When spending time with my mother in the Staten Island house I grew up in, which I frequently do, I take my daily walks at lovely Sailor Snug Harbor, formerly a home for retired mariners and now a cultural and arts center with gorgeous landscaped grounds. Most days, as I walk, I listen to podcasts or videos on my phone—generally woo-woo-related content that’s research for upcoming books (yes, Reader, there are two more in the works . . . so far). One day, I was listening to some material that had to do with “old souls,” a phrase used to refer to souls who’ve had many incarnations—hundreds, perhaps even thousands of them. Apparently, those of us who are drawn to this material, I had come to understand, are likely to be old souls too. And on a gut level, I felt that to be true. As I cut across a parking lot on my way to visit the loo, a license plate on a parked car caught my eye. “HERE B4,” it read. Yep, I thought, me too.
Have you, too, had the feeling you’ve been here before, and maybe more than once? As I write in my book Adventures of a Soul, it could be meeting someone for the first time and having a profound sense that you’ve known them before; it could be an inordinate fondness for—or even an obsession with—something not of your era or culture; or visiting a place for a first time and feeling, I know this place, often with deep emotion involved. (I had this feeling myself upon visiting several cloisters and convents, before I’d ever been told that I’d had many past lives in religious orders—which I was, a number of times.) It could be a phobia, for no apparent reason, or a prodigious inborn talent for, and knowledge of, something like music or math. For those who are curious about the topic, I direct you not only to the astonishing work of Dr. Jim Tucker at my alma mater, UVa, regarding children’s past-life memories—featured in several of my previous blog posts—but now, too, to that of Dr. Brian L. Weiss.
Brian L. Weiss was one of the earliest mainstream authors (and a best-selling one at that) in the field of reincarnation. A psychotherapist with an MD and an Ivy-League background, he used hypnotic regression as a tool with his patients, taking them back to their childhoods to find the roots of issues manifesting in their present-day lives. A skeptic about reincarnation at the time, he was astonished when, while regressing one of his patients, whom he refers to as Catherine, she appeared to recall past-life traumas that seemed to be the cause of the severe emotional problems plaguing her in the present. And while Catherine, quite remarkably, began to rapidly recover once those memories were explored and processed, it wasn’t until she began to bring in, or “channel,” messages from spirit “Masters” that were extremely personal to Dr. Weiss and his family, with information no one outside the family knew—in particular, messages about his deceased son—that he became convinced that what was going on was “real.”
Weiss wrote about the experience in his first book, Many Lives, Many Masters. He went on to write several more books as he continued to work with his patients’ past-life memories, finding them a powerful means of healing, including Same Soul, Many Bodies (about, believe it or not, “progression therapy,” that is, peering into the future—or a future—through hypnosis! I haven’t read it yet, but having just learned about this phenomenon, now I must!), and the hugely synchronistic, fated past-live love story Only Love Is Real (a personal favorite, Reader, as I’m not only a hopeless romantic, but have experienced a fated past-life love story of my own, as told in my book Adventures of a Soul).
Why does all this matter? Well, to me, the idea of past lives is a fascinating topic in and of itself. But then, I always want to learn as much as I can about who I am, where I come from, and where I may be going. Not everyone, I’ve found, does! (Reader, it boggles my mind, but it’s the case.) If we can heal our present-day maladies by processing wounds and traumas from other lives in our past, in my opinion, that’s a valuable thing to know.
And then there’s this: I’m working on a few more books, one of which deals with a subject that I touch upon only briefly in Adventures—the idea that we are currently in the midst of a seismic shift in consciousness on the planet, one that has been predicted by a number of ancient cultures around the world, and talked about by countless channelers and intuitives in the “New Age” movement over the past several decades or more. One aspect of what they see happening to us humans as we evolve as a species is that we will be connecting far more seamlessly with what some call our “higher selves”—the divine part of ourselves to which we are always connected, but with which most (though not all) of us here on the planet don’t currently consciously interact. As we do, it’s said, one thing that we can look forward to is the ability to remember all of our past lives. Yes, Reader, you read that right! And not only remember them, but be able to access, for each and every life, all of the knowledge, experience, and talents that we possessed. Think about what that would mean . . . especially for old souls!
Do I believe it? Yes. Why? I’ll tackle that subject, as I said, in a future book! For now . . . check out Weiss’s books, and the videos on his YouTube channel, and you, too, may find yourself as intrigued as I am by the clues, and sometimes keys, to a present life of happiness that our past lives may hold.