I remember a distinct moment, one of the very first memories I recall having, actually.
I must’ve been around 3 to 4 years old. I remember looking myself in the mirror, analyzing my face, my eyes, my body, and this sudden thought I just couldn’t shake came to me… “Why am I here? Why have I chosen this body and these people as my parents? Why am I here again?”
It was a weird sensation, like I wasn’t really myself in flesh and bone as I was seeing in the mirror. Like I had accessed a greater, unseen part of myself, wiser and above the game of reality that my flesh and bone are playing. And most of all, it did not scare me at all. I felt a weird sense of inner calm, like it was the most natural thing to be asking myself these questions, and to look to my parents as if they were complete strangers I’ve chosen to raise me before I came to earthly form.
That moment passed on quickly – I don’t think the feeling lasted for more than a couple of seconds – but throughout all of these years, it has stuck with me and to this day I recall it vividly. Was it a window of soul memory I’d gotten a glimpse through while innocuously staring at myself in the mirror for too long? A fragment of a previous reincarnation gaining consciousness momentarily?
Then, as I grew up, I became attuned to a certain “gut instinct”… I find (and have found ever since the age of 7) that whenever I’m in a new group of people – be it in school, college, at work – I generally have a “feeling” for people. An inner knowing that points its finger to them and says “this person is going to be important in your life”. Almost as if our souls look at one another and say “ah, we meet again…”. I’ve had this inner knowing with all of my current closest friends, as well as with past relationships, and generally all people who’ve meant something to me in this lifetime. It has never failed me once.
There are a lot of frameworks out there which could explain this inner knowing, these otherworldly experiences which I wholly believe I’m not the only one to have been experiencing. But it all easily boils down to the three dimensions of the human experience – body, mind and spirit. The body handles the feelings, the trauma, the reactions. The mind handles the thoughts, the fears, our self awareness, differentiates right from wrong and serves as a compass for us to both create and seamlessly adapt to the reality we live in. But the spirit goes beyond everything else our body and mind can recognize. It’s something quite literally beyond ourselves – the soul, the energy that lives within us and decides to experience itself in earthly form. This spirit knows no bounds, no rules and no attachments. It floats endlessly and lives eternally, always looking for new lessons to learn.
And it learns by living in physical form. It learns to love, to hate, to have and to lose. But most of all, it learns to detach – from things, people, experiences, momentary pleasures.
There’s a theory forwarded by a hypnotherapist Michael Newton according to which a soul goes through no more and no less than 35 reincarnations. That is, 5 stages of differing levels of consciousness and soul lessons, each encompassing seven lifetimes. The soul goes from infant stage to child, young, mature and eventually old, and each cycle of 7 lifetimes comes with a deeper layer of karmic lessons to learn. The soul knows this – and before each reincarnation, in the space without bounds of time and space known as “intermission period” – it carefully chooses the layout of its next earthly life. Like the way a skilled chess player thinks ahead and anticipates his moves as well as his adversary’s, the soul carefully arranges its chess pieces on the board. It chooses the family it’s born into, the experiences that will shape its childhood, the struggles it will face, its soul family… and continues to make choices from birth to death and then right back from the start.
But all in all, I believe each stage with its lifetimes is about experiencing, learning, sharing and finally detaching. Experiencing, for example, love and relationships with all its ups and downs (toxicity, obsessive attachment, jealousy, possession, heartbreak and loss), learning about them (becoming aware of the pattern), sharing our knowledge (becoming “life guardians”, helping others) and finally detaching, that is integrating it as a small piece of a much bigger puzzle, and moving on to the next stage of life cycles with its next lesson.
And where does karma fit in all of this? Is a question I found myself asking, and you might be too. Karma is often perceived negatively by the collective – as a debt to pay, a ghost that haunts you, a boomerang that hits you over the head when you least expect it to punish you for your wrongdoings. But I like to view it – and I believe it’s healthier to view it as such – as a soul lesson that piles up and grows with each time you refuse to integrate it. Soul lessons have a way of becoming more and more painful each time they have to be repeated, simply because we’re not aware of them, and we need to be made aware of them. Sometimes, a simple nudge is enough – we wake up, understand and move on. Other times, it’s a tougher match – and we find ourselves having to lose it all in order to see what was right in front of us. Throughout multiple lifetimes, even.
And the purpose of it all? To find joy in living, with all its ups and downs, with all its hurts and wonders. To learn to live in flow with life, not against it. To detach – from ego, beliefs, people, experiences, relationships, material gain… and to live solely for the nourishment of the soul.
It’s a long journey. Are you ready for it?
