by Marilyn Gordon, C.C.Ht.
This article combines transformational healing with past-life therapy. It puts forward a three-step process for experiencing, releasing, and transforming the root causes of human predicaments, with particular application to the root causes found in past-lives. The author discusses the principles of this approach, highlights various techniques, and gives examples from cases.
I recently saw a film called “Baraka,” the Sufi word for “blessing”. In frame after frame, I saw images of the wonderful and terrible aspects of human existence, juxtaposed with the prayers of those who pray everywhere—the Sufi Dervishes, the Hebrews, Christians, the tribes of Africa and Native America.
I saw massive traffic jams and huge inhumane factories processing live chickens, as well as Auschwitz and battlefields and subways. And everyone everywhere was in some kind of trance. Everyone everywhere had a hypnotized look—hypnotized into their various cultural trances and customs and practices. And everyone everywhere looked dazed or sedated, nevertheless managing somehow to endure the state of being human.
Elevating the Trance
But life is something more than simply to “endure”. It is ultimately about transforming this trance into a more elevated awareness so that we live out our lives in more than an open-eyed fog. This is our business here, a central purpose of our lives. It’s possible for us to look at everything that has happened to us as opportunities for this awakening. We can look at the traumas we’ve had and see that the healing we’ve had to do because of them was exactly what we needed to move us to higher levels of awareness.
Every past-life event has also been an opportunity for healing and awakening, so one of our purposes in working with past lives is not only to go deeply into the root causes of current predicaments, but it can be an attempt on our parts to bring more enlightened understanding to those fragments of ourselves that have been living in darkness.
Past-Life Freeze-Frames
The material that lies in our psyches consists of freeze-frames, some of which are pictures of unresolved traumas that involve our deepest emotions of grief and loss, fear and rage, sickness and death. Of course there are pictures of great happiness too, and these serve to embrace us with great possibilities for ourselves. But the ones that are most often in need of healing are the more difficult ones that are as yet unresolved.
Shining the Light of Consciousness
So what we’re doing in past-life work is shining the light of consciousness on the difficult places so that they become transformed within us. No longer is our past-life self, that soldier from the Civil War, for example, lying dead and unattended on the battlefield. On another level, through our expanded way of seeing him (really, our self) through past-life therapy, his (our) being ascends and the soul shines through. This transforms the limitations of the physical body and heals the way we carry the old wound within us.
The Three Stages
There are three healing stages to go through: experiencing, releasing, and transforming. In the first stage, you go to the deep experience, and find out everything you need to know about it. At the same time, you feel whatever there is to feel about it at the moment. Next, you can release these experiences as presented later in this article. Finally, you transform the experience with love, wisdom, and healing light. Part of this last stage includes discovering the lessons of the experience.
Discovering the Lessons
One of the great transformational tools we have is the ability to stand back and look at events with a wise eye and an expanded perspective. This is when we ask, “What was I learning in this past life? What is the value in this trauma or event for my soul? And what am I learning now?” There is invariably an emotional thread running through our past lives to the present—moving us toward healing the threads of our samskaras. Samskaras are deep emotional and mental impressions that dwell in our souls from lifetime to lifetime. The grief that we carry, the tendency to feel afraid of speaking our truths, the tendency to feel slighted or rejected or hurt or angry or terrified—these are tendencies that dwell in our souls in lifetime after lifetime of freeze-frames that have gone unhealed. And the purpose of our re-experiencing them over and over again is to heal them, to come to terms with them, to set ourselves free through a transformation of our consciousness.
If you look for a thread of a samskara in your life, you may first find a current dominant thought pattern. Then you might take it back as far as you can—perhaps to roots in past lives. There is a deep core of emotional truth as you allow yourself to experience this root. To remove it is like extracting a sliver from the soul.
Abandonment Issues
Many people have issues of abandonment and its sister issue, rejection. This is a fundamental issue in our lives primarily because we’ve been born, cast out of the great Tao, the great Oneness, to set foot upon an earth plane of duality. We’ve experienced the abandonment of being cast out of Home, and this places a mark on our beings at the very beginning. Fortunately, inside each of us is a homeopathic remedy to help us get back there, to get back home to a place that is comfortable, where our souls can rest and feel a sense of peace. In some of my own past-life experiences is this thread of abandonment. As an infant, I once cried all night, and my sleeping mother was too tired to hear me. My crying with no one coming left a mark upon me. I go back farther, and I am a Native American woman, left alone in an embankment of snow to die. There’s a man standing there—and he turns and walks away. Back further, I am an Asian woman, bereft and anguished because my children have been killed in a fire. Then I am standing on the bow of a ship somewhere, again bereft and terrified because my husband has drowned on the tumultuous seas.
The Healing Begins
In invoking my connection with the power of healing, I ask to see the transformation of these events. I see the Native American woman’s soul rise up out of the embankment of snow, surrounded in light. I realize that the true way of seeing this, from the point of view of the soul, is that she is in no way left alone to rot in the snow. Her soul shines through and ascends. It’s the resurrection all over again, and I relate this to myself: I know that any time, any moment, I can call for the elevation of my own consciousness so that I can see with the eyes of the soul. In the same way the Asian woman (me), in her grief at the loss of her children, has been given the fullness of heart to love all the children of the universe. She is embraced by divine compassion. The same for the woman whose husband has died at sea. After the full experience of this grief and loss, she is moved to a state of comfort and oneness on the level of the soul. This is the divine art of consciousness transformation which can happen in a flash of a moment, yet can change the entire outlook of our lives.
Some Techniques for Releasing and Healing
Several powerful techniques for working with the emotions are in the use of balloons or pillows or chimes. Actual balloons are used to express such feelings as anger, fear, or grief. The client holds the balloon and expresses whatever needs to be expressed and then breaks the balloon. Or he or she might wish to comfort those parts of self that need comfort by holding a pillow and caressing that part of self that needs solace. Another way is to play a chime and ask the client to send off the experience, to release it with the sound of the chime, to visualize its going in any way that might be appropriate.
When the release is completed for now and your client feels relaxed, you can bring in the resources of the higher self, the healing self. You can help to open the heart to healing love. You can help open the channels for healing wisdom to come through. You can suggest that your client experience the light, perhaps as beams coming from the heart or to the client from the universe, protecting and healing. You can also take your client to the time of death in past lives and look at that lifetime’s experiences from a panoramic view, looking at the lessons, carefully observing the meaning of that lifetime from a high state of awareness.
The Samskara of “Incompetence”
When one of my clients we’ll call Naomi was a little girl, she hurt her eye so badly that she eventually lost her sight in that eye. Her parents told her that it had been an “accident” for which she had been responsible, that she had been trying to get the knots out of a shoelace with an ice pick and had been responsible for hurting her own eye. Her sister told her she’d climbed up on a counter and hurt her own eye with a can opener. Neither one of these stories was true. Naomi found out that her father had hurt her eye—but all her life, she was made to feel like the incompetent one.
Themes of Other Lifetimes
Not only was “incompetence” a theme of this lifetime, but it ran as a thread, a deep samskara, throughout many of them. She was an Indian in Canada. Marauders came. She was tied up and gagged. She watched her family being killed and couldn’t do anything about it. (Lot of knots—“nots”—in her thinking. Knots in her shoelaces. Knots in the ropes that tied her.) She was an aborigine in Australia. There was a drought, and she was looking for water and food for her people. She couldn’t find it, and she died not being able to help them. She was a newborn baby in some other lifetime. Her mother died in giving birth to her.
The Problem Speaks
When I asked her to express the feeling of this pattern, she said “My life is like a wasted Christmas. I’ve got all these gifts, and I don’t use them.” I then asked her what were the thoughts in her that were holding her back, and she said “You blew it. You screwed up. You did, should have, shouldn’t have, couldn’t. Why were you ever born?” These were the samskaras in action. This is the hypnotic trance that she has found herself in.
The Healing Takes Place
Healing had to happen on several levels. One important level was the emotional. She found those parts of herself that were in need of comfort and solace, and she brought kind and comforting words to them. She stroked her own hand, saying “It’s okay. It’s all right. Don’t you worry. I’m with you now, and you are just fine. You can do many things.” She also had to talk to the perpetrators. This she did with the aid of balloons, saying, “It’s not my fault. I’m not incompetent!”
Inner Expansion
The next step was to go to the expanded states of witness consciousness, wisdom, and compassion, which she was able to do. In the witness state she was able to observe the lessons her trials had provided for her soul. She saw the lessons about empowerment, the karmic relationships with those who appeared to disempower her in more than one lifetime. She was able to understand their own issues, needs, and human frailties. She was also able to look with the heart of compassion on the entire scenario of her lifetimes, with compassion for herself and for the others involved, for the circumstances, and for the learning that was taking place. In going to the after-death experience, she could view the lifetime with an opened sense of wisdom. This is a powerful level of release and transformation, and it is a level of inner work that powerfully changes lives.
The Work of a Lifetime
Yet even though we set ourselves free at one moment, it does not necessarily mean that we set ourselves free the next, so we have to keep working on it, keep at it, keep on remembering the transformational work we came here for—and keep on bringing the light to every aspect of ourselves. This inner work is about going to the deepest roots of our suffering, stirring the pot and bringing them to the surface, shining the light of consciousness upon them, thereby transforming them and bringing greater freedom to the soul. This is the work we came here to do, the great healing of our lives.