There is believing in the possibility of past lives, and then there is remembering them first hand.
In my early practice of believing, I acknowledged it as a possibility. I was open to it, but had no proof or direct experience one way or another. I had a flicker of hope when my aunt told me stories of going to see a past life regression therapist, but still, I had no direct experience with it.
Then I fell in love with my soul mate, and a waking up process began. I felt something I had never felt before, which was the hand of something greater than me in the budding of that relationship. My rational mind was saying, “This is not part of the plan!” while some other part of me knew there was no other option but to give in to being swept along by this force. Fate, you might call it.
Early in our relationship, I wrote a poem for him, which suggested that this was one of many lives, in multiple forms, where we faced the world together. It wasn’t until many years later when we began our shamanic work together that it was confirmed by someone who is more experienced in identifying past lives that this was indeed the case.
Nothing helps you gain perspective on the day-to-day minor annoyances you experience with your spouse than discovering that you have been in relationship with this person dozens of times in past lives, and doing important work together in those lives.
My husband may be forgetful, and may not be the most handy person around the house, but he is also a warrior of the light, and my knowing that earns him endless forgiveness in this life.
So does learning that some of our relationships were not exactly happy endings. As we began to rely less on our past life guide and more on our own ability to remember, we discovered some uncomfortable truths.
My husband had learned that in one of his lives, he had lived in China, where he was stabbed in the back by a jealous lover. One day we were at our favourite Szechuan restaurant, and as I dug into my spicy fish and Szechuan green beans, I said, “Wow, I love this food so much. It is just so comforting to me. It nourishes me right down to my soul.”
He narrowed his eyes, looked at me quizzically, and said, “Maybe it was you who stabbed me in the back.”
I gasped and covered my mouth. “Oh no! That would be terrible!”
He knew it was true. And on some level, so did I.
What can you say at that point? “Sorry?” I tried. And then, “Wow, thanks for coming back to me.”
At that point, I experienced a profound level of gratitude that the love we shared was deep enough to overcome the understandable desire to walk away from someone who had betrayed him so deeply in the distant past of another life.
A few months later, we found a way to work together to heal the energetic wound he had experienced and carried with him since that time, and our relationship had a chance to deepen further in that healing.
I discovered during my own past life work that a great and malignant block had been attached to my soul during a particularly traumatic end during the witch hunts. It wasn’t until that block was removed and healed through soul retrieval that I began having more memories of who I truly am.
You never know where those triggers can come from. At one point I was having dreams of being chased by a man who wanted to kill me. I didn’t know anything else about our relationship or why he wanted me dead.
A while later I was talking to a priestess friend on the phone. I mentioned that the space between us felt vulnerable to eavesdropping and interception. She suggested that the next time we spoke, we could call on the priestess lineage to guard and protect our conversation. Mention of the priestess lineage struck a chord in me that vibrated right to my core.
After we hung up, the memories came back to me fast and furious. I realized how powerfully that block had affected all my deepest memories. I also realized that I probably didn’t survive the encounter that created that block in my body and my memory. And with that thought, I remembered that the damage had been done by a priest that served the dark, trying to get something from me that he wanted. And as I reeled with that memory, I realized that the priest was an incarnation of the man in my dreams.
Once I was practiced in trusting these memories, in believing they were true memories and not just an overactive imagination, or any of the other things we are encouraged to tell ourselves in this skeptical day and age, these memories started to come back in other ways, and not always so dramatic or frightening.
I realized that appetites for certain foods probably spoke to past lives in some way. Asian food (as in the Szechuan example) has always been my go to for comfort food or when I’m sick, and I love to cook it. I also love Indian food, but I am less interested in cooking it, which I sense speaks to my being of a higher caste, where others cooked for me, when I was alive in India.
While taking an exercise class recently, we did an exercise using two long, heavy ropes, where we had to repeatedly lift them over our heads and slam them down in front of us. Another participant commented on how powerfully I slammed those ropes down. I joked, “I was a stagecoach driver in a former life!”
When the exercise was over and I set down the ropes, I thought to myself, “I was a stagecoach driver in a former life.”
Through opening myself to the lessons of lifetimes, and believing in the process of remembering, I have learned so much more about myself. Certainly, not all of it is easy to face, such as realizing you have murdered your soul mate in a past life, but the more of my deep past that I own, the more of my future I can claim. It has changed my relationship with my immediate family, my extended family, and deepened my spiritual commitment.
Had I not done this work, I would not have been so connected to my reason for coming to earth in this life. As a priestess, lifetimes ago, I sustained severe soul-level injury that kept me from my path, and even from coming back as a woman, for centuries. But this is my true form, and my true calling, and I now own it and am working in service to the Divine Feminine, alongside my fellow priestesses.
I believe each of us has soul commitments that follow us from lifetime to lifetime. It takes belief and some hard work to discover them. Believe me when I tell you it is completely worth it. If you’ve always wished your life would vibrate with meaning, heed the call of your soul, and start the process of remembering.
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