A client asked me recently whether I believe in past lives. All I could do was smile, really, because for me it wasn’t long ago that the whole idea of past lives was basically a fairy tale. Until I started seeing them.
One friend of mine, a percussionist, was having some trouble with his wrists. I could see the energy was congested there, so I began working on him. As I did, I saw an image of his wrists encircled in iron manacles. Even though the manacles were more “Pirates of the Caribbean” than “Breaking Bad,” I asked if he’d ever been ‘cuffed. He hadn’t. Later in the same session, I saw his right hand being cut off. I didn’t have to ask whether that had happened in this life.
I’ve had clients lie on my table as I watched images of them being hanged and burned; I’ve seen them impaled with spears and arrows; I’ve watched them not make it into this life through stillbirth or abortion. One client had very clearly been rescued from a sinking fishing boat in freezing ocean waters, and had been forced to crawl out of burning building, both times unable to save someone important to him. I’ve seen more clients’ deaths on my table than I ever, ever imagined would be part of this work.
I’ve seen their lives, too. I once saw myself as a kind of sub-general in a Chinese army several thousand years ago. I can still see the pale blue silk tunic and pants I was wearing, and the long braid. I had been responsible for a coup of some kind, and the shame of betraying those I had cause to love burned in my present-day belly as I watched the image of myself on that dais. When I, in the session, asked for and found a way to resolve the unspeakable shame over my actions, the feeling of being unforgivable, which I’ve carried for as long as I can remember, vanished. I look for it every now and then, like you would a scar on the back of your hand, and I can’t find it.
I also saw myself once as a slave, and felt my body saturated with the indescribable hatred I bore for the one I was to call Master.
There are a lot of things I’d relegated to the Fairy Tale pile until I started seeing them in this work. And, a true pragmatist at heart, it doesn’t matter to me whether these images I see are events your soul has actually lived through, or something from a movie you watched last week. What matters is that they function as an opening into a place that can be healed.
So what — did I actually betray my leaders and start a coup in China 3,500 years ago? I don’t care. What matters to me is that I’m no longer unforgivable. And that my friend can play the drums without pain. And my clients can breathe easier when we find resolution to the energies their bodies are carrying.
There’s a lot we don’t know. Much of what we do know is incomplete at best. Fortunately, this work works, regardless of how little the mind understands it. Kinda like gravity.