Very often, the portal into a past-life memory is a distressing event in our present life that awakens, or triggers, an older or deeper memory. In the prior examples explored here – Wendy’s story of the Indian raid, Cheryl’s fear from the Roman arena, Peter’s adolescent death wish – we saw how events in each of their lives had caused emotional chaos for many years. But we also saw how paying precise attention to the triggering situation in the present could open the door to the past. What follows is the story of a young woman who walked through just such a door.
SALLY: THE DEAD CHILD
“It was all my fault.”
This woman, whom I will call Sally, was living on the coast of California and training in massage at a school in Big Sur. She was in her thirties and had lived a fairly solitary life with few close relationships. She later admitted that she had never wanted to have a family in this lifetime.
Sally was driving back from San Francisco to Big Sur when she came upon a terrible car accident. A car had gone off the side of the road, rolled down the mountainside, and become wedged in the rocks. Several people had stopped their cars and were looking on in horror. Someone had called the state police.
Sally, who had a degree in nursing and basic first-aid knowledge, was a practical type, so she scrambled down the cliff and tried to get into the car. Inside, there was the body of a woman, clearly dead. Now, the interesting thing is that the sight of the dead woman did not upset Sally in any way, but when she looked around to see if there was anyone else in the car or beside the car, she saw something that did affect her – a baby bottle. It was at that point that she lost control – “freaked out,” as she put it – and started to tremble and weep. She was so overcome that she did not look for the body of the baby, but just scrambled back up the rocks to get away. She said to the state trooper, “There’s a dead woman down there, and I think a baby, you take over, I can’t do anything.” Then she got into her car and drove, trembling, all the way home.
That memory was still with her three weeks later, when Sally came to a workshop. I asked her to focus on that moment when she saw the baby bottle and “freaked out.” I said, “What does that baby bottle make you think of?”
“I was too late,” she said.
I said gently, “Go on!”
“I was too late to save the baby.”
“Repeat that phrase a few times and see where it takes you.”
“It’s too late, it’s too late,” she said. “Oh, my God, the baby’s dead.”
“Where are you?” I asked her.
Sally saw herself on a mountainside in Scotland. She immediately felt that she had the stocky body of a Scottish peasant woman. She was up tending the sheep, and she had heard gunfire from the little village where she lived. It was the seventeenth century, when there were violent skirmishes between the English and the Scottish border people. She came running down the hill, burst into her cottage, and found her sister and two babies – her own and her sister’s – all shot, all dead. “I was too late,” she said. “I should have been there for my child. It was all my fault.”
Just the thought of a dead baby had taken Sally through a doorway into another lifetime. Once I invited her to focus, the transition was almost instant. When she was first triggered, she was too upset to stay with the process and examine the images, but they were right there, close to the surface. It simply took a step through that doorway to find herself in another lifetime. It was a painful life to remember, but it helped her understand why in this lifetime she had chosen not to have children. By the time our sessions together were over, she was able to forgive herself for the failure in her past life, and look more favorably at relationships, and even consider the possibility of a family.
Sally’s story is similar to Wendy’s memory of the Native American boy who could not save his family from the killing, indeed, such stories must have been repeated thousands of times in our bloody colonial history. But the Scottish woman, as the mother of the child, was left with different, though equally devastating, feelings she blamed herself for not saving the baby, a guilt only a mother could feel. So although the Scottish woman died peacefully in her bed in that life, the memory of that terrible day stayed with her and went with her into the subtle realm after death, to be re-transmitted as one of Sally’s soul wounds today. At some level, though she never fully verbalized it to herself, Sally thought she would not be a good mother. No matter how good she might actually be with kids – and it was clear from her massage work that she was a very nurturing woman – such half-expressed thoughts totally undermined her self-worth until they were brought to consciousness and their roots rendered harmless.
OUR COMPLEXES, OUR KARMA
As Carl Jung once observed, everyone knows we have complexes; what we forget is that complexes “have” us! The powerful past life stories behind the present-day problems of Wendy and the others are just that – complexes, but not complexes formed in childhood, as the Freudians would have it; rather, complexes built around the deeper memories that belong to the soul. So it is no exaggeration to say that our karmic wounds from the distant past become the complexes of the present.
In every past life complex ever studied, there lies frozen or buried a strong emotion or feeling (fear, shame, guilt, pride, rage); a buried thought or assumption (“I can never do enough,” “I have to do it alone,” “They’ll all laugh at me”); often a bodily pain (headache, sexual block, skin rash, bowel problems); and always fragments of a script or story (victim of a witch hunt, betrayal in the senate, the tribe wiped out). In the table below, you will see how broad a range of complexes past life therapy can uncover, and the typical stories behind each one.
PAST LIFE COMPLEXES: COMMON THEMES AND STORIES
- Insecurity and fear of abandonment. Often related to past life memories of literal abandonment: being orphaned, sold into slavery, left out to die in times of famine, separated from loved ones during a crisis or a war, etc.
- Depression and low energy. Loss of a loved one or a parent; unfinished grieving; suicide memories; despair as a result of war, massacre, imprisonment, or deportation.
- Phobias and irrational fears. May be caused by all kinds of trauma in a past life: death by fire, water, suffocation, animals, knives, insects, natural disasters.
- Sadomasochistic behavior problems. Usually related to a past life memory of torture, often with loss of consciousness, usually with sexual overtones. The pain and rage seem to perpetuate hatred and desire to revenge oneself in the same way.
- Guilt and martyr complexes. Commonly stem from past life memories of killing a loved one, sacrificing a child, ordering the deaths of others, or feeling responsible for their deaths (e.g., in a fire). The entrenched thought is most often, “It’s all my fault. I deserve this.”
- Material insecurity and eating disorders. Past life memories of starvation, economic collapse, or inescapable poverty; may manifest as anorexia, bulimia, or obesity.
- Accidents, violence, physical brutality. Repetition of battlefield memories from warrior lives; unfulfilled quests for power; love of adventure. This complex is common in adolescence, the time of life when many soldiers historically met their deaths.
- Family struggles. Past life scores to settle with parents, children, or siblings: betrayal, abuse of power, inheritance injustices, rivalries. Includes most Oedipal dynamics.
- Sexual difficulties and abuse. Problems of frigidity, impotence, and genital infection often have past life stories of rape, abuse, or torture behind them. Even cases of incest and abuse may turn out to be reruns of past life patterns where emotional release was blocked.
- Marital difficulties. These sometimes derive from past lives with the same mate in a different power, class, or sexual constellations: e.g., as master, mistress, slave, prostitute, or concubine, or where the sex roles were reversed.
- Chronic physical ailments. Reliving of traumatic injuries or deaths. Headaches may relate to intolerable mental choices in other lives; throat ailments to verbal denunciations or unspoken thoughts; ulcers to memories of terror; neck-aches to hanging and strangling. Therapy often relieves chronic pain in those areas.
The healing work of past life therapy is therefore fourfold:
- To thaw the old, frozen feelings and release blocked energy.
- To bring negative thoughts and assumptions into consciousness in order to recognize their origins, see that they no longer belong to our current life, and let them go so we can then replace them with more positive, life-affirming thoughts.
- To release pains or blocks held in the body.
- To replay the old story and bring about a resolution in the mind of the past life character.
In most cases, the most effective starting point is to relive the story as realistically as possible. Therapists have always known the power of role-playing to unlock our complexes; in past life work, reliving creates a kind of psychodrama that in and of itself offers opportunities to release blocked emotions. The psycho-dramatic approach also enables us to detach from negative thoughts by seeing how they belong to an old and essentially outworn drama. We find we have been living a long ago nightmare that no longer needs to have power over us. And a complex that no longer “has” us has lost its charge; its energy can now be used more creatively.
Few emotions carry such strong charges as anger and rage – but at the same time, nothing can be as devastating as holding these feelings in. Since the early twentieth century, the bodywork of Reich has observed the dire energetic effects of holding suppressed rage deeply in the body; more recently, therapists have developed “rage reduction” workshops to discharge toxic anger. Even so, not all therapists are comfortable helping release rage, and some prefer to avoid it. But past life therapy has found that remembering the source of old rage and expressing it within the psycho-dramatic context of the past life story can be enormously effective, as well as satisfying to the person who releases the pent-up violence from his or her system. Release such as this was first given a name by Aristotle, who observed the powerful effects of emotion on audiences in the theaters of ancient Greece: weeping and moaning in anguish as they identified with the sufferings of Orestes or Oedipus, they experienced a kind of emotional purgation, a cleansing – in short, a catharsis.
LOUIS: DEPRESSION AND BACK PAIN
A Slave’s Old Hatred
An African-American named Louis came to a workshop to explore the depressions he had suffered throughout his adult life. As a psychiatrist, he had taken various medications for relief over the years, but the symptoms never fully went away. In talking about himself, he also mentioned recurrent back pain that had troubled him for a long time.
When he went into a past life regression, he found himself as a powerfully built slave on a sugar plantation. He was a bitter and rebellious slave who ran away on several occasions. He was always plotting how to get out. But each time, he was caught, brought back, and savagely beaten, typically on the back. Finally, after the fifth or sixth attempt, his masters were so angry that they beat him to death, his back taking most of the punishment.
Louis relived the death of the slave in a psychodrama, assisted by other workshop members: his arms were lightly tied in a towel to suggest the struggle in his body, and he was whipped, but very gently, to suggest the beating. The effect was obvious to observers as he tensed his back, held his breath, and clenched his teeth. Naturally, the slave was holding tremendous rage in his back and arms. Because he could not express it, he took it with him at death, everything frozen into those tense areas of his back, chest, arms, and respiratory system. His dying thoughts, clenched in his body, were, “It’s hopeless. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll never be free. I hate them. I could kill them.”
I encouraged Louis to go through the death and remember exactly what it was like. Once it was over, he reported these feelings of enormous frustrations and the tension remaining in his back. But above all, he was left with despair and hopelessness because he was so powerless to fight back. It was clear that the slave had died with intense feeling lodged in his back and other parts of his body, but they were frozen, still clenched with rage and pain.
The story seemed so unresolved, emotionally and physically, that I asked Louis: “If you could have fought these masters back, what would you have done?” He said, “I would have beaten them back. I would have thrown them off me and beaten them back.” Above all, he wanted to use his elbows to get them literally off his back. So, in a second cathartic psychodrama, I gave him some thick cushions and encouraged him to show us what that rage would look like if he dramatized it physically. I gave him plenty of space, and he beat up the cushions with obvious relish, making a lot of noise in the process, breathing hard and emotionally. In a very powerful catharsis, he was able to release the rage of a powerless slave that he had carried in his body all his life.
When Louis reflected on the experience, he saw clearly that his work as a psychiatrist in a hospital – because of the power structure there – had made him feel powerless and constantly resentful. He recognized that he had actually felt powerless all his life and that he had always put himself in work situations in institutional hierarchies where he felt he was under someone else’s thumb. Even though he had a strong personality, he never fought back and he never challenged authority. It was clear to him now how he had carried those feelings of powerlessness and rage with him from the slave life; he saw that the despair he had felt then was a perfect mirror of his depressions today. He even admitted that he felt trapped in his job and that his inability to leave it was depressing him. Clearly, his job situation had been an ongoing trigger for him, and because he never expressed these feelings, they had turned to poison in his system and contributed a great deal to his emotional and physical pain.
Excerpt from Healing Your Past Lives