You’ve been here before…
Have you ever met someone for the first time, yet felt that you’d known him or her for years?
Have you ever been someplace for the first time, yet experienced a sense that it was very familiar?
Do you feel drawn to a particular era or culture, more comfortable with it perhaps than the present you’re living in now?
All these experiences indicate a connection with your past lives. In this book, the world of reincarnation and past lives is clearly explained. An easy-to-follow program guides you step-by-step into and through your past life experiences, helping you uncover the clues that explain your mannerisms, preferences, problems, and feelings of today.
Through repeated incarnations, you gain knowledge and resolve negative situations (karma) incurred in previous lives as you move through the process of evolving your soul.
The value of remembering your past lives is in the insights and knowledge you gain into the experiences in your present life. The benefits of remembering the events and emotions in your past lives is in applying those insights and the knowledge gained from your past life journeys into your present life.
Reincarnation and Your Past Life Memories: You’ve Been Here Before… by Gloria Chadwick is a guide to exploring the mysteries of time and space that will help you grow your soul into the powerful, spiritual light-being that you truly are.
- 236 pages. ISBN: 978-1-883717-46-9. Available on Amazon: $15.95
Be sure to visit Past Life Journeys for our “Tuesday Travels” series to experience a past life regression.
Browse the Book…
Previously published by Random House in 1999, we’ve revised this book and brought it back into print. Filled with anecdotes, examples, exercises, and meditations, this book helps you explore your past life memories. Also included is a very special white candle meditation to help you tune into your spiritual self. Have a look at the Table of Contents and read the first two chapters to see what’s inside.
Table of Contents
Introduction
A Journal for Your Past Life Journeys
Part I — Beginnings
One. Reincarnation and its Relationship to You
Two. The Process of Remembering Your Past Lives
- How Your Subconscious Mind Works
- The Way Your Past Life Memories Surface
- How to Recognize Your Past Life Memories
Three. How to Find Your Past Life Memories
- Meeting Your Subconscious Mind
- How to Encourage Your Memories to Surface
- What to Look For When Your Memories Surface
Four. What to Do With Your Memories When You Find Them
- Trusting Your Feelings
- Validating and Verifying Your Past Life Memories
Five. The Journey Begins
Part II — Explorations and Experiences
Six. Déjà vu … You’ve Been Here Before
- Recognizing Reflections of Past Lives
- Tracing Déjà vu Feelings
Seven. Imagery … The Language of Your Mind
- Seeing and Sensing Past Life Images
Eight. Imagination … The World of Your Inner Images
- Interpretations of Imagination
- Reveries That Recall Past Lives
- Inspiration and Intuition
- Playing With Your Past Lives
- The Serious Stuff
Nine. Looking in the Present to Find the Past
- Current Clues Questionnaire
Ten. Dreams … The Pictures of Your Past Lives
- Discovering Your Past Lives Through Your Dreams
- Deciphering Your Dreams
- Planning Past Life Dreams
Eleven. Separate Selves and Spirituality
- Your Inner Self
- Your Higher Self
- The Essence of Your Soul
Twelve. Visiting the Visions of Your Past Lives
- Preparing for Your Trips Into the Past
- White Light Protection
- Grounding and Centering
- Projecting Yourself Into Your Past Lives
- Mind Tripping Into Your Memories
Part III — Karma
Thirteen. Before Birth
- Entering the Earth Experience
Fourteen. The Law of Karma
- Creating Your Own Reality
Fifteen. You and the People in Your Life
- Soulmates: The Special People
- Past Life Connections: The Karmic Tie That Binds
Sixteen. Paying the IOU’s From the Past
- Understanding Your Karma
- Identifying Key Issues and Past Life Influences
- The Benefits of Balancing
Seventeen. Balancing Your Karma
- Principle of Forgiveness
- Principle of Grace
- Shared and Separate Karma
- The Test of Balancing
- A Few Helpful Hints
- Healing Your Karma and Making it All Better
Part IV — Enlightenment
Eighteen. Discovering Your Destiny
- You Are the Master of Your Fate
Nineteen. The Energy Essence of YOU
- Your Pyramid of Power
- Layers and Levels of Energy and Awareness
- Layers of Energy
- Levels of Awareness
Twenty. The True Nature of Your Spirituality
- Setting Your Spirit Free
Twenty-One. The Puzzle Pieces of Your Past Lives
Twenty-Two. The Quest for Knowledge
Chapter One ~ Reincarnation and its Relationship to You
As people searched for a way to understand the purpose and meaning of life, they found that all truth was within themselves. They became aware of a special essence they possessed that they termed their soul. They learned, through experiences, that their soul was immortal and that their awareness continued through time. Only the perceptions of this knowledge differed; the truth remained the same.
They became aware that death was not the end; it was a new beginning that created a circle of life. They discovered a rhythm that repeated itself in a rebirth of their soul into a different level of awareness. They found that what they did in one lifetime was reflected in another lifetime.
Through the process of reincarnation, your soul is reborn into a new physical body in another lifetime for the purposes of gaining knowledge, and for understanding and resolving negative emotions and actions you experienced and incurred in previous lifetimes.
Through repeated incarnations, you learn karmic lessons and enjoy the rewards of lessons previously learned. As you travel the journey from lifetime to lifetime, you encounter experiences where your actions of previous lives again present themselves in a similar manner. This is known as karma and is commonly referred to as cause and effect.
Cause and effect are the same thing as creating your own reality. You create what you experience in every moment of every lifetime. Through your thoughts, feelings, and actions, you cause events to occur. When you experience karma, you’re experiencing the effect of your previous thoughts, feelings, and actions that you caused and created in your past lives.
In the process of evolving your soul, you become aware of all your actions and the events you’ve caused and created. You give yourself the opportunity to experience your karma and the freedom to choose what you want to do about your karma. You choose whether you’ll change and correct what you’ve done before—if it needs to be corrected—or whether you’ll continue it into a future lifetime.
You also give yourself the opportunity to enjoy and enhance previously acquired skills and talents, to benefit from what you’ve already learned, to reap the rewards of the many good and loving things you’ve done, and the freedom to increase your knowledge. In your quest for spiritual enlightenment and soul evolvement, you become aware that you do, indeed, create your own reality.
To know that you’ve lived before, and to understand the apparent inequities and injustices of life, brings meaning and purpose to your present life. By accepting responsibility for your attitudes and actions in previous lives, you give yourself the power to make positive changes in your present life which allows you to learn lessons and balance karma.
To know that you have the power to control what happens in your life, and to enjoy the many pleasures and challenges of physical existence, brings you the awareness that you are the master of your fate. By understanding all your experiences, you acquire knowledge and enlightenment which gives you the awareness of your true spiritual nature.
By discovering who you were before, and how your past life experiences relate to who you are now, you gain tremendous benefits in understanding your present experiences. The value of remembering your past lives is in applying the knowledge and insights acquired from your past lives into the events, emotions, situations, and relationships in your present life.
Chapter Two ~ The Process of Remembering Your Past Lives
A philosopher once said, “Learning consists of remembering previously acquired knowledge.” Your subconscious mind has a perfect memory and is the storehouse of all your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and accumulated knowledge. Everything you’ve experienced and become aware of, in every lifetime, is recorded in your subconscious mind.
Remembering your past lives is a process that involves three qualities: Your desire to know, your expectation that you’re able to know, and your belief that you are going to know, will open up your memories and allow you to remember your past lives.
All the memories you recall open up for important and various reasons that will help you in your present life. They surface to offer you insights and answers necessary for understanding your feelings about relationships you’re involved in, and they explain your responses to situations and events that occur in your present life.
They help to make you aware of how your present actions and experiences are connected to and caused by past life events, and they bring you a clear understanding of their influence on your present life. They surface to help you learn life lessons, balance karma, and to educate you in spiritual awareness.
How Your Subconscious Mind Works
Your conscious mind serves the purpose of operating your physical body and experiencing your present incarnation within the framework of the physical dimension. Your subconscious mind contains your soul knowledge, with all of your accompanying past life memories.
Your conscious mind focuses on concrete ideas and thoughts, governed by the characteristics of logic and reasoning. Your conscious mind is limited by the amount of information it can receive and process at any one time, and is restricted by the physical perspective of information that relates to organizing and analyzing your feelings and experiences.
Your subconscious mind focuses on inner truth and knowledge, receiving and processing both physical and spiritual information. Your subconscious contains the secrets of imagery and imagination, intuition and awareness, emotions, dreams, and your past life memories.
It operates in a highly sophisticated framework of awareness with an unlimited amount of information, and serves the purposes of acquiring knowledge and helping you understand all your experiences in a spiritual framework during your physical incarnation.
Remembering the events and emotions in your past lives involves opening up and searching your subconscious mind. The information is there, but retrieving it requires the appropriate triggering mechanism. Your mind has a unique filtering mechanism that allows you to remember only what is relevant or important in any lifetime based on present circumstances. This is because of the vast amount of information acquired in every lifetime.
Your subconscious filter is an intricate filing and retrieval system. You receive so much information on a daily basis that your conscious mind can’t absorb it all and keep it on a conscious level. It’s relegated to the realm of your subconscious, where it’s filed in sequence by your feelings.
You only need the proper triggering mechanism to find the appropriate memory that will bring the information to the surface and show you the pictures of the event in your mind. Most of the time, this trigger consists of association of similar feelings and events.
Similar emotions or experiences in your present life will bring forth related past life memories in which those same emotions or events were experienced. Spontaneous recall of a memory occurs when a present situation or feeling connects with a similar past life experience.
People in your life that you’ve shared a past life with can also trigger the memory when the feelings you have now are directly affected by past life emotions. Your responses to the relationship may inspire images of events that occurred before with this person. The significance of the memory in relation to what you’re experiencing now is the activating agent.
Important events are remembered more easily and in greater detail. The more emotionally involved you are with the memory also makes it easier to recall, even if the event occurred three hundred years ago rather than three days ago. Your subconscious mind isn’t concerned with time. That’s part of your conscious mind’s job.
If your past life memories directly affect an emotional aspect of your life that you’re currently involved with, or if they deal with karma you’re in the process of balancing, your memories may flood up to the surface and be very dramatic.
Your memories will show you scenes of past life events, and you may feel the emotions associated with those events. Your memories will explain how the events and emotions you’re experiencing in your present life have their origins in previous lives.
When you begin to remember parts of your past lives, your subconscious mind will initiate a search to reconstruct the events and emotions surrounding the memory in order to bring it to the surface. The emotional aspects will come up first, then the events directly connected to the memory will surface.
The Way Your Past Life Memories Surface
When you begin to open up the memories of your past lives, you most often remember the emotions first that are contained within the memory, rather than the event that originated the emotions. This is because your memories are filed by your feelings. You may see or feel a brief image or fragment of a past life memory that will cause the associated emotions to surface.
A past life memory may be triggered by a present situation that is similar to a past experience, and you may find yourself responding to the emotions from your past life memory without recalling the details of the corresponding memory. This can help you understand situations in your life where your feelings are out of context with the present situation.
As you begin to remember the events and emotions in your past lives, you may have a sense or a feeling about the memories without seeing them clearly in your mind’s eye. You may become aware of a past life connection without knowing exactly what the connection is.
You may become aware of a symbol that represents something you need to understand before the memory surfaces. At first, your past lives may seem like a puzzle with pieces that don’t fit together. You may remember fragments of a memory or see fleeting images of what looks like a past life. Little lights of awareness may appear in your mind and tease you with the tip of a memory that disappears the minute you see it clearly as it eludes your recognition and understanding.
When you begin to see your past life images, they may zip in and out of your mind with lightning speed. When your past life memories are teetering on the brink between surfacing and being swallowed into oblivion forever, just relax and let them flow up to the surface.
How to Recognize Your Past Life Memories
Until you become familiar with how your subconscious mind offers your memories to you, and you recognize what a past life memory feels like and looks like, your past life memories might seem like they’re not really past life memories. You may tend to think that your mind is playing games with you or that your imagination is working overtime.
When your past life memories are starting to surface, you may be aware of feelings and fragments about the memory that aren’t clearly associated with anything in your present life. If your memory has been triggered by a present situation, you may feel emotions that are unrelated to the present situation, and you may become aware of images of past life pictures.
At first, your past life images and feelings may be a little difficult to connect with an experience in your present life. Instead of finding a clear and well-behaved past life memory that fits neatly into your understanding and falls perfectly into place in your present life, you may find that your subconscious seems to be trying to hide the real memories.
You might even secretly think that your subconscious is sabotaging your efforts to remember your past lives. This isn’t true; it only appears to be this way when your memories are slow to surface and show you incomplete pictures. Your subconscious really wants to help you, and will, if you allow it to. Most past life memories surface in a quiet, unobtrusive way, but a few are very intense and surface with an emotional impact that bursts into your awareness.
When you remember past life experiences, and you see and feel the images and emotions of the memory, you won’t find a special signal that goes off in your mind that tells you the memory is a past life memory.
Your past life memories are distinguished by how you respond to them. A past life memory feels different from a present life memory. Somewhere inside of you, you recognize a past life memory and validate it through your feelings about it. When you experience a past life memory, you know it and feel it on a deep, inner, intuitive level within yourself.
This is where trusting your feelings and believing your inner knowledge comes in. Your feelings are the telltale signs of a true past life memory and pave the way to understanding and insight. Present life memories usually feel more familiar at first, and are ones you can place more exactly with the corresponding feelings after a bit of thought on the matter.
As your memories come up to the surface, you may either remember and/or re-experience past life events and emotions. The depth of your involvement, and how vividly you see and feel the images and emotions of your memories, will determine whether your past lives are remembered or re-experienced.
When you’re remembering a past life event, you’re viewing the images in your mind and they have a dream-like quality. You may feel the emotions, but you don’t feel the scene. When you’re re-experiencing a past life event, your awareness is completely absorbed and immersed in the scene. You’re feeling the emotions; you’re intensely involved in the events that are occurring. You’re hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling the sights, sounds, and events around you. It feels as if it’s happening in the present rather than in the past.
As your past life memories begin to show themselves, allow them to surface in their own way. Don’t rush them, or force them, or try too hard. This will push them further away from you. Beware of self-imposed limits and restrictions that you place on your memories. Don’t become discouraged by expecting earth-shattering revelations and finding small recognitions and little clues to begin with.
Your past life memories will open up naturally, in the way that is most appropriate for you. By going within yourself and looking into your subconscious mind, you’ll discover the doorway into your past lives. The very nature of your subconscious mind is gentle and quiet. Most past life memories open up in a quiet way, by showing you things you may already be aware of but haven’t yet connected to your past lives.
Copyright 2009 by Gloria Chadwick.
