chapter 1
Struggle, Justice,
and Beliefs
Early on in my teaching career a funny thing happened. As I sit quietly observing a pair of students at training who are facilitating their first afterlife sessions, I suddenly get a sharp pain on my left side around my abdomen. It grows sharper and sharper until I can’t breathe. I signal over to the training assistant and quickly leave the room. Once outside of the session room, I stand for a few minutes using my breathing to release the pain. It is so odd, but I can’t shake the feeling that I had just been stabbed.
My side starts feeling better, so I pull myself together and go check in on another student pair who are doing their sessions in another room. I quietly open the door and go in. The student who is facilitating the session is sitting behind the desk, while her partner, John, is lying back in the recliner absorbed in a scene from the last moments of one of his past lives. I stand in the corner quietly observing them when the pain returns even stronger now.
I hear John quite matter-of-factly say, “He killed me … he stabbed me! I’m dying. I stabbed him too … but I didn’t kill him.”
John continues to describe the scene of his death on the battlefields at the Battle of Antioch during the time of the Crusades. As one of the Knights Templar, he wore a white mantle with a red cross, and rode a horse with a red tassel on its head. His hair was long, and his beard was now encrusted with a mixture of blood and snow.
It was cold and snowing, and their army was running low on supplies and manpower. As they came up over the horizon there were thousands of Turks prepared for battle, waiting to take them by surprise. The Turks swarmed upon the invading army and attacked. The young knight brutally battled his way through the sea of men and found himself engaged with one Turk in particular. Bludgeoning one another, the knight was finally knocked off of his horse by his adversary. While his maimed body was lying on the ground, his Turkish attacker jumped off his own horse and continued to stab him, making sure to finish the job.
As a young man the wounded warrior had looked forward to growing up and becoming a knight, as did most of the young boys in the village. He had been taught that to go to war on the side of Christianity was to fight for justice and for God. Now approaching thirty, he was wiser and weary from many battles and saw things differently. Disillusioned, he now believed all this fighting was nothing more than an exercise in power and greed. Stealing from one thief to give to another.
But once “in service” there was no way out. He knew that he faced certain death from his own army if he were to speak out or try to leave. He had seen what happened to those who had tried to leave, so he kept quiet and did what he had to do, no longer out of loyalty to any belief, but out of a sense of survival until these fatal wounds offered the only way out of this lonely existence.
And now he was dying, feeling angry as if he had been tricked into service along with other young men just like him. Giving his life for something he no longer believed in, he welcomed his death and his freedom.
As his soul leaves the lifeless body, the facilitator carefully guides him through the death scene, asking him to bring forward those he had loved in his life. He struggles as he looks back over that life; he had no one … no one he loved or who loved him … except for his horse.
“The closest thing you have is your horse who’s with you in battle,” he says. He describes his life as a knight as a lonely life of solitude. There was no special someone to go home to. Even if there had been, it doesn’t matter because he hasn’t been home in so long he doesn’t even know where that is anymore. All he has now is his horse and what he carried with him.
So, he musters up courage after feeling the intense loneliness of the life he had just lived, and looks into the eyes of his horse, thanking him for always being there and then he lets go. His soul is gently taken to a special healing place to be cleansed of the emotional imprint that this particularly difficult life has left on his spirit.
This doesn’t seem out of the norm to me; in fact, I recognize much of the scene he is describing. Months prior to this day, I had facilitated a session with John at my office before he had even decided to take my hypnosis certification course. The battle scene from the Crusades, the white mantle with the red cross, and the red tassels his horse wore all seem familiar to me in great detail, as if I had been in the room watching their session the entire time.
As John comes out of the session he seems so shocked at the depth of loneliness and isolation he feels from that life that he hasn’t yet realized that I have joined them in the room. I give him a moment or two before speaking and then ask, “Don’t you recall we went to this same scene when you came to see me at my office last winter … the battle, the red cross, and the horse with the red tassels?”
He very clearly states, “No, we didn’t go to this life in that session. This is the first time I’ve ever revisited this life.”
I reply, “Yes, don’t you remember the weather was harsh and you were so weary, but you had no choice but to fight?”
He insists, “Nope, this is the first time I’ve revisited this past life.”
“But how would I know all of these details when I wasn’t in the room with you today until the very end of your session?” I argue. “I was held up with your classmates’ session down the hall.”
I then turn to the student who had just facilitated the session and ask if she had remembered to ask if he recognized the person who had stabbed him to death. My reasoning for this is twofold. First, soul recognition occurs when a client recognizes someone from their present life who appears in their past life, so it’s important to ask. Second, it is an opportunity for healing if forgiveness work or grief work is needed, or if there’s conflict or unfinished business to be resolved with them.
She starts to speak when she is interrupted by John, who looks up at me and points. “Why, it was you, Bryn. You’re the one who stabbed me!”
Then they simultaneously say, “Bryn, why are you holding your side that way?”
I look down and realize that I am holding my side, which has started hurting again. Startled and laughing all at the same time, I say to them, “A few minutes ago down the hall I had to leave the room because I suddenly had the inexplicable feeling that I had been stabbed!”
We are quite surprised once we all realize that the reason the details of the battle scene from John’s session are familiar to me is because I had been there myself. Although it’s happened once or twice, I don’t typically end up in my clients’ past lives. I know the scene not from having facilitated a session or as the observer, but because I had lived it along with him.
I know this to be true also because I began to recall one of my own sessions that had occurred during the Crusades, but I had only known about a small portion of that life from when I had popped into a different time frame in that lifetime. Now years later, John’s session fills in some of the blanks for me from that life. It also reveals a connection to John, whom I had not met yet in my current life at the time of my session.
John smiles and says, “Don’t worry, I forgive you. I was only thirty years old but was ready to be done with that life. It was a painfully lonely existence.” He feels a lingering sadness at having such difficulty in finding someone to say his goodbyes to in that life and after several moments of searching, all he found was his horse. As he lets go of that life, almost immediately the pain in my side goes away too.
Not every death is over and done with without animosity, but for that lifetime that’s what it was. John and I have no unfinished business to work through. He simply needed a way out of that life, which I unknowingly obliged on the battlefield that day as a worthy opponent.
In a follow-up Soul Expression Regression Session (SESR), John discovers more about his life’s purpose helping others as he crosses into the spirit world, and his guide greets him and takes him to another realm, to a city in the sky. From here John is led to a facility where he is greeted by a priest who has knowledge and an understanding of how things work. The priest informs John that we come to Earth to learn. “In order for our soul to develop, we must understand truth. There are those on Earth who have come to foster truth. This is an interesting experiment. We are looking to see whether we can shift the consciousness away from where it has resided for a long time. How much of a shift can we make based on souls who have incarnated to battle the illusion and pursue truth?” he says, as he reminds John there are forces of good working in the world too.
The priest begins to perform a sacred ritual with swirling light in front of an audience who is participating to send support and love to the earthly realm. He explains to John that this needs to be done to help with Earth’s transition. “We do this to combat the dark, the lower dimensions that influence the Earth realm,” he says. “We can then learn to communicate truth in a realm [Earth] that doesn’t like truth or want to hear truth … Earth is a school with a certain way of doing things. This realm is one of duality. It is not pure, it is not truthful, but it is buried beneath the distractions or physicality of this realm. It is there for us to discover. That is the learning here. Many believe they have truth, but they have beliefs. Beliefs and perceptions are not truth. You have to discover truth on your own. When you discover it, you know it. This is a battle. Without what we do, Earth would be very dark. The more people that are awakening on Earth will tip the scales. This is the duality.”
The priest reminds John that this city in the sky is the place that he returns to between lifetimes. “In the spirit world, we have many other existences. Many roles we play,” he says. “We will prevail; we always do.”
He reveals to John that in his current incarnation, he is doing residual work to help others open to truth. “Souls can fall off their life path and learn but is this the right learning?” he asks. John helps others to see beyond the material world of competition and possessions that can distract souls who incarnate on Earth, causing them to lose focus of why they are here. It’s okay to have material things, but when that’s where the focus is, it puts one on the wrong path of learning. He reminds John of the importance of souls staying connected to the divine.
The priest explains, “You have to begin to understand what the Earth realm is, and your soul will develop to a higher level and you’ll have more opportunities open to you. This work is to get the individuals to do the spiritual work we do to accelerate the rate and the pace of the development.”
His final message for John is, “To know truth, you must seek out truth. Truth can come incrementally, and the path may have detours. It’s not a straight line, especially on Earth.”
John feels recharged and happy as a result of his visit “home.” In his current life, he has a strong dislike for injustice and dishonest practices perpetuated by corporations, governments, religions, and other organizations that operate merely to keep people in the dark, or as an exercise in greed. These beliefs have carried over from that lifetime a mistrust of people who used the system for their own political power and gain, as well as other lifetimes in which John was responsible for keeping law and order. In one life, he died as a lawman following his duty to uphold the law and keep order and truth in the untamed Wild West. The warrior life carried over into John’s current life, causing him to be passionate about righting wrongs by helping others see through the deception that’s being presented to them. It’s about aiding humankind in finding truth.
_ Soul-Minded Journaling _
Where are you struggling in your life? What beliefs or concepts are giving you difficulty with regard to society’s expectations or your own beliefs about yourself? Are you feeling disillusioned or do you feel empowered and hopeful by what you see around you? Are you able to cut through illusion and see truth? Is it difficult for you to move forward with goals you’ve set for yourself? What beliefs about yourself are holding you back from achieving your goals?
1. Reflect on your current situation to identify your beliefs about yourself and the world around you by pondering some of the questions above.
2. Now, reflect on your past.
• What childhood/early adult experiences shaped these beliefs?
• Have your beliefs changed or have they stayed the same throughout most of your life?
3. As a result of those past beliefs that have shifted:
• Have you become more open, or more closed off, in your interactions with others?
• Are you authentic or hiding behind these beliefs?
• Has this benefited you or become a detriment to goals you’ve set for yourself and the relationships in your life?
• In hindsight, do you see them differently than you once did?
4. What goals have you set for yourself?
• What is holding you back from achieving them? Starting them? Finishing them?
• If you could have what you want, what would that life look like?
5. Ask your spiritual team for guidance. You can ask your soul directly, or ask a spiritual guide who is a member of your spiritual team.
Sit quietly with your hand over your heart. Relax your breathing. Bring your attention inward. Ask your soul or spiritual guide for guidance. Listen to what is being revealed through messages, feelings or intuition.
As you learn to discern the ways your soul or guide sends guidance, notice when things flow and when they seem blocked. Notice how you “feel” when you follow your intuition or know you’re moving in the right direction. Learn the difference between “feelings” and the gentle nudge or warm feeling you get when your soul is naturally guiding you through intuition. Learn what it feels like when your guide is sending guidance.
Practice this regularly to learn to find and follow your soul’s guidance, and to discern the ways that guidance is revealed to you in your life.