by Bryan Jameison

Life is real, life is earnest and the grave is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul.” Longfellow

“It’s so nice to see you again. It’s been such a long time.” Have you ever felt like saying that when meeting a total stranger for the first time? Or conversely, have you met someone you instantly disliked or feared? There seems to be a sense of inner recognition that you know this stranger, even though that awareness doesn’t quite logically fit. If reincarnation is not part of your belief system, then you may drive yourself crazy trying to figure out why you feel such a strong pull toward the person. On the other hand, if you accept reincarnation, you automatically may assume that the negative or positive feelings you have when encountering someone for the first time is traceable to a past-life connection. You may think this too weird, but I have found that all of my clients have known at least one person, and more often, several.

Roles change. Besides being a romantic partner or soul mate, the person also could have been an enemy, a child, an infuential teacher, a parent, a boss, a sibling or anyone else with whom we’ve had a relationship in a former life. A person who once killed us may now be our sibling, or we could have killed as an enemy who is now our best friend. The following is a case in point. Through regression, a young man in his twenties discovered that his father’s long-standing feelings of indifference towards him stemmed from a past life in which his father was a Cheyenne Indian brave who had killed him and his family as they were heading West. In this life, he simply gave my client, his son, a new life and a new body to replace the one he took. There was nothing in their contract saying the father had to love his son. This definitely is a perfect illustration of the principle “an eye for and eye…” in action.

Through many incarnations, it becomes obvious that our relationships can become extremely complicated and convoluted. However, according to my experience, the belief that all the people we now know are those we have known in the past to be without foundation. Along this line, much has been said and written about soul mates. In fact, it’s the most popular single topic among believers in reincarnation. It seems that nearly everyone wants to know if they have had a past relationship with their present-day spouse or lover. When the answer is “yes,” they generally want to explore those past-life connections A.S.A.P. The more history a relationship has, the wiser one would be to explore it.

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, soul mates are people with whom we supposedly have had a series of romantic and/or marital involvements. Granted, such relationships do exist; however, contrary to popular belief, we may have been in totally different roles than what we might have hoped. Just because we once were romantically involved with someone in the past, doesn’t necessarily mean we are destined to continue that relationship in our present life. Regrettably, most love relationships seldom follow the idyllic paths many writers on the subject would like us to believe.

Of course, we all love to fantasize about how nice it would be to go back to a life when we were the great love of a beautiful damsel or a Prince Charming, but I have found these relationships are few and far between. However, don’t be disheartened. If you are like the majority of my clients, you probably have a dozen or more soul mates out there just waiting to meet you again. I find this thought far more encouraging than the thought of being limited to having only one soul-mate.

If you become parted from someone you love and your love is reciprocated, you surely will meet again to continue the relationship until it has run its due course. It’s not uncommon when one meets a former spouse or lover to feel an instant attraction toward that person, as well as an inner sense of familiarity. I usually have found that the get-acquainted period is extremely brief in such cases. This is because, at soul level, you both know your present relationship is a continuation of a dance begun long ago. One thing for certain, all unfinished business eventually will be dealt with and completed, if not in one life than in another.

The following is an example of such a relationship: Randy’s complaint centered around the sudden development of migraine headaches about eighteen months before I regressed him, when he was twenty-five. Until then, he seldom, if ever, had a headache. The thing that baffled him most was why they started for no apparent reason. He had no particular stress or health problems at the time, was allergic to nothing, and hadn’t changed his diet, nor had he suffered any physical injuries.

During his pre-regression interview he told me his headaches first began when he was out on a first date with a woman he had just met and to whom he was very attracted. The evening, which had been very pleasant ended with him feeling as if his brain were about to explode. In fact, the pain was so severe he barely was able to drive; consequently, he stopped at a hospital emergency room on his way home where he was given a shot to ease his pain. After awhile, he couldn’t help but notice that his headaches became more frequent and severe each time they went out together. Oddly, they would usually manifest after he took her home from a date. By the time I saw him, he was already deeply in love with her. Because of the comfortable way he felt when they were together, he wondered if there might be a past-life connection.

Almost immediately, he regressed into the lifetime when he knew her before in the early 1930’s in Chicago. In that lifetime he was a small-time hoodlum, and she was his “#1 squeeze” (girlfriend). Even though he was crazy about her, he never had mentioned marriage, despite the fact he had thought about it several times. They always used to meet at a local speakeasy where he knew she would be safe. This was because everyone knew she was his girl. Then one night, when he finally planned to “pop” the question, he found her sitting with another man in a darkened back-booth. Blinded by jealously and rage, he attacked the man, beating and kicking him to a pulp. He then slapped his girlfriend across the face and stomped out of the place. “She’s just like all the rest,” he thought. “I’ve never met a broad I could trust.”

After arriving back at his cheap hotel room and slamming the door behind him, he realized how much he loved her and fell into a black hole of grief and depression. His life no longer meant anything to him. After writing a brief note of apology for slapping her, he went to his dresser, opened the top drawer and took out a chrome-plated 32-caliber pistol. He then placed the muzzle of the pistol to his right temple and, in one last moment of anguish, he blew out his brains. As his corpse slumped to the floor, he found himself floating above it just as his girlfriend burst into his room and threw herself across his body. As she screamed how much she loved him, she sobbingly declared the only reason she allowed another man to sit beside her was to make him jealous enough to ask her to marry him. Although he felt no emotion while viewing the scene, he was aware she truly did love him. Now he deeply regretted what he had done. Before leaving the death scene, he also was aware of her making a vow to be with him again.

After that, his Higher-Self told him his feelings of hatred, rage, betrayal and retained grief from that incarnation were the underlying cause of his headaches. Knowing this, he chose to take them to the Light and dump them. Several months after the regression, he called to tell me he no longer suffered from migraines and also was planning to marry his new/old girlfriend, who, in this life, does nothing to make him jealous.

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Another client, Betty, became involved in an intense holiday romance while vacationing in Germany. It all ended after a few days when each tearfully promised the other to meet again some day, but at the same time, really knowing it would never happen. She later told me it was like letting go of someone she’d known and loved all of her life. The surprising thing about this affair, however, was that no sooner had she left her lover behind, her grief ceased and she felt wonderfully free, content and at peace with herself. What puzzled her was that she had expected to miss him for months, if not forever, but, instead, she didn’t miss him at all.

To resolve her dilemma, she came to be regressed several years after that affair ended. The causal lifetime for her feelings occurred in France over 500 years ago. In that life she had been married to a young soldier who went off to war but never returned. He died in battle without having the chance to say goodbye. She died several years later without ever knowing for sure what had happened to him. She only knew she longed to see him again and to love him just once more. During the regression, it was discovered her German lover was her long-lost French husband. They, at last had their chance to meet again, to make love to each other again and finally to say farewell. Their appointment was kept, and something left unfinished for over 500 years finally was concluded during their brief holiday romance.

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Chance meetings and fleeting romances oftentimes are found to be bits of unfinished business from past lives. Sometimes, clearing them leaves a person happy and sometimes sad, but one always feels more complete for having made the contact. Contrary to popular fiction, many of our past loves were rag-clad, horrible smelling wretches who had dirty, matted lice-ridden hair and rotten teeth, if any at all. (Bathtubs, dentists and dry-cleaners were unknown on the human scene until recently.) This reminds me of a woman I regressed into a prehistoric lifetime where, according to her, her mate was really ugly. AND I DO MEAN UGLY.

Joan, a recent widow, had come to be regressed because she had loved her deceased husband very much. She wanted to know if they had been together in another lifetime, and if so, she desired nothing more than to go back to their very first life together. The lifetime she was regressed into was prehistoric. Judging by the tone of her voice and the expression of disgust on her face, she wasn’t looking forward to this experience. As she described him, her utter distaste for his physical appearance was obvious. There absolutely was no enthusiasm on her part ever to go into that lifetime. After a little persuasion, however, she reluctantly consented to “go for it.” Her bad attitude shifted immediately after he brought her some wild game to eat, picked the lice from her matted, dirty hair and later saved her life when he killed the alligator which nearly had her for lunch. Soon she realized there was much more to true love than a handsome face. Before the session ended, she found herself deeply in love with this man who always protected and loved her. I found it interesting to witness her transition as she moved through her present-day value system into the one she had had when she lived in caves. As you might already have guessed, the cave man had been her now recently deceased husband. For her, the best part of the regression came at the very end when she was assured by the HIGHER SELF that she could expect to see him again in a future life.

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Even though few people want to hear it, past-life involvement with others can often lead to present-life tragedies. For example, you meet a young man, fall madly in love with him, marry and have children. You love each other very much, and your sex life is fantastic. Then one night while making love, you suddenly feel that what you are doing is wrong. Feelings of aversion to any sexual contact with your partner sweep through you, and for no known reason you begin to feel guilty about having sex with him. At first you may shrug off these totally inappropriate feelings, chalking them up to stress, overwork or just a temporary hormonal imbalance, but the feelings of repulsion and guilt continue to intensify over the ensuing months. Neither you, your mate nor your marriage counselor can understand what has happened to your once perfect marriage, which now is falling apart because you refuse to have sex with your husband.

In these instances, I often find the cause for the current problem is found in a past-life relationship in which you and your mate were in a parent/child or brother/sister type relationships. At some level, the feelings from the past relationship bleed through into the present. The trigger to this may be reaching a certain age, an inadvertent glance, a particular mannerism or some action taken by either one of you.

In one such case, the trigger was the husband giving his wife a pair of diamond post earrings. Her acceptance of his gift unconsciously triggered a time in her past when her husband had been her father who had given her a pair of diamond post earrings on her sixteenth birthday. This trigger caused her to feel that having sex with her husband/father was incestual. Through regression, she was able to change her unconscious misperception, and release the inappropriate feelings from the past, which were damaging to their present relationship. Thereafter, everything between her and her husband returned to the way it previously had been.

In another case, a male client lost all sexual interest in his wife after giving her a pearl necklace. As she accepted the gift, he flashed on her playing the part of his mother in an earlier life. Again, the present relationship suffered until he was able to release his inappropriate feelings. In most any case, once the truth has been unearthed and the detrimental feelings and distorted perceptions of the mate are released, the present-life relationship can be salvaged. However, there are some people who are unable or unwilling to release their former feelings. When that happens, there’s nothing I can do to help them.

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I know a few couples who have known each other before when they either hated or barely tolerated each other; however, when they found each other again in this life, they went on to eventually love each other. The following is such a case.

As Lynette, a middle-aged woman, sat across from me in my office, her eyes filled with tears as she talked. She told me she had been deeply in love with her husband of eleven years. According to her, they had a wonderful life together. She said she had never met a man with whom she could communicate or respond to as passionately as she did with him. Best of all, he apparently felt the same way about her. After discussing what a wonderful marriage she had for about fifteen minutes, she finally got around to telling me why she wanted to be regressed. Despite everything she had going for her in her marriage, she was unable to feel intimate with her husband. For instance, she never allowed him to hold her hand. When he tried, she quickly withdrew her hand from his, a practice which had become embarrassing to her. This didn’t seem to bother him, however, because he had turned it into kind of a joke. When she wasn’t looking, he would reach across the dinner table and playfully grip her hand and laugh. Her reaction didn’t make any sense to her since they truly loved each other, shared their thoughts and had great sex together.

For the answer to her dilemma, we had to go back about 300 years to a time when she and her husband were living in England near the coast. Nearly everyday they spent many hours together walking, hand in hand, along the cliffs watching the sea breaking on the rocks below. Their relationship truly was a romantic and intimate relationship. But because he was a seaman, he had to go out to sea for several months at a time. Each time he left, she faithfully vowed to wait for him until he returned. While he was gone, she would go to the cliffs daily, hoping each time to see his returning ship. She could barely wait for the time to pass until they would be in each other’s arms again.

They had been married for about ten years when one day his ship did not return on schedule. Many lonely years passed as she continued to go to the cliffs daily and wait in vain for him to return. No one ever knew what had happened to his ship, but she kept the faith and never was dissuaded. On her deathbed she vowed to be with him again, even if it took forever. She actually died of a broken heart. Since nobody wants to carry that pain any longer than they have to, she happily dumped it.

As I always do at the conclusion of every regression, I asked if she knew anyone from that incarnation who was with her this life. With surprise and delight in her voice, she exclaimed, “My husband! My husband then is my husband now! Oh my God! My present husband and I met when I was twenty-nine years old. That’s the same age I was in England when he sailed away to sea. As if that wasn’t enough, we celebrated our tenth anniversary on a cruise ship.”

Now she finally was able to “put two and two together.” She realized the reason she couldn’t hold her present husband’s hand was because she unconsciously felt guilty. At soul level she felt she was betraying the vow that she would wait forever for her former husband to return. Her guilt immediately vanished when she realized her past and present husband were one and the same soul. He had, indeed, returned to her just as he had promised. In retrospect, she realized the reason she did not recognize him in this lifetime was because her English husband was five foot six or seven, with blond hair and blue eyes, and this time he was over six feet tall with brown hair and brown eyes. In England he had been a fisherman, and now he was successful businessman who never failed to come home every night. As she left, I asked her to let me know how things were going.

A week or so later, she called to tell me she no longer pulled her hand away when her husband tried to hold it. She said he also immediately noticed the change. With a giggle, she told me she could hardly let go of his hand long enough to eat dinner.

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The following is a story told by one of my clients that illustrates a case in which the relationship needed closure.

“When we first met, the minute I looked into his eyes, we connected. It was as though I had known him forever. There was no adjustment period, we just fit. When we made love, chemistry wouldn’t be the word for it. It was wonderful. There’s no way to describe how much I loved him. My feelings were too deep for words. Then, after only a few days together, as suddenly as it began, it was over. Finished! Just like that, we said goodbye, and surprisingly, that was OK. He went his way, and I went mine. Although I could not believe it at first, it was as if whatever we had to do together now was completed.”

If something like this has ever happened to you, you can bet a karmic appointment was kept. The chances are that somewhere along the way the two of you parted prematurely but made a date to meet again to finish out whatever was started. This kind of thing is more common than most people imagine, and, when it happens, there usually is no logical way to explain it other then reincarnation.

Such an affair may run against every moral principle you have. It may be totally out of character for you. You may even he happily married to someone you love very much when it happens, but it happens anyway. If you don’t understand what’s happened, it could prove to be a life-shattering experience when it needn’t be. Such encounters need not be made into something they’re not.

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Occasionally people have spontaneous flashbacks. These deja-vu experiences catch them totally off guard and unprepared for a “trip” into a past life. Such was the case of a budding entrepreneur who lived in Chicago many years ago. Trent and his two partners were attempting to put together a major business venture of which he was the initiator. As is the case in any venture, it reaches a point of no return where the project will either come together or fail. It was at this critical moment that Trent was forced to turn over the chore of management to his two partners because he had to be out of town for two months on other business.

Believing they were capable, trustworthy, and responsible, he left. Upon his return, however, he discovered neither of them had followed through, and some extremely critical business had been ignored until it was too late. This set the stage for not only a potential delay of several important months, but also for the eventual collapse of the project. When the first partner told him he thought the other partner was taking care of things, Trent was very upset, but when he phoned his second partner and heard the same lame excuse, he became incensed. He had never known himself to be so completely enraged with anyone in his life. He literally saw red when he slammed down the phone. Instantly his left shoulder was seized with excruciating pain. He felt as though his left arm had just been ripped from its socket. Completely baffled, he wondered what was causing it. While pacing the floor, clutching his shoulder in agony and wondering what to do about the horrible pain, the word “rage” popped into his mind. This was followed by the most bizarre experience he ever had in his life.

He suddenly had a vision in which he saw himself seated on what seemed to be a medieval throne at one end of a huge hall. This image was quickly followed by another scene of several armed men dressed in costumes of the fourteenth or fifteenth century bursting into the hall. They ran to the throne and tore him from his seat of power. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed his two henchmen standing off to one side as he was forcibly being dragged away. These were the same men he had trusted with his life to warn and protect him from exactly the type of event that was happening. Instead, they passively watched the entire scenario with apathetic expressions.

In his struggle to free himself from his captors, his left shoulder was dislocated. In the next scene he saw he was being forced at knife point, to stand with his back against a wall in a small alcove while his enemies slowly proceeded to close it up with mortar and huge stone blocks. As the opening at the top became smaller and smaller, he became more enraged as he thought about his friends’ betrayal. Still furious and suffering from his dislocated shoulder, he died in total darkness four days later.

While viewing the scene, Trent intuitively knew that his present-day business partners were the reincarnations of his two former comrades who had betrayed him. He also knew that just as he had lived four days in agonizing pain while standing behind that castle wall, it would be four days before his tormenting shoulder pain would cease. Exactly four days later to the hour, the pain stopped. Needless to say, after this insightful experience there was a major shift in his relationship with his business partners.

Trent experienced what is known as a spontaneous recall of a past life. Unlike Trent, thus far, none of my clients ever have experienced physical pain in the course of being regressed using my process.

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It is important to keep in mind that nearly all of our major relationships in this incarnation were arranged and agreed upon by all parties concerned before their births. This also includes relationships that may have been disastrous. As I have already stated, it is quite likely we all have numerous soul mates living somewhere on the planet, souls with whom we have been romantically involved in the past or those with whom we quite possibly have some unfinished business. This is because an involvement with any given soul mate may occur fewer than a dozen times in a thousand years.

One of the real benefits of reincarnation is that it gives us the chance to meet old friends, family members and lovers once again, sometimes for only a fleeting encounter. Other times it is to pick up and continue from where it left off.

From what I’ve seen, true love never can end, nor can it truly be lost. It is only temporarily put on hold until a more appropriate time occurs when it can come into its full and complete expression. This is especially comforting if you have been prematurely parted from someone you loved very much. When viewing any relationship from the perspective of the reincarnationists, the words “I’ll see you later,” “Aloha,” or “hasta la vista” take on an entirely new and deeper meaning.

Excerpt from Exploring Our Forgotten Live: The Amazing Healing Power of Past Life Therapy