By Lois W. Werner
I had not intended to do past-life readings; but at a recent event I received several requests to do so. It has been quite a few years since I had the bulk of my own past-life readings. I suppose I had forgotten how helpful and meaningful they can be for us at particular points in our spiritual growth to explain certain relationships and recurring patterns in our lives. They can also help us get over phobias or irrational fears or let go of harmful situations.
Understanding past lives may be the only way we can achieve some of these ends. I am a firm believer in psychotherapy; but to the best of my knowledge, it does not officially address past lives, although I feel sure it will one day. Until it does, people will have to look for these answers with people who can either regress them hypnotically to a past life or who can read past lives for them.
Personally, I have been regressed and I have had past-life readings. When the past-life situation is traumatic, I find that a regression is much more difficult to deal with and is more painful to integrate than if I have the buffer of someone else’s seeing it and telling me about it through a reading. I went to a psychic seminar about twelve years ago in Sedona, Arizona, and the final experience was a past-life regression. It was so traumatic I spent the next three months getting over the upset. I have had equally traumatic experiences related to me by a reader; and, although it was difficult, I did not suffer the trauma all over again. I still understood what it was I needed to know about my past, but the reading was not re-traumatizing. Let me add that certainly not all past-life readings are upsetting. Some are merely informative. For example, one lady learned that she had been a cutting edge experimental herbalist in England a couple of hundred years ago. This was why she was so drawn to the medicinal uses of plants in this lifetime.
Below are some examples of past lives I have seen, with names changed to protect everyone.
One woman, Linda, whose parents were divorced when she was in her thirties, reacted with a deep depression that she was unable to shake, feeling that somehow she was to blame. When I looked into her past life repository (the occipital region of the brain), I saw a people who, although they were very culturally advanced, lived in houses built into the sides of mountains, very much like caves. (I do not know when or where this was; I know of no such civilization on earth, but I suspect there have been many civilizations which faded into dust without leaving a trace.) They had beautiful art forms and a highly developed legal system. Their roads were all stone and built by hand. They walked everywhere and had pack animals to pull loads on stretcher-like structures, but they did not have the wheel. They had light-colored skins. I sensed that this was a very, very long time ago.
I saw Linda lying in bed inside the cave giving birth to a baby. She lived with her mother and father, and Linda would not tell anyone who the father of the baby was. Having a baby and not naming the father was a very embarrassing and socially-prohibited thing which was also against the law. Finally, the council of elders, who were all women, decided that unless she at least told her own mother who the father was, she would be banned from the society. Being banned would have meant death to Linda and the baby, so she reluctantly told her mother. Naturally, telling her mother that the father of the baby was her own father resulted in the breakup of her parents. Although Linda had been an unwilling participant in the sexual relationship with her father and in the breakup of her parents’ marriage, she still felt responsible.
When her parents divorced in the current lifetime, it brought back, on some level, most of the original trauma, hence the depression she could not shake. Understanding that she was not to blame this time or in the previous life helped Linda to move on emotionally. Interestingly, Linda had already opted not to have children in this lifetime. She did not change her decision not to have children as a result of this past-life reading. However, it helped her understand why she had chosen not to have children.
Evangeline, another woman for whom I did a reading, had been a chieftain of a tribe of people in the late 18th century on the east coast of Africa. The chieftain had many people to rule, and things were getting out of hand because he was not a strong leader. He decided that if anyone committed a breach of the rules he would send them away in the ships of the strange people from the west who paid money for taking these misfits off his hands. This prevented uprisings because he sent away anyone strong enough to take his place; and doing so made him a feared leader, which he liked. He had no idea what actually happened to his people once they left until some fifteen years later when someone actually bought his freedom and came home. When the chieftain heard about what slavery actually was, he was horrified and died almost immediately of a heart attack.
Hearing this helped Evangeline to understand why she felt so upset when anyone moved away from her neighborhood or town. Her feeling of a tremendous sense of loss and deep pain was as though somehow she should have prevented their leaving, and that something horrible would happen to them after they were gone. This was almost a phobia with her, and understanding the past helped her to begin to let go of this pattern of fear.
There are many reasons we reincarnate with the same people. We come back with the same souls because we have issues to work out with them, or we have love between us on a soul level, and we just want to be with them, or both. We incarnate to clean up many old relationships, some of them with old enemies. Some of us we are here to balance some very old scales in our understanding. But we are also here to experience the joy of life, which comes from within and is not dependent upon circumstances.
When we integrate unfinished business from past lives, we can get back certain positive attributes which that person had. It is as if once we understand and accept that part of ourselves, those attributes are available to help us in our lives when needed. All in all, this is a very good deal. I for one have integrated certain past lives and found it to be freeing in many ways. Part of my reluctance to go public with my own psychic abilities had to do with a past-life situation which I have finally settled within myself. When that finally happened, I began to benefit greatly from it on many levels. Spiritual growth is not always a "piece of cake," but it can be unbelievably rewarding. This is because Spirit is what we are, this body and lifetime are simply an "earthsuit" (or as the songwriter/singer "Sting" calls it, a Soulcage) which the soul uses to experience life on earth for the purpose of growth of the soul’s experience.
