Experiencing a "Past Life"

 My "Past-Life Regression" Hypnosis Session

I've told this story to a few people, but I've never written about it before. I'm going to try to do the whole thing justice. As I explain at the end, I don't know whether this was literally a past life that my soul has lived, or just a very vivid glimpse of being someone very different from my present self. Part of what made this experience so compelling to me, is that it was totally different from what I was expecting or hoping to find.

Back in 2010, about 4 years into my "spiritual awakening" journey, and a couple years after my encounter with the tree in the 9th dimension, I was going through a phase where I was intrigued with the "divine feminine" and ancient "goddess" religions. The same woman, Aine, who had led the guided meditation for "opening the portals to the 9th dimension," (which in some incredible and mysterious way, had actually led to me having the most intense and profound experience of my life…) had written a fictional story about a woman in Ireland who had all these amazing experiences of herself in past lives in various incarnations, like fairy goddess, and druidic herbalist healer.

I found myself wishing that I could discover what my past lives might have been. I was imagining something along the lines of what the fictional character in Aine's book had found. Maybe some Isis cult member in Egypt? Maybe a shaman? (Someone had told me once that they saw me as a shaman in two past lives.) Whatever it was, I imagined it to be something positive and good. Right?

So I managed to find a person in the area who did "past-life regression" hypnosis sessions and set up an appointment.

I was feeling a bit of trepidation, frankly, as I walked into the house where she was going to do the session. I had no experience with hypnosis, and was unsure how it would feel or if it would even work. We went into a small room she was using as her office, and shut the door. She explained a bit about how the session would go. She would start with a guided meditation to bring me into the brain wave state which would allow the information to come through, and then she would ask a series of questions to elicit images in my mind, and I was supposed to just say out loud the first thing that came into my mind, without judgment.

I don't remember exactly how the initial guided meditation went. I think it was a walk through a beautiful forest or something, but she ended it by guiding me down a long set of stairs in my mind and into a hallway with a lot of doors on either side. She invited me to walk down the hallway until I got to the door that had the life that had the information that would be the most helpful to me at this time. I did. Once I opened the door, she asked me to look down at my feet, (in my mind,) and tell her what I saw.

I really didn't feel like I was in an altered state at all at this point. But I did what she said, and looked down at my feet. An image gradually formed of my feet wearing fancy jeweled slippers with upturned pointed toes. She continued with questions, and I continued answering them with the first thing that came into my mind.

I was wearing knicker-length richly-colored pantalones. I was a man, not a woman (at this juncture, I felt a little subtle dope-slap.. "oops, this isn't going to be what I was expecting"..)  I was living in a nomadic caravan-type tribe, around the year 500, somewhere in western Asia. We lived in very ornately decorated tents. I was the head guy. Everyone did what I said, and served me.

I didn't really feel any connection to or affection for anyone around me, except for one person, a little girl about 9 years old. I could feel how she loved me. No one else did, or at least I didn't feel it. She wasn't my biological child. I don't know what her relationship was to me, but she was actually more like a parent than a child, the way she cared for me in an unconditional way. I had a "memory" of riding on horseback with her sitting behind me, and I could feel the love emanating from her little body into mine. She was the light of my life. She's the only thing I loved in that life. She's the only one who made it possible for me to feel what love feels like.

The next "memory" that came up was of me standing outside one of our tents, with a few people around me. A couple people showed up from our left side to give me some news. They told me that the little girl that loved me had been killed.

I totally went beserk. I whipped out my sword?scimitar? weapon thing, and whacked off the head of the person standing next to me. From that point forward, I ceased to care even slightly about anyone or anything. It's as though my heart went dark, turned into a stone, and I went from being a tolerable person who people served more or less willingly, to being a completely irrational and violent tyrant who people were terrified of.

The next place/time I was asked to go to was the last day of this particular life. I felt myself lying on my back, looking up at the sky. I knew I was dying, and I knew that I was dying because someone had poisoned me. I knew that I deserved it. I knew that everyone would be happy when I was dead and no longer terrorizing the people around me.

Then I died, left my body and went upward into a bright light. Suddenly I was overcome with immense shame and regret. I suddenly became aware of the way my actions had affected the people around me. The shame was like a crushing weight, and I wanted so SO badly to be able to go back and undo what I had spent my life doing, harming the people around me…

That was the end of the session, and I was asked what this life meant to me in this life now. I felt a couple of ways this past life was related to this one. First of all, I could feel a connection between this past life, and the way I had felt ashamed as a little girl in this life, in a deep sort of way that I had never really had an explanation for before. Secondly, I could feel how my marriage, which had ended 4 years previously, and which had felt like living with a tyrant for 12 years, was in some way, at least a partial payment of karmic debt. It gave me a sort of peace and sense of rightness about that period of my life that I hadn't felt before.

I have no idea whether this actually happened to me literally as a soul in another life. The "memories" were quite vivid and emotionally intense. They felt like real memories. I still cry when I tell about the little girl getting killed. But maybe the hypnosis was just a way of being able to inhabit the experience of a different human in a different time, who wasn't actually literally me. Maybe it is the memory of an ancestor, carried down in some way through my DNA.

Regardless of whether it was a real past life of mine or not, this experience gave me a very vivid glimpse, in a visceral embodied sort of way, of what it was like to be someone who lived a very different life from the one I am living. It gave me a glimpse of how and why a person could lose all empathy, which, in a paradoxical way, enables me to have more empathy now for people who have no empathy. It gave me a glimpse of the way it feels to die and enter the next dimension, and how much a soul can feel shame and a desire to get a chance to make right what they did wrong.

(Knowing how it felt to die and suddenly understand things that I hadn't been able to see while I was alive, could have been partly due to the experiences I've had since my mother died, and how she gave me the message that she understood everything now and just wanted me to be happy. My mother died 6 years before this hypnosis session. I write about this in the my blog post number 12.)

Several years after this "past life regression," I had another layer of epiphany surface about the experience of being this tyrant. During a period of my life, in 2015, when I was feeling a lot of unworthiness of being loved, it occurred to me that this past life may be one reason why. Once the little girl who loved me had been killed, and I lost all sight of love myself, and became a monster, it never occurred to me while I was being a monster, that it would result in me feeling like I would never deserve to be loved again by the very person whose love had been taken from me.. I had lost any sight of a future that might have the possibility of love, and that hopelessness had led me to do things that made me feel unlovable. A cyclical self-fulfilling prophecy.

It has given me insight into the suffering of those who do horrible things to other people. It leads me to feel like those who do the awful things to other people are actually suffering more than the people who have awful things done to them. Because if I'm the victim, at least I can keep my own sense of my own goodness intact. I can feel self-righteous. But if I am the one who does heinous things to others, that is a very difficult burden to get out from under. It feels unforgivable. Feeling like my soul deserves to be in hell IS like being in hell.

It also makes me realize that in all of our own ancestral lineages, each of us HAS tyrants, rapists, murderers and all manner of hard-hearted humans.

All of this ancestral memory is carried around in our own bodies. We can't just pretend that we have always been on the side of "good." 

If the number of ancestors in my family tree doubles with each generation, and each generation is about 25 years, then how many ancestors do I have that lived 1000 years ago? Let's do the math. 4 generations every 100 years, times 10 100's, equals 40 generations in 1000 years. If each person has two parents, then I have to double the number of ancestors 40 times. I just tried to do this on my phone's calculator. When I do 2x2x2, even 36 times, I am already at 34 billion!!! Obviously, a lot of my ancestors shared ancestors with others.. because there weren't 34 billion people on earth at one time, ever. The point I'm making is that with that many peoples' DNA combining to make my own, there's some of every kind of character in my blood.

Either I disown a lot of my own DNA, or I accept that I contain multitudes, and I can love them or hate them, but hating them doesn't make them go away. They are still there. It feels self-destructive to try to disown the parts of myself that I despise. I think it's much healthier to try to bring those parts into the light of Love, and offer them forgiveness so that they can heal into better versions of themselves within me.