Using Past Lives for Healing
For those who know about or have heard stories of people spontaneously remembering past lives in great detail, the focus is on adults and spectacle. Much like posts, videos, memes or new stories which now "go viral", stories about past life memories were only as good as the drama they inflicted on the person and those around them. Similar to conspiracy theories today, people were drawn either to confirm or debunk the tales told while others stood and watched as the person's life warped in a slow-motion train wreck along the way.
Of course, these stories were more fascinating if the memories seemed to heal unsolvable medical or mental problems, cured phobias, and/or resolved fixations.
Over the past century methods have been developed using hypnotherapy, shamanic trance, and various medicinals to help individuals gain access to their past lives specifically for healing. Retrieving the details of past relationships, traumatic deaths, or even career paths and responsibilities have helped people work through issues in their current lives.
What is not commonly known is these spontaneous adult reports of past life memories are the exception rather than the rule. Most past lives are remembered, without prompt or trigger, by children. Often the child, once able to communicate clearly, will let their family know they aren't really related. That their biological parents aren't their real parents and other parents down the street or in another town are the real ones.
Unlike the common way in which children try to command some control over their environment by having an emotional tantrum, these reports are usually made calmly, are matter of fact, and often come with a large number of specifics and details which can be verified. Sometimes the child can explain why they are no longer with their "real" family, due to injury/accident or intentional homicide, what lessons they are trying to learn, and why they reincarnated as they have.
Dr. Ian Stevenson spent the majority of his career documenting these cases and collected over 3000 based on interviews with children from Africa to Alaska. He collected only those cases where it could be verified the child was not prompted to make a report nor had access to information about the past life prior to the report. He tried to do several follow up interviews with each child as they grew older and found for the most part that once the child had moved into the pre-teen and teen years the past life memories themselves had completely disappeared and all that remained were the child's memories of having reported them and how they felt at the time.
This is understandable if looked at as part of the incarnation process. Much like grafting in agriculture, the soul and the body are joined pre-birth, but this joining takes time to fully bond. During gestation the connection is so tenuous that should the soul have even an instant of second thought or doubt the physical connection can be lost and the body injured, causing a birth defect or death.
From birth to age 3 the soul is helping the body grow and learn how to operate in the world. It is fully present and yet attempting to also keep itself from becoming too enmeshed in the process. Imagine a newer soul being inundated with stimuli during the beginning years and having no means of shielding itself from the onslaught or a mature soul feeling trapped with all the desire to manifest in the world yet still needing diapers.
Age 4 - 7 is when the soul and body become fully incorporated. It is during this amazing and creative time when most past life memories are fresh to the individual. They can bring wisdom, help the child load already acquired skills and aptitudes into their new body, inflict anxiety or phobias, guide them in one direction vs another, and highlight interests which might not be readily accessible through any other venue.
Past age 7 the soul and the body are, for the most part, fully enmeshed and inseparable. Catholicism actually calls this phase out as the Age of Reason and the point at which the child can start taking communion. It's also when spiritual wisdom starts adding in cautions about their practices. Hence all of the spiritual teachings on how to get out of your body via meditation, astral travel, trance, herbs and so on include warnings not to go too far out. The soul/body connection can be stretched too thin which sends a signal to the body it is time to end. This can lead to death or near-death experiences (NDE).
So, when parents and grandparents tell me about a precocious child in their family who has psychic gifts or wisdom beyond their years, I don't often recommend any special attention be paid to this or any additional education or practices be given to them in the moment. Usually what the adults are seeing is the mature soul showing through and this will recede in time. The child's path more than likely isn't a psychic one and they won't hold onto these gifts for very long. If a child continues to be "precocious" past age 7, then parents can shift into supporting their child's gifts while mitigating the negative feedback they will get from their peers for being weird, different, or spooky.
Using Past Lives for Healing
As with most organic processes, the integration of soul and body tends to be messy in one way or another. If in early childhood we remember too much, connect too strongly to past events, or hold onto our soul sense too long, shards of the past can remain behind. Like time release capsules or land mines they can awaken at any time creating problems for us in this life which we didn't plan for.
This is in large part why soul books will often seal off the most recent past life and prevent it from being read. The events and experiences are too raw and potent, seeming to overtake or hijack the current life with very little benefit.
External forces can also make a hash of things by causing a soul to back away from gifts and wisdom they intended to incorporate into the current life, thus leaving them in the person's body like machinery in an abandoned factory. Or situations might cause a child to feel so desperate they reach out through their Akashic connection and higher self to retrieve skills or wisdom from past lives. This is usually a survival reflex rather than premeditated and ends up having drastic consequences which can enhance or subvert the current life.
No matter how the problem came into being, healing is possible through conscious integration of the past life remnants into the current soul/body system. There are a variety of means for doing this including soul retrieval, direct communication with the person's higher self, hypnotism, and past life regression. Most of these are best done with the help of a qualified professional so the person can fully and safely immerse themselves in the process.
Sometimes it is enough simply to read or relive the part of the past life which is being held as a shard in the body via birth mark or scar. Or which is causing a phobia such as fear of dark colored birds or drowning in wells. At other times more information around the skill or process needs to be extracted from the life in order to use it appropriately or to understand it shouldn't be used at all.
There are two avenues I suggest people consider first when they need healing for these types of issues. Life Between Lives (LBL) hypnotherapy or working with their soul teacher to help them read the Past Lives section of their soul book.
Unlike past life regression which leads the client to experience a past life in real time, LBL helps people connect with the time between lives when they have a full understanding of what the past life means, what wisdom and skills they gained from it, and what they intend to do with them in the future. It also allows the person to connect directly with their guides and/or higher self to gain further insights and make concrete plans for how to move forward. The process is healing on multiple levels and can be transformative.
Each of us has a soul teacher, either the one responsible for our soul group or someone assigned to us for the duration of our current embodied life, who has helped us set up the life we're living prior to our birth, monitors our progress, and is there to receive us when we return home to the Akashics. They are the being who takes us into seclusion and helps us process the events of the life just ended and allows us to extract the wisdom and becoming it has afforded.
They are available to us at any time should we have difficulty processing soul level information during embodiment and are skilled at helping us parse out and heal from past life infringement issues. In my Akashic Record Level 2 class I provide a meditation to invite the student's teacher to meet them consciously and start a relationship with them which can focus on past lives and healing or broaden out into much more depending on the desires of the student and the willingness of the teacher.
You can also use past lives for Problem Solving
When people discuss past lives it is in two main contexts: "Something in a past life needs to be healed so I can move forward" or "I can't believe what I was or did in a past life". Rarely do people consider them as helpful or in any way practical concerning this life.
One of the more amazing and frustrating parts of embodied life is how free will makes it impossible to accurately control or even predict future events. The level of complexity in all beings, human - animal - plant - mineral, acting on their free will in each moment makes things magical and also means even with our best of intentions it's nearly impossible for us to follow through accurately on the plans we made for our lives prior to embodiment. As the saying goes, "Life happens while we're making plans."
This means while we mean to zig, we somehow come to zag or someone zagged causing us to wildly zig in a direction we never thought we'd go. We therefore can end up needing skills, experience, wisdom and aptitudes we didn't bring with us on this journey into the flesh. Accessing our past lives can help us retrieve them or even download entire packets of beingness directly into our body so it implants in our DNA.
Past life regression, if targeted specifically at any possible past lives which contain relevant experiences, can be highly effective in creating download packets of this nature and getting them to start integrating smoothly.
Approaching your soul book with specific requests can do the same thing. The soul book will open specifically to the relevant past life(s) and have them display, not necessarily in a real time review, but like YouTube video clips bringing the parts of the puzzle together so it is both consciously processed and also fully subsumed into your prana.
Whichever method is used, the person, after a bit of disorientation, will feel they "just know" the way forward, the solution to the issue, or have a feeling of new-found confidence as capabilities on all levels of being slot into place.
Our past lives are a full accounting of how we got there from here, who we have been, what we have accomplished and an arrow pointing towards what to work on next. They can also be a hindrance if they interfere with the life we are living now. We aren't indentured to them, needing to live out experiences dictated by our past selves in order to work off some debt or survive a punishment for previous missteps. Instead they are a navigation tool which can steer us towards new goals. Each life we enter into is a fresh start and each day in it full of opportunity.
Where will you head next?