A New Spirit Guide

A year ago I had no clue who my spirit guides were.  Spirit Guides are souls who assist us in our lives on Earth.  They can be a friend or a relative that you never knew.  Through meditation, readings from other talented intuitives and help from my intuitive friends, I know several of my guides today. Recently I met a new spirit guide, and I am sharing the story with you because it's a fascinating story of synchronicity.  In a previous post, I wrote about the clues that Spirit leaves you and how it's a puzzle that you must put together.  Learning about my new spirit guide came to me in just this way, pieces of a puzzle that I finally put together.

One evening. I was following a guided meditation and I was supposed to see a significant symbol for me.  I saw an ornate bow and arrow.  It looked like it was custom made and it was given to me (probably in a past life) as a gift from a king or queen.  I didn't know what it meant at the time but I filed away this information in my mind.

One morning last week, I left my toddler in the kitchen with her breakfast and went up stairs to change. She immediately followed me up the stairs and said she was scared.  I asked her of what.  She said, I am scared of the basement.  I asked, is there someone in the basement?  She said, yes.  A big boy  or little boy?  Big boy. she answered.  I thought uh oh, not another spirit!  But I didn't have time to deal with it at that moment so I said a quick prayer to Archangel Michael to remove any spirits that were not there for our highest good.

Later that I day I was doing Reiki on a friend.  I always connect to Spirit when I do Reiki and I was focusing on her when she says to me, "I have to tell you something.  Someone is here and he keeps saying, tell her I'm here.  Tell her I'm here."  My mind immediately went to the "big boy" in the basement.  She didn't have any other information so I tried to tune in to who this was.  It was a male, older maybe in his 50s and he was wearing a crown.  The name that I got was Richard.  I tried to communicate with him but the veil was thick so I asked Archangel Gabriel to help me figure out who he was.  Gabriel told me it was King Richard and he was here to give me a message.  The message was about the bow and arrow!

King Richard told me that I will be "hitting my target more and more and with better accuracy."  He didn't say with regard to what, but my intuition says this has to do with my psychic gifts.

A few days later I looked up King Richard on the web.  I knew there must be several in Britain.  I looked at pictures and saw one that resembled the spirit I saw.

Richard the Lion Heart

Then I read this, "killed by a crossbow."  Apparently a boy shot the King out of revenge for his parents' death. King Richard actually pardoned the boy and let him go and he died of gangrene as a result of the bow shot.

Oh. My. God.  I sat there and gasped.  Then I thought, I hope I wasn't that boy in a past life!

I still haven't figured out the details about the meaning of the bow and arrow but leave it to Spirit to come up with such an amazing synchronicity!

Understanding Past Lives

For the past year I have been trying different ways to learn about my past lives.  I have believed in reincarnation for a long time.  I could simply not believe in the alternative, which would be one life and that's it.  That didn't make sense to me at all.  We have one life?  Why?  Why not more?  What would be the point of one life?  Plus there is so much evidence to the contrary, such as near death experiences or that precious little boy who saw Jesus in the book, and now TV movie, called Heaven is Real. Recently a little boy remembered how he was murdered in a previous life, you can read about it here.

My first exposure to reincarnation was Buddhist philosophy.  I learned that Buddhists believe that all life is precious, including an insect.  So you shouldn't deliberately step on a bug.  I used to laugh at this especially since I am not fond of bugs.  But now that I have evolved spiritually, I actually think twice!  I ask myself, is it necessary to kill that bug?  Or can I somehow find a way to get it outside?  In fact, I recently did this with a centipede I found in my home.  Sometimes it's unavoidable, when the annual parade of ants enters my kitchen after a rainstorm.  But now, it's not so easy for me to kill them.

When I first learned about Hinduism, they taught that if you were bad in one life, you could be reincarnated as something horrendous, like a slug.  I thought that was an interesting concept, but this didn't resonate with me and sounded like the angry God of Catholicism, so I quickly moved on.

In the past year I have read numerous books on reincarnation, especially information gathered from regression hypnosis from authors like Dr. Brian Weiss, Lois Wetzel or Dolores Cannon.  Up until this point, my simple concept of reincarnation was this:  a soul was contained in a body, when that body died the soul would leave and eventually would occupy another body.  The soul came here to learn lessons or to relearn lessons or make up for mistakes made in past lives.

Here was my problem, if God was perfect and we were made in the image of her than why were we so imperfect? Why do we even have to learn lessons? The answer is the soul is perfect but we forget that we are when we are born in the physical in order to experience life for God and experience who we really are at any given moment.  In fact, I recently learned that a soul is so huge and the vibration so large that it can not be contained in one body, it is more like an enormous energy field.  With this fact in mind, and the fact there is no such thing as time and everything is happening right now, our soul could be having hundreds, perhaps thousands (like I have been told in readings) of lives all at the same time!

In addition, every thought and decision we make (and the various options/consequences) creates a parallel universe where that option is played out!  For example, today I decided to lay out in my yard instead of go to the pool.  But there is a Tina who in a parallel universe that plays out what happened when I go to the pool instead of stay in my yard.

Did I lose you yet?

Let me give you a specific example from my life where I remembered a "past" life that is affecting my "present" one. In fact, in this case my past self is aware of my present self but not vice versa.   I have had neck and shoulder pain since I was child. There was not one thing that triggered it, it just started when I was 11.  By the time I was a teenager, I was trying to sleep on the floor because I thought the crappy beds in my boarding school were hurting my back.  I have been to countless chiropractors and physical therapists.  I have taken a ton of Advil. Dr. Weiss and most other past life regressionists, propose that healing can come from remembering past lives, sometimes very quickly.  So I have tried to remember what they are through hypnosis, meditation or intuitive readings by others.  So far (get ready it's gruesome) I have been mauled by a bear, had my head chopped off, been stoned to death and wore a heavy ibis mask as a Thoth priest in ancient Egypt.  So far remembering these lives has not gotten rid of the back pain for good.

Last weekend I saw my mentor and multi-talented spiritual medium, Shaman and Reiki Master Joy.  I asked her to help me resolve this pain, what else do I need to know?  What else do I need to heal?  She gave me Reiki and had a vision of me as a slave girl with some sort of farming contraption on my shoulders and I was pulling it through earth, like a horse would. She said that this girl is aware of me in my present life and she resents me because she feels like I have an easy life and that she could never be happy. So Joy talked with her to convince her that she could drop that contraption from her shoulders and she no longer needs to carry it, that she can be happy too. She said there was also a fear that once you are happy, it will not last (Joy said every time I have that thought, my back pain may show up again). I admitted that I also felt this way, more so in the past. There is also a future part of myself that is afraid that the happiness won’t last either. So she pulled these two parts of myself into my present body and my angels advised me to “have faith.” Hopefully this will do the trick, otherwise I am open to learning more, and open to further healing.

Today I was thinking about that little slave girl. I want her to know that, in her honor, I will do my best to be happy, and to take nothing for granted. And I remind myself, to not view life as a burden, but a source of joy and happiness.  Release your burden little one, and enjoy life with me!

Proving Reincarnation is Real

I have believed in reincarnation for a long time.  It didn't make sense to me that we would have one life, die and then there was nothing.  Like what's the point of that?  If there is a purpose to all of this, then wouldn't we keep coming back?  Over and over again I kept hearing that Earth was like spiritual boot camp.  So we kept returning and kept learning lessons.  Hopefully we become enlightened enough to stop.  At least that's my hope.  

So last June, I decided to find a regression hypnotherapist.  This is a person trained to hypnotize you so that you have the ability to remember your past lives.  I had already read several books by Dr. Brian Weiss on past life regression. According to his website, Dr. Weiss, a traditional psychotherapist, was "astonished and skeptical when one of his patients began recalling past-life traumas that seemed to hold the key to her recurring nightmares and anxiety attacks. His skepticism was eroded, however, when she began to channel messages from “the space between lives,” which contained remarkable revelations about Dr. Weiss’s family and his dead son. Using past-life therapy, he was able to cure the patient and embark on a new, more meaningful phase of his own career."

I searched the internet and found Dr. Esther Iseman in Reston, VA.  She is a licensed marriage and family therapist, a certified clinical therapist and trained in regression therapy. I thought great!  She sounded perfect.  So I went ahead and made an appointment.  I had to make a two hour appointment. The first hour was devoted to getting to know me and the second hour we did the regression.  She asked me to come with a question that I wanted answered.  My question was, "Why do I have chronic neck and shoulder pain?"  I have had this pain since I was about 11 years old.  I have been going to chiropractors since I was in my early twenties to alleviate this pain, which never really goes away.  Of course there were several car accidents that might explain why I have this back pain but I was curious to know if this was related to a past life.  Dr.  Weiss firmly believes that if we can trace a current issue to a past life that issue can be healed.  Well I think does work for some people, but it is not as simple as it sounds.  

I had my doubts about being able to be hypnotized.  I remember watching one of Oprah's old shows where an entire audience was hypnotized.  I thought, come on really?  How can a whole group of people be hypnotized at once?  I just didn't get it.  That's why I wanted to try it myself.  

The night before my appointment I couldn't sleep.  I was nervous.  What if it didn't work?  I already knew that I was an old soul.  I was hoping that this information would help my back problems.  

So I sat on a small couch and closed my eyes and relaxed.  I was listening to her voice, and trying to focus and concentrate.  She told me that, as she guided me to relax, my body would feel heavy.  But I was totally aware of everything.  I could hear the hum of the air condition through the vent.  She was telling me to imagine numbers flowing into a cloud, and the more the numbers entered the cloud the darker the cloud got.  I was having a hard time with this.  I had a hard time picturing the numbers.  I really did want to do my best so I focused as much as I could.  You know when you close your eyes and you can see yellow and red though your eyelids?  I saw that the whole time.  

I remember Dr. Iseman said, let's go to a life that will answer Tina's question.  She had me walk down stairs and through doors and then she told me, look at your feet.  All of a sudden I could see my feet.  I was wearing beige leather sandals.  She asked me to look down at my body and tell her what I was wearing.  I was wearing a long toga-like dress.  And I could see my hair, it was long and dark and curly.  In my mind, I was in awe.  But I kept my focus because I wanted to know where this led me.  

While hypnotized, I thought I would be able to see like I could in my dreams.  But this was different.  It was less clear, almost out of focus.  But I knew all the answers to her questions! I simply had to think of the question and the answer would pop up!  I saw images, almost like pictures.  Where a dream is more like a video this was more like a slideshow.  But not even like that.  She would ask a question and sometimes I would see the image as an answer.  

She asked me how old I was and I said 20.  She asked me my name and I told her Maria.  I told her I was happy and single and I had a boyfriend--who is my husband in this life (I found this realization amusing even as I said it)!  She asked me when was this life and I said 1200 BC.  Then all of sudden I was in a dark cave.  I felt scared!  The emotions were so real and I was panicking.  I started crying and she told me I wasn't there anymore and that I am safe now.  She told me to rise above the scene and observe what is happening.  I was alone in a dark cave and I saw a large animal, a bear.  I was trapped!  And the bear killed me with several powerful swipes of its paws, including at my neck and right shoulder.  

Someone once said that you can't fake emotions.  And the emotions I felt were real.  And so it proved me that this life was real.  

Dr. Iseman told me to bury this pain so it would not affect me anymore.  Did my back improve after this?  I would say that it did but it did not eliminate the pain totally.  I still have back pain.  And I have identified other past lives that have something to do with this back pain but I won't get into that right now.  That's another blog post :)

For days after the regression I felt so sad and tired.  I felt sad for Maria in that cave and the absolute terror that she felt.  I couldn't shake the sadness for days.  I felt like I was mourning for her.  Eventually these feelings went away.  

Although I have proved to myself that past lives are real, I don't think I will ever be regressed again.  The emotions were so overwhelming.  There are other ways to remember your past lives via meditations or psychic readings.  I have chosen to remember in other ways now.  So far I have chronicled 39 past lives.  This Saturday I will be going to an all day conference led by Dr. Brian Weiss in New York City.  I am sure I will remember many more lives to add to my list.