In today’s episode I answer a question posed by one of our podcast listeners.
Thinking about parallel lives, does sending healing energy in the present moment to a “past” life change the course of that lifetime?
To answer the question I cover the following concepts: parallel lives, linear reincarnation, the shower of healing, changing timelines and soul retrieval.
To learn more, scan the barcode below to open the podcast in Itunes or listen below.
Episode Transcript:
Listener question:
Thinking about parallel lives, does sending healing energy in the present moment to a “past” life change the course of that lifetime?
Ok folks this question is a deep one with lots of elements to it. I have an answer but then there is a lot extra that I wish to explain and concepts to teach, to truly give you insight into the complexities that this question has. So that is what this episode will be about.
When a listener poses a question like this, I believe it is important to address the question right away, because, it is important in the now moment, and is an issue that they are grappling with. I respect this, and also I respect my own time in that I may not be able to create a podcast episode in the timeframe needed to help.
So this is an excerpt of what I responded, after clarifying where the question came from. In this case the podcast listener was thinking about a past life that they had as a man. Here’s what I wrote in a text message:
“Be careful to examine your thoughts about his life. Every life is perfect and a balancing act. We have free will. The problem is that we look at life from the perspective of birth to death. Source looks at it as one continuing experience across all lifetimes. So each life is a chapter in a book, that is all vital to the story.
So the question is, are you wanting to heal him, because he needs "fixing" or heal yourself? What may be helpful is reframing how you view his incarnation. Make friends with him. Because you are making friends with yourself. What you judge of him, is what you are judging about yourself. There is no such thing as a wasted lifetime, and each lifetime is not about ticking the boxes to reach the finishing line the fastest with the most ticked boxes. Your soul grew tremendously because of his experience. If he had a "vanilla" lifetime of peace and happiness, that does not grow the soul. That rests the soul. He chose to do in essence a lifetime that did the hard work of bringing up the anger- a deep cleanse so to speak. We must not repress the anger. without his hard work you may have been born ... with cancer or some kind of illness that manifests as a result of unexpressed anger.
So if you want to send him healing, do it with the express feeling of gratitude. Be deeply grateful for his experience, because he did it so that you didn't have to ever go through that again. Don't send him healing, send him love. He wants your love and gratitude not your judgement. And most of all he wants you to love yourself. Because in loving yourself deeply, truly and despite your flaws, you love him. In loving yourself you love every version of yourself throughout time.”
MUSIC
Now, let’s dig into the question a little bit deeper.
Concept: Parallel lives
To understand the definition of parallel lives we need to understand what time is.
What is the definition of time in physics?
In physics, the definition of time is simple— time is change, or the interval over which change occurs. It is impossible to know that time has passed unless something changes. The amount of time or change is calibrated by comparison with a standard. The SI unit for time is the second.
So we as humans experience our life according to time. We organise our reality around the concept of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years.
We organise and process our lives around the notion that time moves forward in a linear fashion and that because of time we age. So we view the narrative of birth, life and then decline and death.
We live in the now moment. A moment ago was the past, and in a moment is the future. But we can never access either the future or the past, because the only moment we have is the now moment.
It is important to note that every different culture and civilisation has its own perspective and understanding of time. I won’t even begin to expand on the different theories but I will put in the show notes a link to an infographic that summarises nicely some of the interesting theories of time.
My teenagers and I have very heated debates about the notion of time, and I feel to do any justice to the concept of time, according to their scientific and historic brains, I would need them to be co-writers of this episode, and well that is impossible, for they do not know that this podcast exists. Yet. for it is rather delicious for me to share my thoughts without being judged right now.
I will share just one interesting snippet about how our brains are created to help us understand and process the concept of time:
A team of Norwegian scientists, led by Albert Tsao, found a network of cells within the brain that appears to play a crucial role in connecting an awareness of time’s passage to the formation of memories. The study, conducted on rats, suggests that certain groups of cells within a brain region known as the lateral entorhinal cortex, which is adjacent to the hippocampus, encode episodic memory by “allowing the hippocampus to store a unified representation of what, where and when.”
Right then, still with me?
What did Einstein said about time?
Albert Einstein once wrote: People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Time, in other words, he said, is an illusion. Many physicists since have shared this view, that true reality is timeless.
However, as Mira Kelly points out we live within a human body, and we have a brain with a specific capacity to process information. “Neurologically we are only able to tune into the present life we know, because this helps us to maintain a coherent sense of self”.
So if there is even the slightest possibility that we entertain the notion that time is not linear, it follows hypothetically that all incarnations are happening at once.
Concept: Linear Reincarnation:
Ok, so if you’re anything like me, when you come across concepts your brain hurts for a bit whilst you grapple with it and go from not understanding, to kind of understanding, to trying the concept out logically, to eureka and integration.
So, if time is a human earth concept, and all lives occur at once, how does this work with the concept of the soul journey over time? If we live every life right now at the same time, how can we learn from another incarnation because we’re doing it right now?
Ha ha - I’ve grappled with this one. Now let me state out loud, that this podcast is my legacy to my future self, to record my thoughts and realisations as I journey through this life. God knows I have hundreds of notebooks crammed with my jottings and realisations and highlighted quotes and articles. Have you ever seen the movie “A beautiful mind” with Russel Crowe? It’s from 2001 and is the story about the mathematician John Nash. In a particularly poignant scene (I’m going from memory here so please forgive any inaccuracies) John’s wife goes into his office and is horrified by what she sees. On the wall is a complex web of string, thumb tacks and pieces of paper, as John’s mind has seemingly tried to link together all the pieces of his mind and thoughts regarding a secret assignment. He had to look for hidden clues and patterns in magazines and newspapers to thwart a Soviet plot. Nash becomes increasingly obsessive in his search for these patterns, delivering his results to a secret mailbox, and comes to believe he is being followed. He is ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia but learns to heal his mind naturally later in life.
So too is my mind when I grapple with all my thoughts about spirituality and reincarnation, and this podcast is a way for me to organise these in a kind of logical and rational sequence, but also to teach myself as I ponder, and answer your questions.
So that’s the long way around of saying- I reserve the right to change my mind later.
Here’s what I know at the moment.
The soul chooses the lifetime it needs. It can also choose the time frame within which to be incarnated. However, when the soul incarnates as a human being on earth, a planet which operates according to the laws of gravity, and time, then the mind can only understand reincarnation according to linear time. And thus reincarnation is linear and sequential in the majority of cases UNLESS you choose to have multiple aspects of your soul incarnate at the same time as different human beings. Yes this is a real thing, and I have personal experience with this. But let’s leave that for another time. For now, simply allow your mind to acknowledge that you understand time is an earth and this universe concept and that although all incarnations exist at once, your beautiful brain needs to cope only with one incarnation at a time. That is the one that is listening to this podcast right now.
So the listener question asks, if all incarnations happen at once, essentially can we access and influence the other incarnations in the now moment?
Yes we can connect to our other lifetimes through past life regression and in the dream state, and it appears as though that life is occurring now, which it is, however, it is not helpful to split our mind, and worry about what we are doing in another incarnation. Our job is to focus on the present moment, but to understand who we are as a result of our soul’s journey, purely from the point of self compassion.
You do not become aware about the reincarnation system so that you can hate on yourself. You already do that enough. No, you become aware about the reincarnation system so that you can be more compassionate to yourself and to gain insight into your journey across time.
Michael Newton, in the Journey of Souls, talks about the fact that each soul learns a lesson in its own way, in its own sweet time. One of his clients took 750 years to learn the lesson of “envy”. It’s our modern mind that stresses that we need to be perfect now. There’s no need. Release that notion here and now. When you strive so hard to be perfect and to overcome an emotion, you increase the attention upon it, and we know from the law of attraction that what you vibrate, you attract. You rob yourself of the present moment. Soothe your mind, and focus on taking one breath at a time.
Concept: Healing our past selves: Shower of Healing
After we die and cross over, we receive spiritual energy restoration. Michael Newton goes into this in detail with his books Life Between Lives Hypnotherapy and Destiny of Souls. But basically, before we do our life review, we receive a special energy healing treatment known as a “shower of healing”. Our treatment is highly personalised but according to Michael Newton includes three general categories:
The standard treatment before orientation for large numbers of souls
Emergency treatment for souls whose energy has been damaged by a violent death
Special treatment in recovery areas designed for souls who have been severely contaminated throughout an entire lifetime.
This energy shower and healing is something that we need to understand exists but best left to the private realm of your soul. So know that you have already received healing for anything that you experienced in each incarnation. If something is being triggered and coming up and if you are shown a situation in a past life it is because your soul wishes you to examine your current behaviours, and thought patterns because they are similar to something you have already experienced. You are human after all, and just because we learn our lesson, doesn’t mean we don’t slip up and forget and need to revisit why we decided to think a different way.
To give a non past life example- when you have a baby, everything is new. You have to learn how to change their nappy, feed, them, what their temperament and routine is like and how to fit the baby into your life. It’s all a new experience. And when the baby grows a bit, your mind forgets the minute details of the hardships of the learning of each step that you went through.
Fast forward 24 months, and you may be blessed with another baby. Now you have two. It seems overwhelming. How do you deal with both children? You may forget some of the nuances of the small things that you learnt with the first baby. You might be in the middle of trying to figure out something and think, OMG, I forgot this was the easiest way to do it! Oh my I can’t believe I forgot how to do that! What was I thinking?
Do you see the parallel? Our brains can’t store in our immediate recall every single thing we need to know in life. We file it away into our memory, until something triggers us to stretch our brain, grab the ladder and find the correct book on the shelf of our brain that contains the answer we need. Having read the information in the book, and accessed it, we then put it back on the shelf for future reference. So too, it is with experiences in this life, that are linked to experiences in other lives. Don’t dwell on it. Access it, find the learnings, integrate and then put them back on the shelf, and continue with living your life.
Concept: Changing timelines
But isn’t the point of it all that we can do a form of time travel like in the movie back to the future and do some healing and change our past life so that we can have a better outcome? Isn’t that what quantum healing is all about?
Ok again, another concept I have grappled with and I will get a quantum healing expert to come onto the show and give you their beliefs, but for me here’s what I understand right now.
The akashic records contains an energetic imprint of all of your soul’s incarnations. Furthermore it contains an imprint of every possible thought, belief, and action that your soul could have possibly ever made, or not made. It contains the energetic imprint of the complete totality of all possibilities.
So, you could instruct your higher self to go “back” in time to make a change or modification to a decision you made, with the assumption that your higher self is going to make the modification that is in the best interest of your soul. Let’s assume they do this. What they are doing is shifting your timeline. You are potentially changing the trajectory of your life by quantum leaping to another timeline where the other set of possibilities exists. (Remember all possibilities exist). (think of the movie Sliding Doors with Gwennyth Paltrow).
The question is do you want to do that? You know what happened when Marty mucked with his past right? He started to erase his parents out of the photo. My instinct is that your higher self, if asked to do that would shift timelines in a small, tiny way. Because your higher self, your angels and spirit guides MUST respect your FREE WILL. That’s the deal about earth and about being a human. We have FREE WILL to make any darn decision we like, we just have to learn to live with the consequences.
Free will assumes that we have the power to do what is best for us, given a set of choices at a particular point in our life. We make the decision according to a whole bunch of elements, but we make the decision. Although it may seem later, looking back, that we made the wrong decision, because it lead to an outcome that we did not desire, actually that’s bullshit. You’re applying judgement there. There is not such thing as a mistake, or a wrong decision. There’s only a decision. Right or wrong is an arbitrary judgement. There’s just the decision.
So the only reason that your higher self would ever wish to help you “heal” the other incarnation by changing timelines is if the tweak does not mess with your free will but assists in relieving a block or limiting belief that you are experiencing in this lifetime that is now so detrimental that it is putting a brick wall up in front of what your soul agreed to achieve and experience in this lifetime, AND, you asked for help. So I repeat, it has to be made without judgement, and without impacting the free will of your soul in the other incarnation and benefit your best and highest need across all lifetimes and positively help you with a limiting belief in THIS lifetime.
So in fact, this act is NOT healing the other incarnation, it is healing YOU.
Let’s just let that sink in for a minute.
All healing is in the present moment, present lifetime. It occurs in the now moment.
Concept: Soul retrieval
Ok Katische so that’s wonderful but you’re not really helping me. Everything in this episode that you’ve just said makes sense logically to me, but emotionally I still need help. What can I do.
Great, perfect. I’m glad you asked.
Sound and energy healing is perfect. Work with essential oils or flower essences that are specifically designed to assist with the issue that you are experiencing right now.
I recommend that you examine your limiting beliefs and next time you do a past life journey, ask that the next journey not only be a regression but include specific limiting belief related therapeutic resolution in it. While you are in a hypnotic state your mind is suggestible, so it is the perfect time to break the bonds of time, and insert a suggestion to help you reframe the limiting belief.
The other suggestion that I have, is to work with me and do a soul retrieval. What? Isn’t that a Shamanic concept? Yes, and no. It depends how you look at it and what your intent is.
In my process, I work with the client to determine what has been troubling them. Usually I’ve been working with the client for a while anyway, so I know what they are going through. Then we go into a sound healing session, where we relax the body deeply with sound, and enter a hypnotic state. We then go on a journey into a cave that represents your soul journey. Inside this cave we look for treasure. The treasure is to be collected by you and put into your never ending bag. You are not to analyse what the treasure is, simply collect it. When all the treasure is collected we follow the cave to the light at the end, throw the treasure into the light and then jump into the light ourselves. At this point the soul integrates the missing pieces and the effect is immediate and truly mind-blowing. You experience bliss and peace and wholeness. Every part of you that you discarded over your incarnations (that you are ready to collect) is symbolised by the treasure, and you are reintegrated once more.
So hopefully we have now come full circle and if you are still listening to this episode, I congratulate you for getting through! The simple answer to the listener question is that all healing occurs in the now moment, so concentrate on the now. When you need to understand yourself you can examine the past (just as we do when we study history), but the true secret to life is understanding that life is created in every moment. So take a deep breath, listen to your intuition and just do the best you can right now.
Or as Maya Angelou would say “when you know better, do better”.