Remembering who you are and discovering who you can be
The first experience I had with past lives was when I was 8 or 9. I had a series of dreams about the time between lives, and glimmers of past lives I had lived. I was fortunate that at this particular time I had a couple of spiritually inclined adults I could talk to about it. So I was not completely alone in contemplating these experiences but there was not much expansion to it after that.
In fact I didn’t have any more dreams of that nature until June of this year.
I had done a couple of past life regressions prior to this, including some more spontaneous experiences in Breathwork. But these dreams were not only glimmers from past lives, they included representation and structure of what that process actually looks like. I believe that had a lot to do with the karmic healing work I began doing in a structured, daily way from March to June of 2022.
This essay was part of a multi-part email series that attempts to capture the experience of exploring past lives and karmic healing. It has been combined and edited for clarity.
As an introduction, this whole piece does assume the premise that there are past lives. I am beginning with the premise that we have a soul, which endures beyond this lifetime and before. Our Karma determines those incarnations, and we can actively work to resolve or complete our karma or participate in life more unconsciously.
There is a perspective regarding karmic contracts and agreements that before we are born our souls choose this particular life, and that this life is uniquely positioned to complete or carry out these karmic agreements, to resolve patterns and complete aspects of growth and expansion that began in other lifetimes. Sometimes this is misconstrued as suggesting that if you experience pain and trauma in this life, that means you “did something bad” in the last or are being punished. This is a simplification and devalues the fact that it is often our most painful experiences that initiate the greatest growth in our lives, while ignoring that sometimes we are simply a part of someone’s story and there’s no special meaning to a negative experience. It is also sometimes said that those souls who have hurt you the most in this life have taken in the greatest karmic debts in order to facilitate those lessons. Again I agree with this to an extent, but not all pain is karmic in nature. And not all karmic agreements are made with love either. A lack of conscious awareness, and therefore choice, is another factor that throws some chaos into the mix.
A meaningful beginning to exploring your own karma is considering the most conflicted, challenging, and impactful experiences and relationships. In this process we can reflect on the connections and repetitions of patterns. At the risk of belaboring the point, not all of patterns and conflicts are karmic in nature but if they are it is likely that they have repeated more than a few times in similar ways. These repetitions could be seen as opportunities to learn something or rework an emotional pattern. If a dynamic or pattern is karmic, this means that it likely holds repetitions in other lifetimes as well.
Seeing the broader patterns of your experience as having echoes in other lifetimes, in other dimensions even, is hugely liberating in terms of allowing trauma to transmute and change. It offers another way to contextualize your experience beyond simply the terrible things you may have endured. It opens up a bigger story.
Before continuing, I want to state this clearly for those who are working with trauma histories specifically, but perhaps it can extend to all. Many of you who know me are aware of the stance I come from, but it bears repeating.
Identifying a karmic pattern relating to abuse, especially with your parents, does NOT mean “you chose to be abused.” This is another avenue to self-blame, it is also a slippery slope to spiritual bypass. Our overall soul consciousness, or core soul, encompasses the big picture of energetic evolution. Even as the soul chooses this life and context, this is based on potentials for healing and resolution. We experience unique qualities of conscious awareness in each lifetime. It’s not all set in stone, with you having agreed to every specific term and event. None of us can know definitively what the future holds because it is always changing. We all have free will, and we make choices based on our conscious perceptions as well. The world around us does not revolve around our individual soul purpose.
The goal isn’t to “get over” being abused, or growing up with neglect and parents with a general disinterest, or not receiving the unconditional love you needed to develop a healthy sense of value as a child. But this a major dilemma of surviving childhood trauma (and sometimes adult trauma): on the one hand you need to find some way to not be defined by that experience and on the other there is no salve that can completely erase old scars— because you’re not the same person now and the echos of that experience need to be integrated. There’s no relationship in your adult life, romantic or platonic that can replace the need for a parent’s love that wasn’t received when you were a child. There’s no degree of trust and connection that can reverse the knowledge that some would seek to hurt a person intentionally, and such people exist and you might not see it coming. There is a lot of heavy shit going on out there and if you’ve been unfortunate enough to witness it firsthand it leaves a mark that one must learn to carry. In this sense, there isn’t a “complete healing” available here.
You could work with these wounds forever and at some point you will plateau because not all healing can revert us to a previous form.
But you also can’t live within that space and expect to thrive. It’s necessary to find a way to move forward and not be haunted by the past.
There’s another spiritual bypass that’s pretty common around this to the tune of letting things go which seems like nicer way of saying “get over it.” It’s not exactly about forgiveness either, although that can happen as a byproduct of healing and realizing that it was never really about you. I would define the healing that is needed and possible as more in the form of transformation, to be sort of reborn in a new cycle that changes the nature of those past harms.
A karmic approach to healing is not a magic wand, or in itself a way to release pain absolutely. But it can be a path towards reconnecting with an unconditional sense of self-love, that includes loving yourself as you moved through your most challenging experiences. Unconditional and ruthless self-love, understanding that every moment of this life, good and bad brought you here, and that you are alive and deserving of joy– this is a resource that can begin to heal the hearts of those past selves. Because this energy can both reach back to the past and endure into the future.
With time, and with love, those present life and karmic wounds can become a book you carry around with you and have read a hundred times, before realizing that you know it by heart. So you finish it and set it on a shelf in your home. It’s there, you can see it, maybe you ever pick it up from time to time and reread an underlined passage. But it lives somewhere just out of your sight line. It’s in the background. A part of your home but not the center of it.
And you also begin to realize this tale has been told many times, in many ways. It’s not your unique burden that was made for you, and it’s just one part of the bigger fabric of your soul’s story. Even when you reflexively pick that story back up, and become engrossed it it, you can remember “oh, this this just a story, I can set this down.”
This creates a new story of your life where you can alchemize your pain into expansion.
I don’t claim to have mastery of this, it is lifelong work for us all. Sometimes, indeed in the writing of this series, I have found myself in a familiar place of feeling totally overcome by grief. Existential pondering can feel very alienating, confusing, overwhelming, and even hopeless at times. What is life even?? These are the moments when we need to invite our unconscious to come forward, to be held by our guides and teachers so that we can hold these ambiguities without short circuiting. Like Dorothy and her ruby slippers, we must remember that we already know how to return home.
Something important to contemplate in understanding “past” lives and what they have to do with us, is that linear time is a human construct and one that doesn’t really exist in the broader cosmos. Past lives as a concept in the daily vernacular generally views lifetimes in a linear way, where there are a series of lifetimes occurring one after another up until this present lifetime, and the future lifetimes haven’t happened yet. When our perspective broadens to time being circular, continuous, simultaneous, moments strung together by our mind, then we can understand that these various lives are occurring in the same timeframe and informing each other. Another way to view it is that perhaps these are other dimensional selves, or perhaps we can imagine an answer explained by “spooky entanglement.” I think these could all be true, and a greater truth is beyond our conscious comprehension.
When we seek to have a glimpse into the differing contexts of these patterns as they played out/are playing out in other lifetimes we can relieve ourselves of some of the angst of why we struggle to change behaviors that are causing us pain. Or why we are attracted to certain kinds of people even though those relationships are ultimately unsatisfying.
…Change is hard. As humans we are pattern makers, and we love to use patterns to predict the future. We’re not very fast, or strong, our eye sight, hearing, and sense of smell isn’t all that great, and we take a very long time to physically develop and be able to care for ourselves. Our ability to identify patterns to attempt to predict what is coming next is not unique among sentient beings, but we are heavily reliant on it. Our bodies hold memory, and our energies hold memory. It’s often pretty unconscious, our bodies responding even before our mind makes the connection with a thought. Changing unconscious patterns that are rooted in our survival (whether our mind agrees this is true or not) is extremely hard. It takes a lot of repetitions. Our energy itself can become bound up in these loops, unable to reach its full capacity for flow.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time pondering what it would be like to be a consciousness without a body, just energy existing or moving…wherever energy might go, and perhaps I get a taste of it when I astral project. It seems pretty cool and interesting to me, but from what I’m hearing as I continue these travels between realms it’s a pretty cool and incredible thing to be embodied. To be anchored and have the capacity to move energy, to transmute it, to shift it consciously and within a 3D physical experience is an amazing skill we have as humans (other beings on earth can also do this of course). I believe that’s why we choose to incarnate. I don’t want to say it’s boring to be without a body, I don’t think that term has relevance in the broader multiverse, but it’s a unique way to cultivate experience (which is to say energy).
One of the dreams I mentioned earlier that I had recently took place in the mundane environment of a hospital waiting room. Someone came out and said “Ok, you’re going to die. So we need to know what you’d like to be done with your remains.” And I go on to say I want to be cremated, but if it’s legal I also think an ocean burial sounds pretty neat… and they interrupt me to say “no I’m talking about your body, what are you plans for your consciousness?” I’ll skip of the more personal elements of this conversation but essentially this individual said that we choose if we’re going to have another life here in earth, and knowing if you plan to come back or move on to another realm is important because it informs how you may choose to resolve your karmic agreements in this lifetime. When we do not make a choice, we are leaving much of this potential resolution to chance.
This of course is a dream, my dream, and not a prophetic declaration I’m making. But I was surprised in that moment that the idea of not returning to earth, for all its bullshit and problems, made me feel overwhelmed with grief. I definitely had an understanding that this notion of reincarnation being a hierarchal one, where we progress in the forward march of time (or don’t) and then “graduate” to the great beyond is not a useful framework, and moreover it’s not accurate.
What a relief actually to be able to say to yourself “yeah, I don’t think this is going to be fully resolved for me in this lifetime but I’m going to do my best to make whatever progress I can and that’s enough.” And in contrast, as rewarding as it might be to have the sense that those resolutions are within your grasp in this life, how sad to imagine leaving planet Earth permanently for the next…I don’t know— dimension? Planet? Space? Unembodied consciousness? Spirit guide?
It’s worth thinking about because it reflects some of our ideas of what our soul purpose is. Why are we here? What matters to you, what do you want to accomplish in this life? And how does this find balance with just enjoying the experience of being alive? Enjoyment and wonder seem like importance parts of cultivating consciousness to me… it can’t all be doom and gloom (contracts and vows! trauma and lessons! This can’t be the whole purpose of being here).
If you’re inclined to believe in spirit guides, this is where we might be able to access some support in bridging the gap between what brought us here and the general experience of our lives thus far. While reading Essential Energy Balancing, the author refers to the Lords of Karma as the sort of governing body of karmic contracts. This concept is echoed in a lot of writing about karmic healing. I did find those meditations very interesting and would highly recommend them, but something about the language and overall description felt in contrast with my experience. Or maybe my feminist sensibilities just gristle at the word “Lords.”
I might prefer to say that within our meditations, and in collaboration with all our guides, teachers, supports, angels, etc. as well as the concept of karma as something that goes beyond just us individually, we can assemble a sort of counsel of advisors to help us tune into our own soul’s memory. And this would unique to each of us.
It’s ironic that perhaps one of the most effective methods for cultivating energy and consciousness is to live a life on earth, but the catch is that the moment you’re born you “forget” pretty much everything that happened before. I feel like there are countless movies and books that essentially explore this awareness in the creative unconscious. Remembering those “past” (really “other”) lives is then an important key to deciphering between becoming distracted in the everyday affairs, drama, and consumption of our lives vs. staying focused on what’s really important to us and benefits the collective. Some distractions offer lessons and opportunities, others are more like “Groundhog Day” where we just repeat the same experiences much as we try to change the outcomes.
The Intersection of Past Lives and Ancestral History
I recently listened to a long and very interesting episode of Ghost of a Podcast, which explores an in-depth sort of case study over three generations, and demonstrated how the natal chart is born of the past, present and the future: it holds much raw data, but it is also not a predictor of the future. It is a screenshot of themes, potentials, resourceful qualities alongside the tricky spots of where we are pulled into dysfunction. Along with the karmic imprints and past life energies we hold, all those incarnations of consciousness we have had, we also hold in our bodies and brains the dna of the ancestors within our family lineage.
Ancestral work is then a part of karmic healing, and sometimes the most tangible way that we can affect it. The choices we make, the patterns we can shift in our current relationships open the door to letting that healing flow back through your lineage as well as forward. When we request or focus our energy towards karmic resolution and integration, we are specifically asking for that energy to move backwards and forwards in time: through all the versions, all levels of energy in our body and aura, all the generations, this lineage and others.
We do so in a respectful way that does not impose this will onto others, it is focused on the effects that we have had and continue to have on others. Energy is not bound by time, and so when we approach karmic healing on the energetic level we can use our experience and awareness in the present moment to feel into the past and future. We can also identify energetic echoes, stagnation, and hotspots felt in the present moment and begin to work with them metaphorically even if we have no idea what the context is. Stagnation happens for a reason, but when we have the ability to allow flow and make the necessary changes to support continued flow, we initiate healing through doing so.
Identifying our unique gifts, that we have inherited through family lineage and past life lineage, points us towards our soul purpose. Clearing the energy that is blocking us from shifting into new patterns, stepping into another spiral or timeline of development, is often necessary to allow us to integrate the lessons of past traumas without feeding the pain of those experiences. Remembering who we were may inform who we are now, but we must also make choices about who we want to be. In addition to clearing discordant energies that are keeping us in the past, we must also tap into frequencies that allow for transmutation and expansion.
Actual transformation requires death and rebirth, release and cultivation, salvaging what can be transmuted and returning to source what no longer serves a positive purpose. Just as trauma healing cannot be accomplished through insight alone, knowing the details of past life experiences and karmic patterns will not automatically resolve them. We must remember how to tune into our own ability to transmute energy, you are the venue of this change: through your mind, body, energy, and actions you create new personal realities all the time.