Positive Health Online

Past Life Memories - Are they real?

Fact - Thousands of ordinary people have provided reports of near death experiences, of leaving their body and entering a tunnel. Often they come back with memories of obscure details of the physical environment that they left behind that have subsequently been proved correct. This may include the room that their body was in or the conversations between the medical people attending to them. Often they have been monitored by medical staff and found to be brain dead at the time.[1]

Fact - Dr Ian Stevenson has investigated 2600 young children who have been found to suddenly make statements about their last life, often to the complete bewilderment of their parents.[2] Some have displayed a depth of knowledge of obscure but verifiable facts about people or places that they could not have acquired in any normal way. And a few have unusual birthmarks or even physical defects that correspond exactly to the wounds from which they died in their previous life. It seems that not only does our consciousness or soul survive physical death, but it also returns to earth again and again in different lives.

Sceptics insist that the people are creating intricate and imaginative stories from information they have gained by perfectly normal means, even if they might have consciously forgotten it. But how would they account for those cases where subjects recall details so obscure that they could never have gained knowledge of them in this life?  What, for example, are we to make of the Australian woman who had never been to England in her life, but led a documentary team to a disused chicken shed just outside Glastonbury, where they found an intricate carving on the floor, just as she had drawn it back in Sydney?

Memories obtained through past-life regression are not infallible. But such cases seem to prove that they cannot be dismissed en masse.

Can experiencing a past life help heal our current life problems?



At this point we'll turn to a client that we'll call Claire. She was a 35 year-old single woman who had re-occurring thoughts and dreams of stealing, which made her anxious because she was an accountant responsible for managing her company accounts. Worst of all she had re-occurring thoughts of, "They are taking my children" and would get so angry that tears would roll down her cheeks. This had been going on for about 15 years, and she had tried everything to stop it. The strange thing is that she was not married and had never had children.

Claire quickly regressed into a past life story of being a woman living with her two children in the woods and healing people with herbs. She had been living in harmony with the local villagers for a number of years. One day however, a group of stern looking Quaker men came to her house. Some held her children and others dragged her away and accused her of being a witch. She was taken to a river by the village and tied to the end of a wooden plank face down. As the plank was positioned over the water of the river she was unable to look at it, and the fear of the water was vividly remembered as she told the story. As she drowned still tied to the plank all her energy was focused on her dying thoughts, "My children have been taken away, who's going to look after them."

In her second past life she found herself a poor man in England in the Middle Ages not able to find the money to buy food for his family. The poor man broke into a big country house, stole a painting and rode off on a horse. The noise he had made alerted members of the household who chased him on foot. One of them fired a pistol and shot him in the shoulder. He fell off the horse and was caught by the crowd and hung. The poor man's dying thought was about the mistake of stealing. Claire was amazed at experiencing the pain in her shoulder at the point of being shot, and the difficulty breathing as she experienced the poor man's hanging.

With both these past lives there was unfinished business at the point of death. Thoughts, emotions and physical pain associated with a trauma appear to be imprinted on the soul. When the person is reincarnated again these memories are acted out again in the new body and new situation. It is as if the pattern needs to be recreated until the person's soul has resolved the problem.

With Claire she was able to resolve the unfinished business by clearing the blocked energy from the past life in therapy. She reported afterwards that the reoccurring thoughts of stealing and having her children taken away had stopped. She also noticed other things in her life had changed. She used to have a phobia about water. Her mother had been shocked at her loud screaming when she had simply tried to wash her hair in a basin when Claire was a small girl. After resolving the past life conflict Claire was no longer scared about water. It also cleared another unexplainable problem she had in her life with men in authority. After therapy, an aggressive businessman accused her of bumping her car into another car. She said, "My legs would normally have turned to jelly, but I was able to hold my ground and tell him he was just as much at fault."

Physical pain too can be carried from one life to another. This can be illustrated with a client that we'll call Joan, who was a single mother with four children on income support. She had been in a series of abusive relationships for most of her life and had suffered from unexplainable pains in her joints and in different parts of her body.

Joan regressed into the past life of a girl abandoned in Victorian times and brought up by nuns. She left the nuns at an early age and found work in a laundry. Her miserable job was washing other peoples clothes by stirring the clothes in a large caldron of hot water for long hours each day. She caught the eye of a wealthy older gent who eventually married her. Although he was well respected in the community as a successful businessman, he didn't want a sexual relationship and took his frustrations of life out on her. As a poor woman with no family she found no one would listen to her. She was regularly beaten and left on the floor covered in blood. Unable to leave the relationship she felt powerless and just took the beatings. The final beating was more severe than normal. She was thrown down the long stairs of the house and half unconscious dragged into a dark cellar.

As she died she was able to recall the relief of leaving the physical body. Her feelings of powerlessness and her physical symptoms appeared to be carried with her. As she experienced powerlessness in relationships in this life, the physical symptoms were triggered from the past life. When the blocked energy from the past life was released, she was able to stand up to the man in her current relationship and tell him, "Be good to me or leave". This was something she had never before been able to do before and her unexplainable physical pains never bothered her again.

Can we heal our Karma?
Reincarnation is a process governed by Karma. Every thought or action we take has a consequence. If we hate others, then hate will eventually come into our lives too; if we give out love we fill our lives with love. The bible calls it, "we reap what we sow". However Karma goes further than this and is the way our soul learns by repeating lives until a lesson is learnt.[3] If we are at harmony with our fellow humans and our environment at our death the energy is balanced and no karma will be carried to the next. As shown in the case studies of Claire and Joan, when unfinished business from a past life has been resolved, it can bring about a profound healing of chronic unexplainable emotional and physical symptoms in the current life.

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