What Is Reincarnation?

The reincarnation belief system states that after death the soul or spirit is reborn into a new body. Most people believe that we can be reborn only into a human body, but some traditions include animal lives. For example, the Hindu tradition states that we can reincarnate from animals into humans and vice versa. A human being could have been, say, a seagull in a previous life.

The essence of reincarnation is that we progress as souls, so during each life we develop different areas of our personalities or characters. The belief is that through our different lives we experience all that life has to offer, whether wealth or poverty, health or disease, ignorance or a good education. We can be male or female, black or white, nobility or peasant. We can belong to any and every religious organization, and we can espouse every nonreligious belief, and every political view. We can live in every culture so that we experience, understand, and eventually accept all cultures, at which point a further human incarnation is not necessary and we can ascend to a pure spirit form.

This belief system is an ancient one. Several religions recognize it as central to their beliefs, and many pagans, and those who follow New Age beliefs or such esoteric philosophies as the Kabbala and Gnosticism, believe in reincarnation. There is also debate among Spiritualists — whose belief is that the spirit exists distinct from matter — some of whom hold this as a belief and some of whom do not.

Discovering Your Previous Incarnations

There are a number of ways to access information about your previous incarnations. These are the most commonly used methods.

Recession

Recession occurs when a therapist who is treating you in a complementary health or spiritual manner comes across past-life themes that are relevant to you in this lifetime. Whether the discovery is the result of a deliberate search for past-life problems or an accidental occurrence, the therapist will determine ways of addressing those themes.

Note that this is different from regression, described below. In recession, the therapist is intuitively accessing information from your past lives in order to heal you in the present.

Reading

Instead of looking at your present or future life, a psychic or medium can give you a reading in which he or she accesses information about your past lives and gives you information about one or more previous incarnations that are relevant to or resonate with patterns in your life now.

Regression

Regression is the process of going back into your past lives to retrieve past-life memories. This is different from recession because it is you, yourself, not the therapist, who recalls and discovers the past life.

To recall one or more of your own past lives in this way, you must be hypnotized by a qualified therapist. It is normally only under hypnosis that deliberate regression comes into play. It does so because hypnosis places individuals in a calm, receptive state, which allows memories of a past life to be brought to mind. While you are under hypnosis, you may also remember something about your life between lives or, as we call it, time spent in the discarnate realm.

Spontaneous Recall

Spontaneous recall happens when an event, situation, person, place, or emotion triggers your recall of a previous incarnation without any prior intent on your part to do so.

Dreams and Feelings

You may have dreams that relate to a past life, so it is worth taking particular note of any recurring dreams, because these may be connected to past-life events. Our friend Vicki used to dream of a previous life in a South American jungle, where she sometimes had to cross a narrow ravine via a wood and rope bridge. In Vicki's dream, she was always nervous when crossing this fragile bridge; and rightly so, as it happened. One day, she was gingerly crossing the bridge while holding her small daughter by the hand, when one of the wooden slats broke. The little girl started to slip through the gap, but Vicki pulled her back up and then ran back to their village with the crying child in her arms. Vicki discovered later that her little daughter's arm had been broken in the fall.

One day in present life, Vicki's daughter told her that she a recurring dream that bothered her. In her dream, she was a little girl who lived with her family in a South American jungle, and that she had slipped through a wood and rope bridge, and only been saved from death by her mother hauling her back up. Interestingly, Vicki's daughter once broke her arm badly in this life, and it has never been quite right since.

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Everyone's reincarnation story is different. We'll share our story in the next chapter, so you can get an idea of past lives and how information about them is obtained in regression sessions.

Jass's Story

We all know what it is like to reach a crossroads in our lives and not know which way to go. The following story is one that showed me (Jass) the answer to a problem that was facing me. It showed me that money (or, in my case, a good salary) is not a guarantee of happiness, and that one can be happier with less income but better circumstances.

My first ever regression session was about ten years ago. Krys and I were both in stressful jobs, our children were young adults, and from time to time, Krys and I had reflected on the meaning of life and our frustration in our jobs. I had intended to be in the line of work I was in for a couple of years to get myself on my feet financially so that I could do something I enjoyed, but fifteen years later, having climbed the career ladder and being relatively well paid, I found it harder and harder to make the change. In spite of the good salaries we enjoyed, we were so exhausted at the end of each week that we didn't really feel the benefit from the money we earned — most of which seemed to go toward paying bills anyway. It was at this point that I had my first past-life regression, in which I vividly experienced two very different lives. The substance of them is related here.

Looking at my clothing on entering my past life, I discovered that I was wearing a dark green riding habit, smartly tailored to fit my young adult female figure. Going back to an even earlier stage of this past life, I found myself as a young girl hiding in a tree. From this viewpoint, I could see a very large house and surrounding estate. I knew that the estate belonged to my father and that I lived there with my mother and father and many servants. I looked into one of the windows of the big house, straight into the schoolroom, where my governess was pacing up and down in anger. I laughed to myself, knowing that she was waiting for me. I was meant to be in the classroom having a boring lesson with...