Past lives can sneak up and jump out at us just when we least expect it. We may be enjoying a movie, reading a book or doing a bit of leisurely sightseeing when suddenly our world feels like it’s been turned upside-down.
Something has triggered a past-life memory – and when that happens, it’s like letting the genie out of the lamp. It won’t go back, and you can’t ignore it. From then on, it will be part of your life. It may not grant you three wishes, but if you pay attention to it, like the genie it will bring some new magic into your life.
Because they’re designed to immerse us in their world, movies are one of the best triggers for past-life memories. When that happens, the memory that’s been dozing in our subconscious suddenly wakes up and gives us a prod.
The emotions we felt at the time are usually the first thing to come up. Flashes of the actual memory may then follow. We may also get a strong sense of inner knowing that we once lived in that kind of world.
In 1936 an incident took place in a Liverpool cinema that startled not just one person but the whole audience. The movie was showing the beheading of Lady Jane Grey, who was queen for just nine days in Tudor England. Suddenly a young woman in the audience shouted out ‘It’s all wrong! I was at the execution!’
Afterwards she said she suddenly knew that she’d been a lady-in-waiting at that event. Her memory of the executioner was especially clear. She said he wore black bands around his wrists as a sign of his grim office. They weren’t part of his costume in the movie – like many other details she said were incorrect.
These days, when a movie reminds us of a past life, we’re less likely to be quite so startled by it. We probably won’t leap up and blurt things out. We’re starting to take this kind of effect more in our stride – but it can still be unexpected.
A friend of mine went to see an acclaimed Chinese movie about concubines called Raise the Red Lantern. She said it hit her so hard that she wandered around the streets of London for hours afterwards. That was her way of absorbing the impact of realizing that she’d just seen something very like one of her own past lives.
When Stuart came for a regression he found, as many others have, that he’d been a monk in a past life. He discovered that the monastery was full of dark secrets. As he tried to expose them, he put himself in mortal danger.
One day he had to take a message to another monastery. On the road there, two brigands attacked and killed him. He knew the Abbot had sent them to do this.
Afterwards he said he now understood why the movie The Name of the Rose had had such a strong effect on him. It had haunted him for days because it had reminded him of his own dark experiences in the monastery.
Susannah told me how much she loved films of Jane Austen’s novels.
‘I can watch them over and over – I don’t really care about the story,’ she said. ‘I just love feeling like I’m back in that world again.’
Her love of delicate textiles, long dresses and formal manners also pointed to her penchant for those times. She felt that the modern world has become coarse and chaotic since then.
So it was no surprise that when she came for a regression, she went back to a life in Regency England. The real surprise was that she’d been a faithful old servant to a large household.
The family she worked for were kind and had treated her well. Because of that, she’d put them and their whole way of life on a pedestal. They were an ideal that she longed for and aspired to – not just in that life, but in this one as well.
Books can be major triggers of past-life memories, widening our inner horizons and opening doors that we never knew were there.
Sometimes those books can be part of a healing process as well.
When Rod was a teenager, all he wanted to read was World War Two prisoner-of-war escape books. No other kind of war story interested him.
When he came for a regression, he discovered that he’d died while trying to escape from a German prisoner-of-war camp. The searchlights found him as he ran away, and the guards shot him.
He felt that the books he’d read about escaping prisoners who’d got away had somehow helped him to get over that death. Regressing back into that experience was like taking the dressing off an old wound – and finding that it was healed.
When Finny was a child, she loved Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did books, set in America in the late nineteenth century. She said she began to write imitation stories of her own, about a large and happy family living on America’s East coast about a hundred years ago.
She’d naturally forgotten all about her stories until she came for regression. Then she discovered that she’d lived in exactly the kind of family she’d depicted at that time in America. Triggered by a book, the stories she wrote as a child had been drawing on her own memories.
‘I wrote it all down in a notepad of bright-pink, lined paper,’ she said. ‘I can see it in front of me now. I’m sure I must have thrown it away as rubbish later on. It’s strange to think how that silly-looking notebook actually had some real significance.’
Stephanie came for a regression to see if she could sort out a problem with a work colleague. She told me there was a strangely deep hostility between them. She didn’t understand it and wondered if it might come from a past life.
In her regression, she went back to a life a few centuries ago. She was one of the men who used to loot ships that had been wrecked in storms and washed ashore. They also used to lure ships onto rocks to destroy them, for the same purpose.
Her memory began at a sea cove. The man she’d been was wearing a tricorn hat and black shoes with buckles. A ship had been wrecked, and the gang was waiting to grab its bounty. A chest had already come ashore. They opened it with a crowbar and found treasure inside.
Sailors from the wreck were also washing up on the shore – some of them still alive. The gang’s usual policy was to kill any survivors, to stop them reporting what they’d seen.
‘This time, I decided not to do that,’ Stephanie recalled. ‘There’s a woman, her cloak flapping in the wind, who’s yelling something. She’s my wife. She’s very angry because I didn’t order the men to kill the sailors. She says they’ll tell on us.
‘She yells, “You’re a fool John Mosset! I’ll show you what a man looks like!” And she grabs a stick and goes and bludgeons the half-drowned sailors to death. The others just shrug. The general feeling is, it needed to be done.
‘When we get home she’s screaming with rage like a banshee. She tries to hit and kick me, saying she never liked me and she regrets marrying me.
‘After she’s screamed herself out, I go outside to think. I make up my mind that it’s time for me to leave her – and also this whole way of life.’
So he left and found his way to London. To make up for his past he later became a gentle priest, much loved by his flock.
Afterwards Stephanie said the furious woman in that life was the work colleague who’d been giving her so much trouble. She decided to try one last time to make peace with her. But if that didn’t work, she’d do the same thing – wash her hands of it and walk away.
She also told me that she had at home a library book called The Wreckers. She’d felt very drawn to it – but once she’d got it, she couldn’t face reading it. Nor could she bring herself to take it back to the library. She’d had to renew the library loan three times without ever opening it.
The next time Stephanie came to Glastonbury, she told me that after the regression she’d found it easy to read that book. She discovered it was about exactly the sort of thing she used to do – looting wrecked ships. But knowing that she’d walked away from it in the end made it easier to read.
When she went back to work, she heard that her troublesome work colleague was getting a transfer elsewhere. The problem had solved itself.
‘I wonder how this works?’ she asked. ‘It looks as if just becoming aware of the past-life cause of a problem somehow helps it to melt away.’
It’s said that if you stare at a picture for long enough, it will feel as if you’ve entered it. But to be an effective trigger of past-life memories, lengthy gazing may not be necessary. If the picture rings a bell for you, just one look can be enough.
The following experience happened to a friend of mine when he was a little boy.
‘I used to get the children’s educational magazine Look and Learn,’ he said. ‘One day it arrived on the front doormat as usual. I picked it up. On the cover there was a picture of a Viking. He was in full battle regalia, with one of their ships behind him. And I fainted! No other picture had ever had that effect on me – not even the gory, violent ones.’
When he came for regression other, more pressing memories came up. It clearly wasn’t the right time for him to access his Viking memories. But other clues in his life are like the tip of that hidden iceberg.
He told me once that he’d suddenly thrown out all his son’s books about Vikings. And over the course of his life he’s spent a lot of time in Scandinavia. This may be part of a healing process centred on that part of the world – where the Vikings originally came from.
Life may even present us with a portrait of ourselves in a previous life. In his book Past Lives, Future Lives, hypnotherapist Dr Bruce Goldberg writes about a woman who went on holiday to Germany. While she was looking around an old German castle, she saw a thirteenth-century portrait on the wall.
She stood in front of that picture completely transfixed for 45 minutes. She’d recognized the picture as herself in a past life. As she stood there, all her memories from that time came tumbling into her mind.
One of my clients went back to a life that confirmed something he’d long suspected – he’d been the model for Thomas Gainsborough’s picture, The Blue Boy.
He said that the first time he saw the picture he was transfixed. He knew with every bone in his body that he was looking at himself in another time.
In his regression he had an overview of several lives, with brief glimpses of each. One of them was in eighteenth-century England, a life that he began in wealthy circumstances but later fell on hard times. This supports what we know about Jonathan Buttall, the model for Gainsborough’s picture.
A theme ran through all the lives he was shown. It was the tension between enjoying being the centre of attention and wanting to get away from it. He often became cynical about how fickle admiration and popularity can be.
By this lifetime he’d developed a deep distrust of people. He said getting these memories helped, because he could now see where that issue had come from.
Next time a picture from long ago draws your attention, look a bit closer. Scenes that feel strangely familiar may be showing you the kind of world you once lived in. If a portrait of someone from the past rings a bell for you, you may or may not have been that literal person. If not, you could well have been someone a lot like them.
Has anything ever rung a bell like that for you? If so, that bell may have been one of your past selves asking to be let in. They come to us when we’re ready for them. Once we accept them – even if some healing is needed – these aspects of our greater self can become our best allies.