Now that you’ve explored your ancestry to discover who you are today, the next chapter in the story of your soul is to explore some of your past lives. Doing so will give you an even broader understanding of who you are today—and will provide another way to help your awareness of your soul evolve.
Since the Akasha holds a record of all of our lifetimes, and because time and space as we know them do not exist in the Akashic Records, information regarding our problems and their origins is always readily available in the Records. Having said that, however, I want to make it clear that the Records do not function for us as The Big Fishing Pond in the Sky. We can’t just open our Records, cast our line, and reel in information about our various past lives. The Lords of the Records allow only the Masters, Teachers, and Loved Ones to share information that we are ready to hear. So unless the problem a person is presenting began in a different lifetime, that person will not get past-life information during an Akashic reading. This may be frustrating to some of your clients who are especially intrigued by reincarnation. However, those who are well aware of Divine timing and Divine reliance will understand when it is and is not appropriate to receive information about past lives in the Records.
Past-life healing in the Records is similar to energy healing in that your readings will follow different levels in order to help you:
From an Akashic point of view, all souls are eternal. Your soul has been reincarnating throughout time to experience and express its Divinity in a variety of conditions. The human lifetimes your soul experienced before this current incarnation are known as your soul’s past lives. (The issue of moving from human form to animal form throughout the reincarnation cycle does not arise in the Akashic Records. Instead, we see only the journey of the soul in its human incarnations. Whether a soul transitions from human being to family pet is not addressed in the Records.)
At the start of each new lifetime, your soul sets out to learn certain lessons and accomplish certain goals. In some cases, your soul will learn a particular lesson within a single lifetime. At the end of such a lifetime, your soul will shed its physical body and integrate the wisdom of that lesson into its consciousness. (In more familiar terms, this is when the body dies but the spirit lives on—and is more evolved than ever because of its new understandings.)
Sometimes, however, a particular lesson takes more than one lifetime to master. In such a case, what once was merely a lesson to be learned at the human level becomes an energetic blockage, or problem, that must be cleared at the soul level. Here’s what happens. Let’s say that your soul enters a lifetime as “Katie,” with a plan to work on the lesson of over coming prejudice. But this turns out to be a tall order, so despite Katie’s best human efforts, she reaches the end of her lifetime without having mastered the lesson.
I asked my Masters, Teachers, and Loved Ones why I always take classes in all different areas of life—art, photography, scuba, skiing, improvisation, voice lessons, piano—and never become proficient at any of them. Since some of them are very expensive and time consuming, I had always felt bad about this behavior. In a reading, the answer that I got was that I was a Russian ballerina in a past life. I spent that whole life having to be disciplined in that one art, so now in this life I get to try whatever I want. It totally made sense and has allowed me to feel great about this part of my life. I think what the knowledge provides is the ability to, as in all “light bulb moments,” understand and let go; understand and let go.
—Barbara
As the human being known as Katie, your soul made many advancements toward overcoming prejudice. Yet on this particular lesson, your soul still has work to do. At the end of your lifetime as Katie, your soul sheds Katie’s physical body, but the energy of the unfinished lesson still exists as a blockage in your soul-level consciousness. With nowhere else to go, this energy blockage takes up residence in the body and mind of your soul’s next incarnation: “Malik.”
As Malik grows up, some of his prejudicial beliefs and actions are directly influenced by the unresolved problems Katie left behind. Malik’s parents are baffled by his behavior. They can’t understand how, despite the fact that they raised all of their children in the same way, Malik has such different ideas from the rest of his family. As a matter of fact, Malik himself doesn’t always understand why he feels and acts as he does. There’s just something deep down inside him that he can never quite explain.
In its lifetime as Katie, and now as Malik, your soul has been allowed to view different kinds of prejudice through different sets of eyes in order to learn to overcome this problem. If your soul succeeds during its lifetime as Malik, it will clear away the problem and its energy blockage, integrate the wisdom of the lesson, and move on to learn something else. However, if Malik does not succeed, your soul might decide to come back as “Pierre” and ... try, try again.
This learning process will repeat itself for as many lifetimes as are necessary for your soul to solve its problem and integrate its lesson. Then, once the problem is solved, your soul will be free to get on with the rest of its life—or more accurately, its lifetimes—unaffected any longer by this particular lesson and all of its resultant problems.
It is important to stop here and note that it is an energetic impossibility for a soul to go backward in its evolution. A human experience may appear to be a regression to past patterns of thinking and behaving, but that does not mean the soul is backsliding. Behaviors and ways of being that are constricting, limiting, and uncomfortable—criminal activity, addiction, extreme poverty, and violence, for example—are all valid paths for a soul to take on its way to learning love and self-acceptance. They are opportunities to realize the Divine Presence no matter what the circumstances. So do not be fooled by appearances: there is no going backward.
Understanding this concept is similar to understanding the movement of a “retrograde” planet. Planets do not go backward, but they sometimes slow down in their orbits so much that they appear to be going in reverse because the heavenly bodies around them are moving at their regular rates of speed. Like those heavenly bodies in retrograde, in some lifetimes we human “heavenly bodies” operate at a slower pace than others around us. Or we choose to live out a particularly difficult challenge that takes all of our focus and attention, so our progress appears to be minimal. But make no mistake, there is only progress in our Universe—always expanding, always unfolding, always evolving. Sometimes that evolution is easy to recognize, and sometimes it’s unrecognizable.
Past-life healing in the Records is similar to energy healing in that both forms of healing follow the same three levels of telling your story, looking for the causes and conditions, and recognizing the soul-level truth. The differences in past-life healing, however, are that when you look for the causes and conditions of your problem during Level 2, your Masters, Teachers, and Loved Ones will help you meet with the past-life incarnation (person) that you were in the lifetime during which the problem originated. That past-life incarnation will then explain how and why the problem began, and how you can heal it now. Then, when you look at the soul-level truth during Level 3, you will be given the opportunity to invite your past-life incarnation to either integrate itself into your soul’s consciousness or return to the Light of the Records.
As you might imagine, this is deep work in the Records. Attempt it only when you feel comfortable and ready to hear the information. When you are ready, you can use the following exercise to familiarize yourself with the process of healing past lives in the Records. Depending on your experiences during this exercise, you may or may not need to personally advance through all three levels of healing. For the sake of learning the process, however, and knowing how to use all the levels for yourself and others in the future, you’ll want to read through the entire exercise. When you use this exercise with another person, the three levels and the process will be identical, only you will be the one conducting the reading and facilitating the process.
Or:
If you still don’t have a sense of resolution, keep your Records open and move into Level 2.
Or:
If you’re having trouble making peace with the person you were—or with what the person did—during that former lifetime, keep your Records open and move into Level 3.
Normally, following these three levels of past-life healing is enough to dislodge most problems and clear their energy blockages. If you have a problem that’s particularly challenging, however, you can go into your Records and repeat this process as many times as you need to until you find clarity and peace. It may also be true that you had other past lives that play into this particular problem. If that’s the case, when you get to Level 2, ask to be shown a different lifetime during which this same problem existed, and converse with another of your soul’s incarnations to get his or her perspective. As always, make sure that the information you receive is practical, useful, and pertinent. If it’s not, you are free at any time to end the reading by counting to three, clapping your hands, and closing your Akashic Records.
The most important thing to remember while doing this healing work is that you are the authority when it comes to determining your own experiences. In other words, you are the one who will know whether a problem is cleared up or it needs more work. You also will know how much you can handle at any given time, so it’s up to you to set your own comfortable pace. There is no need to rush the process. Actually, doing so can have a negative effect that further complicates things. So be your own spiritual authority. Take the information you receive from your Masters, Teachers, and Loved Ones and use it to determine your best strategy for healing.
Though exploring past lives is extremely helpful for healing existing problems, there are also times when exploring past lives can support you in situations that are already good. For example, let’s say you’ve been made a manager at work. While you’re thrilled with this vote of confidence in your ability and expertise, you’re also kind of nervous. Being promoted to this new position involves a lot of unknowns. You wish you had a mentor—someone who’s “been there and done that” before, who can give you some pointers as you begin to navigate your new position. Well, guess what? You do have a mentor; it’s you! That is, it’s “you” as you were in a past life during which you were an expert at managing others. All you have to do to receive that past-life expert’s advice is go into your Records and ask for it.
You can use the following exercise to explore a positive past life in your Records. The process you will follow is a simplified version of the process you used for past-life healings. If you choose to explore a positive past life while reading for someone else, you can use the process described below and rephrase the questions as necessary.
Or:
The preceding past-life exercises work just the same whether you’re exploring your own positive past lives or are helping other people explore theirs. The results will vary depending on each person’s receptivity and level of understanding. However, in every case, as we learned with “Joe” in Chapter 5 on energy healing in the Records, the healing will have begun on some level, even if it’s not obvious right away.
As you’ll discover after working in your Akashic Records for a time, there are many healing methods and avenues to explore. Given that this is a beginning-level book, I’ve presented the methods that I feel will provide the most solid foundation for you. They can serve as a powerful springboard that will help you dive into your personal journey of spiritual healing and growth.