Healing Troubled Relationships
DAN, A BUSINESS EXECUTIVE IN HIS LATE THIRTIES, was seeing me for therapy for several reasons, one of which was his passionate yet turbulent love relationship with Mary Lou. He is an intense, intelligent, and idealistic Italian-American from Boston’s North End. Mary Lou is from South Carolina, from a very different culture and religious background. The two started with a strong, immediate, and passionate attraction to each other. That was not their problem.
The problem began with her flirting. After Mary Lou had a drink or two, her usually tightly controlled behavior would disappear. Then she would enjoy hugging their male friends, touching their hair, rubbing their necks, kissing them when arriving and leaving, and sometimes even spontaneously in between. Yet this was the extent of it. There was never any additional sexual acting out. There was never an affair, only flirting, and this behavior always occurred in public.
Dan would go crazy. He would rage, yell at Mary Lou, and demand that she respect herself more and act more properly. He could barely control his anger. The extent of his emotional reaction transcended the concept of macho or male pride and possessiveness in his culture. Dan’s rage transcended any previous personal reactions with other women. He had been married once and divorced, had dated a lot, and had had several long-term relationships, but he had never experienced anything like this rage with any of the other women.
For several weeks Dan and I talked about his anger. Then, on one particular Thursday afternoon, he appeared for his appointment with seething anger. She had done it again! At a dinner party, Mary Lou had flirted with one of their male friends. Dan had felt like “breaking her neck,” and Mary Lou was frightened.
Here were two otherwise sophisticated, mature professionals, but she could not stop drinking, flirting, or provoking him, and he would always become a raging bull whose reaction was very disproportionate to her “crime.”
For thirty minutes Dan and I talked about the party, about her behavior and about his. As the scene replayed itself in his mind, Dan could not control his anger.
“Why does she continue to do this?” he raged, pounding the desk. “Is she trying to destroy the relationship?”
Significantly, Mary Lou was willing to convert to his religion for the sake of the relationship. And they were planning a wedding.
We were getting nowhere with our talking. Ventilating his anger, fears, and other feelings did not help because the reservoir of his emotions was much too full. He was willing to go along with a suggestion I made.
“Let’s try to go back to the real source, the root, of your relationship. Perhaps you had a girlfriend like Mary Lou. Perhaps there is something deeper. Let’s find out.”
Dan allowed himself to be hypnotized, and soon he was in a deep hypnotic trance. I told him to allow his mind to remember the roots of their relationship problem, to go back to the causes.
I never know what to expect when this nondirective approach is used. No matter how many patients I have regressed in this manner, I still get surprised and humbled by what comes out.
His body, which in the trance had become very relaxed and peaceful, again became tense. He seemed to be listening to something.
“I can hear my cousin,” this highly successful executive whispered. “I can see him! He’s dressed in a white robe and has a dark beard. My uncle is with him. They are talking to me.”
This man’s cousin and uncle had both died many years ago. “They’re telling me to let her go! They’re saying, ‘Let her go. She needs to develop, to overcome her attitudes and handicaps. But this is for her sake, for her development, not for yours or for your comfort. This is a test of love. Then she can come back to you, when she has overcome her negative traits.’”
There was more.
“We will now show you,” Dan’s relatives said.
Suddenly Dan watched with amazement and horror as a series of past lives with his lover flashed before his mind’s eye.
“I’m stabbing her with a long dagger!” Dan observed miserably. “She has been unfaithful to me, and I have killed her in anger.” This occurred around the seventh or eighth century and he was a warrior and an early follower of Mohammed.
Dan had also killed Mary Lou in two other ancient lifetimes. In a few others he had left her, usually in dire or dangerous situations. Thus, he had already killed her three times and had abandoned her several times, and yet Mary Lou kept springing back into a new life like a phoenix, ready to repeat the same script once again.
All in all, Dan found Mary Lou and this repetitive pattern in at least six lifetimes. These were only the lifetimes in which he, always the male, killed or rejected her, always the female. In subsequent past life regressions, we learned that the two had also been together in other family or friend or enemy relationships with the sexes and roles sometimes reversed.
Dan’s rage and anger vanished completely. In less than an hour he felt more love and tenderness toward Mary Lou than he had been able to feel and express since the very beginning of their relationship in this lifetime.
Dan later told Mary Lou about the regression session and tried to “let her go.” She would not go. She wanted to do the necessary work from within the relationship, without physically severing the bond. Dan realized that “letting go” did not necessarily mean “sending away.” There are many ways to let go.
Dan also realized, as these and other past life patterns were revealed, that his “warrior” needed more of the strength that comes from love, compassion, awareness, and understanding. He needed the strength derived from wisdom, hope, and faith, and less of the pseudo-strengths of anger and rage.
He also realized that his cousin and uncle were still alive, even though their bodies had died. He now knew, in his heart and his bones, that he, too, would never die.
Within a year Mary Lou and Dan married. That was two years ago from the time of this writing. Their problem pattern has never recurred. He has stopped behaving in an accusatory way toward her, and she has stopped provoking him. Their communication is far better than it was in the golden days when they met because they have both learned an important lesson about anger. They have seen how destructive negative patterns can be, and how long lasting. Now, as soon as either of them senses a problem, no matter how small, they discuss it and try to resolve it. As a couple, Dan and Mary Lou truly have an ability to communicate joyfully, deeply, and intimately.
Some of our more difficult and challenging life experiences occur in the context of relationship and families. And so do many of our most fulfilling and loving ones. We live in our bodies, and we express ourselves through our relationships. This is how we human beings communicate. It is our primary method of learning and evolving.
Through my experience I have learned that many of the severe and chronic conflicts therapists see in couples therapy, marital therapy, and family therapy actually have their root causes in prior lives. Therapy that explores other lifetimes in addition to the present one can resolve relationship conflicts that prove to be resistant to the usual therapeutic techniques, as Mary Lou’s and Dan’s were. When the search for the root of the problem or its treatment is expanded beyond the limited time span of the current relationship, much suffering can be minimized, or even avoided. Often, the anger, hatred, fear, and so many other negative emotions and behaviors manifesting in the current life relationship may actually have had their beginnings centuries ago.
Diana, a wealthy forty-year-old woman from Philadelphia, came to see me because of her chronic depression. As therapy progressed, I became convinced that a tumultuous and perpetually hostile relationship with her daughter was the root of this woman’s unhappiness.
My patient had experienced an instantaneous dislike of this daughter dating from the first moment she held the newborn baby in her arms. Diana had not experienced these upsetting emotions at the birth of any of her other three children. Far from it. Joy and elation had been the hallmark of their births. Diana was perplexed by the instant and lingering anger and revulsion she had felt toward Tamar, who was now eighteen. By the time Diana entered therapy, the two had been arch enemies for nearly two decades. Their relationship was punctuated by frequent, violent arguments that were usually set off by something trivial.
During regression therapy, Diana related that she had suddenly gone into hemorrhagic shock and nearly died just before Tamar’s birth. Diana remembered floating out of her body and watching her husband panic and run out to get the doctors. She had then experienced a classic near death episode.
After this session, I thought that the relationship might improve. Perhaps the patient had nurtured an unconscious or subconscious hatred of this child because the birth had nearly killed her. This regression memory alone might have provided the catharsis necessary to release those negative emotions.
At her next session, however, Diana reported that life with Tamar remained as stormy as ever. We tried regression therapy again. This time we were more successful. Diana’s memories revealed that this lifelong animosity, felt equally by mother and daughter, had its source not in the birth experience, but in a past life. In the lifetime in question, Diana and Tamar had not been related. They had been arch rivals for the same man’s affections. And the man in question was now Diana’s husband and Tamar’s father in this lifetime!
Clearly, the arch rivals were still battling it out in their current incarnations.
Diana and Tamar’s relationship improved somewhat after she had this memory of their past life competition. Diana did not tell Tamar about the episode since she simply didn’t feel comfortable about sharing this unusual experience. But when Tamar underwent a past life regression with a different therapist in another state, she regressed to the very same past life with the very same details. At this point, Diana was shocked enough to share her own experience with her daughter.
With this startling and illuminating new perception, their relationship finally transcended the fixed script of endless competition and hostility. Diana and Tamar are now good friends.
On a sunny, humid October morning, I drove to my office after helping to get my daughter, Amy, off to school. On the way out, I hugged Carole good-bye.
“Don’t forget to work on the relationship chapter,” Carole reminded me. We had been talking about intimate relationships and couples therapy on and off over the weekend, discussing the effects of past life connections on current life relationships. Carole knew I had left some time at the end of the day to begin writing down our thoughts and conclusions.
At eleven, my only “new” patient of the day came in. She had somehow convinced my secretary to bump her to the top of my waiting list, and the day of her appointment had finally arrived. After she left, I reminded myself that there are no coincidences.
Martine, a thirty-year-old mother of two, stated that her only problem was a “terrible” seven-year marriage. Her childhood had been happy, and her relationship with her parents was still wonderful. Her children, a four-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, were joys to her. Martine liked her house and had many good friends. She enjoyed her job in a dentist’s office.
However, Martine’s husband, Hal, was constantly critical, demanding, and negative. Hal found fault with everything Martine did, and he never lost an opportunity to criticize or demean her. He was like a lead weight to her, an anchor around her neck, yet she persisted in trying to make the marriage work. They had already separated several times, twice during her second pregnancy. Martine had not wanted to become pregnant that time, but Hal had “pushed and pushed” for it. And then he had left her. Eventually he returned, guilt-ridden, but soon left her again. Martine seemed to passively accept the situation, Hal’s behavior, and his ultimata. Individual and couples psychotherapy had not improved the marital discord at all.
Several weeks prior to our session in the office, Martine had attended a workshop I presented in Miami. During the workshop I taught a group of about two hundred people how to visualize and how to experience regressions while in a hypnotized state. Twice I had taken the entire group on a past life journey. Their eyes were closed and their bodies were entirely relaxed as my voice guided them to remember details from childhood and then even further back to memories from a previous lifetime.
Martine had reached a state of deep relaxation during these exercises. She felt serene and peaceful. She remembered herself as a child in this lifetime, but she went no further. She had no past life memories at all. She saw nothing.
Martine had bought an audiotape to use at home. The tape is of my voice conducting relaxation and regression exercises. (A modified written version of this tape is found in Appendix A of this book.) When Martine listened to the tape at home, she was able to relax deeply, and sometimes even fell asleep. But she still had no success recalling past life scenes.
In my office I took Martine’s medical and psychological histories and then hypnotized her to a deep level. Unlike her experience during the workshop or while listening to the tape, she could now answer my questions, and I could guide her more carefully and specifically. When I asked Martine to find a pleasant childhood memory, she moved easily back to her fifth birthday.
“I see my parents and my grandparents. There are lots of presents around.” Martine was smiling as she recalled this memory. Clearly, it was a very happy one. “My grandmother made the chocolate cake she always makes. I can see it.”
“Open some presents and see what gifts you got,” I suggested. She was delighted as she opened some of the brightly wrapped gifts and found clothes, a new doll, and much more. The joy of the five-year-old girl was evident in her beaming face. I decided to move on.
“Now it’s time to go further back, back to a time when you and your husband or anyone else in your family might have lived together before. Go back to the time from which your current marital problems arise.”
Martine immediately began to frown. Then she began to cry with little whimpering sobs.
“I’m so afraid. It’s black, pitch black. I can’t see anything. I’m just afraid. Something terrible is happening.” Her voice was still childlike. I thought Martine was in some void, somewhere between lifetimes. But why was she afraid? I was confused.
“I’m going to tap you on the forehead and count backwards from three to one. When I say one, you’ll see where you are.”
It worked.
“I’m a young girl, sitting at a large wooden table in a big room. There isn’t much furniture in the room, just the table really. I’m eating food from a bowl. It’s like oatmeal. I have a big spoon.”
“What’s your name?”
“Rebecca,” she answered. She did not know what year it was. But when Martine later died in this remembered lifetime, she stated that the year was 1859.
“Are you alone? Where are your parents?”
“I can’t . . . I don’t . . . ” She began to cry again. “My father is there, but my mother is not. She’s dead. I killed her!” Rebecca’s mother, Martine went on to explain, had died during Rebecca’s birth. Rebecca’s father blamed his daughter for the death of his wife.
“He’s awful to me. He beats me and locks me up all alone in the closet. I’m so scared!” she cried.
Now I understood why Martine had been so frightened to be in the dark void she had encountered earlier. It had not been a void after all. She had been a terrified little girl locked in a pitch-black closet. For how many hours had she been forced to suffer in darkness?
Rebecca’s father, a woodcutter who worked with an axe, treated her like a slave. He gave her long lists of chores, constantly criticizing her, finding fault, beating her, and locking her in the dreaded closet. Martine tearfully recognized the man as Hal, her husband in her current life.
Rebecca never left her father. Despite his constant cruel and unloving behavior, she stayed with him until the end of his life.
I took her forward in time, to the day of his death. She was around thirty. After Rebecca’s father died, I asked her what she felt.
“Relief . . . just immense relief. I’m so glad he’s gone.”
After her father’s death, Rebecca married Tom, a man who treated her wonderfully. She recognized Tom as her current life son. Although Tom had wanted children, Rebecca did not, fearing that she would die in childbirth as her mother had. Nevertheless, they were very happy. Tom died first, then Rebecca. I progressed her in time to the last day of her life.
“I’m in bed. I’m an old lady with gray hair. I’m not frightened. I’m going to be with Tom.” She died and floated over her body.
“What did you learn in that life?” I inquired.
“That I have to be assertive,” she quickly responded. “I have to do what is right for me . . . when I am right . . . and not continue to suffer needlessly. I have to be assertive.”
Emerging from the hypnotic state and remembering everything, Martine felt ecstatic. She felt stronger, relieved, and lighter, as if a heavy anchor around her neck had finally been removed.
“I’ve been repeating the same pattern,” she observed, beaming brightly. “I don’t have to do this any more!”
I noticed that Martine was actually shivering with the excitement of this discovery.
When she left the office, I did not know what would happen to Martine’s marriage. But I knew that whatever happened, she would be dictating many more of the terms and conditions of their relationship. She would behave much more assertively and be much more in control.
Two months later, Martine called me. She felt great, and her marriage had improved significantly since our regression session. She was “so much stronger.” Perhaps in response to her new strength, Hal was being more considerate to her. Or perhaps some distant memory had reverberated inside him when she told him the details of her regression and his role in the recurrent pattern.
It is through relationships that we learn to express and receive love, to forgive, to help, and to serve.
From the experiences that some of my patients have in the “between life” state, I have come to believe that we actually pick our families for each lifetime before birth. We choose to live out the patterns that will afford us the most growth with the souls that will most effectively manifest these situations in our lives. Very often, these are souls we have met and interacted with in many ways in other lifetimes.
People always ask me whether they will be reunited with their loved ones in another life. I keep finding, and many other researchers concur, that we come around in groups, over and over again. We reincarnate with the same people. The group can become quite large, as the number of lifetimes increases, but the core group remains small and fairly constant. Relationships within the core group may change. For example, a mother-son relationship in one lifetime might recur as a sibling relationship in another, but the spirits or souls are the same. With regression experiences, recognition of the previous relationships can be brought to awareness.
The subconscious recognition of a person with whom we have had a past life connection is sometimes manifested by an immediate attraction or repulsion and by the repetition of the old behavior programming from the past life. The behavior may seem out of context or out of balance in the circumstances of the present life. This occurs most frequently in families or in couples where the relationships are closer and the bonds are more powerful. But past life recognition and acting out of ancient behavior patterns can also occur in many other relationships, such as boss-employee, neighbors, teacher and student, and even at the level of world leaders lunging at each other’s throats.
Hope is a forty-five-year-old woman who discovered that she had once known a close family member in a completely different, nonfamilial context. Hope came to therapy complaining of a depression that seemed to be stimulated by the problems with her teenage son, Steve.
Steve was a poor student at a prestigious private school. He was also occasionally truant. Some of his problems stemmed from a learning disability. He also had a habit of speaking angrily to Hope, not listening to her, and testing her limits, which bothered his mother a great deal. Steve’s problems did not seem inordinately severe to me. Hope appeared to be overreacting.
But Hope felt she had to protect herself from Steve. She felt he was depleting all of her energy, and that both her depression and Steve’s problems were quickly becoming more acute. Hope had become convinced that life was nothing but one long struggle that would always leave her anxious and sad. She was also becoming convinced that she had to leave her son to protect herself, that he was cheating her out of her own life. The relationship was permeating every aspect of her day. As a result, Hope felt exhausted, almost as though she were seeping away. She was truly at the end of her rope.
However, as I interviewed Hope, it became clear to me that her feelings of struggle and hopelessness had not originated with her son. Her father had left the family when Hope was five. Hope’s mother had died when the little girl was seven, orphaning both Hope and her younger brother. For two years Hope and her brother had been homeless. They cleaned and did chores for strangers in exchange for food and clothing, supplementing these meager earnings with what they found scavenging on the street.
When Hope was nine, her godmother finally found and rescued the children. But when Hope was thirteen, her godmother’s family fell on financially difficult times, and they put Hope and her brother in state foster homes, where they lived for eighteen months. Eventually, Hope and her brother were able to return to the godmother’s house where Hope stayed until she married at the age of twenty.
In the intervening years, Hope’s marriage had endured four separations, but the family was still together. Things were looking up in many respects. At this point in life, Hope’s family was doing much better financially.
When we tried to regress her to childhood, Hope had a great deal of trouble visualizing and letting go. She became so anxious about the possibility of reexperiencing childhood hurt that I decided it would be more constructive to bypass her childhood altogether.
At this suggestion, Hope was able to approach the regression process much more calmly. Soon she reported that she was a young man walking down a city street at the turn of the century. Hope entered a small apartment building where she found her employer in that lifetime. There she angrily and suddenly confronted the man, telling him she had realized that he had been taking advantage of the young man that she was, paying her almost nothing and advancing other employees at her expense.
Infuriated, Hope turned on her heel, walked out, and never came back again. This lifetime continued, but she never really found happiness because she carried this anger, this sense of being exploited by her employer, throughout the entire lifetime. Her perception and emotional reaction was that this had been a very intense and taboo betrayal, almost as though her employer had actually been her father.
But he was not her father. In fact, it was then that Hope realized that the man who had taken advantage of her so completely in that lifetime had reincarnated as her son, Steve.
After the regression, Hope seemed to see Steve more clearly. She realized that her relationship with him in this current lifetime is distinct from the one she had in the past lifetime. She recognized that she had been overreacting to his perceived transgressions. Steve was not a man intentionally trying to cheat her in business but a young person going through a perfectly natural, if trying, adolescent stage. If he had committed any transgressions against her at all in this lifetime, they were certainly petty.
Hope also realized that the themes of betrayal and being cheated are her issues, not Steve’s. She understood that, in fact, they had cropped up very strongly in her childhood, many years before Steve was born. She recognized that not letting go of the anger she felt toward her employer in her past life hurt no one but herself, and that it was jeopardizing the joy she could feel from her relationship with Steve in this lifetime. We discussed the probability that her son’s anger and acting out in this lifetime are related to her own behavior in the past life, when she turned on her heel and walked out on him.
Hope’s therapy continues, and as it does she continues to gain more insight into which issues are hers to resolve, and becomes more aware that her anxiety and depression do not depend on her son. She has gotten more realistic and is gaining more perspective. I would not be surprised to find out that she and Steve have shared many other lifetimes together.
The parent-child relationship may be a very dramatic one, but its intensity and potential for growth do not, by any means, rule out the potential for humor, another great growth stimulator. I fondly remember the day when I was explaining to a workshop how we pick our family situations before birth in order to provide us with the greatest amount of growth possible. At this point, a mother in the group turned to her daughter, with whom she was clearly having a minor disagreement.
“See? You’re the one who picked me,” the woman told her teenager.
“Well, if I did, I must have been in a hurry!” the girl retorted without batting an eye.
This exchange, needless to say, was humorous, and the fact that this mother and daughter had chosen to attend the workshop together suggested that they actually had a very good relationship. Family members as well as couples can be regressed individually, as in any other past life exploration, or also simultaneously to resolve problems they share or to make a good relationship even more meaningful and insightful. Sometimes couples or members of the same family attend my workshops together. When they compare their regression experiences, they sometimes find that they have unknowingly regressed to the same lifetime and have found the others there. The improvement in relationships after such group regressions is often quite rapid and dramatic, similar to the improvement seen with individuals who get rid of chronic emotional or physical symptoms by regressing to the true precipitating causes of the problems, whether in this lifetime or another. In fact, some therapists who work with couples and families are already using regression therapy quite successfully in their practices. Adopted families are no different from biological children in this regard. I have regressed more than one adopted child who has discovered that he or she has shared previous lifetimes with his or her adoptive parents.
Patients do not always have to return to past lives to improve family relationships through hypnosis. Betsy was a patient who was having problems resolving her relationship with her authoritarian, strict, and distant father who was now deceased. The man had made her feel unloved. He had abused her emotionally by insulting her. He was so remote to Betsy that she had trouble dealing with him in therapy. Despite all of this, she still loved her father, but she couldn’t take him off the pedestal long enough to see him accurately in order to deal with their relationship in an effective way.
In hypnosis I asked Betsy to visualize a very spiritual place in the form of a garden. In this garden her father came to her. He had just one message to her: “Think of me as your brother.”
And that did the trick. Once Betsy was able to think of her father as a brother, an equal, she was able to see both his virtues and his flaws much more clearly and comfortably. Then she was finally able to understand him, forgive him, and let him go.
The suggestion was so powerful that I have started to use it in therapy with other patients who have problems with one or both of their parents. In Freudian terms, it greatly eliminates the distortion caused by projection.
To share many lifetimes, joy and sorrow, achievement and despair, love and forgiveness, anger and grace, and, above all, endless growth with another soul is what it truly means to have a soulmate. A soulmate is often someone with whom we meet and feel an instant connection, as though we have known that person for a long time. In fact, we probably have. We do not have to be romantically involved with a person to experience the satisfaction and fulfillment of the soulmate connection.
Nor do we each have only one soulmate. The popular Western idea propagated by the philosopher Plato, that each of us has only one perfect other half who can “complete” our own incomplete soul, is only partially true. While others can seem to complete our experience—sharing and expanding our growth, intimacy, and joy—it is more likely that we have a soul group that consists of many soulmates. This may be a small group of souls that gets larger as we collect deep experiences with more and more souls over many lifetimes, but the feeling of having known a person before or sharing intense feelings and insights is certainly not limited to one person. We can even have more than one soulmate relationship at a time. Our romantic partner may complete our soul in one way, and so may, in other ways, a best friend, a parent, or a child.
As we grow by interacting with our soulmates, we ascend the ladder of lifetimes. We transcend old patterns, come to fully experience love and joy, and lose every last vestige of anger and fear. Eventually, we come to the point where we can voluntarily choose to be reborn to help others directly or even choose to stay in spirit form and help others from another level. Reincarnation for emotional growth is then no longer necessary. We can move from this path of growth to the path of growth through service.
To lose a soulmate to death or separation is by no means a loss of the opportunity to grow. A patient of mine recently lost her husband in an accident. She was absolutely devastated, certain that she had lost her soulmate and that nothing in life would ever have the same meaning or be worth anticipating. While her grief is very deep, real, and justified, we are working on the idea that she can look forward to future relationships that may be just as full of love, passion, intimacy, and growth.
A reunion with a soulmate after a long and involuntary separation can be an experience worth waiting for—even if the wait is one of centuries.
On a vacation in the Southwest, my former patient, Ariel, a biologist, met an Australian named Anthony. Both were emotionally mature individuals who had been married before, and they quickly fell in love and became engaged. Back in Miami, Ariel suggested that Anthony have a regression session with me just to see if he could have the experience and to “see what came up.” They were both curious to find out whether Ariel would appear in any way in Anthony’s regression.
Anthony turned out to be a superb regression subject. Almost instantly, he returned to a very vivid North African lifetime around the time of Hannibal, more than two thousand years ago. In that lifetime, Anthony had been a member of a very advanced civilization. His particular tribe was fair skinned, and they were gold smelters who had the ability to use liquid fire as a weapon by spreading it on the surface of rivers. Anthony was a young man in his mid-twenties in the midst of fighting a forty-day war with a neighboring, darker-skinned tribe that vastly outnumbered the defenders.
Anthony’s tribe had actually trained some of the members of the enemy tribe in the art of warfare, and one of the former trainees was leading the assault. One hundred thousand of the enemy tribe carrying swords and hatchets were crossing a large river on ropes as Anthony and his people spread liquid fire on their own river, hoping it would reach the attackers before the attackers reached the shore.
To protect their women and children, the defending tribe put most of them on large boats with violet sails in the middle of a huge lake. Among this group was Anthony’s young and beloved fiancée, who was perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old. However, the liquid fire suddenly burned out of control, and the boats caught fire. Most of the tribe’s women and children perished in this tragic accident, including Anthony’s fiancée, who was his great passion.
This tragedy broke the morale of the warriors, and they were soon defeated. Anthony was one of the few who escaped the slaughter through brutal hand-to-hand fighting. Eventually, he escaped to a secret passageway that led to a warren of rooms underneath the large temple where the tribe’s treasures were stored.
There Anthony had found one other living person, his king. The king commanded Anthony to kill him, and Anthony, a loyal soldier, complied against his will. After the king’s death, Anthony was all alone in the dark temple, where he used his time to write the history of his people on gold leaf and to seal the writings in large urns or jars. It was here that he eventually died of starvation and grief over the loss of his fiancée and his people.
There was one more detail. His fiancée in that lifetime reincarnated as Ariel in this lifetime. The two of them reunited as lovers after two thousand years. Finally, the long-postponed wedding would take place.
Anthony and Ariel had only been separated for one hour when he stepped out of my office. But the power of their reunion was such that it was as though they had not seen each other for two thousand years.
Recently Ariel and Anthony were married. Their sudden and intense and seemingly coincidental meeting now has a new layer of meaning to them, and their already passionate relationship is now infused with a sense of continuous adventure.
Anthony and Ariel plan to take a trip to North Africa to try and find the location of their past life together and to see what other details they can uncover. They know that whatever they find can only increase the adventure they find in each other.