his strength of character.

His new focus served him well until he had another accident, this time during a game. The doctors thought he might end up a quadriplegic. He didn't, but while this remained a possibility, Efrén lay in bed thinking. He wondered why the accidents had happened to him. Being told it was ‘God’s will’ didn’t satisfy him. The question became an obsession, and he started looking for answers. Eventually, he heard about life between lives regression.

During the session, he discovers his disability was part of the plan for his current life. He is in the process of developing balance between the physical and non-physical. Some people over-identify with their body, ignoring their spiritual connection. Others focus on the spiritual realms, resisting their physical nature and the realities of our physical world. At an advanced stage of development, souls set out to balance these two contrasting attractions.

Efrén is told he needs to spend time meditating, focusing on his inner world, as well as staying fit and playing sport. This will allow him to find the balance he seeks.

The wise beings explain that many disabilities are planned before we are born, to help the individual grow in some way. For example, being born visually impaired bestows opportunities not available to sighted people. By looking within, blind people can develop their intuition. Their listening skills and their feeling sense are also greatly enhanced.

Marcos

Marcos came to see me because he was feeling emotionally attacked by his ex-wife, complaining that she has never supported him or the children. He is very successful in his career and his new marriage is happy, but his ex-wife is jealous. In her bitterness, she told lies to their teenage children and turned them against him.

He struggled with a major setback in his career at the same time his children became spiteful towards him. Then, his mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Marcos always endeavours to be positive but he was finding it difficult to maintain the act. Underneath he was feeling a tremendous amount of stress. He was self-doubting and negative. Soon after all the stress, he began losing his hearing.

In his life between lives, he is told his negativity caused his hearing problems.

Your negative self-talk and high expectations of yourself are the reasons you lost your hearing. You didn’t want to hear the negativity anymore. If you want to stay healthy, you must stop the negative self-talk and continue meditating. You are burning off a lot of karma by your daily meditation. Keep doing that and your health will improve and stay improved.

Marcos received other useful advice about reconnecting with his children and letting go of his anger at his ex-wife. He left confident that his health would improve, and feeling more at peace with his situation.

Conclusion

Healing appears to be automatic when we are in the realm of our life between lives. As soon as we arrive, we are taken to a center where all heaviness and pain is released. One soul, in his life between lives, was clearly given this message.

When you visit this sacred place, you are cleared of all negativity. You cannot be in this scared place with negativity. Here there is clarity and purity. You choose what you take back to Earth with you. You return cleansed and pure and you need to remain vigilant so you continue to instill clarity and purity into your thoughts and body.

Unfortunately, when we return to Earth after being in our life between lives, some of us pick up our old patterns. Perhaps it takes a very strong soul to permanently wash away the old destructive negativity that we seem to hold in our bodies.

The next time I spoke with Mauricio about his struggle with cancer, he told me that he felt fine. Eventually though, his doctor persuaded him that another round of chemotherapy would be useful to keep the cancer under control. Mauricio had acquiesced. Although I recalled his guides suggesting he be wary of toxins, I said nothing and wished him the best. A few years later, his wife contacted me. Mauricio had passed.

Some of the clients in this chapter were able to instill their new learnings into their physical bodies. Elisa, for example, continued to work with the information she was given in her session. Her health, her relationships and her life improved and she described herself as happy.

Spirit guides tell us healing is possible. We need to change our mindset from pain to comfort, from fear to trust, and from negativity to positivity. Specifically, they said, ‘Those who act healthy and feel healthy, are healthy.’

I decided to implement this advice to address my own health problem. My right hip was so damaged that a specialist said I needed a hip replacement. I had been in pain with this hip for years and I was now only walking when I had to. It had worsened over the last two years and I even used a wheelchair for long distances when I was overseas. I realised that as I walked, I focused on the pain. This is understandable, given that pain seems to cry out for attention. I gave it attention—negative attention.

When I decided to take the guides’ advice, I focused attention on my pain-free left hip, enjoying the freedom of movement in that leg as I walked. Then I imagined my right hip feeling that same freedom. To help, I also mentally repeated the words, ‘strength and comfort’ as I walked.

Whenever I did this, I noticed that the pain in my right hip and leg reduced significantly. Often, I walked without pain. Sometimes I would forget, feel some pain, and fall into my old habit of tightening up against the discomfort.

I managed sufficiently for another three years after the surgeon said I should have my hip replaced. During that time, there were two major improvements in hip surgery that helped make my new hip durable, my operation successful, and my recovery swift.

Capítulo 7. Emociones

 CAPÍTULO 7. ECOS EMOCIONALES

Vea la película de PIXAR sobre las emociones siguiendo este enlace:

Al margen del tema, o no, es interesante en la imagen de la película de PIXAR que las emociones tengan cara. Sí, tenemos caras femeninas para el asco, la felicidad y la tristeza, y masculina (cómo no) para la ira y también para el miedo. En español las emociones solo tienen género GRAMATICAL masculino o femenino (no  tienen genero neutro como ocurre en lengua asturiana y algunas otras lenguas romances) y es necesario señalar que son cosas diferentes el género GRAMATICAL y el género SEXUAL. Las lengua son sexualmente neutras (nunca me encontré con una palabra con pene o vagina, pero nunca se sabe... :) pero no lo son los cerebros de algunos humanos que se empeñan en sexualizar todo, incluso el lenguaje, aunque esta sexualización no es inocente ya que detrás de eso hay un movimiento político de tinte totalitario y avasallador. Que cada uno ponga nombre a ese movimiento.

En idioma inglés, parece razonable que sea una hembra humana la que encarne el asco, la felicidad y la tristeza, mientras que es aceptable que el macho de la especie, (violento según las totalitarias sexualizantes), sea la encarnación de la ira y, para compensar el exceso de testosterona, también el miedo. Está claro que si no hay problemas suficientes, nos inventamos más..... 

Capítulo 6. Entendiendo las Relaciones

Understanding Relationships

There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved. GEORGE SAND, NOVELIST

One of the most difficult challenges we face in our physical lives is navigating our relationships with others. Accessing our past lives and life between lives can shed light on our current relationships by providing us with information about our behavior over many lifetimes.

As we go through life, we develop different strategies for interacting with other people. Some of these strategies serve us well; others may be destructive. Without realising it, we may act out these negative strategies in our intimate relationships. If we keep repeating these strategies, they become a habit, or pattern. Once we become aware of these negative patterns we want to change them. But change can be difficult when the origins of these patterns lie deeply buried in our soul memory.

A regression can illuminate our personal history, and give us a better understanding of our most challenging relationships.

The following case studies show how the insights gained during a session can help us address problems in our current relationships. In addition, some of these case studies show how reliving the past can help us release unwanted, negative emotions.

Lola

Lola realised that she was attracted to needy, pushy people. She came to her session hoping to understand the genesis of this pattern, and why it kept playing out in her life, with predictable results.

In her relationships, she would do everything she could to keep her partners happy. It never worked. No matter how much she gave it wasn’t enough, and her relationships always ended badly. Lola was keen to change this dysfunctional dynamic.

While Lola was in the trance, I asked that she be given the answers she needed. She was guided to the house she lived in when she was seven years old.

Lola is in the lounge room, dancing around in front of her parents and brothers. She’s the fairy princess. As she pirouettes she senses the energy of her aunt, who can be a nasty, pushy woman. The aunt had recently visited the family and had managed, as usual, to greatly upset Lola’s mother. Lola’s mother and the aunt are sisters. The aunt has always been extremely jealous of Lola’s mother, believing her to be more attractive and more popular.

While Lola is dancing, she senses a dark presence behind her. She dares not turn around. Instead, she focuses on the sunlight pouring through the doors and windows. She wants to stay facing the light because it brings her happiness.

I check to make sure that she feels safe and strong. Lola nods. Then, I encourage her to turn around to face that dark energy. She wants her question answered and the answer is there but she has to be brave enough to see it.

She senses a monster behind her. When questioned, she describes it as ghostly and wispy grey, with gnashing teeth.

Eventually she summons up the courage to turn around and face that monster.

When she shifts her attention, Lola sees two older females in the hallway behind her. The hallway is a dark tunnel, and the two women are filled with a sullen desperation. Lola describes them as grinding their teeth and clawing at the walls. Their arms are spread out in wild disarray. Lola stands rooted to the floor, staring, as they advance slowly towards her. She senses the terror that underpins their longing.

She becomes aware that these two women are her grandmothers. They are begging for her forgiveness.

Her paternal grandmother is easy to forgive.

This grandmother died before Lola was born. Lola’s father loved his mother and always spoke kindly of her. The grandmother seems to pick up Lola’s feelings of compassion because she gradually changes colour, from grey through blue, mauve, pink to peach. She slowly fades away and Lola senses that she is now at peace.

Her maternal grandmother is in much more turmoil. She would find it difficult to accept forgiveness, even if it was offered. Although Lola would like to forgive her grandmother, she does not feel forgiving. She has some compelling reasons for her reluctance.

Lola has always sensed a coldness in her mother and her maternal grandmother. She never felt loved by her mother, and she knows her mother never felt love from this grandmother. Lola needs to understand why they were both so emotionally distant.

Suddenly, Lola finds herself in her maternal grandmother’s house. She sees her grandmother as a younger woman, desperately scrubbing clothes on an old scrubbing board. Lola intuitively knows her mother was a child at this time.

Her grandmother’s hands are red and raw. She is washing the clothes of her husband and eight children. She has to get it all done. She is a devout Christian and she must make sure everyone is dressed in clean, neat clothes so they can go to church.

Her entire focus is on pleasing her husband. The Bible says this is her duty. The family goes to mass every morning before they go to school or work. They are all perfectly groomed so others will admire them, and her husband will feel proud of his family.

Every evening they all sit down at the dining table. Lola’s grandmother has prepared the dinner, making sure everything is perfect. After dinner the males sit around and talk while the females clear and wash up. The work for Lola’s grandmother is never ending.

Lola sees that her grandmother is emotionally shut down. Her grandmother feels safe focusing on external appearances. She never stops to notice her feelings or those of her children. Her whole identity is caught up in pleasing her husband and impressing the other churchgoers.

Lola’s mother and the other children, including the nasty aunt, grow up feeling unloved. They all shut down emotionally to varying degrees.

Now that Lola understands, she feels compassion for her grandmother. She opens her arms and hugs her closely, offering deep love and forgiveness. The grandmother sobs. Lola feels her grandmother’s pain and cries too, until all their grief is released.

Lola now sees images from her current life. Everything falls into place. She realises that she spent her childhood turning away from any negativity. Instead, she focused on being as happy and as light as possible. Being positive was her survival strategy. She needed to feel safe, even though she lived with a mother who was clearly disturbed and unable to give her the love she needed.

Lola carried this strategy into adulthood. As a child, she turned a blind eye to her mother’s faults. As an adult, she overlooked the faults of her partners. As a child, she took full responsibility for making her mother happy. Later in life, she believed she had to make her partners happy.

As a result, Lola remained in relationships with pushy and needy people, long after an emotionally healthy person would have left. But pushy and needy people felt familiar to Lola. Her relationships always ended badly because the people she chose as partners were always fundamentally unhappy.

The compulsive desire to keep one’s husband or partner happy was an emotional need that had been passed down her maternal line. At this point in her life, Lola had a young daughter. She was pleased to know she was not going to pass this problem onto her daughter.

Now that Lola understood the genesis of her behavior, she was determined to change. She soon left her abusive partner and started valuing herself. She put healthy boundaries in place so any future partner would treat her and her daughter respectfully.

Pedro

Pedro’s wife encouraged him to undertake a life between lives regression. She’d found her session beneficial, so Pedro decided to give it a go, despite his skepticism.

During the regression, his guide took him back in time to a poignant experience in his current life. He found himself at his mother’s deathbed. He said he remembered seeing hatred in her eyes.

After making this statement, Pedro went silent. I sensed he was receiving some important information. Eventually he spoke.

I am being told that what I saw in her eyes that day was not hate. She saw me coming into the room and she wanted to sit up to greet me. The look in her eyes was pain. She felt a lot of pain while making the effort to sit up. She wanted me to have a good memory of her. She was trying to look after me. She loved me.

I saw what I wanted to see. I felt a lot of guilt. I hadn’t visited her much. I was busy and travelled a lot. Even when she was dying, I didn’t stay long. I thought she was angry at me for not spending time with her. But it wasn’t her. It was all me.

Pedro had tears running down his cheeks. He was relieved his mother loved him and that he no longer had to carry his heavy burden of guilt. He said he was now at peace.

Pedro was genuinely surprised that the regression enabled him to let go of this sad episode in his life.

During regressions, many people are given the opportunity to release emotion from old, unresolved wounds, whether they were inflicted in their current life or in a past life.

Adriana

Adriana wanted to undertake a past life regression because she was caught in an emotional triangle with two other women. Tall and confident, Adriana worked as a social worker, so caring for others came easily to her. She explained how normally she was positive and happy, but this emotional dilemma was bringing her down.

Adriana was deeply committed to her female partner, Erin. Erin had her own successful business and travelled frequently. Adriana and Erin had been together for a decade and were now married.

Two years ago, a new employee, Casandra, started working in Adriana’s workplace. Adriana felt immediately drawn to Casandra and they quickly became good friends.

Although she was very competent in her job, Casandra was sometimes nervous and very talkative. Adriana didn’t mind. When Erin was travelling interstate, Adriana was delighted to have Casandra’s company to go to the theatre, the shops or to chat over coffee.

Right from the beginning, Adriana felt connected to Casandra at a soul level. She felt so comfortable with Casandra, and talked so much about Casandra, that Erin eventually became concerned about the nature of the relationship.

Adriana insisted she was not attracted to Casandra in any sexual way. She only wanted a close, platonic friendship. But it was evident to both Adriana and Erin that Casandra harboured a strong sexual attraction to Adriana.

In their daily life, Erin was making a lot of noise about Adriana’s relationship with Casandra, not understanding why she just didn’t give Casandra up. The arguments were starting to affect their marriage. Adriana wanted to please her life partner but felt an overwhelming sense of grief at the thought of not seeing Casandra again.

Eventually, she agreed to give up her friendship with Casandra but it didn’t last. Adriana received a birthday card from Casandra. Gradually Adriana and Casandra started phoning and texting. Adriana wanted to see Casandra again but before meeting her, she decided she should be honest with Erin.

Erin was devastated. She told Adriana she loved her enough to let her go to be with Casandra if that is what she really wanted. Adriana never wanted to lose her marriage to Erin but she didn’t want to lose Casandra either. She was caught again, right in the middle, feeling that she was being pulled apart.

Adriana sensed that the drama she was playing out with Casandra was karmic. She hoped a past life regression would throw some light on the situation.

The regression took Adriana back to her life as Isa, a young woman who lived in an English town in the 1890s.

I am living with my husband and younger sister in the poorest part of town. The dwellings are small and cold and butted up against each other. The building seems to be set near a cliff and there are many steep steps in the back yard.

Many children in the town are ill. Some die. I am scared for my sister. She is young and frail. She is like a daughter to me. I don’t want her to become ill. I am so anxious, I am frantically cleaning the house. I am also obsessively looking after my sister’s wellbeing. I am preparing special food for her. I am making sure she is dressed warmly. I am not allowing her to go out into the cold and rain. I will do anything to prevent her getting ill.

In spite of all Isa’s efforts, her sister soon begins to ill.

She has developed a fever. Now she is coughing. I am sick with worry. I am doing everything I can to help her. I am coaxing her to drink water and giving her food that she doesn’t want to eat. Now I am sitting beside her. She is in bed and she looks so weak and pale. I pray she won’t be taken, but I can see she is slipping away.

Adriana cries.

She is dead. There is nothing I can do. I can’t believe it. I am so sad. She was so young. She didn’t deserve to die. I miss her so much. My husband is trying to help me but I find no solace in his efforts. I am always crying.

The years pass and I am still crying. I just cannot get over the loss of my dear sister. My husband cannot understand. I am inconsolable.

Isa died at age forty. She was glad to go. It was a life of so much sadness.

I see my sister. The first thing she says is ‘It’s not your fault.’ Everything is all beautiful and white. Now I see my husband passing over and he is sorry for not understanding.

Isa drifts towards the light. Her guide appears, and explains the purpose of Isa’s life.

There was a plan. Isa’s life was about grief, learning to deal with grief. The death of her young sister was the obstacle that Isa was supposed to overcome. She failed. She never got over the loss of her sister.

The guide is telling me that the grief has to be resolved. I am here with you now, sitting in this chair, experiencing all this so I can resolve it.

Isa’s sister is the same soul as Casandra, and Isa’s husband is the same soul as Erin.

The guide is telling me that there is something I need to do. If I want to progress in my current life, I have to do this. It will resolve what was unfinished in Isa’s life. I need to let Casandra go.

Adriana cries deeply for several minutes. Grief is not easy for her. She’d told me earlier how deeply upset she had been when her grandparents died some years ago. Suddenly she feels her grandparents near her.

They are hugging me and telling me how much they love me. I feel so much love from them. It seems like they are really here.

I silently give Adriana time to cry. I know she is feeling the intense feelings of joy, light and love that come from above.

As her grief subsides, Adriana says she can now understand why Casandra’s arrival into her life had created so much turmoil. She now knows for sure that she and Casandra are soul-related. And she knows that she will see Casandra again at the end of her life.

Adriana is also clear that she is meant to be with Erin. In this current life, they are a married couple again. They have an opportunity to experience the love and intimacy they had missed out on in Isa’s life.

Adriana felt peaceful but drained when she came out of the trance. She knew exactly what she was going to do.

Erin will not be home until later. I have an opportunity and I am going to take it. I will visit Casandra on my way home, hug her and say goodbye. The karma from Isa’s life is finished.

Adriana’s intuition was correct. There were important soul relationships in play in her current life as well as unresolved issues from a past life. Once Adriana had freed herself from the past life grief and understood her purpose this life, she was easily able to implement the changes needed to get her life back on track.

Llarina

Llarina, aged forty-one, sought a past life regression to gain more clarity about her current life. She specifically wanted to understand her relationship with Enol, a fifty-four-year-old divorcé with whom she was living. Although Llarina loved Enol, at times he could be nasty and abusive. He was easily offended, and responded viciously when triggered. His previous wife had been unfaithful and had cheated him out of money, so he was not very trusting.

Llarina regresses easily to her past life as a woman aged twenty, named Mara. Her bare feet are covered with a dark blue robe. This robe completely covers her from head to toe with just a slit near her eyes so she can see. She is alone inside a house with open windows. Looking out a window, she sees nothing but sand and desert. She notes that the climate is very hot and dry. She can see other houses and feels she belongs to some sort of community. The houses are made out of an earthy material and all look the same.

Although she lives in this house and feels at home, Mara knows it is not her house. She takes care of it and the man who lives there. He is Ajmad, aged forty. Although they have a sexual relationship, they are not married.

Mara does everything she can for Ajmad because she owes him.

From the age of three through to sixteen she lived with relatives who disrespected and mistreated her. Mara is light-skinned while her relatives are darker. They make it clear that they deeply dislike her and her light-skinned mother. She doesn’t know why her mother left when she was three, and has been waiting many years for her to return.

Ajmad is a business associate of her relatives. He visited their home many times over the years and saw the way Mara was treated. Although Ajmad is a hard man, he didn’t like the way the males in the household looked at Mara as she grew older.

When she is sixteen, he tells her the truth that her relatives have been keeping from her. Her mother is dead. She died when Mara was three. Mara grieves deeply for her dead mother. Ah-mad offers to buy her off her relatives and take her with him. She cannot forgive her relatives for playing with her emotions so cruelly, and willingly leaves.

Mara’s life is better with Ajmad. She has more freedom and can walk to the market to buy food. She gradually grows to love him.

We move to a time when she is in her mid-thirties. Ajmad is sick and she is taking care of him. He cannot do anything anymore. Although he is mean sometimes, she puts up with that because she feels she owes him a debt for rescuing her. He dies. Time passes.

I am in the same house and on my own. People don’t have anything to do with me but I don’t mind. I have everything I need. I can read. He taught me to read. He taught me everything and I am grateful. I am always by myself but people are beginning to get a certain amount of respect for me. Although they don’t have anything to do with me, they no longer walk away.

We move to the end of Llarina’s life as this desert woman, Mara.

I am very old, in my nineties. I missed him a lot. I didn’t like living so long. I am not diseased or sick, just old and tired.

She passes in her sleep. As she becomes her eternal soul-self, Llarina realises that Ajmad in that desert life is the same soul as Enol in her current life. She also sees that her mother in her current life shares the same soul as the mean adoptive mother in the desert life. Her mother in her current life is not a happy person.

With the help of her guide, Llarina assesses the past life and looks at parallels with her current life.

She notes that as a child in that past life as Mara, she endured some terrible experiences in the hands of her relatives.

When Ajmad offered to help her, she seized the moment. This is an important lesson for her current life.

I have taken an opportunity for a better life in being with Enol. I am supposed to look at my life in a more positive way.

Enol tries to help but I don’t see it as help. I don’t feel that I owe him, and because of that I don’t allow myself to open to what he offers. Just because he is a hard man doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. He is hard because he thinks he needs to be. He is only protecting himself.

I don’t need to feel I am less than anyone else. I have a vast potential within me that is still untapped. I need to trust, open up and let my abilities unfold.

I need to learn that I will be let down at times. There will always be disappointments as this is a part of life. It is not personal. There are ups and downs. If I close myself off so that nothing bad ever happens to me, I shall never get to experience life as I am meant to. I am being told I will always get through.

My guide is saying that I need to say positive things to myself everyday. I can be envious and jealous and I need to work on that. I need to say good things about myself out loud. I have no need for envy and jealousy and I will overcome them if I do what my guide suggests. I have a lot of inner strength.

From her session, Llarina realises that she can persevere with the relationship with Enol. They both are closed to some degree, as they were in their past life together. In that life, Mara felt inferior to Ajmad, and some of those feelings of inferiority have carried over into Llarina’s current life. She has few financial resources while Enol is a very wealthy man. The power imbalance that prevailed during her past life is playing out again in her current life.

After Ajmad died, Mara spent many years alone, and built a lot of independence. This tells Llarina that she could walk away from Enol if the worst came to the worst, even though she would struggle financially. But walking away from Enol could mean remaining closed. Being in a relationship forces her to open up.

The same is true for Enol, who pulls away to protect himself. By staying with him and deciding to be more accepting and open, Llarina can give Enol an opportunity to gradually rebuild his trust. The relationship presents a chance for each of them to progress along their spiritual path by learning to be tolerant, generous, and accepting of each other.

Conclusion

Exploring your relationships with those you love by visiting your past lives and life between lives is an exciting exercise. You discover the nature of your soul relationship with your loved ones, and whether you have incarnated with them before. You also discover that some of the issues causing trouble between you and the significant people in your life have arisen in previous incarnations. With increased understanding and strong determination, you are given an opportunity to resolve these issues.

The cases discussed in this chapter exemplify the emotional connections that can flow from one life to another or, as in the case of Lola, down the ancestral line. Some souls may invest many lifetimes in the same relationship, struggling to make it work. Others may draw powerful lessons from past relationships, whether they succeeded or failed. All our relationships can play out in myriad different ways. Everyone on the planet is unique and every relationship we have with others will reflect our individuality.

Creating relationships in which we respect ourselves and each other is not easy. Most people struggle to get this balance right. A regression can help when there are misunderstandings between people, and a need for more information. Knowing the past life history playing out in our relationships can give us the power and inspiration we need to take appropriate action— whether that action is to accept our life as it is, or to make radical changes.

Capítulo 5. ¿Afectan a esta vida las anteriores?

 CAPÍTULO 5. EFECTOS ACTUALES DE VIDAS PASADAS

Do Our Past Lives Affect This Life?

Everything that is today could not be if it were not for that which was before. ABRAHAM, CHANNELED BY ESTHER HICKS

From guiding many people through regressions, I have seen how our experiences in one life can influence our following lives. Quantum physics has revealed the amazing underlying reality of our world. Research by scientists such as Dr. Bruce Lipton and Dr. Ian Stevenson shows us how our past lives can affect our current lives.

Scientists tell us that everything is made up of energy. Quantum physics reveals that our material world is not really solid. Atoms, the basic component of the universe, are 99.99% space. Like an empty room containing air, an empty atom still contains something, namely an electromagnetic field. I think of this field as vibrational energy that we just perceive as solid and substantial.

Our emotions and thoughts also have a vibrational frequency. This we know intuitively. Our knowledge is reflected in our use of phrases such as ‘we were on the same frequency’ or ‘I sensed a strange vibe when I walked into the room’.

Dr. Bruce Lipton, biologist and researcher into stem cells, is the author of Biology of Belief. In that book he explains how our identity, our ‘self’, is not physical. He means we are more than our physical bodies. A membrane containing many receptors covers our cells. These receptors pick up vibrational signals from the environment. This environment includes our thoughts and emotions, which are vibrations. The membrane-covered cells are analogous to a TV set that picks up signals from a transmitter. What is this transmitter? Our true self. Our true self is not contained in the body. We could also refer to our true self as the soul. Dr. Lipton writes:

My self exists in the environment whether my body is here or not. Just as in the TV analogy, if my body dies and in the future a new individual (biological ‘television set’) is born who has the same exact set of identity receptors, that new individual will be downloading ‘me’. I will once again be present in the world. When my physical body dies, the broadcast is still present. My identity is a complex signature contained within the vast information that collectively comprises the environment.[6]

Our thoughts, emotions and experiences combine to create an informational package of vibrational energy. It is part of our soul’s fingerprint.

In his book, Dr. Lipton suggests that evidence for the ‘broadcast’ of an individual continuing even after death can be found in the experience of people who have had organ transplants.

The Heart’s Code, by Paul Pearsall, supports the idea that our individual personalities find expression at a cellular level. Pearsall shares stories about people who received organs transplanted from deceased donors. There are many examples of people who begin to exhibit aspects of the personalities of their organ donors. Dr. Lipton draws a powerful conclusion: ‘Cells and organ transplants offer a model not only for immortality but also for reincarnation.’

When we complete each life, the quality of our soul is changed by that Earth experience.

Dr. Thomas Campbell, the physicist and out-of-body researcher, theorises that the purpose of incarnating multiple times is to refine the quality of our consciousness, thereby lowering the entropy of the universe. Wisdom is the sole catalyst for refining our consciousness. Our wisdom increases as we gain knowledge and experience, and as we reflect upon all we have learned. Our consciousness is a culmination of all our previous experience.

Our memories of patterns of behavior, emphatic decisions, emotional stances and trauma are vibrations that manifest in the cells of our bodies, right from birth. The late Dr. Ian Stevenson, researcher into reincarnation, suggested that memories, habits, and even birthmarks can be carried over from past lives.

It appears that memories carry over when they have not been fully addressed and previously resolved. Resolution comes when we have the time, strength and inclination to explore and integrate the issue into every aspect of our being. If we turn our attention away from the issue, it remains repressed. This affects the quality of our soul. To be free, we need to resolve our issues at some point—maybe in our next life, maybe in a thousand years. To the soul, time is immaterial.

‘Very well,’ you might think, ‘but what about these lives we have between our lives? Can we resolve these issues after we die and before our next incarnation?’

Even if it is possible for souls to work on resolving issues in between incarnations, they need an Earth experience to test their progress. Our lives on this planet are intensely physical. This physicality enables us to separate good intentions from true resolve.

When we plan our lives at the soul level, we set up situations that will force us to confront our unresolved issues. For example, imagine that a young woman died of starvation in a past life. A fear of not having enough food might carry over into her next life. Initially, this fear lies dormant. Then one day, while still quite young, she hears her mother cry out because the cupboard is bare. Although this only happens once, this incident awakens her latent fear. As an adult, she begins hoarding food, without knowing why. Hoarding is her strategy for dealing with the underlying fear.

However, her fear still needs to be resolved. When her hoarding becomes a problem, this prompts her to address her fear of starvation. She might seek help to understand her behavior. What kind of help? A regression is one way of revealing the source of her hoarding behavior and resolving her fear.

Intense emotions, if they are not resolved, can easily be carried over from one life to another.

One of the most dangerous things you can do in life is to make a curse. Curses have great power because of the intense emotion that accompanies them. A curse can reverberate through subsequent lifetimes. Once the individual is aware of the curse and sincerely revokes it, the curse will no longer be active.

As the following case shows, the greatest effect of the curse is on the person making it.

Marisa

Marisa visited a past life where she suffered so deeply that she ended up railing against God.

Marisa lived as a pioneering woman somewhere in North America a couple of hundred years ago. The scene opens with Marisa burying her husband, who has died from a sudden illness. Apart from two children, a boy and a girl aged nine and eleven, she is alone. They live in an isolated cabin built on a gentle knoll that rises above the alluvial plains. A river curves around the perimeter of the property.

On a fine sunny day, the children are playing down by the river while Marisa is working in the vegetable garden near the cabin. Suddenly, Marisa sees a wall of water explode down the river. After the regression, she describes it as ‘like a tsunami’. She rushes down to the river, now flooded, calling for her children. They are gone. No matter how long she searches, they are never to be found.

Marisa is totally bereft. She has lost her husband and now her children. Her shock turns to anger. She cannot accept her loss. She is furious with God’s unfairness. She stands outside, near the river, looking up at the sky. As she shakes her fist at God she curses Him, vowing to never love children again. She is done with life and dies soon after.

In the next life, Marisa is a man. Tall, slim and sinewy, he lives alone. Cut off from his family and with no friends, he finds work wherever he can as he wanders from place to place. Living in various boarding houses, he keeps to himself.

This man feels very little for other people. He is empty and numb. There is only one thing that arouses his emotions—something too terrible to contemplate.

A soft, kind smile from a child hits him like lightning. He feels a quick softening inside him that he cannot tolerate. There is only one way to deal with this feeling. He kidnaps and kills the child. It is all about reclaiming his power. He feels driven to kill the feeling of love that briefly rises up in him and he does this by killing what he perceives as its source—the child.

One day, a child with a warm, loving smile comes up to him and gives him a flower. He feels himself soften for a moment. This feeling is terrifying. A deep yawning gap opens up in him. It is the emotion of loss, the great loss he suffered in the previous life. Of course, he doesn’t realise this. He just feels the deep pain. He is compelled to kill this feeling in himself. He captures a beautiful young girl of about eight or nine. He takes her away and, to his surprise, she remains open and trusting. She doesn’t seem to have any fear. Even as he kills her, there is a gentle questioning in her eyes. He is completely shaken. Shattered, he finally realizes what he has been doing. The guilt he feels is heavy. His career as a child killer is over.

Soon after, the authorities accuse him of murder and he is tried and is hanged.

He refuses to leave his body. He is terrified of hell, as he is sure that is where he is headed. Marisa is physically shaking with fear as she is recounts his demise and death. Eventually, after being sufficiently reassured, he floats away.

Marisa learns that she was carrying some of the guilt and fear passed down from this man, who had not been able to release it. For some time, she had been carrying an enormous fear of getting into serious trouble. She irrationally felt she might be sent to jail, or die. These emotions needed to be released. During the session, she feels an immediate sense of relief. Now, to be fully resolved and whole, she needs to come to terms with the criminal behavior of this man and find within herself the compassion needed to accept and forgive him.

Other emotions and attitudes can also be carried over between lives. In the following case, the major recurring emotion is guilt associated with the use of food.

Xabel

Xabel is overweight. He seeks a past life regression to gain a deeper understanding of his relationship with food. He intuitively feels that his weight problems originated in a past life.

In an earlier incarnation, Xabel lives as a nobleman in France around the fourteenth century. The scene opens on the evening of his sixteenth birthday. His father has put on a lavish display and invited all the important people to the celebration. A few people seem genuine and they greet him warmly. He soon realises, however, that nearly all of the guests are there to gorge themselves on the banquet and play politics with their associates and rivals. He is annoyed that his birthday is the excuse for their antics, and disappointed that his father is a part of it all.

This is when I start to become contemptuous. Some of them think they are so clever they can dance words around you. It is not worth responding. As soon as you do, you are part of their game. They think they are cleverer than those who don’t play.

They like to insult the ones who are genuine. They think I am stupid and not aware of what they are doing. I want to get away but I am not supposed to leave. I am a showpiece. That annoys me. Luckily they are not coming near me.

The tables groan under the weight of all the game, fruit and cheeses displayed on silver platters. Most of it will be discarded after the party. This upsets Xabel further. His father has overcatered deliberately: he wants his guests to notice how wealthy he is. Being excessive is part of the game. Xabel feels revolted. He is well aware that the ordinary people have very little.

They treat food like a weapon. They consistently give too much to themselves and too little to others. Then take it away from others as if it was just a game. They don’t care about the effect on others. If they see the effect, they justify it. They think they are better than everyone else. They think they are entitled to more. Power and entitlement go together. It is a game to them.

The scene changes. Some years later, Xabel is in charge of some of his older brother’s estates. He refuses to play the political games so beloved by his noble contemporaries. He cares about the people on his lands and doesn’t want to exploit them the way that others would, were they in his position.

I don’t want to play their little games. I want to make things run smoothly out here. I want this place to be home for people.

Unfortunately, Xabel and his people pay a high price for his fine principles. His lands are ravaged. Spanish soldiers on their way to fight a war up north pass through his estate, looting the farms and villages.

I feel like this shouldn’t have happened. I feel it is my fault but I don’t know how I could’ve stopped it. All the people are now gone. Their houses are empty. Everything was taken. They have nothing. Their food is gone. Everything is gone. There is no reason for them to come back. I should have stopped it.

Xabel is sure that the looting of his lands was less an act of thoughtless plunder than an act of treachery. One of the French nobility, who has a Spanish wife, encouraged the soldiers to come through and ravage the lands. Xabel was forewarned but could do nothing about it. He had no powerful allies to help defend his people. He has no friends to help him now seek justice. He knows he will get nowhere if he confronts the powerful people who allowed the soldiers to pillage with impunity. They will just deny any part in it.

Xabel is very disillusioned. He has never liked the way the world is. He cares about the poor people. He had tried to change one little part of it where he had some authority. But his good intentions came to nothing.

Years go by and Xabel’s older brother dies. Now the lands could pass to Xabel. But to take possession of the lands, he will need to play political games. He will need to form alliances against his cousins, who are maneuvering to seize the lands for themselves. He has to make up his mind to either plot and scheme to win what is rightfully his, or to walk away. He fears that if he stays he will need to compromise his values. If he leaves he will leave the fate of his people to others who do not care for them.

The next scene occurs after many more years have passed. Xabel is old and coming to the end of his life. He is not ill, but knows he will die soon. He lives in the castle because he won the title to his lands. He decided to stay and played the necessary political games.

Every day since then I have paid a price. Playing the game has become my life. Now I am one of the ones I feel contempt for. To be fair to my people I must often be less fair than I would like.

Xabel thought he was helping his people, but because of the decisions he has been forced to make, some of his people now hate him. He withheld food from his people to gain their compliance. He held lavish banquets, just like his father did, to shore up his alliances with the powerful nobility.

If you don’t have extravagant banquets, the nobility discounts you. And you need them for trade and defence. I don’t know how I am going to die but I am so tired, I cannot keep going on. I don’t have it in me.

When he finally dies in his canopied bed he is greatly relieved to pass over.

As he draws parallels between his past and current lives, Xabel realises that he uses food as a weapon. In his past life he used the threat of starvation to punish his people. He hosted sumptuous banquets to win favours from his fellow nobles. He hated himself for this. In his current life, he punishes himself by overeating.

I am bringing all the guilt I felt in that life into my current life. When I use food as a weapon in this life, I feel the same as I did in that past life where I used food as a weapon. The more I use food as a weapon, the worse I feel about myself.

In his life between lives, Xabel is told his dysfunctional relationship with food has arisen in several lives. He has developed a tendency to see food as a symbol rather than as the sustenance it really is, and this is playing out in his current life. For him food can symbolise punishment, a solution to a problem, or a much-desired reward.

In the next case, we are given a glimpse of all the human incarnations of a soul. This illustrates how recurring patterns of behavior develop over a number of lifetimes.

David

David had visited two past lives and his life between lives. You might recall David from a previous chapter where he was the monk, Desmonte, in one of his past lives. In his life between lives, he is given vivid information about all his previous past lives. This broad view paints a clear picture of his spiritual development over a series of lifetimes.

In his first incarnation, David is a Roman centurion wearing a bronze helmet, crested with flamboyant red plumes. He has great courage, fighting in many battles. With his men, he is often victorious. He remains in warrior roles in subsequent lives and continues to develop his courage.

After many lives as a warrior, he finds himself in a slightly different role: a spy. Again, he has several lifetimes spying for one side or another. He is caught and dies in many of the early lives. Gradually, he develops his spycraft. He learns to read people accurately, and this skill is carried over into subsequent lifetimes.

As a spy, he betrays others and is betrayed. He decides he needs to atone for the sense of guilt that gnaws away at his soul. He starts incarnating in religious roles, often as a monk. Over several lifetimes he lives as a devotee of all the major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. He meets many inspiring people and comes to believe that he can free himself from the physical realm. He becomes a seeker of enlightenment.

Now his bid for enlightenment guides him through several lifetimes. During these lives, he gradually becomes more solitary and reclusive. He learns that this pattern of seeking solitude is also carried over from life to life. As he learns to love the monastic routine, he loses touch with the courage he developed in his early lives as a warrior and spy.

In his second-last life before his current life, he feels deeply let down. His many lives as a monk have left him increasingly disillusioned with the religious path. It is the time of the Reformation. He is exposed to the politics and hypocrisy of those in the church. He has an opportunity to develop new directions, but he falls back on his old patterns. Sometime after his sessions, David reflects on what he has learned.

The lifetimes revealed to me by my guide showed an incremental progression, with many of my habits, strengths and weaknesses crossing lifetimes. Many of my career choices were similar across lifetimes, starting from the military, progressing to intelligence gathering, and to religious institutions. I only shifted my life purpose when my circumstances during the Reformation provoked an epiphany. However, I still struggled to break the habits I’d developed during my previous lives.

David was fortunate enough to be given an overview of all his lives during his sessions. He could clearly see the connection between each life and the patterns he developed.

The regressions of these three clients give us a glimpse of the powerful effect our past lives can have on our current life. A few other cases, briefly reviewed below, confirm this power. They help demonstrate that numerous challenges, including emotions, memories and patterns of behavior, can be carried over from lifetime to lifetime.

One client had many lifetimes as an alcoholic. In his previous life, he had died penniless and drunk. Even his knowledge of this repetitive, destructive pattern of behavior was not enough to permanently break this long-standing habit.

Another client came to see me because he had lost his purpose in life. A regression revealed that he was here to help his brother, Santiago. Santiago didn’t cope well with setbacks in his physical lives. When things became too tough, Santiago took an early exit. There were several lifetimes where he demonstrated this pattern of bailing out, including the First World War when he climbed out of the trenches to run into enemy fire. My client had lost his way after Santiago committed suicide a few years earlier. Wearily, my client informed me, he would be coming back in his next life to try once more to help Santiago stay grounded.

Two of my clients experienced past lives where they were pregnant. Both were nearly full term when they died. The first starved to death at the end of the Second World War. The second was of high birth living in Ancient Egypt. Her noble origins could not save her from a fatal illness. At the moment of death, neither wanted to leave her body or her baby. Such grief, carried over from moments of trauma, manifested differently in their current lives.

The first developed an eating disorder when she and her husband decided to try for a baby. She spent more than a year intermittently overeating until she came to see me. I took her back to her death from starvation in the Second World War, which gave her the opportunity to release her grief over her lost baby. She later told me that she conceived on the evening after our session. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl, and her eating disorder never returned.

The second became emotional whenever she was near a baby. This tearfulness had occurred all her life. She felt embarrassed because she didn’t understand her tears. Once her past life grief was released, the sadness she’d felt around babies vanished completely.

Conclusion

Many people have benefited from discovering and releasing issues that had their genesis in past lives. Brian Weiss, author of Many Lives, Many Masters, and Michael Newton, author of Journey of Souls, have publicised this powerful phenomenon. Every day, practitioners trained by the Newton Institute confirm the benefits of exploring our past lives. Once they are liberated from their blocks, fears and emotional reactivity, people can approach their lives with a renewed sense of purpose. From my personal experience of accessing and releasing my own past life traumas, I can attest that the benefits are real and permanent. Every time I released a past life issue, I felt lighter, more confident, and filled with a sense of freedom.

I have noticed that some clients sense intuitively that certain issues manifesting in their lives are related to a past life. They may have tried more conventional psychotherapies, without isolating the cause of their distress. I always trust a client’s intuition and, almost without fail, their intuition is correct.

However, many clients encounter and release past life issues that were not evident before they came for their session. Only after they emerge from their trance can they see the relationship between their past lives and their current life. They are always pleased to be relieved of these unanticipated and unresolved issues.

It is worth remembering that positive patterns of behavior also develop over many lifetimes. David, for example, learnt to cultivate courage during his many lifetimes as a warrior. Although the effect was dissipated during his religious lives, he was soon able to reconnect with that courageous energy and make the significant changes needed to get his life back on track. His case also demonstrates how we develop skills that carry over from life to life. He developed the ability to maintain order and routine. From his monastic lives, he also learned to be independent and enjoy his own company, with no fear of loneliness. Of course, making progress requires us to find the right balance between competing demands, and now David now needs to develop his relationship skills.

I can only be in awe of the creation of this amazing universe where we are given unlimited opportunities to develop and evolve. Eventually we can enjoy this wonderful physical reality by learning how to create the experiences we desire, without the traumas we suffered in past lives.

Capítulo 4. La Prueba.

 

Proof

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. NIELS BOHR, QUANTUM PHYSICIST

Is it possible to find proof for the existence of past lives, or for lives of healing and reconciliation that take place between our incarnations?

These days, information about reincarnation and life after death is readily available. Many books have been written about past lives. A few have been written about our life between lives. Anecdotal stories of children who remember past lives can be viewed on YouTube. The late Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia spent forty years researching reincarnation. He documented over two thousand cases of children who provided credible evidence of their past lives. Nevertheless, such ideas are considered unorthodox, and many people remain skeptical.

Very few mainstream educational institutions are interested in researching non-physical reality, reincarnation, and life between lives. People who conduct such research rarely belong to academia. Some have little or no academic background. Many have left mainstream science.

Collectively, researchers such as Michael Newton, Robert Monroe, Brian Weiss, Bruce Lipton, Rupert Sheldrake and Thomas Campbell have made a great contribution to the understanding of non-physical phenomena. If you are looking for evidence of the non-physical, I can recommend their work.

Not everyone needs scientific evidence to convince them that other dimensions exist beyond our conception of physical reality. Some people are in tune with their deeper selves. They know that we are more than just our physical bodies.

In the past, I was fairly skeptical. Over the years, however, I have encountered a great deal of anecdotal and scientific evidence of paranormal phenomena. This opened my mind to the possibility of non-physical reality. Then I gathered my own personal evidence through paranormal experiences, self-hypnosis, lucid dreaming and regression. Even so, I value evidence over blind faith. I think it is important to keep the door open to new information and possibilities. I like to remain in a state of learning.

Ultimately, we need to reach our own conclusions about the existence of life before and beyond death. Information gathered during regressions can provide convincing evidence for other lives and life between lives. Here are a few examples.

Belya

Belya experienced a past life as a nurse in the Second World War. After I guide her into a trance, she finds herself with a group of displaced people near the end of the war. They are hiding in a forest because they are afraid of being caught by their enemies. They walk for miles behind the tree-line, too frightened to venture out into the open, where they might find something to eat. Because Bella is a nurse, others in the group look to her for leadership. But she does not know whether to rest or to keep moving, or which way will lead them to safety. She decides to forge on, hoping to find some food. It makes no difference. Eventually they all weaken, and die of starvation.

When Belya comes out of the trance she comments on the uniform she was wearing in that life.

‘It was very distinctive. There was an apron-type thing with a cross on it. And a cap. I would know it if I saw it.’

I suggest we look on the Internet for pictures of nurses from the Second World War. We find pages and pages of images. I point out different possibilities that seem to match her description. She rejects them all until finally she sees a picture of nurses from Scotland. ‘That’s it!’ Belya exclaims.

Belya is shocked. The nurses wear a shirt with a Pedro Pan collar, an apron with a cross on the bib and a basin-style cap. This is the uniform she saw.

Karen

Personal experience can be a powerful convincer, as I discovered some years ago during my first visit to my life between lives. When the practitioner took me back to my immediate past life, I was surprised to find myself living as a male during the Second World War. Even more astonishing, he served as a German infantry soldier on the Eastern Front during the invasion of Russia. During the invasion, he witnessed a scene that shocked him.

I am standing looking at a group of captured Russians. Apart from their Captain and one of the men, they are all sitting on the ground facing me. Their hands are on their heads. The Captain is kneeling on the ground, attending to some injury on the back of one of his men. The Captain has his back to me. Beside me, on my right, is a German soldier with a rifle. I feel no fear.

The captain’s uniform is very strange. He wears a blue cap and a jacket that is off-white with a bluish tinge. I can’t believe that anyone would choose such a pale colour for a uniform. War is a grubby business. A light colour like off-white is so impractical. It doesn’t make sense. I must be making it up.

Now I am feeling uneasy. The German soldier is pointing his rifle at the Captain. He is going to shoot him. I want to stop him, yell out and say ‘No!’ It doesn’t seem right to me, shooting a man in the back, a man that is our prisoner, our responsibility. Before I get anything out, he shoots the Captain in the back. That must have been a signal because now I hear machine gun fire. I am aware of two German soldiers, one on my far right and one on my left. Each is aiming a machine gun at the Russian prisoners. They are mowing them down, killing them all. I don’t feel a part of this slaughter even though I am a German like those murdering these men. I am shocked. Dismayed. It is wrong.

After the regression, I undertake some research. I find out that Russian prisoners were often shot by the Germans. I also learn that Hitler gave a specific order in 1941 that all Commissars were to be shot. The Commissars were officials of the Soviet Communist Party.

I have a strong sense that I fought at the Battle of Stalingrad in my previous life, and died there in December 1942. The German invasion started in June 1941, so I work out that this incident must have happened in the 18 months between June 1941 and December 1942. I search the Internet until I find a picture of a NKVD Commissar Captain. The NKVD was a Soviet law enforcement agency, closely aligned with the secret police, and part of Stalin’s apparatus of political repression. It was later renamed as the KGB. The uniform I discover exactly matches the one I saw during my regression.

The Commissar can be seen in the picture on the previous page. His jacket is a bluish-tinged off-white, and his cap and trousers are dark blue. This uniform was only in use in 1941 and 1942. The picture is from a painting by the talented Russian artist, Andrei Karashchuk (used with permission).

I feel shaken. Up until this point, I was still not sure if past lives really existed. Perhaps we make it up, I’d thought. I know I have never seen this picture before in my current life. With this hard evidence, something shifts inside me. I cannot deny it anymore. I surrender to the idea that I have lived before.

David

David experienced a past life as a Catholic monk called Desmonte. It is 1560 and Desmonte is travelling around the Bohemian countryside visiting Catholic churches. He is secretly gathering information about the excesses of the priests. He notices that they wear elaborate robes and their churches are ornate. He also sees that the peasants are poor, hardworking and suffering economic hardship. He believes the priests are exploiting the piety of the masses.

He returns to Prague in 1564 to make his report. He sees a large crowd gathered around people in stockades. There is social upheaval and he cannot find the religious people with whom he is aligned. They have been replaced and now are in hiding or have fled. There are two factions in the church, one given to power, the other devoted to spirituality. Desmonte belongs to the latter faction, hoping that the church will experience spiritual renewal. Unfortunately for Desmonte, his faction is losing ground.

Desmonte never finds his allies. Eventually, he leaves Prague, and dies many years later in Spain.

When David returns to do a life between lives regression, he tells me he has been researching his past life as Desmonte.

It all makes sense now. It was the time of the Counter-Reformation in the Catholic Church. But during the regression, I kept doubting the information I was getting. It seemed a bit strange being a devoted, spiritual monk who was spying on others in the church.

The Counter-Reformation was an attempt by the Catholic Church to regain its power in the face of the Protestant Reformation. It ran from 1545 to 1563, and while a number of administrative reforms did take place, they did not herald the changes that Desmonte and his colleagues hoped for.

David is one of those people who easily receives names, dates and details during regressions. Not everyone has this capability. David spent many lifetimes in monasteries. I wonder if his ability to observe and record detail was developed in those quiet, secluded lives.

Jacobo

Jacobo had lived previously in the thirteenth century[3]. During his regression, Jacobo found himself embarking on a journey to Jerusalem with many others. Together they rode into battle, and brutally conquered a mighty city. When Jacobo emerged from the regression, I asked him what he knew about the crusades. He said he knew nothing about them. Returning home, he began to research their history.

In the course of his reading, Jacobo came across some old illustrations of Istanbul, previously known as Constantinople. He immediately recognised it as the place where he had fought as a crusader. The crusaders were merciless. Jacobo admits that it was so disturbing that he didn’t want to see what he had sensed during the regression.

I fought against the information I was receiving. I thought I must be making it up. But I remember the city vividly. It had a cathedral with a great copper dome. When I did some research I realised that the city was Constantinople, not Jerusalem. The cathedral was the Hagia Sophia.

The Hagia Sofia dates back to AD 537. Jacobo was a part of the Fourth Crusade that sacked Constantinople in 1204. The Fourth Crusade originally intended to conquer Muslim-controlled Jerusalem. Instead, the crusaders were diverted to Constantinople. A historian described this infamous event:

They rushed in a howling mob down the streets and through the houses, snatching up everything that glittered and destroying whatever they could not carry, pausing only to murder or to rape, or to break open the wine-cellars[4].

Even though Jacobo knew nothing about the crusades, I sensed that the experiences he was reporting during his regression related to a life as a crusader. However, he didn’t mention the word ‘crusade’ at any time during the regression and neither did I. In fact, the crusaders never used this term. They described themselves as Knights of Christ and saw themselves as undertaking an armed pilgrimage. The Christian military campaigns against Islam during the Middle Ages were not described as ‘crusades’ until 1638—four hundred years after the Fourth Crusade!

After undertaking his research, Jacobo was convinced that he had not made it up. The doubts he experienced during his regression proved to him that he had relived a genuine past life.

Cenicienta

Cenicienta experienced a life as a woman during the American War of Independence.

The scene opens when she is in her early twenties. She is watching a battle that is taking place in a field. She is not afraid, just curious. She notices, with some surprise, that on one side the soldiers are dressed in uniforms with red jackets. The others are not in uniform and look less professional.

I ask her whose side she is on. She doesn’t know. I prompt for more information. She struggles to make up her mind. She says she doesn’t really care who wins. Cenicienta is young and never studied English or American history.

After the past life, Cenicienta and I discuss her experience. She says she found it difficult to accept what she was getting. She thought she was making it up. It was true that she was struggling to receive the information. I had to intervene frequently to help her maneuver around her blocks.

Even during the regression, she thought it was very strange that she didn’t know which side she supported during the battle between the redcoats and the militiamen.

I recall the case of Andrés[5], one of my other clients, who had regressed to a past life during the early days of the American War of Independence. I describe his experience to Cenicienta.

Andrés is on the side of the rebels and against the redcoats. He says many settlers have not yet decided who to support. The redcoats are advancing, and Andrés is riding back to his farm. In the distance, he sees a small contingent of redcoats ride up to his neighbour’s farm. He feels he should intervene but knows he cannot. He has an essential role to play in this war. Andrés knows his neighbour tried to sit on the fence because he was afraid to take sides.

Andrés lies low and watches. His neighbour’s indecision does not save him. The redcoats drag him outside and execute him.

Cenicienta is reassured by this story. She can see that her indecision actually makes sense. She was living at a time when the settlers were loath to take sides. They didn’t understand all the issues and they were afraid to commit to one side, as they had no idea who would prevail.

When Cenicienta came back to do her life between lives regression, her skepticism had been resolved. The regression proceeded smoothly without the blocks and confusion that accompanied the past life regression.

Proving that we retain consciousness during the period between incarnations is more difficult than validating past life experiences. Individuals can find evidence, however, in the form of predictions that are subsequently found to be correct. An example is my own life between lives regression, mentioned earlier. I felt overwhelmed by my responsibility for my elderly mother. She was suffering from dementia, and had few financial resources. During my regression, the Council told me that my mother would be well cared for, and subsequent events proved this to be true.

Conclusion

Many people experience doubts while they are in the trance. They worry that aspects of their story are not making sense. Such doubts block their progress and need to be put aside. They are always surprised and reassured when eventually the story does make sense or when their subsequent research bears out what they saw in the session.

I can also be surprised. I have had my initial doubts about a past life later overturned. As noted earlier, in my previous life I served as a German soldier in both the world wars. During the regression my therapist asked me what I did between the wars. ‘I am a soldier,’ I replied.

I have studied both world wars in some detail and I had some doubts in my mind. I had assumed that the Treaty of Versailles prohibited Germany from having a standing army.

I was wrong. When I looked it up, I discovered that Germany was allowed to have a standing army of one hundred thousand men after being defeated in the First World War. I also learn that soldiers were trained in Dresden. This explains another mystery for me: Some years before I knew about these past lives, I experienced a compelling sense of déjà vu when I first visited Dresden. I knew I’d been there before.

Clients have told me that they have visited cities for the first time during their travels, only to discover that they immediately felt right at home. They knew exactly where to go and what scenes would unfold as they walked around a corner. The city fitted them like a glove. Such experiences can act as evidence of past lives.

People who visit their past lives and life between lives often begin to trust that they will endure after their current physical lives come to an end. Those who doubt are often opened up to greater possibilities. The more they open their minds, the greater their chance of having more affirming experiences.

We all need to do our own research and come to our own conclusions about the nature of our universe. While scientific evidence can be helpful, nothing quite beats the experience of remembering a past life, which reveals personal historical truths we had not previously known.