3

PAST-LIFE EXPERIENCES

[W]ithin myself I discover this:
indeed, I shall never die,
I shall never disappear.
There where there is no death,
there where death is overcome,
let me go there.
Indeed, I shall never die,
indeed, I shall never disappear.

NEZAHUALCOYOTL

Is there life after life? Is our soul immortal and caught in the birth-death-rebirth cycle? What is the role of our physical bodies?

Many indigenous societies hold a deep belief in reincarnation, in the migration of the departed soul into another person, animal, tree, or other life form. Regrettably, no one person can scientifically prove reincarnation, yet many stories have been told about it over the centuries; it is the subject of the books, poetry, songs, and oral traditions of all cultures, including some religions.

As a self-declared rationalist and atheist I used to be awfully cynical about concepts like past lives. It wasn’t so rare for me to make fun of people who, after a past-life regression, said things like “Oh, I was Jesus,” or “I was Mary Magdalene,” “I was a pharaoh,” and so on. I believed these stories were just an excuse for not taking responsibility for what the person didn’t want to do or be in his or her current life. I tended to look at these kinds of recollections as a bit crazy and disillusioned. But in my grief over the passing of my mother, I found myself hoping and praying that my mother’s soul would return in the form of a daughter. So, when I began to experience the reality of past lives, as in the following stories, it totally caught me by surprise and made me a believer.

TWO KNIGHTS

“Can you ‘see’ a past lifetime vision I had recently had?” a new client challenged me as we were sitting to do a candle reading. At first I was taken aback by her forthright question as I always wait for the images to come to me and do not like to be forced or challenged this way. So I took a big breath. Scanning and gazing at her softly, suddenly a picture of two English soldiers riding fast, dark horses and wearing heavy armor materialized on the left side behind her head. It was the middle of a massive battle. A large forest surrounded the slanted green hilly battlefield. I recognized my client as the man on the left. His shoulder was terribly wounded. Blood was gushing freely out of his armor and was streaming down. I watched him as he finally fell off his horse bleeding to death. The man on his right, his best friend, looked backward and continued galloping, realizing he could not protect or save him.

As I conveyed this vision to my client she nodded in sadness and confirmed that it was exactly what she saw and experienced herself. “Why couldn’t he save me?” she asked with deep mourning. “That is the story of my life. I am always deeply disappointed when people don’t come to help me,” she sighed.

MARGARET’S STORY

From high above, watching like a bird gliding in the sky, I followed a tall, slender young woman. She walked all by herself on the edge of what seemed like a large, immaculate square green lawn surrounded by a row of tall, groomed poplar trees on all sides. Her footsteps were unstable, unsure, almost floating, as if afraid to bother the ground she was walking on. She seemed highly sensitive, disturbed, and frightened. Her honey-colored hair was pulled under a wide-brimmed white sun hat, and her long-sleeved white cotton dress hugged her slim figure as it softly brushed the fresh-cut grass. She moved as if in a dream. It was a bright and crisp spring day with an uncanny stillness in the air, like the calm before a brewing storm. A few feathery white clouds floated in the blue skies. Standing in the background was a large modern white building that had two floors with two big glass doors in its center and many windows on both sides, for each of the many rooms that overlooked the grounds. I recognized it as a mental institution, a sanitarium. There seemed to be no other human beings in sight. I hovered closer to get a better view of her. Somehow, in an instant, and without a doubt I recognized the woman. At first I refused to accept it, but then I realized: She is me. Chills ran throughout my body.

It was I who was walking dreamlike toward the tall, black wrought-iron gates, as an unseen hand led me to the edge of that grassy lawn in total indifference. She hardly even noticed the two bearded men dressed in black suits with black top hats who were waiting for her at the gate. As she came closer the gate seemed to open silently, all by itself. The two men firmly helped her climb up into a waiting carriage where she settled into the back seat. There were no words exchanged. Instantly the carriage took off, pulled fast by the two black horses. They drove through tree-lined roads, quite a long distance. All she could hear was the sound of the horses’ hooves clicking on the road, like Chinese water torture. They arrived in front of her family’s townhouse and stopped. She did not wait for them to help her down. Instead she threw open the carriage door in a panic. As her heart pounded violently, she threw open the black iron gate and dashed into the open door of the house. The two men behind her yelled at her and tried to hold on to her but she did not pay any attention to them. She ran breathlessly upstairs, climbing the narrow, winding staircase, pulling at her dress as it dragged heavily behind her. She entered her bedroom in the small attic on the fourth floor and without any hesitation she held on to the windowsill, looked down to the street below—the trees, the triangular shingle roofs under her—leaned out, and in a last-ditch effort, threw herself out of the window. In midfall she felt the gushing air suffocating her and she couldn’t breathe anymore. Floating from above, she could see, as if a witness, her body slowly falling down, weightless, like a falling yellowed leaf, until she reached the sidewalk. She was finally, oh God, in complete peace.

From this vista I noticed that even the familiar busy street looked calm and beautiful now. I could see clearly the beautiful row of trees that grew alongside the cobblestone avenue, the horse-drawn carriages, the small beautiful houses, and most amazingly, every small detail of the clothing worn by the men and women who were strolling leisurely on this weekend afternoon. At once droves of startled people rushed toward her lifeless body that lay face-down on the sidewalk. I noticed their clothes as they were crossing the avenue to reach her—the men with elegant black suits, white shirts, and black top hats, carrying their walking canes, the women in long, heavy gray dresses with tight waists adorned with black buttons and gray hats. Then the ringing sound of emergency bells came closer, and soon a horse-drawn ambulance arrived and stopped by the dead body. Four men in black uniforms picked up her body and carefully placed it on a simple stretcher, lifted it, and laid it inside the ambulance. The ambulance jerked forward, the bells continuing to ring their emergency sounds, and I followed the ambulance as it started to move up the street until it reached the city hospital. I was totally oblivious to the panic other people around me were expressing. I saw them unloading my lifeless body and passing the stretcher to the waiting medical crew, and then watched them carry me into the building.

Then I left, but before I did, I wanted to know who I was and where this had taken place. I called out and asked her. A message came back to me clearly: “My name is Margaret. I was born in the 1890s and lived in a highly respected section of Vienna, Austria.”

Slowly I opened my eyes. I was still standing barefoot, clad in my white underwear on the mud floor of a semidark healing room. The strong smell of cow manure, alcohol, and tobacco smoke in the room had brought me back to my surroundings. Jorge Tamayo was still whipping my head with a bunch of dry leaves, chanting an old Quechua prayer. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like someone had knocked the air out of me. My eyes filled with salty tears. I felt deep mourning for the dead Margaret, and for myself.

At the end of the session I slowly got dressed and sat on a bench leaning against the white wall, gathering my thoughts and feelings. I couldn’t believe what I had witnessed. Was it a past-life experience? How long did it last? A few seconds? Minutes? An hour? How could I see every detail, sound, and emotion so vividly and clearly? Did I make it all up? I sat there contemplating, trying to make sense of it all. Don Esteban, the miniature elder shaman, wearing a colorful feather crown, snored loudly in the other corner of the room, completely drunk and tired from working straight around the clock. I needed space to figure this all out. I excused myself, got up and went outside and made my way through the herd of cows and busy chickens to the cornfields. There behind the outhouse I stood and watched the beautiful valley below. It was still early afternoon and the setting sun painted the fields in magical colors. Everything looked so unusually unreal and at the same time utterly peaceful. I contemplated: Okay, I was a young woman, not a man, with depression. I committed suicide. How and why is this related to my current life? Why was this past life revealed to me now, here in the High Andes of Ecuador? Is it related to my mother’s depression or her maiden name, Margalit? Margaret was from a well-to-do family—is this why I have an aversion to money in this lifetime? Was this is the source of my present-life fear of heights?

Since my early childhood I have always had an inexplicably strong fear of heights, specifically, falling from roofs. My legs stiffen, my breath shortens, and my palms begin to sweat when I am up high. No wonder when I saw a picture of a hanging cable bridge built over a deep river in Dream Change’s trip brochure I was terrified. The bridge was relatively narrow and had no railings or ropes to hold on to. Seeing it made me worry that my legs would become paralyzed, as had happened to me when I was at the top of the Duomo in Milan, Italy, many years before. I was sure that I would fall down into the deep, gushing waters. Did Margaret’s story and her jumping to her death uncover the source of that deep fear? If so, maybe I don’t need to repeat that experience again. Was that experience my healing?

A week later, in Miazal, in the heart of the Shuar jungle territory, while on our way to the sacred twin falls, we had to cross that very bridge. My heart started to pound heavily with anticipation. I took a big breath, remembered Margaret, made a few cautious steps, and lo and behold, my legs were relaxed and my breath flowed easily. I got to the center of the bridge and started dancing, laughing and cheering uncontrollably. But even then I still had this nagging question: Was it really real or did I just made it up? No way to know. I needed proof, but how? Should I go to Vienna to look for historical records? Nah . . . I dismissed it.

A few years later, on a cold September night at the Omega Institute, a group of us sat outside on a bench, some of the same people who had taken that trip to Ecuador with me, as well as a few others who had joined our noisy reunion. We were all sharing memories from our trip, storytelling, with a lot of laughter.

“Hey Itzhak, tell them your Margaret story,” my good friend Ariel Orr Jordan encouraged me. Reluctantly, I agreed. When I finished telling my story, a woman said from the darkness, “You know, I’m from Vienna and I know that sanatarium. And, you know, it’s still there.” My heart skipped a beat.

“What a confirmation,” Ariel said.

Maybe I need to go to Vienna after all, I thought.

Fast-forward nine years. Cramped in my Italian host Alessandra’s packed car, Isabel, Maria, and I were heading back to Florence from Baratti, a beautiful resort beach town where I had just finished teaching a shamanic seminar. Isabel was hurrying to take the train back to her home in Vienna for the weekend. The weekend traffic made the trip even longer than expected, and to pass the time I asked Isabel if she knew of this sanatarium. “Can you describe it?” she asked, and so I described it to her. “Why do you want to know?” she asked suspiciously. I then told my companions the Margaret story. “Aha,” she said seriously, her eyes concentrating, trying to think of the sanatarium’s name, “there are few possibilities, but you know, I’m working at the Vienna Museum; why don’t you come there and we will find out if your story is true?”

Isn’t that a coincidence? I thought—I was on my way to Vienna to teach.

Vienna had been on my mind for the longest time. My wife’s most admired dance teacher, one of the most influential artists in my life, Gertrude Krause, a Dada dancer, was Viennese. It was an excellent opportunity to visit the places she always reminisced about. I wanted to see those artist and intellectuals’ cafés and taste the best Viennese coffee and strudels and see the palace where Gertrude brought the house down when she wildly danced at the first Dada Congress.

At 10 a.m. sharp a few days later, I entered the Wien Museum on the famous Karlsplatz. I walked into a modern three-story building that was filled with every item of the city’s rich history. I asked the receptionist if I could see Isabel. A few long minutes later, a beautifully dressed woman showed up to greet me, very different-looking from the wild shaman she was in Italy. “Hey, is that you?” I asked laughingly. She giggled and led me to her quarters, where her stern-faced associate interrogated me again and again about the details of my story. There was a short discussion in German, and then a plan of action was formed. For sanatariums we needed to search the Internet. To find out about the ambulances we would have to go downstairs to the transportation department. For street scenes there was another department. And so after three hours of searching flat drawers, deep drawers, and opening old envelopes, we found it all: pictures of the sanatarium, the stretcher, the horse-drawn ambulance, the bells, the hospital, the townhouses, pictures of men and women walking the streets, and even their exact clothing. We made photocopies of it all.

But the most emotional and confirming moment for me happened while looking again at the photo of the sanatarium in Purkersdorf. In the photo it had three floors, not two as I had seen in my vision. I started doubting myself again. Reading the picture’s caption we found the explanation: “The famous architect Josef Hoffman designed it in 1906. In 1935, a third floor was added to the original building.” That meant Margaret was in her mid-twenties at the time. “Only very well-to-do families used to send their members there, many from the Jewish community. At that time it was built quite far away from the city,” Isabel continued reading. It was hard for me to keep cool on the outside. I started to have heart palpitations, fear was growing in my stomach, my palms were sweating, and I was shaking and short of breath. “Do you want to visit the place?” Isabel softly asked. “It is just a few train stops outside the city; I can show you how to get there.”

I consulted my spirit. “No, that’s enough for me now,” I said.

MY LIFE AS A WITCH

Very thin, with dark, flowing, curly hair, dressed lightly in black top and shorts befitting a hot New York summer’s day, Laurie walked into my healing room. Her brown eyes were bright, playful, and curious, hiding a lifetime of deep suffering. “I need to be prepared for my planned trip to Peru, where I am going for the first time to drink ayahuasca. I want to cure my chronic depression, anxiety, and addiction to painkillers.”

These were the reasons she gave for coming for this shamanic healing. Little did we know then that this session would reveal a whole other lifetime. I brought to her attention the fact that most of the time when a person takes antidepressants or anxiety medication, shamanic healing may not be as effective, as it needs to combat those spirits too, while the client’s spirit is suppressed. She seemed to understand and agreed anyway.

“I have some pain on the right side of my lower back. Could it be an intrusion of bad spirits?” she asked.

I handed her a jaguar bone to hold between her two palms to check for possession. “No you are not possessed, but you had some trembling in your left hand, which signals problems or disturbances with a mother or a feminine energy,” I said. She nodded in agreement. As we continued our conversation, a picture—a holographic image—formed above her right shoulder slightly above her head. A short, heavyset, round, and youngish European woman stood in her kitchen mixing with her right hand what seemed like soup in a big cauldron on a wood-burning stove. Her light blond hair was tucked under a light blue cap, and a white apron was tied to her bluish dress, covering her full feminine figure. While continuing our regular conversation, I thought, Who is this woman? How is she related to my client? She seems to not have any resemblance to my client, so why is she here? Is she is her ancestor? I needed more information.

“What is your ancestry?” I asked my client, looking into her dark eyes.

“Oh, part French, part German, and part English. Why do you ask?”

It must be France then, I thought. “I do not know why yet, but there is a woman here.” I went on, describing to her the scene that was evolving in front of my eyes. “I think she is a healer, a witch making a special brew to heal someone.”

“How does the kitchen look?” Laurie asked.

“Let me concentrate. Well, it is small and narrow, with a brick floor and log walls, and a very low ceiling.”

“Do they have windows and animals?”

“The windows are very small squares, I guess to keep the heat in. And yes, there are animals outside, I can feel them but I can’t see them.” I continued and took a deep breath. “Now I can see a young man walking into the kitchen from the right side through an inner door. He is handsome and has a bushy blond mustache and light hair. I guess he is her husband. He is wearing khaki-colored work clothes and a brown vest. He has to bend his head to come in through the door.” I took a breath, and another vision came. “But wait—there is a girl walking in from the door on the left side—their daughter. She is maybe sixteen, looking like a younger version of her mother, but without the cap. The woman is thirty-two years old. She is calmly teaching her daughter to make the healing brew. They seem to be so innocent and peaceful, an almost idyllic image of a young farmer’s family, but not for long. I can see a few people coming down a road from the fields. I don’t know who they are.” I concentrated on them. “Suddenly the front door of the kitchen on the right side opens aggressively and three men walk in. They are wearing black hooded robes.”

“Who are they? Are they are priests?” Laurie asked.

“Yes, they are, wearing black robes with hoods over their heads; I can’t see their faces. I think they came to take them. Yes, they’re arresting them. They are going to burn them as witches.” I had to stop and take a big breath, as I felt goosebumps spread over my entire body. I continued: “I have the sense that this woman might actually be you a few hundred years ago. I think I’m seeing you in your past life.”

“Interesting,” Laurie said as she played with her curly black hair. We had a long period of silence. “You know, it makes a lot of sense. I’m a writer, and for the past few years I have been working on a book about women healers from all cultures who fought against society’s judgment. I feel very passionate about it. I’m also working for an organization for women’s rights.”

“Oh, that’s fascinating,” I said.

“And you know, I have one daughter too.”

“How old is she now?” I asked.

“Twenty-five.”

“No, I guess it’s not her. Wait—were you pregnant when you were sixteen?

“No, but I was when I was seventeen, and it was too frightening, so I had an abortion,” she said.

“Are you very protective of your daughter?”

“You bet! I hope not in a bad way, though,” she said, laughing.

“Your husband in this lifetime, does he have light hair and a bushy mustache?”

“When I met him he did, a nice big, bushy blond mustache. Yes, strange . . . And you know what? It is so funny, the women from the French side of our family are all short, round, and have huge behinds,” Laurie said with a giggle.

I went on to finish the candle reading, and as we were ready for the cleansing ceremony I suggested that Laurie concentrate on that woman and see if she could communicate with her. “I will also dedicate this ceremony to your previous incarnation, because her soul or spirit also needs healing, and with that we will heal your entire female line.” Laurie agreed.

La Limpia—the cleansing session (more about this later in this book)—was intense. Laurie’s body finally relaxed, tears flowed down her cheeks, her face became peaceful and clear, and she started breathing normally. “Thank you, Laurie,” I said at the end of the session. We embraced. Next, she kneeled down and put her face to the floor for a few long minutes.

“I saw her, we spoke, and it was so powerful, thank you,” she said quietly.

Later that week of the cleansing, I got a long e-mail from Laurie: “I went that night to bury the eggs and candle as you directed, and as I was walking down the street I thought of how this kind of activity would have had the Inquisition after me in a flash back in those days, and in fact I felt very furtive doing it.

“Of course, I got busy researching the French side of my family (French-Swiss to be precise) to try to locate a likely time and place of witch persecutions in northeastern France and Switzerland, but was soon overwhelmed by all the names, the mass barbecues, the deaths under torture, beheadings, and so forth, a hysteria kicked off by—who else—the Catholic Church. All high-ranking assholes, royal and cleric, signed ridiculous antiwitchcraft pledges or legislation, exactly as the idiots today sign the no-tax, no-abortions, no gay marriage, etc., pledges. Classic mass hysteria, and about as reasonable as no-tax pledges. Prosecution for witchcraft went from one of these nasty little legal maneuvers used when the court has no case (e.g., Anne Boleyn and Jeanne d’Arc) to a universal remedy against political enemies, inconvenient wives, annoying neighbors, and boredom. Like gladiators, guillotines, and lynching, people just looovvve a day out to enjoy someone else’s death.

“I digress. I found quite a few mothers and daughters listed. I didn’t get a strong sense of any of them, but by this time the personal tragedy I’d felt during the healing had become so horrifically repetitious that I couldn’t feel more awful for any one of them over another. One thing kinda’ stopped my heart though, that I hadn’t thought of when you were telling me about my girl, was what happened before the fire—burning to death would have been a preferable end over the hideous torture to get confessions.

“I realized that there wasn’t anything unusual about my past life. For a European peasant woman living between 1240 and 1690, being burned alive for witchcraft seemed to be almost as likely as a European Jew being murdered in the camps in the years of the Third Reich.

“I think my previous incarnation was called Marguerite. I’m finding myself at a loss for how to reconcile the extremes of her suffering. How facile it would be to tell her to forgive herself, or to try to remember the sweet part of her life when the end would have poisoned all those memories; if it had been just her who had to endure it, if they’d taken just her, I think she’d have moved past it, knowing what the world is capable of. But for her to witness and experience firsthand the agonies her daughter had to face must have been a fate worse than her own death. I can see how a mere 800 to 500 years would not be nearly enough time to heal those wounds.”

I replied to her e-mail: “Hi Laurie, After our session I realized I did not ask that woman in the session her name. So after you left, I closed my eyes and journeyed to her, where I found her and asked her to tell me her name. She said it was Margarita. I dismissed the coincidence and did not tell you this, as I had another past-life experience with another Margaret in Vienna in 1890s. So I got goosebumps reading your e-mail.”

A week later, Laurie was bubbling with excitement about all the research she had been doing.

So many questions ran unanswered in my head, and I’m sure in hers, too. Was it Laurie’s real past life? Is this why she is so interested in women’s rights and in writing books about women healers? How much of her current life is influenced by that past life and this death incident? Is it a coincidence that she has only one daughter and had an abortion at the same age as her past-life daughter? Why is it that she decided to return in Laurie’s body during this lifetime? Are we really free to choose our own destiny or are we players in something bigger? Are our previous incarnations constantly with us even if we do not see them?

A few months later, Laurie and I had a chance to see how her past life influences her in this lifetime. We did a soul retrieval—a subject covered in our next chapter.