As I mentioned in my last post, I spent the last few days staying in Paris. The experience felt, for lack of a better word, karmic. What do I mean exactly? It felt like my intuition was underlining random moments - nothing earth-shattering but just small things that felt healing for reasons I didn’t totally understand. The one that stood out was sitting down between two groups of French women at a bakery and having them make a seat for me in between their bags. For some reason, I kept having the thought that in a past life, these women would not have let me sit next to them- or that perhaps they had been rude to me. I have zero reason to believe that now. They were nothing but kind and welcoming, which is unusual for Parisian women. No shade, but it’s not really the culture for the French to be immediately warm to strangers. We chatted for a bit in French and one of them told me they had a nephew in Los Angeles where I am living, and did I know him.
The past life in question I learned about through a session with a medium, as well as my own past life flashbacks from meditations and EFT tapping. I was a can-can dancer in the early 1800s or early 1900s. And like many women in that profession things did not go that well. Much like being a stripper now, it started as an edgy art form and ended in sex work and violence.
I talk briefly about past lives with the musician Inara George in an episode of The Side Woo. I discovered that she too lived in Paris. She was at the Moulin Rouge and I hadn’t yet figured out where I had been. The medium told me it was north of Paris, but after I researched it, can-can dancing didn’t really take place outside of Paris. It’s most likely that I was in the north of Paris, in the Montmartre district, where most of the cabarets took place, including the famous Moulin Rouge. Maybe we knew each other?
Much like my curiosity about why astrology works and whether it predicts or describes our lives, I can sometimes obsessively wonder how many people in this lifetime I knew before now. I’m not sure what difference it makes except that in my experience, knowing certain information can help explain dynamics that maybe don’t make sense in this lifetime. For example why you feel a certain way about someone you just met, or why a relationship with a parent has the tension it does.
I have been thinking about this type of thing for a while as something to write about, but wasn’t sure how it might be received. Not everyone believes in reincarnation with all its sticky metaphysical and scientific questions and theories.
For a long time, I didn't believe in reincarnation either, especially the kind that had us coming back over and over again to the same planet, sometimes even in the same family. It felt like this idea lacked imagination. If the universe is so big, why would we come back here all the time? And know the same family? It’s kind of like thinking that all aliens we encounter will stand on two legs and breathe oxygen out of their nose holes. Possible, but not really that exciting or likely.
But then I heard this idea described by Ainslie McLeod, a past life practitioner that did an interview with Oprah, who said essentially if you go to school to learn something, you don’t want to constantly change the rules on yourself by playing different games. You want to play the same game over and over until you master it. Or as they say in the iconic song by the Indigo Girls, until your soul gets it right.
But that begs the question: How long will that be? And who decides?
To start with, the phrase past lives is an expression and not an accurate description of what most practitioners believe about lives happening outside of the one we are inhabiting. In the metaphysical world, time doesn’t exist in the way that we know it. (And according to A Course in Miracles it’s something that will cease to exist when it is no longer useful.)
The theory goes that linear time is a construct that exists in our physical dimension for the purpose of learning certain lessons that have something to do with cause and effect. If everything happens all at once, you don’t experience the outcome of your choices in the same way. As soon as you think something, it would be real. But in this dimension, we are given free will which means that there is space and time between thinking of something, and it happening - aka manifestation.
Most past life practitioners also believe all our lives are happening at the same time, but we say past lives because it helps our brains make sense of the lessons we learn, one after another here at the Earth School.
I liked what Inara said about her belief in past lives:
“I don't know if I necessarily believe in direct past lives, I believe that you might pull things from -- I believe in the energy, right? And that you kind of plop in. But I don't know if like a similar spirit came into my body... It feels like, Whatever is happening in different dimensions is sort of imitating something that happens here. And if you think about it, like when something dies and how it gets absorbed. It feels like the way that cells behave or, I don't know. It seems like it's more of a collective thing.”
I like this image of an amorphous blob of energy in which everything is happening and existing all at once and you can move in and out depending on frequencies and intentions.
In mediumship classes, I learned that we all carry around a lot of information from past lives in our auras which can have impacts on our physical bodies. For example when doing an energy scan on someone I saw that they had a past life wound in their stomach and when I mentioned it, it turned out that they had a history of stomach issues. I don’t really get how that works other than it’s like a memory our soul carries with us that can play out in a psychosomatic way in our body, similar to the way our physical world wounds or traumas might.
From this practice you can learn to heal these wounds through treatments like reiki and also corrective experiences like my interaction at the bakery. I like to believe that the universe gives everyone second, third, and fourth chances to get it right. To be nice to the person you were mean to. To do the right thing. To make up for lost time.
I think if we knew that for sure either there would be a lack of urgency and everyone would get completely complacent or, we would all feel way less shame and guilt at having missed our one chance to do the thing that we would do it a lot sooner.
I am also aware that focusing too much on the metaphysical and spiritual questions in life, like reading tarot too often, does tend to take me out of the present moment. What does it matter how a past life ended, or what the card of the day is, when I am trying to be in the now?
Upcoming:
Vantage opens at Good Mother Gallery on Sept 2 in Los Angeles
The Side Woo x ICA SF - Save the date for a live event on November 3 in San Francisco