Dianne Seaman is no stranger to the Journal’s pages. Her article in last year’s Journal was a discussion of the relationships between astrology and the “new” physics, and she was invited to continue those explorations for this issue. However, as she says, synchronicity happens, and the personal experiences she shares with us below took center stage. Dianne has given us a heartening account of those experiences, and the good people who “happened” to come into her life when she needed them, to help her heal.
“And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”
I chose this quote from Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” for the title because it so succinctly captures the main theme of this article: The interpenetration of the body by the spirit and the subsequent role past-life therapy can play in physical healing. A secondary concept, which explores the incredible support that emerges from life itself to assist us in our growth and healing, is also demonstrated in the following journey. To paraphrase medical intuitive Carolyn Myss… Heaven can get very cooperative when we get cooperative.
This is my personal story, written from direct experience. First the background, including the physical, the psychological, and the “vibrational” (chakra system) dimensions. For two years I had been experiencing more and more frequent and debilitating menstrual cycles. I was even beginning to consider surgery, but through intuition I sensed there were other solutions. Regarding the chakra system, I had consistently been told by various healers that the energy in my second sacral chakra was deficient. For the past several years I had been making a concerted effort to change that by using a combination of Reiki, dance, yoga, imagery, and massage. Progress seemed to be made and the second chakra energy was now more available for optimal functioning, although not completely. I also experienced some relief in my physical symptoms, which I interpreted to be a result of this positive change on an energetic level, since the timing was correlated.
The symbolic psychological piece revolved most significantly around blocked creativity, especially in the area of writing, for which I’d consistently been told I had talent. My subjective experience was that some deep, irrational fear was holding me back. This was both painful and frustrating, especially since I’d made considerable attempts over the years to clear the cause. There had been some improvement in that I wrote more, but I was still aware of some self-sabotage and terror in regard to publishing my work, specifically a particular manuscript. In the spring of 1998 I was once again made painfully aware of this when some people came into my life who had the potential to get this book into print. This stepped up my resistance once again, and I was disheartened that the debilitating fear was still there after all the efforts I’d made to get free from it. I seemed to have unearthed one possible source when I uncovered two past lives as female writers that revealed a pattern. Both published one book and then died. I had hoped this pattern coming to conscious awareness would free me from its grip, but it didn’t. Publishing a book still felt like a life and death issue to me.
The second emotional factor was a tremendous fear of childbirth. It took me until my forties to admit to how overriding this fear was. While I had never wanted to be a mother, I’d always attributed that only to my temperament. I’ve never had a strong maternal drive and need a lot of solitude. Now I realize both factors contributed to this decision. I find it interesting that neither past-life female writer had children. One remained single with no involvement with men and died fairly young. The other married but had health problems with her reproductive system, making pregnancy physically impossible. The layers of this pattern had obviously been building over many lifetimes.
These were the pieces of the puzzle I had by March 1998. The process then began to intensify when I discovered a growth on my cervix. My initial reaction was panic, fearing it might be cancer. My first thought was to move up a gynecology appointment in June to ASAP. But, after the fear subsided enough for me to “hear” intuitive guidance from an inner level not as fear based, I sensed the right course of action was to do a past-life therapy session and keep the gynecology appointment unchanged.
The first scene that came to me during the past-life session was “my” funeral in a past life. From there I went back in time in that same life and saw myself struggling to give birth. It was obviously a very difficult labor. I wasn’t able to access which specific detail of the difficult labor caused the death. What I was aware of and what did seem significant were two women standing off to the side of the room and whispering to each other about how this fatal delivery was somehow my just punishment. (I had been an herbalist/healer in that life and lived according to my rules more than society’s). I was aware that this past-life woman had overheard them as she was close to death. In her weakened and exhausted state she had unconsciously absorbed their comments as true.
What distinguished this session from the many others I’d done was my extreme difficulty in staying present in the scene or the past-life body and in feeling anything. Normally I have little trouble doing either. But this time I kept pulling out of my body and witnessing the scene from as great a distance as possible while my emotional state was very flat. Dr. Janet Cunningham, who’d done three prior sessions with me concerning other issues, and I both knew there was something I wasn’t ready to access and that I had gone as far as possible that day. We agreed that this had been a significant first step toward healing and hoped that life would trigger the subsequent stages as needed.
One step my intuition quickly led me to take was working with music created by Steven D’Annunzio. I focused on his tape for the second chakra. According to Steve, this sound helped to loosen any repressed energy in that area and bring the issues to conscious awareness as well as facilitate the body returning to a more balanced state. The second cue occurred about a month after the past-life session. I had called Janet about some APRT business, but she also shared a personal idea which had come to her recently…that I would benefit from doing bodywork. At the time her suggestion felt neutral; I was also aware that I didn’t know who or what particular technique to work with.
Within six hours these problems were suddenly solved. I was talking with my yoga instructor, Linda, after not being in touch for over a month. She excitedly told me she had just returned from training in a new bodywork technique. “It’s called Embodiment and works specifically to release blocked energy in the pelvic area, especially fear,” Linda informed me. She and I had not discussed my physical symptoms nor the past-life session, so I was amazed at the perfect fit of this technique to my situation. I chose not to ignore these two consistent messages which had come so close together. So in April I began seven embodiment sessions, completing them in mid-June. In the last week of June a normal menstrual cycle began. Nothing unusual, nothing extreme, as things had been improving.
A check-up at the gynecologist was also scheduled for this week. I will add some relevant points about the doctor, Dr. Helene Leonetti, whom I had first met a year earlier at a presentation by Shakti Gawain. When Dr. Leonetti stood up to make a comment about her work I knew on a gut level that I wanted her for my physician. We spoke briefly that day, then corresponded. I sent her the chapter on past-life roots of reproductive problems in Dr. Roger Woolger’s book, Other Lives, Other Selves. At the time I thought I was merely playing the role of professional past-life therapist by sending her material relevant to her field. I wasn’t at all conscious of any personal link, but now I am reminded of how often the unconscious mind is way ahead of the conscious one! She wrote back and expressed openness at learning about these new dimensions of healing. Indeed it turned out that she was even studying with Dr. Gladys McGarey, who has spoken at APRT conferences. Dr. Leonetti was to become yet another remarkable strand in a supportive, co-operative web of life.
The night before my appointment I went to bed as usual. About an hour later I awoke, aware that I was bleeding much heavier than normal. This was to continue for the next six hours, and I got very little rest. Around two o’clock, in a groggy state, I thought…Gosh, I can’t fall asleep…I’d wake up in a pool of blood. Immediately my mind flashed back to the past-life session and the scene of dying in childbirth. Prior to this sudden and unexpected shift in consciousness I had not given any thought to this area for I had been much too absorbed in the present physical circumstances. Now “I” was “back” on that deathbed and knew on a visceral level that death had been caused by hemorrhaging. The past-life physical experience at death had become an energetic reality, no longer merely some distant image like it had been in March. My spirit had interpenetrated my body which was physically recreating the death experience. Simultaneously, waves of emotion I hadn’t been able to feel in March, or possibly ever, began to well up.
During the next intense thirty minutes I experienced a clearer state of multi-dimensional awareness than ever before or since. Overlaid were the physical symptoms duplicating the past-life death scene, emotions of grief and fear, and a type of spiritual transcendent awareness of joy that I was finally clearing this pattern at the core. In addition I was experiencing something akin to an interior “computer-like” mental activity which evaluated the astrological energies at play in my chart. This mental inner computer went so far as to project when the heavy bleeding would stop, and it was accurate within one hour. I might add that not once did I experience fear for my present physical well-being.
All these levels were experienced simultaneously and each one did not seem to modify or dilute the sometimes conflicting feelings and perspective of the others. This meant I was experiencing real grief on one level while I genuinely felt joy on another. It felt as if I were flipping TV channels so quickly that all the images were seen blurred together as well as singly.
By morning I was exhausted, having slept only about two hours. On the way to the doctor’s office I decided I would be totally honest about my experience the night before and my interpretation of it. Perhaps this choice resulted from lack of sleep and loss of blood, which created a somewhat altered state, but suddenly I didn’t care what anyone else thought. I knew what I had experienced. The timing of the appointment, made over four months earlier, coming within hours of this clearing, as well as the doctor and our correspondence the summer before also suggested to me there was a bigger design at play here than the personality level.
After I described the events of the previous night, including my belief that it was a powerful past-life clearing, Dr. Leonetti was neither patronizing nor condescending, but was actually appreciative of my sharing my story. She saw it as offering her a real life scenario of what she had previously only read about. She also told me that most doctors would have responded by scheduling me for surgery the next week. My answer was: “I know. Why do you think I found you?!” We laughed and both agreed that there were alternatives to surgery. So I’d continue doing what I had been, and she also added hormone therapy to my list. Yes there were physiological factors such as hormone imbalances and fibroids. But were they the root cause of the physical symptoms or merely somatic expressions of a deep trauma, a psychic wound around reproduction from a past life?
For a few weeks afterward I was deeply exhausted and felt as if I were recovering from surgery. But it had been a type of “surgery” on the non-physical level rather than the physical. If physical discomfort and disease do often begin on an energetic level, then filter down into the body, which is how I experienced this one, then I had to go to an energetic level to heal. Based on my experience I believe that the energy around this death in childbirth had been so “frozen,” locked in on such a deep cellular level, that it took the combination of the sound vibrational work, the past-life session, the bodywork focusing on the pelvic region, and Reiki, which works on the etheric body, to clear it.
I felt that I had been guided to each modality in its turn, thereby modifying the classic spiritual saying “When the student is ready, the teacher appears” to “When the patient is ready the healers/healing modalities appear!”
There is also the factor of right timing. A classical concept found in alchemy is that an alchemical opus could only be performed at certain optimal moments (Greene/Sasportas, 1988). This experience felt alchemical…some deep pattern had been transmuted. This belief in alchemy supports my research that there are certain ripe moments, as shown astrologically, for breakthroughs to occur. And this experience validates both my theory and the alchemical concept since there were six planetary triggers to my chart that relate to this theme, including the moon which activated the chart during the exact hours the past-life physical manifestation was occurring. (The moon moves approximately one degree every two hours and its influence is precisely timed. For a more detailed discussion of the moon’s influences, see Seaman, 1997).
Now, three months later, my physical symptoms have greatly improved and I am starting once again to take steps toward getting my manuscript published. I feel much less fear around that. I understand now on a deeper level that the pattern of “birthing” a book, then dying, had originated from that past life in which I had imprinted that I deserved to die when I gave birth. Sometimes the course a traumatic imprint takes over lifetimes differs greatly, at least on the surface and to the rational mind, from the original wound. But to the symbolic energy level of the second chakra, birthing an infant or a creative project would be the same. I also wondered why I seemed fine with publishing Journal articles, which I’d done on more than one occasion. Perhaps my view of writing journal articles as more a type of academic intellectual exercise rather than a creative one avoided triggering this pattern. This subtle distinction is curious at any rate.
References
Greene and Sasportas. Dynamics of the Unconscious, Vol. 2. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1988.
Seaman, D. Past-Life Therapy, Astrology, and the New Quantum and Space-Time Physics. The Journal of Regression Therapy, XI (1), 47-54, 1997.
Woolger, R. Other Lives, Other Selves. New York: Bantam, 1988.