Exploring Your Past Lives
Unraveling and understanding your past life memories is like reading a
wonderful mystery novel. Your past lives are filled with interesting and
informative characters who share secrets and clues with you. You'll find
fascinating facts and hidden truths. You're the detective and it’s up to
you to unearth the clues that will lead you to discovering your past lives.
If you’re ready to explore who you were before and how the events and emotions in your past lives affect and influence who you are now, this write-in workbook and experiential guide is for yo.
Based on the author’s reincarnation workshops, and her past life regressions with hypnosis clients for the past 37 years, this book offers numerous mind-opening meditations, experiential exercises, anecdotes, and examples as it takes you on a journey into and through your memories that show you the pictures of your past lives.
You’re guided through understanding, balancing, and healing your karma in a clear, loving way. You’ll see how to recognize soul mates and special people you’ve been with before, and to understand their connections to you now.
This book offers you many areas and avenues to pursue in helping you open up your memories, such as dreams and déjà vu, current clues, past patterns, pre-birth promises, carry-overs, continuations, and much, much more. It shows you how to put together the puzzle pieces of your past lives as it empowers you to be the director of your destiny.
Contents ~ Exploring Your Past Lives
Introduction
Part I ― Beginnings
One. Reincarnation and its Relationship to You
Two. The Process of Remembering Your Past Lives
How Your Subconscious Mind Works ~ The Way Your Past Life Memories Surface
How to Recognize Your Past Life Memories
Three. How to Find Your Past Life Memories
Meeting Your Subconscious Mind ~ How to Encourage Your Memories to Surface
What to Look For When Your Memories Surface
Four. What to Do With Your Memories When You Find Them
Trusting Your Feelings ~ Validating and Verifying Your Past Life Memories
Five. The Journey Begins
Part II ― Explorations and Experiences
Six. Déjà vu … You’ve Been Here Before
Recognizing Reflections of Past Lives ~ Tracing Déjà vu Feelings
Seven. Imagery … The Language of Your Mind
Seeing and Sensing Past Life Images
Eight. Imagination … The World of Your Inner Images
Interpretations of Imagination ~ Reveries That Recall Past Lives ~ Inspiration
and Intuition ~ Playing With Your Past Lives ~ The Serious Stuff
Nine. Looking in the Present to Find the Past
Current Clues Questionnaire
Ten. Dreams … The Pictures of Your Past Lives
Discovering Your Past Lives Through Your Dreams ~ Deciphering Your Dreams
Planning Past Life Dreams
Eleven. Separate Selves and Spirituality
Your Inner Self ~ Your Higher Self ~ The Essence of Your Soul
Twelve. Visiting the Visions of Your Past Lives
Preparing for Your Trips Into the Past ~ White Light Protection ~ Grounding and
Centering ~ Projecting Yourself Into Your Past Lives ~ Mind-Tripping Into Your
Memories
Part III ― Karma
Thirteen. Before Birth
Entering the Earth Experience
Fourteen. The Law of Karma
Creating Your Own Reality
Fifteen. You and the People in Your Life
Soulmates: The Special People ~ Past Life Connections: The Karmic Tie That Binds
Sixteen. Paying the IOU’s From the Past
Understanding Your Karma ~ Identifying Key Issues and Past Life Influences ~ The
Benefits of Balancing
Seventeen. Balancing Your Karma
Principle of Forgiveness ~ Principle of Grace ~ Shared and Separate Karma ~ The
Test of Balancing ~ A Few Helpful Hints ~ Healing Your Karma and Making it All Better
Part IV ― Enlightenment
Eighteen. Discovering Your Destiny
You Are the Master of Your Fate
Nineteen. The True Nature of Your Spirituality
Setting Your Spirit Free
Twenty. The Puzzle Pieces of Your Past Lives
Twenty-One. The Quest for Knowledge
Your Past Life Journal
Chapter Two. The Process of Remembering Your Past Lives
A philosopher once said, “Learning consists of remembering previously acquired knowledge.” Your subconscious mind has a perfect memory and is the storehouse of all
your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and accumulated knowledge. Everything you’ve experienced and become aware of, in every lifetime, is recorded in your subconscious mind. Remembering your past lives is a process that involves three qualities: Your desire to know, your expectation that you’re able to know, and your belief that you are going to know, will open up your memories and allow you to remember your past lives.
All the memories you recall open up for important and various reasons that will help you in your present life. They surface to offer you insights and answers necessary for understanding your feelings about relationships you’re involved in, and they explain your responses to situations and events that occur in your present life. They help to make you aware of how your present actions and experiences are connected to and caused by past life events, and they bring you a clear understanding of their influence on your present life. They surface to help you learn life lessons, balance karma, and to educate you in spiritual awareness.
How Your Subconscious Mind Works
Your conscious mind serves the purpose of operating your physical body and experiencing your present incarnation within the framework of the physical dimension. Your subconscious mind contains your soul knowledge, with all of your accompanying past life memories. Your conscious mind focuses on concrete ideas and thoughts, governed by the characteristics of logic and reasoning. Your conscious mind is limited by the amount of information it can receive and process at any one time, and is restricted by the physical perspective of information that relates to organizing and analyzing your feelings and experiences.
Your subconscious mind focuses on inner truth and knowledge, receiving and processing both physical and spiritual information. Your subconscious contains the secrets of imagery and imagination, intuition and awareness, emotions, dreams, and your past life memories. It operates in a highly sophisticated framework of awareness with an unlimited amount of information, and serves the purposes of acquiring knowledge and helping you understand all your experiences in a spiritual framework during your physical incarnation.
Remembering the events and emotions in your past lives involves opening up and searching your subconscious mind. The information is there, but retrieving it requires the appropriate triggering mechanism. Your mind has a unique filtering mechanism that allows you to remember only what is relevant or important in any lifetime based on present circumstances. This is because of the vast amount of information acquired in every lifetime.
Your subconscious filter is an intricate filing and retrieval system. You receive so much information on a daily basis that your conscious mind can’t absorb it all and keep it on a conscious level. It’s relegated to the realm of your subconscious, where it’s filed in sequence by your feelings. You only need the proper triggering mechanism to find the appropriate memory that will bring the information to the surface and show you the pictures of the event in your mind. Most of the time, this trigger consists of association of similar feelings and events.
Similar emotions or experiences in your present life will bring forth related past life memories in which those same emotions or events were experienced. Spontaneous recall
of a memory occurs when a present situation or feeling connects with a similar past life experience.
People in your life that you’ve shared a past life with can also trigger the memory when the feelings you have now are directly affected by past life emotions. Your responses to the relationship may inspire images of events that occurred before with this person. The significance of the memory in relation to what you’re experiencing now is the activating agent.
Important events are remembered more easily and in greater detail. The more emotionally involved you are with the memory also makes it easier to recall, even if the event occurred three hundred years ago rather than three days ago. Your subconscious mind isn’t concerned with time. That’s part of your conscious mind’s job.
If your past life memories directly affect an emotional aspect of your life that you’re currently involved with, or if they deal with karma you’re in the process of balancing, your memories may flood up to the surface and be very dramatic. Your memories will show you scenes of past life events, and you may feel the emotions associated with those events. Your memories will explain how the events and emotions you’re experiencing in your present life have their origins in previous lives.
When you begin to remember parts of your past lives, your subconscious mind will initiate a search to reconstruct the events and emotions surrounding the memory in order to bring it to the surface. The emotional aspects will come up first, then the events directly connected to the memory will surface.
The Way Your Past Life Memories Surface
When you begin to open up the memories of your past lives, you most often remember the emotions first that are contained within the memory, rather than the event that originated the emotions. This is because your memories are filed by your feelings. You may see or feel a brief image or fragment of a past life memory that will cause the associated emotions to surface.
A past life memory may be triggered by a present situation that is similar to a past experience, and you may find yourself responding to the emotions from your past life memory without recalling the details of the corresponding memory. This can help you understand situations in your life where your feelings are out of context with the present situation.
As you begin to remember the events and emotions in your past lives, you may have a sense or a feeling about the memories without seeing them clearly in your mind’s eye. You may become aware of a past life connection without knowing exactly what the connection
is. You may become aware of a symbol that represents something you need to understand before the memory surfaces. At first, your past lives may seem like a puzzle with pieces that don’t fit together.
You may remember fragments of a memory or see fleeting images of what looks like a past life. Little lights of awareness may appear in your mind and tease you with the tip of
a memory that disappears the minute you see it clearly as it eludes your recognition and understanding. When you begin to see your past life images, they may zip in and out of your mind with lightning speed. When your past life memories are teetering on the brink between surfacing and being swallowed into oblivion forever, just relax and let them flow up to the surface.
How to Recognize Your Past Life Memories
Until you become familiar with how your subconscious mind offers your memories to you, and you recognize what a past life memory feels like and looks like, your past life memories might seem like they’re not really past life memories. You may tend to think that your mind is playing games with you or that your imagination is working overtime. When your past life memories are starting to surface, you may be aware of feelings and fragments about the memory that aren’t clearly associated with anything in your present life. If your memory has been triggered by a present situation, you may feel emotions that are unrelated to the present situation, and you may become aware of images of past life pictures.
At first, your past life images and feelings may be a little difficult to connect with an experience in your present life. Instead of finding a clear and well-behaved past life memory that fits neatly into your understanding and falls perfectly into place in your present life, you may find that your subconscious seems to be trying to hide the real memories. You might even secretly think that your subconscious is sabotaging your efforts to remember your past lives. This isn’t true; it only appears to be this way when your memories are slow to surface and show you incomplete pictures. Your subconscious really wants to help you, and will, if you allow it to. Most past life memories surface in a quiet, unobtrusive way, but a few are very intense and surface with an emotional impact that bursts into your awareness.
When you remember past life experiences, and you see and feel the images and emotions of the memory, you won’t find a special signal that goes off in your mind that tells you the memory is a past life memory. Your past life memories are distinguished by how you respond to them. A past life memory feels different from a present life memory. Somewhere inside you, you recognize a past life memory and validate it through your feelings about it. When you experience a past life memory, you know it and feel it on a deep, inner, intuitive level within yourself. This is where trusting your feelings and believing your inner knowledge comes in. Your feelings are the telltale signs of a true past life memory and pave the way to understanding and insight. Present life memories usually feel more familiar at first, and are ones you can place more exactly with the corresponding feelings after a bit of thought on the matter.
As your memories come up to the surface, you may either remember and/or re-experience past life events and emotions. The depth of your involvement, and how vividly you see and feel the images and emotions of your memories, will determine whether your past lives are remembered or re-experienced. When you’re remembering a past life event, you’re viewing the images in your mind and they have a dream-like quality. You may feel the emotions, but you don’t feel the scene. When you’re re-experiencing a past life event, your awareness is completely absorbed and immersed in the scene. You’re feeling the emotions and you’re intensely involved in the events that are occurring. You’re hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling the sights, sounds, and events around you. It feels as if it’s happening in the present rather than in the past.
As your past life memories begin to show themselves, allow them to surface in their own way. Don’t rush them, or force them, or try too hard. This will push them further away from you. Beware of self-imposed limits and restrictions that you place on your memories. Don’t become discouraged by expecting earth-shattering revelations and finding small recognitions and little clues to begin with.
Your past life memories will open up naturally, in the way that is most appropriate for you. By going within yourself and looking into your subconscious mind, you’ll discover the doorway into your past lives. The very nature of your subconscious mind is gentle and quiet. Most past life memories open up in a quiet way, by showing you things you may already be aware of but haven’t yet connected to your past lives.
Mystical Mindscapes, 330 pages, $17.95. 978-1-883717-64-3
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Read What Other People Are Saying About the Book
This book is a how-to manual designed for those interested in finding out more about themselves. Rather than stressing only case studies or theories, this book shows the reader how to find out about his or her own past lives. Within its pages, Chadwick discusses situations such as a familiarity with someone you’ve just met, the meaning of birthmarks, inexplicable fears, familiar scenes, and other phenomena that seem to be indicative of past life experiences. It avoids occult phraseology and it gives a workable theory for understanding the nature of the unconscious mind.
— Fate Magazine, June, 1989
Starting with the assumption that reincarnation is an established fact, the author concentrates on the ways in which past lives may affect the events and details of a person's present existence. Ms. Chadwick describes how to recognize past-life memories as they arise from the subconscious mind in relaxed states and in dreams. Included is the technique of following up those "this has happened before" feelings of déjà vu. Furthermore, there are sections on validating past-life experiences through investigation and research.
Also presented is the traditional and proven technique of getting ideas about what must have happened in a past life that would bring about conditions that exist in the present. For example, intense and long-lived interests that you pursue in your spare time may point to a career in a previous incarnation. So may talents that surface unexpectedly from time to time. Apparently irrational fears may be based on real occurrences in a previous life.
The author concludes with a lengthy discussion of karma, the universal law of cause and effect whereby the effects of our activities in one life may not be felt until a future life. People from past existences may show up in your life and "give you the opportunity" to get the relationship right this time around. The book tries to show you how every deed has its inescapable consequences—a concept that tends to foster a sense of responsibility. Ms. Chadwick explains everything simply, and without jargon—except for a few buzzwords such as "Alpha" and "karma," which she explains carefully. There is much valuable information here to look at.
— David Godwin, Fate Magazine, January, 1991
Ms. Chadwick teaches classes on reincarnation and has conducted thousands of past life regressions. In the book, she goes into detail on how current fears, likes, and attitudes may be the result of experiences from the past intruding on the present. There are four basic sections (Beginnings, Explorations & Experiences, Karma, and Enlightenment), each of which is further subdivided into chapters. There is a strong emphasis on self-development which is all to the good. The suggestions on how to enter a receptive state are powerful and will help you to understand your motivations. It is best to keep a journal on everything that comes through as even the smallest detail may turn out to have significance later on. Each chapter of the book contains a number of useful exercises. Dreams are a direct pathway to the subconscious and a tool for exploring past lives. Karma is simply letting the past go and creating a much more fruitful present. The nature of this book is to help you create a positive experience. Worth reading and very well done.
— W. Ritchie Benedict, The Emerald Path, May-June, 1991
Absolutely loved it! I couldn't put it down and finished it in less than two days. I continue to read it and try her exercises. Since purchasing it, I have learned that it is recommended by several New Age believers. Though I haven't gotten far in my discoveries, I take her advice and remain patient. Day by day, I understand more and more, and come ever closer to further enlightenment.
— Amazon reader, September, 1999
Amazing ... She put meaning and reason behind all that I thought. She gave excellent exercises to do, and so much more. She answered questions in a down-to-earth manner and I really enjoyed the book.
— Amazon reader, July, 1999.
It made sense of my thoughts that weighed heavy on my heart! This book has been so powerful at making sense of what I was already thinking and feeling. I found the way she explained things, such as why we are here and to let life happen, has put my life in a perspective with such harmony and joy that now I enjoy my life as an adventure more than ever. It helps to have direct exercises to open our spirit to become more in tune with why we are learning the lessons that are in our life now. I have shared many of the views from this book with my friends and they are feeling the same release of pressure to just do what society says and instead to listen to our inner voice. We know so much more than we give ourselves credit for! My favorite part was about the three types of soul mates. I continue to ready this book daily. I recommend it to everyone that enjoys learning more about who they are in this lifetime.
— J. Nichols-Parrish, May, 1999
Finally ... The "why's" answered from fears to birthmarks. If you ever wonder why you fear things, don't like certain people, or where birthmarks come from, this book on reincarnation will answer these questions and spark your interest. Author Gloria Chadwick offers an in-depth look at past lives and ways to remember them. In order to keep the book interesting, Chadwick fills each chapter with real stories about people who have actually remembered their past lives, as well as explanations to questions that today's scientists have not answered. Though many people see a hypnotist to experience past life therapy, Chadwick teaches how one can achieve this on their own, in the comfort and privacy of their home. For believers or nonbelievers, this book will surely be an interesting read for both the information and the entertainment it offers.
— Amazon reader, June, 1999