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Eternal Lives, Eternal Deaths
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Chapter 6
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Chapter 6
From Shadow Realms to Healing Visions
Shadows of the Past
With the karmic evolution of consciousness in motion, a great challenge arises. As life after life lessons are learned and experiences are made, higher levels of awareness can be reached – with that comes bliss, peace, and degrees of enlightenment. However, as light inevitably casts shadows, so comes as a ‘by-product’ of our evolution a mass of unresolved, unconscious psychic content Jung famously called the shadow. It entails everything that we don’t allow into our awareness because it feels painful, shameful, and weak – or is regarded as unacceptable by social standards. The artist whose father tells him to become an accountant, the gay lover whose sexuality is closeted, or the spiritual seeker whose work is labelled pseudo-science, all may push their talents and desires away. Hence, it often is our suppressed creativity and higher aspirations that end up in the shadow realm (so-called golden shadow). All these disowned traits are becoming hard to face, and will frequently be projected onto others, for example, in the form of anger or envy. As the Higher Self of one of my clients once said it: What you envy in others, is your existential program. In other words, what we envy in others, may be the potential we do not embrace in ourselves. Conversely, what we are angry about in others, may be a negative trait we can’t face in ourselves. The shadow frequently becomes apparent in our relationship with others.
Thus, it is not a merely individual but a collective phenomenon. C. G. Jung warned us that the greatest danger for humanity was millions of us collectively falling into unconsciousness, living out a collective psychosis, and thereby creating our own destruction. Indeed, the very same collective shadow he warned about emerged soon after: in World War II, the Nazi Holocaust, and other dictatorial regimes such as Communism. The entire 20th was marked by it and we are not yet free from it, either. All the unconscious blind spots in every individual can become entries for harmful social conditioning which leads to harmful collective behaviours such as oppression, exploitation, and colonisation.
Paul Levy uses the term Wetico for the kind of collective shadow that covertly operates through the unconscious and spreads like a contagious psycho-spiritual disease. The word Wetiko comes from the Cree language and refers to a spiritual sickness that brings forth the symptoms of greed, selfishness, and the consumption of others, including other species and nature as a whole. What is interesting about the concept of Wetico is that it becomes a semi-independent force, a destructive morphogenetic field that takes on a life of its own. It feeds off fear and polarisation. It transcends boundaries. It transcends generations. It transcends time and space.
Thus, it is not a merely individual but a collective phenomenon. C. G. Jung warned us that the greatest danger for humanity was millions of us collectively falling into unconsciousness, living out a collective psychosis, and thereby creating our own destruction. Indeed, the very same collective shadow he warned about emerged soon after: in World War II, the Nazi Holocaust, and other dictatorial regimes such as Communism. The entire 20th was marked by it and we are not yet free from it, either. All the unconscious blind spots in every individual can become entries for harmful social conditioning which leads to harmful collective behaviours such as oppression, exploitation, and colonisation.
Paul Levy uses the term Wetico for the kind of collective shadow that covertly operates through the unconscious and spreads like a contagious psycho-spiritual disease. The word Wetiko comes from the Cree language and refers to a spiritual sickness that brings forth the symptoms of greed, selfishness, and the consumption of others, including other species and nature as a whole. What is interesting about the concept of Wetico is that it becomes a semi-independent force, a destructive morphogenetic field that takes on a life of its own. It feeds off fear and polarisation. It transcends boundaries. It transcends generations. It transcends time and space.
Trauma Across Time and Space
Research has demonstrated that trauma can indeed transcend generations. Trauma experienced by one generation does influence the psychological, behavioural, and even biological outcome of subsequent generations. It has been shown that epigenetic changes caused by traumatic events, for example, among Holocaust survivors, can be passed on to children born after the event. Holocaust exposure that affected a mechanism controlling the expression of the ‘stress gene’ FKBP5 – linked to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could be observed not only in the survivors but also their offspring. Despite living in stable environments, children of the survivors showed signs of depression and anxiety, too. This happens even without the child knowing about the parent’s traumatic past. Gábor Máté has, at some point, shared the example of a woman who had recurring nightmares about being hunted in a forest, unaware that the exact same scenario was actually a traumatic memory of her father, who had only narrowly escaped Nazi soldiers in a forest.
Transgenerational trauma may be accounted for, at least partially, in epigenetic terms – but digging deeper, our connectedness across time seems even more profound. Every action, every experience reverberates in the field of life and sometime, an interconnectedness across lives may become apparent under the most unusual of circumstances.
Yonassan Gershom, a rabbi from Minnesota, had a young Norwegian woman arriving at his doorstep one rainy night. She wanted to speak to the Rabbi because all her life she felt an unexplainable, deep connection with the Holocaust. Being invited in, she broke down in tears as he played her the tunes of Ani Maamin, a hymn of faith sung by many thousands of Jews as they were led into the gas chambers. Even though the Norwegian woman had never heard that melody before, something emerged from inside her, something that felt like a recognition, a memory, a belonging.
Since that evening, Rabbi Gershom began to collect cases of people who had regained memories through various means – dreams, visions, déjà vu impressions, past-life readings, intuition, spirit guides, automatic writing, and hypnotherapy – of having died in the Holocaust. Some of them were Jewish in this life, but many were not.
Having found hundreds of cases of people who remember having been victims of the Holocaust in previous lives, opened the Rabbi’s mind to consider reincarnation as a real possibility. Many of these cases were of enormous personal significance and often revealed challenging karmic links. A Swedish girl, for instance, who had Holocaust flashbacks all her life, found out that her hypnotherapist had been the commandant of the camp where she used to be incarcerated.iv Even more dramatically, an Australian Jewish woman discovered that her daughter Leah was the reincarnation of the officer who pushed her and her baby brother into the gas chamber. Remarkably, the daughter had remembered something herself. When the mother did not want to tell her about these Holocaust memories, she asked, ‘Mummy, I was on the other side, wasn’t I?’
Rabbi Gershom’s research is remarkable, not only for finding a way to reconcile the tenet of reincarnation with the Jewish faith, but also for showing the intertwined nature of all the trauma humans have inflicted on each other throughout history. Trauma transcends multiple generations and spreads across nations and nationals. Gershom’s research suggests that the trauma suffered from the Holocaust would reverberate across generations and ethnic boundaries – what Echkart Tolle would call a collective pain body – and becomes part of the collective thoughts, sentiments, and energies of the whole of humanity. Atrocities harm not only the victims but our entire human heritage.
During World War II, Berlin-based journalist Charlotte Beradt collected and smuggled out of Germany dreams of people living in the Nazi totalitarian era. Her in-depth collection shows that it was not just Jewish (or else directly persecuted) people who lived with fear infiltrating their deepest unconscious, but everyone. The strongest expressions of fear, of course, were among the Jewish people. (Their dreams even foreshadowed the Holocaust killings years before they historically happened, feeling the need to flee the country. For instance, there were dreams about carrying papers everywhere, being held back at the border, or looking for the last land on Earth where Jews were still accepted.) However, dreams of the entire population were also filled with paralysing, Kafkaesque anxiety and powerlessness. (There were, for instance, dreams of living room lamps turning into Nazi surveillance equipment or people being forced to move to the bottom of the sea for some privacy, because all apartments became public places.)
Collective trauma of such magnitude as the Holocaust is like a continental-size earthquake which devastates everyone in its epicentre but sends further shock-waves of disaster even to distant shores. Genocide harms first and foremost the victims and their people but as Gershom’s past life and Beradt’s dream research demonstrate, it reaches even further.
We have not yet understood nor processed fully the psychological implications of the insane violence that swept through the 20th century. Thomas Hübl who works excessively with collective trauma, pointed out that we live with so much unresolved trauma that our entire society suffers from denial and suppression. We cannot stare at the Holocaust nor can we even begin to contemplate the millions of victims of communist regimes, the two world wars, Rwanda, Bosnia... while we make our morning coffee and get ready for the day. We live with ongoing, maladaptive coping mechanisms consisting of dissociation, desensitisation (in the sense of ‘normalising the abnormal’), and avoidance. These mechanisms cause us to dissociate from our current catastrophes, for instance the environmental crisis, they enable us to watch news clips of starving children without interrupting our dinner, while we also avoid the question of where the meat on our plate comes from.
Past life regression therapy holds great potential to treat trauma that transcends generations and multiple lifetimes. It opens up karmic memories, as well as trains the individual to switch perspectives. Shadow material is first processed from the third person perspective (seeing it), then from the second person (having a dialogue or interaction with it), and finally, from first person perspective (fully owning it). It enables the individual, as Ken Wilber puts it, to work through shadow material by ‘facing it, talking to it and being it.’ Furthermore, it allows for connecting individual shadow work to the collective. Personal actions are scrutinised against the impact they have on society. Shadow work in past life therapy is a dark dance, oscillating back and forth from the past to the present, from the external to the internal, from the individual to the collective… until all manifestations are detected, cleaned up, and integrated.
Transgenerational trauma may be accounted for, at least partially, in epigenetic terms – but digging deeper, our connectedness across time seems even more profound. Every action, every experience reverberates in the field of life and sometime, an interconnectedness across lives may become apparent under the most unusual of circumstances.
Yonassan Gershom, a rabbi from Minnesota, had a young Norwegian woman arriving at his doorstep one rainy night. She wanted to speak to the Rabbi because all her life she felt an unexplainable, deep connection with the Holocaust. Being invited in, she broke down in tears as he played her the tunes of Ani Maamin, a hymn of faith sung by many thousands of Jews as they were led into the gas chambers. Even though the Norwegian woman had never heard that melody before, something emerged from inside her, something that felt like a recognition, a memory, a belonging.
Since that evening, Rabbi Gershom began to collect cases of people who had regained memories through various means – dreams, visions, déjà vu impressions, past-life readings, intuition, spirit guides, automatic writing, and hypnotherapy – of having died in the Holocaust. Some of them were Jewish in this life, but many were not.
Having found hundreds of cases of people who remember having been victims of the Holocaust in previous lives, opened the Rabbi’s mind to consider reincarnation as a real possibility. Many of these cases were of enormous personal significance and often revealed challenging karmic links. A Swedish girl, for instance, who had Holocaust flashbacks all her life, found out that her hypnotherapist had been the commandant of the camp where she used to be incarcerated.iv Even more dramatically, an Australian Jewish woman discovered that her daughter Leah was the reincarnation of the officer who pushed her and her baby brother into the gas chamber. Remarkably, the daughter had remembered something herself. When the mother did not want to tell her about these Holocaust memories, she asked, ‘Mummy, I was on the other side, wasn’t I?’
Rabbi Gershom’s research is remarkable, not only for finding a way to reconcile the tenet of reincarnation with the Jewish faith, but also for showing the intertwined nature of all the trauma humans have inflicted on each other throughout history. Trauma transcends multiple generations and spreads across nations and nationals. Gershom’s research suggests that the trauma suffered from the Holocaust would reverberate across generations and ethnic boundaries – what Echkart Tolle would call a collective pain body – and becomes part of the collective thoughts, sentiments, and energies of the whole of humanity. Atrocities harm not only the victims but our entire human heritage.
During World War II, Berlin-based journalist Charlotte Beradt collected and smuggled out of Germany dreams of people living in the Nazi totalitarian era. Her in-depth collection shows that it was not just Jewish (or else directly persecuted) people who lived with fear infiltrating their deepest unconscious, but everyone. The strongest expressions of fear, of course, were among the Jewish people. (Their dreams even foreshadowed the Holocaust killings years before they historically happened, feeling the need to flee the country. For instance, there were dreams about carrying papers everywhere, being held back at the border, or looking for the last land on Earth where Jews were still accepted.) However, dreams of the entire population were also filled with paralysing, Kafkaesque anxiety and powerlessness. (There were, for instance, dreams of living room lamps turning into Nazi surveillance equipment or people being forced to move to the bottom of the sea for some privacy, because all apartments became public places.)
Collective trauma of such magnitude as the Holocaust is like a continental-size earthquake which devastates everyone in its epicentre but sends further shock-waves of disaster even to distant shores. Genocide harms first and foremost the victims and their people but as Gershom’s past life and Beradt’s dream research demonstrate, it reaches even further.
We have not yet understood nor processed fully the psychological implications of the insane violence that swept through the 20th century. Thomas Hübl who works excessively with collective trauma, pointed out that we live with so much unresolved trauma that our entire society suffers from denial and suppression. We cannot stare at the Holocaust nor can we even begin to contemplate the millions of victims of communist regimes, the two world wars, Rwanda, Bosnia... while we make our morning coffee and get ready for the day. We live with ongoing, maladaptive coping mechanisms consisting of dissociation, desensitisation (in the sense of ‘normalising the abnormal’), and avoidance. These mechanisms cause us to dissociate from our current catastrophes, for instance the environmental crisis, they enable us to watch news clips of starving children without interrupting our dinner, while we also avoid the question of where the meat on our plate comes from.
Past life regression therapy holds great potential to treat trauma that transcends generations and multiple lifetimes. It opens up karmic memories, as well as trains the individual to switch perspectives. Shadow material is first processed from the third person perspective (seeing it), then from the second person (having a dialogue or interaction with it), and finally, from first person perspective (fully owning it). It enables the individual, as Ken Wilber puts it, to work through shadow material by ‘facing it, talking to it and being it.’ Furthermore, it allows for connecting individual shadow work to the collective. Personal actions are scrutinised against the impact they have on society. Shadow work in past life therapy is a dark dance, oscillating back and forth from the past to the present, from the external to the internal, from the individual to the collective… until all manifestations are detected, cleaned up, and integrated.
Karmic Memories of Perpetrators
The following cases come from clients who faced shadows that were particularly difficult both on the individual as well as the collective level. They remembered being not the victims but the perpetrators of atrocities. Their cases show how hard it is to see the moral wrong of one’s actions while living the life in which they occurred and how invaluable retrocognitions can be. The first participant, Tia, remembered lives both as a robber as well as a Nazi interrogator. (Both lives had to be unearthed fragment by fragment over a longer period of time – here, a summary is given.) The second participant, Liz, we met before in the previous chapter, learning about the group-building power of collective challenges such as HIV. In these other sessions, Liz remembered being a Nazi officer and, as such, experienced the dark side of groups, being completely swallowed up by the collective trance of the time.
Tia: Life as a Robber Baron
In that life, I was born in a simple feudal village. As a young man, I was engaged to the most beautiful girl in our village. She had long, thick, golden hair and a slender figure with an ample bosom. But then the feudal lord exercised his ‘right’ and slept with her on the first night. Not only that! At the end, he married her and turned her into a lady. I ran away and asked myself what it was that he had and I did not. I concluded that he had a castle, so I became obsessed with the idea of having my own. With time, I gathered a growing fellowship consisting of vagabonds who helped me rebuild a dilapidated castle. Afterwards, we lived like lords ourselves. Whoever approached our territory, we attacked first. We killed the adults, only kept a few tasty females as our concubines and strong children to grow up as our soldiers. We never even for a moment questioned the morality of this. Over time, I gained so much power as an outlaw ruler that the feudal lords of the region formed an army alliance against me. Eventually, they formed a ring around the castle, systematically beginning to starve us out. One by one, my men surrendered. Only I remained, withdrawn into my own dungeon, where I died of thirst and hunger before I would give up my fortress. If I ever felt any remorse, so it was in those last, dying hours, because I actually called for a priest to come and see me. But the priest was too afraid, so I died alone, hating myself and hating the Church.
In more recent past life, the same theme of not noticing the wrong of his behaviour, returned:
Tia: The Nazi Interrogator
This memory escaped my recall for so many attempts, but at last, I remembered this make-shift office building, which consisted of a single corridor and some rooms on one side. I was working there as an interrogator. My methods were very efficient: I don’t think that I ever had to rely on torture; I had excellent skills to penetrate the mind of anyone. Never did I question what the obtained information was being used for. Previously, I had been working as a physical education teacher and an athletic coach, organising summer camps for the boys. Hitlerjugend had its glamorous sides: Those kids learned discipline, camaraderie, and love for the outdoors. We were all in great shape. Personally, I was very much drawn to the idea of the Übermensch, that somehow we can be more than we currently are and one day we may become super-human. Later, during the war, I was removed from the office, which I think happened because of a jealous superior. After that, I experienced the harsh reality of all the horrors we were actually causing. Vaguely, I can recall us herding a group of emaciated people on a muddy road. We raped women. I did, too, because we all did. But there was this one woman, as I held her in my captive embrace, a sense of guilt overcame me. I tried to turn my violence into a comforting hug – not sure how she felt about it. I was relieved when, soon after that, somehow I got shot and died.
The chilling, disturbing, even bizarre reality of participating in some of history’s most horrendous atrocities, without even being aware of the wrong of one’s actions, also becomes apparent in Liz’s past life memory about having been a Nazi military officer.
Liz: Memories of a Nazi officer
The Nazi officer lived out his life to such a strict and serious schedule that it began to tire him. At one point, he felt unsatisfied and started to spend a lot of time at home alone, drinking.
At no point during the interview did the officer show any remorse over his function as a concentration camp guard. Later, he was talking about meeting a little boy, the son of another guard, who started to question the morality of it all. But even then, the officer remained a proud and firm believer of the Nazi cause. He called the people they murdered ‘Abschaum.’ (Abschaum is a German derogatory term which means scum or human trash.)
Recollections such as these are hard to obtain and even harder to process. It requires courage to face one’s own evil. Such memories can have a profound, challenging, even unbalancing impact on the psyche. However, until healed, the person experiences lots of restraints in their current life, mostly from within through vague yet powerful feelings of guilt and sadness. Liz called it the Grundtraurigkeit, a feeling of baseline sadness. Yet another past life explorer, Thomas, who remembered as an SS officer having had to shoot a comrade in the head, describes his current life as very low-key: Even though he has the material means and the educational background to make more of his life, he moves ‘as if the hand-brakes were on.’ These experiences of restraints remind us of the importance of facing our own evil – as an individual as well as a society – and transcend it. In the following, we will inquire deeper into the nature of human evil and go on a search to find a way to heal it.
Tia: Life as a Robber Baron
In that life, I was born in a simple feudal village. As a young man, I was engaged to the most beautiful girl in our village. She had long, thick, golden hair and a slender figure with an ample bosom. But then the feudal lord exercised his ‘right’ and slept with her on the first night. Not only that! At the end, he married her and turned her into a lady. I ran away and asked myself what it was that he had and I did not. I concluded that he had a castle, so I became obsessed with the idea of having my own. With time, I gathered a growing fellowship consisting of vagabonds who helped me rebuild a dilapidated castle. Afterwards, we lived like lords ourselves. Whoever approached our territory, we attacked first. We killed the adults, only kept a few tasty females as our concubines and strong children to grow up as our soldiers. We never even for a moment questioned the morality of this. Over time, I gained so much power as an outlaw ruler that the feudal lords of the region formed an army alliance against me. Eventually, they formed a ring around the castle, systematically beginning to starve us out. One by one, my men surrendered. Only I remained, withdrawn into my own dungeon, where I died of thirst and hunger before I would give up my fortress. If I ever felt any remorse, so it was in those last, dying hours, because I actually called for a priest to come and see me. But the priest was too afraid, so I died alone, hating myself and hating the Church.
In more recent past life, the same theme of not noticing the wrong of his behaviour, returned:
Tia: The Nazi Interrogator
This memory escaped my recall for so many attempts, but at last, I remembered this make-shift office building, which consisted of a single corridor and some rooms on one side. I was working there as an interrogator. My methods were very efficient: I don’t think that I ever had to rely on torture; I had excellent skills to penetrate the mind of anyone. Never did I question what the obtained information was being used for. Previously, I had been working as a physical education teacher and an athletic coach, organising summer camps for the boys. Hitlerjugend had its glamorous sides: Those kids learned discipline, camaraderie, and love for the outdoors. We were all in great shape. Personally, I was very much drawn to the idea of the Übermensch, that somehow we can be more than we currently are and one day we may become super-human. Later, during the war, I was removed from the office, which I think happened because of a jealous superior. After that, I experienced the harsh reality of all the horrors we were actually causing. Vaguely, I can recall us herding a group of emaciated people on a muddy road. We raped women. I did, too, because we all did. But there was this one woman, as I held her in my captive embrace, a sense of guilt overcame me. I tried to turn my violence into a comforting hug – not sure how she felt about it. I was relieved when, soon after that, somehow I got shot and died.
The chilling, disturbing, even bizarre reality of participating in some of history’s most horrendous atrocities, without even being aware of the wrong of one’s actions, also becomes apparent in Liz’s past life memory about having been a Nazi military officer.
Liz: Memories of a Nazi officer
The Nazi officer lived out his life to such a strict and serious schedule that it began to tire him. At one point, he felt unsatisfied and started to spend a lot of time at home alone, drinking.
- How old are you?
- 45.
- Where are you?
- At home. Alone. I have no family.
- Since when are you in your current job?
- Over twenty years. I’ve been in the military for over 20 years. My father had a mechanic’s workshop, but I wanted to go away from the countryside. I went to school and wanted to become something special. I joined the army. No more of that farmer’s life.
- Do you like the military?
- Yes, here I could always prove myself. I worked myself up.
- What is your strength?
- Discipline. I do it like our Führer, his way, being so confident and strong. Yes. Hitler. He’s doing it exactly right. Cleaning up, bringing order into things. Before him, people were just lost, frustrated, and confused.
- What’s your current work with the military?
- I’m a guard at the Konzentrationslager (concentration camp).
- What are your thoughts about this work?
- I’m glad to be part of it. Makes me feel empowered to control and determine everything.
- Now, move ahead in time. Is there any point in time later when you get any doubts?
- Yes.
- Tell me about your doubts.
- I have a girlfriend. I start doubting her. Looks like she wants to leave me.
- Do you ever get a bad conscience about how you are treating people?
- Yes, I have yelled at my girlfriend a couple of times. I see it now, how I yelled at her.
At no point during the interview did the officer show any remorse over his function as a concentration camp guard. Later, he was talking about meeting a little boy, the son of another guard, who started to question the morality of it all. But even then, the officer remained a proud and firm believer of the Nazi cause. He called the people they murdered ‘Abschaum.’ (Abschaum is a German derogatory term which means scum or human trash.)
Recollections such as these are hard to obtain and even harder to process. It requires courage to face one’s own evil. Such memories can have a profound, challenging, even unbalancing impact on the psyche. However, until healed, the person experiences lots of restraints in their current life, mostly from within through vague yet powerful feelings of guilt and sadness. Liz called it the Grundtraurigkeit, a feeling of baseline sadness. Yet another past life explorer, Thomas, who remembered as an SS officer having had to shoot a comrade in the head, describes his current life as very low-key: Even though he has the material means and the educational background to make more of his life, he moves ‘as if the hand-brakes were on.’ These experiences of restraints remind us of the importance of facing our own evil – as an individual as well as a society – and transcend it. In the following, we will inquire deeper into the nature of human evil and go on a search to find a way to heal it.
On Human Evil
Studying these types of cases reveals that actions later clearly recognised as unethical were, at their time, largely committed without awareness of their moral wrong. The Robber Baron committed murder after murder without thinking twice, and the Nazi Interrogator supported a war-criminal cause without ever checking the consequences of his actions. The Nazi Officer showed no remorse about his involvement in running the concentration camp, the worst he could think of was having been unkind to his girlfriend. Another client, Clara, remembered a prehistoric past life in which he unrepentantly killed his wife because she shared their food with others. Yet another lady, Sarah, recalled the pride they felt hunting gladiators for the Roman arena. In none of these cases were the perpetrators aware of any wrongdoing at the time. This mechanism can repeatedly be observed in past life cases involving unethical behaviour: The moral wrong clearly visible from the present stage, was a moral blind spot of its time and only becomes apparent at the next stage of development. To put this into a formula:
The moral wrong obvious at Stage X+1 is a moral blind spot at Stage X.
When we experience the truth behind this simple, yet profound formula, something paramount happens. We realise that each stage of evolution has its blind spots, which in turn can help to detect such blind spots in the present. This awareness helps to take our current life under scrutiny, see it more objectively, and make amends.
An example of a current moral blind spot, on the collective level, would be the mass factory farming of animals. While we have learned as a society to condemn slavery and genocide, we remain blind to the fact that we are imposing the same evil on non-human animals, even though they are sentient beings and capable of the same suffering as we are. Once this moral spot becomes visible, future generations will look back at the horror of all the abuse that was happening in factory farms, in the same way as we look back at plantation slavery and ask: How could ‘good’ and ‘decent’ people allow such a horrendous thing to happen?
The Milgram experiment (1963) famously demonstrated how ‘good’ and ‘decent’ citizens would indeed be willing to inflict serious suffering, even death, on their fellow humans when ordered so by an authority figure. The set-up is worth briefly recalling: Participants were told they would be assisting in a learning experiment by delivering increasingly strong electric shocks to a ‘learner’ behind a one-way glass whenever an incorrect answer was given. Unbeknownst to the participants, the learning experiment and the shocks weren’t real. The ‘learners’ were actors and the true purpose of the experiment was to observe obedience to authority. Despite hearing cries of pain and pleas to stop, most of the participants continued to administer what they believed were dangerously high voltages as an authority figure in a lab coat insisted that the experiment must continue. The Milgram Experiment highlighted the unsettling tendency of individuals to override their own moral instincts under social pressure. It underscores how deeply authority and social conditioning can shape human behaviour and offers insight into how the human shadow can become so titanic on the collective level.
Group behaviour in institutionalized settings often demonstrates this troubling psychological tendency of individuals following authority, assuming that the behaviour of the group is all right. This dynamic marks the genesis of group evil, where responsibility is endlessly be delegated – either vertically (‘I’m just following orders’) or horizontally (‘we are not the competent department’) within the institution. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist who investigated the psychology of human evil, was stationed at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. When he sought to interview the responsible decision-makers following a war crime at MyLai, he was met with repeated deflections. One department claimed that they were only supplying the weapons but did not determine the policy. The policy department, in turn, insisted they only decided how the war would be conducted – not whether it would be conducted. Meanwhile, the military asserted that it only followed orders from the White House. And so it went on. After repeated rounds around the halls, like a snake biting its own tail, Dr Peck had to conclude that no one in the Pentagon seemed to bear responsibility for the war at all. Such dynamics illustrate how groups can act without conscience—or even awareness—creating a moral vacuum where accountability disappears.
Other examples of this phenomenon can be found in business corporations. Like a nation state that may go into war, commit genocide and other war crimes, a corporation is a legal person and, as such, can enter into contracts, acquire property, even alter the environment. Yet, from a psychological point of view, it is but a zombie, a fiction on paper that lacks the faculties of consciousness, self-awareness, and responsible thinking. Its behaviour is governed by law and corporate policy (aimed at making a profit), not by moral or ethical standards. Current US-American law – which is rapidly exporting itself across the globe – requires a corporation to maximize profit in the interest of its shareholders, even if it has to perform immoral acts. In other words, if the CEOs of a corporation are faced with a choice between Plan A that is cheaper but harms the environment and/or violates human rights or Plan B which is ethically better but would be more expensive for the shareholders, they are obliged to choose Plan A, the unethical but cheaper option. Here, we can see the legal system itself as a manifestation of a collective shadow in which the Wetiko virus thrives, while our corporations, for lack of a higher purpose, run amok in the world, blindly chasing profit.
The moral wrong obvious at Stage X+1 is a moral blind spot at Stage X.
When we experience the truth behind this simple, yet profound formula, something paramount happens. We realise that each stage of evolution has its blind spots, which in turn can help to detect such blind spots in the present. This awareness helps to take our current life under scrutiny, see it more objectively, and make amends.
An example of a current moral blind spot, on the collective level, would be the mass factory farming of animals. While we have learned as a society to condemn slavery and genocide, we remain blind to the fact that we are imposing the same evil on non-human animals, even though they are sentient beings and capable of the same suffering as we are. Once this moral spot becomes visible, future generations will look back at the horror of all the abuse that was happening in factory farms, in the same way as we look back at plantation slavery and ask: How could ‘good’ and ‘decent’ people allow such a horrendous thing to happen?
The Milgram experiment (1963) famously demonstrated how ‘good’ and ‘decent’ citizens would indeed be willing to inflict serious suffering, even death, on their fellow humans when ordered so by an authority figure. The set-up is worth briefly recalling: Participants were told they would be assisting in a learning experiment by delivering increasingly strong electric shocks to a ‘learner’ behind a one-way glass whenever an incorrect answer was given. Unbeknownst to the participants, the learning experiment and the shocks weren’t real. The ‘learners’ were actors and the true purpose of the experiment was to observe obedience to authority. Despite hearing cries of pain and pleas to stop, most of the participants continued to administer what they believed were dangerously high voltages as an authority figure in a lab coat insisted that the experiment must continue. The Milgram Experiment highlighted the unsettling tendency of individuals to override their own moral instincts under social pressure. It underscores how deeply authority and social conditioning can shape human behaviour and offers insight into how the human shadow can become so titanic on the collective level.
Group behaviour in institutionalized settings often demonstrates this troubling psychological tendency of individuals following authority, assuming that the behaviour of the group is all right. This dynamic marks the genesis of group evil, where responsibility is endlessly be delegated – either vertically (‘I’m just following orders’) or horizontally (‘we are not the competent department’) within the institution. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist who investigated the psychology of human evil, was stationed at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. When he sought to interview the responsible decision-makers following a war crime at MyLai, he was met with repeated deflections. One department claimed that they were only supplying the weapons but did not determine the policy. The policy department, in turn, insisted they only decided how the war would be conducted – not whether it would be conducted. Meanwhile, the military asserted that it only followed orders from the White House. And so it went on. After repeated rounds around the halls, like a snake biting its own tail, Dr Peck had to conclude that no one in the Pentagon seemed to bear responsibility for the war at all. Such dynamics illustrate how groups can act without conscience—or even awareness—creating a moral vacuum where accountability disappears.
Other examples of this phenomenon can be found in business corporations. Like a nation state that may go into war, commit genocide and other war crimes, a corporation is a legal person and, as such, can enter into contracts, acquire property, even alter the environment. Yet, from a psychological point of view, it is but a zombie, a fiction on paper that lacks the faculties of consciousness, self-awareness, and responsible thinking. Its behaviour is governed by law and corporate policy (aimed at making a profit), not by moral or ethical standards. Current US-American law – which is rapidly exporting itself across the globe – requires a corporation to maximize profit in the interest of its shareholders, even if it has to perform immoral acts. In other words, if the CEOs of a corporation are faced with a choice between Plan A that is cheaper but harms the environment and/or violates human rights or Plan B which is ethically better but would be more expensive for the shareholders, they are obliged to choose Plan A, the unethical but cheaper option. Here, we can see the legal system itself as a manifestation of a collective shadow in which the Wetiko virus thrives, while our corporations, for lack of a higher purpose, run amok in the world, blindly chasing profit.
Transforming Human Evil
This is the Catch-22 of shadow work: While it is on the collective level that human shadow is causing the greatest harm – war, genocide, suppression, environmental destruction – the collective has neither conscience nor holds the necessary awareness to work through it. Human history shows that the best of ideas become compromised when their custodian becomes the public: As the teachings of the prophets become religions, holy wars arise; ideas of socialism cause mass-murders on a large scale under Communist regimes; the evolution to the Übermensch became distorted to murderous racial madness in Nazi Germany.
The individual, however, has the chance to draw the necessary conclusions by oscillating between perspectives. The Milgram experiments not only demonstrated that most people would commit cruel, even murderous acts when ordered by authority, they also brought forth some individuals who refused obedience. One of them, interestingly, was originally from Germany, a medical technician who grew to adolescence during Hitler’s regime. She, in a courteous but straightforward way, refused to continue the experiment when it became cruel. When interviewed about her decision, she remarked that ‘perhaps we have seen too much pain’ already - referring to the perspective she gained from having lived in a dictatorial regime before. Another participant who resisted the inhumane authority was a professor teaching Old Testament at a major divinity school. He said: ‘If one had as one’s ultimate authority God, then it trivializes human authority.’ His words indicate that he was able to switch from a personal (ego) point of view to a higher, divine perspective where the absurdity and the wrong of cruel human authority becomes apparent.
Even those participants who did obey frequently gained new perspectives as a result of having participated in the experiments. First, they suffered from the unexpected insight the experiment inflicted on them about the dark side of their own nature. This is how one participant – a social worker – reflected on his own behaviour: ‘What appalled me was that I could possess this capacity of obedience and compliance to a central idea, i.e. the value of memory experiment even after it became clear that continued adherence to this value was at the expense of violation of another value, i.e. don’t hurt someone else who is helpless and not hurting you. As my wife said, ‘You can call yourself Eichmann.’ I hope I can deal more effectively with any future conflicts of values I encounter.’ As he did, 84% of the Milgram participants said in retrospect that they were ‘glad’ or ‘very glad’ to have participated. Even though it was hard to process the inflicted insight, as they engaged with the results and drew conclusions, they grew as human beings as a result.
Explorers of past lives who encounter the evil they have committed, much like participants in the Milgram experiments, face similar inflicted insights. These revelations catalyse a transformational process that is still scarcely studied. They constitute the ultimate shadow work, leading into a dark labyrinth for which we have neither a map nor a thread to guide us through. Yet, the karmic trajectory itself appears to be a path of healing – one that traverses various perspectives, generating wisdom along the way and bringing forth the transformation of human evil, so that violence, war, and atrocities can be left behind.
In the following, we shall take a look at excerpts from Tia: The Nazi Interrogator’s subsequent karmic trajectory that will shed some light on the transformational processes inherent in the reincarnational journey.
Tia: Reborn in Israel
It seems as if no time had lapsed between the moment when the woman I raped during the war got pregnant and nine month later, when she gave birth in Palestine. This time I was the baby, a girl who grew up to be a female soldier in Israel. Striking among the memories in the rocky desert landscape was a hill I used to climb at night, joining there an old Palestinian man who also liked to sit under the stars. It was an unlikely, condemned friendship, but as we sat up there, night after night, we were far away from the human world. There were no borders there, just the stars. I loved the old man so much that I began to sneak over to his house and hang out with his family. Eventually, I became the lover of his handsome son but that was a mistake. The son and his friends kidnapped me and held me hostage until I would tell them the whereabouts of our armoury – but I never did. They gang-raped me once a day, every day until the old man realised what was happening and freed me. The whole time I suffered from a home-grown version of the Stockholm Syndrome, pretending they were not keeping me prisoner but as a guest and that they were not raping me but loving me. Back in our barracks, I was half treated like a traitor even though I held out and never gave out our military secrets. Sitting on my bed, I was trying to write down some thoughts, which I had hidden under the mattress. But my soul never recovered. Later, during fightings, I saw a child falling off a bridge. I jumped after it, even though the shallow water on rocks made it impossible to survive. I was almost glad, though, that I had an honourable way out.
Tia’s case reveals the workings of karma at their finest. Negative actions of the past reverberate but there is no vengeance or punishment to it: rape reverberates as rape, imprisonment as kidnapping, killing as untimely death. Yet, the new life already holds the seeds for healing. It offers a powerful shift of perspectives: from Nazi Germany to Israel. The loving encounter with the old Palestinian man adds wonderfully to the sentiment that being German, being Jewish, or being Palestinian are but temporary experiences, all equally part of the human journey. They form facets of the soul which are integrated into the greater evolutionary process through the famous life review in the bardo state.
Tia: Cosmic Life-Review
After going through my death in a previous life, I’m suddenly being sucked away with tremendous speed into space, leaving my physical body behind. It is hard to interpret what is happening but it feels as if some alien beings, emitting blue light, perform a kind of psychic surgery in my heart region (in an energetic sense). After this, I seem to become pure consciousness. The only form left, is a sort of three-dimensional puzzle-piece, which fits together with other similar pieces. Those other pieces come from other consciousnesses, who are bringing their own experiences from their respective previous lives. When we put the pieces together, they form a globe-shape: a kind of cosmic computer which calculates the ‘results’ of all our combined experiences. It feels like a peer-conducted experiment. Together, we assess experiences: which ones contribute to happiness and which ones do not. We decide which experiences to keep and which ones to discard. When this ‘calculation’ is complete, this globe-shaped structure explodes and all of us individual consciousnesses are catapulted back into yet another physical existence.
Before Tia was reborn into her current human life, an extraordinary memory indicates that something remarkable occurred. Ontologically, the experience – involving physicality unlike what we know here Earth – is hard to classify. Was it a bardo experience or a life in an alternate reality? We may never know. Yet, psycho-spiritually, it seems to represent a natural progression toward greater unity, belonging, and inclusiveness. Tia personally saw it as a healing gift from higher realms: as a result of this in-between-life, she was able to recalibrate her consciousness towards a better, improved version of reality.
Tia: In-between-Life on ‘Arachna Zenion’
After death, all borders of the human world irreversibly disappeared and I found myself moving with the speed of thoughts across the cosmos. At one point, I no longer feel alone. I’m held by beings who have no form or shape, yet a dark, royal blue colour accompanies their essence. They are holding me in space and on my heart they are performing a kind of energetic surgery.
Then I am sent to a semi-physical place where I get to live a life of extraordinary connectedness. The name ‘Arachna Zenion’ comes to me. It’s a place that obeys different laws of physics. For instance, sound does not travel in the air: Hence, every word ever uttered remains in place, like a statue. Walls of houses are built of music. Since the spoken word remains forever, we are using it very sparingly – only a dozen of times or so in one life. For actual communication we use touch: gestures, movements, durations of movements, locations of touch all serve like grammar and vocabulary. It is dark on ‘Arachna Zenion’: The Sun here had died some while ago but we found a way to preserve its energy and burn tiny lights everywhere, which make the place feel cosy. Since all communication requires physical touch, we are all very connected, almost reading each other’s thoughts. You cannot argue here, unless you physically fight, but that is not what we do anyway. We have lots of sports, none of which is competitive: If we run, we run holding hands and try to become faster, as a group, not as individuals.
Tia had the intuitive feeling that she had been invited to live a life on Arachna Zenion so that she could heal from all the violence on Earth. The path out of the shadow realms has opened for her. The milestones along her way were changing perspectives, opening to every aspect of an experience (seeing it both as perpetrator and as victim), and finding a vision (a world of interconnectedness) that counterbalances the chaos.
This last aspect – finding a vision – is a recurring motif that proves crucial in all journeys that are leading out of the shadow realms.
The individual, however, has the chance to draw the necessary conclusions by oscillating between perspectives. The Milgram experiments not only demonstrated that most people would commit cruel, even murderous acts when ordered by authority, they also brought forth some individuals who refused obedience. One of them, interestingly, was originally from Germany, a medical technician who grew to adolescence during Hitler’s regime. She, in a courteous but straightforward way, refused to continue the experiment when it became cruel. When interviewed about her decision, she remarked that ‘perhaps we have seen too much pain’ already - referring to the perspective she gained from having lived in a dictatorial regime before. Another participant who resisted the inhumane authority was a professor teaching Old Testament at a major divinity school. He said: ‘If one had as one’s ultimate authority God, then it trivializes human authority.’ His words indicate that he was able to switch from a personal (ego) point of view to a higher, divine perspective where the absurdity and the wrong of cruel human authority becomes apparent.
Even those participants who did obey frequently gained new perspectives as a result of having participated in the experiments. First, they suffered from the unexpected insight the experiment inflicted on them about the dark side of their own nature. This is how one participant – a social worker – reflected on his own behaviour: ‘What appalled me was that I could possess this capacity of obedience and compliance to a central idea, i.e. the value of memory experiment even after it became clear that continued adherence to this value was at the expense of violation of another value, i.e. don’t hurt someone else who is helpless and not hurting you. As my wife said, ‘You can call yourself Eichmann.’ I hope I can deal more effectively with any future conflicts of values I encounter.’ As he did, 84% of the Milgram participants said in retrospect that they were ‘glad’ or ‘very glad’ to have participated. Even though it was hard to process the inflicted insight, as they engaged with the results and drew conclusions, they grew as human beings as a result.
Explorers of past lives who encounter the evil they have committed, much like participants in the Milgram experiments, face similar inflicted insights. These revelations catalyse a transformational process that is still scarcely studied. They constitute the ultimate shadow work, leading into a dark labyrinth for which we have neither a map nor a thread to guide us through. Yet, the karmic trajectory itself appears to be a path of healing – one that traverses various perspectives, generating wisdom along the way and bringing forth the transformation of human evil, so that violence, war, and atrocities can be left behind.
In the following, we shall take a look at excerpts from Tia: The Nazi Interrogator’s subsequent karmic trajectory that will shed some light on the transformational processes inherent in the reincarnational journey.
Tia: Reborn in Israel
It seems as if no time had lapsed between the moment when the woman I raped during the war got pregnant and nine month later, when she gave birth in Palestine. This time I was the baby, a girl who grew up to be a female soldier in Israel. Striking among the memories in the rocky desert landscape was a hill I used to climb at night, joining there an old Palestinian man who also liked to sit under the stars. It was an unlikely, condemned friendship, but as we sat up there, night after night, we were far away from the human world. There were no borders there, just the stars. I loved the old man so much that I began to sneak over to his house and hang out with his family. Eventually, I became the lover of his handsome son but that was a mistake. The son and his friends kidnapped me and held me hostage until I would tell them the whereabouts of our armoury – but I never did. They gang-raped me once a day, every day until the old man realised what was happening and freed me. The whole time I suffered from a home-grown version of the Stockholm Syndrome, pretending they were not keeping me prisoner but as a guest and that they were not raping me but loving me. Back in our barracks, I was half treated like a traitor even though I held out and never gave out our military secrets. Sitting on my bed, I was trying to write down some thoughts, which I had hidden under the mattress. But my soul never recovered. Later, during fightings, I saw a child falling off a bridge. I jumped after it, even though the shallow water on rocks made it impossible to survive. I was almost glad, though, that I had an honourable way out.
Tia’s case reveals the workings of karma at their finest. Negative actions of the past reverberate but there is no vengeance or punishment to it: rape reverberates as rape, imprisonment as kidnapping, killing as untimely death. Yet, the new life already holds the seeds for healing. It offers a powerful shift of perspectives: from Nazi Germany to Israel. The loving encounter with the old Palestinian man adds wonderfully to the sentiment that being German, being Jewish, or being Palestinian are but temporary experiences, all equally part of the human journey. They form facets of the soul which are integrated into the greater evolutionary process through the famous life review in the bardo state.
Tia: Cosmic Life-Review
After going through my death in a previous life, I’m suddenly being sucked away with tremendous speed into space, leaving my physical body behind. It is hard to interpret what is happening but it feels as if some alien beings, emitting blue light, perform a kind of psychic surgery in my heart region (in an energetic sense). After this, I seem to become pure consciousness. The only form left, is a sort of three-dimensional puzzle-piece, which fits together with other similar pieces. Those other pieces come from other consciousnesses, who are bringing their own experiences from their respective previous lives. When we put the pieces together, they form a globe-shape: a kind of cosmic computer which calculates the ‘results’ of all our combined experiences. It feels like a peer-conducted experiment. Together, we assess experiences: which ones contribute to happiness and which ones do not. We decide which experiences to keep and which ones to discard. When this ‘calculation’ is complete, this globe-shaped structure explodes and all of us individual consciousnesses are catapulted back into yet another physical existence.
Before Tia was reborn into her current human life, an extraordinary memory indicates that something remarkable occurred. Ontologically, the experience – involving physicality unlike what we know here Earth – is hard to classify. Was it a bardo experience or a life in an alternate reality? We may never know. Yet, psycho-spiritually, it seems to represent a natural progression toward greater unity, belonging, and inclusiveness. Tia personally saw it as a healing gift from higher realms: as a result of this in-between-life, she was able to recalibrate her consciousness towards a better, improved version of reality.
Tia: In-between-Life on ‘Arachna Zenion’
After death, all borders of the human world irreversibly disappeared and I found myself moving with the speed of thoughts across the cosmos. At one point, I no longer feel alone. I’m held by beings who have no form or shape, yet a dark, royal blue colour accompanies their essence. They are holding me in space and on my heart they are performing a kind of energetic surgery.
Then I am sent to a semi-physical place where I get to live a life of extraordinary connectedness. The name ‘Arachna Zenion’ comes to me. It’s a place that obeys different laws of physics. For instance, sound does not travel in the air: Hence, every word ever uttered remains in place, like a statue. Walls of houses are built of music. Since the spoken word remains forever, we are using it very sparingly – only a dozen of times or so in one life. For actual communication we use touch: gestures, movements, durations of movements, locations of touch all serve like grammar and vocabulary. It is dark on ‘Arachna Zenion’: The Sun here had died some while ago but we found a way to preserve its energy and burn tiny lights everywhere, which make the place feel cosy. Since all communication requires physical touch, we are all very connected, almost reading each other’s thoughts. You cannot argue here, unless you physically fight, but that is not what we do anyway. We have lots of sports, none of which is competitive: If we run, we run holding hands and try to become faster, as a group, not as individuals.
Tia had the intuitive feeling that she had been invited to live a life on Arachna Zenion so that she could heal from all the violence on Earth. The path out of the shadow realms has opened for her. The milestones along her way were changing perspectives, opening to every aspect of an experience (seeing it both as perpetrator and as victim), and finding a vision (a world of interconnectedness) that counterbalances the chaos.
This last aspect – finding a vision – is a recurring motif that proves crucial in all journeys that are leading out of the shadow realms.
Healing Visions
Among the dreams Charlotte Beradt collected during the Nazi era – where both victims and perpetrators had nightmares – the only ones that weren’t nightmarish were those dreamt by resistance fighters. There was no Kafkaesque absurdity and paralysing fear in the dreams of those who carried a positive idea. Instead, there was a sense of adventure, also real danger, yes, but the actions of the freedom fighters carried meaning and turned suffering into hope. Here is one of their dreams:
On a sunny day, I carried a child in a long white dress to be baptized. The way to the church was leading up a steep mountain. Yet, firmly and safely I carried the child. Unexpectedly, a crevasse opened in front of me on the glacier. I plunged into the abyss, but before that, I just had enough time to place the child safely on the other side.
This was the dream of Sophie Scholl – condemned to death at the age of 21 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at the University of Munich – from the night before her execution.i She interpreted the dream’s meaning to her cellmate as follows:
The child in the white dress is our idea. The idea will prevail in spite of all obstacles. We were permitted to be pioneers, but we must die early for the sake of that idea.
Scholl’s child, the idea of freedom, did indeed survive. A copy of the anti-Nazi leaflets she distributed as member of the White Rose resistance group, eventually made its way to the United Kingdom. Recognising its powerful message, the Allied Forces decided to reproduce the leaflet on a massive scale. In mid-1943, they dropped millions of copies over Germany from the air, spreading the call for freedom and justice far beyond the original reach of the group. Carried across the skies, her call for freedom became a symbol of hope and resistance and Sophie Scholl is still remembered as being among Unsere Besten (Our Best), the greatest Germans who have ever lived.
Visions such as Sophie Scholl’s, arising from the darkest chapters of human history, demonstrate the real value of shadow work: finding the light, finding the value within.
On a sunny day, I carried a child in a long white dress to be baptized. The way to the church was leading up a steep mountain. Yet, firmly and safely I carried the child. Unexpectedly, a crevasse opened in front of me on the glacier. I plunged into the abyss, but before that, I just had enough time to place the child safely on the other side.
This was the dream of Sophie Scholl – condemned to death at the age of 21 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at the University of Munich – from the night before her execution.i She interpreted the dream’s meaning to her cellmate as follows:
The child in the white dress is our idea. The idea will prevail in spite of all obstacles. We were permitted to be pioneers, but we must die early for the sake of that idea.
Scholl’s child, the idea of freedom, did indeed survive. A copy of the anti-Nazi leaflets she distributed as member of the White Rose resistance group, eventually made its way to the United Kingdom. Recognising its powerful message, the Allied Forces decided to reproduce the leaflet on a massive scale. In mid-1943, they dropped millions of copies over Germany from the air, spreading the call for freedom and justice far beyond the original reach of the group. Carried across the skies, her call for freedom became a symbol of hope and resistance and Sophie Scholl is still remembered as being among Unsere Besten (Our Best), the greatest Germans who have ever lived.
Visions such as Sophie Scholl’s, arising from the darkest chapters of human history, demonstrate the real value of shadow work: finding the light, finding the value within.
Underground Treasure Hunt
If we look at all the issues and themes – COEX systems – within a person’s life and in their karmic trajectory, from past lives and the present, from dreams and visions, concerning drawbacks and goals, weaknesses and strengths all combined, we learn that the shadow always carries its light counterpart. Furthermore, it is not always the evil or the shameful gets banned into the shadow realm. Often, we find our very talents and powers there, waiting to be liberated. Therefore, shadow work does not equal simply facing our psychological terrors, if conducted with courage and wisdom, it quickly may turn into an underground treasure hunt.
Margaret: The Owner of the Green Pendant
Margaret is an advanced spiritual practitioner, who has intelligence, healing and therapeutic talents, as well as a number of relevant qualifications, yet at the time we began her karmic explorations, she felt she could never put them fully to use. We have examined the challenges of her current life with the karmic imprints and resources she inherited from the past, as well as her dreams and visions to find her highest path.
Challenges of her current life
Margaret grew up in the tension field between an over-demanding father, who loved her conditionally, expecting her to be the best in everything, without receiving fair due for anything, and a jealous, bipolar, and violent mother who tried to keep her low. She had a hard time separating from an abusive first husband, as she has a challenging time now to decide on a current relationship with a nice but emotionally distant and spiritually incompatible husband. Even though she has been married most of her life and had a lover, Sergei, she was very attracted to, she felt lonely most of the time.
Karmic Imprints
- Magic under House-Arrest. In this past life, she found herself imprisoned at home by her own mother and the husband she had to marry, so that she would fit in. Even though the intention of her mother was basically good – she wanted to save her from being burned as a witch by the village – the situation became abusive: She was forced to stay at home for the best part of her life, while her husband and mother carried on an affair with each other.
- The Vain Princess. Visiting the Museum, Margaret found a bedroom where in a past life, she used to sleep as a Princess, who was incessantly waiting for her Prince to come. Yet, since no man was ever good enough for her, or even dared to try after a while, she remained alone for the rest of her life.
Resources from the Past
- Power and Love in the Egyptian Temple. In a past life, we explored in relation to her lover Sergei, she found herself in an Ancient Egyptian temple, as a god-like priestess. Her body felt light and amazing, with wings, not quite human. People came to her on telepathic invitation. Her lover at that time was a powerful human who came worshipping her in the temple, where they shared an amazing exchange. She gave him protection and love, while he was more about strength and courage. She helped him to unlock a universal power inside himself.
- Finding the Green Pendant. In the Antique Shop, Margaret was given a pendant with a green stone which she used to wear. This is how she remembered the life, in which the pendant belonged to her:
‘I used to wear the Pendant with the Green Stone, at a place that was full of light. I have a strange, elongated head; not sure what my body is like but my feet are not human. Then I moved back in time, when I learned to love. I moved very fast in space and realised that I was pure, bright light (like a bright star) and one with others. We are all one. There’s only love here, so bright and light. What a beautiful place! We are all together as one. One being. I don’t remember feeling this good ever in my life.
Then we were divided. We just knew, we had to do it. There’s this strong impression that I am a teacher now… not even walking… I’m in the air… moving around... There are other beings around me… I’m teaching them, without speaking, without even touching them… I just teach them love. These other beings, they didn’t know love. They were the survivors of the war. They stopped believing in love. I’m whispering into their ears, not necessarily words, but energy which makes the fears melt away.
There were so many places to visit after the war, to heal those places. After the war, after the holocaust, the survivors did not believe in anything, everything was washed out, feelings, colours… it was all black and white. We had to teach more than love. People did not believe that anything depended on them. They did not trust anyone, they could not trust each other. We have to teach them that they can change a lot. I had to bring their souls back – ask for their souls to come back and they did. I showed them that they do have a choice.’
Dreams of Ascension
Margaret’s karmic puzzle pieces started to come together in a series of dreams that featured a multi-tiered landscape. Down in a basement, some adoption papers were waiting for her to sign them, to adopt a little girl, in order to protect – like Sophie Scholl – the child. When she was preparing for signature, she realised that her (real) name, in her native language, actually consisted of the words ‘god’ and ‘fame or glory.’ That prompted her recognition that opening her third chakra personal power is a crucial evolutionary step in this lifetime, in order to ‘work in God’s name.’ She was called to boldly step into her power as a beyond-human, magical, helper, healer, teacher, and guide for others to raise their vibration and ascend. This was symbolised in her dream world as a climb upwards through a ‘production line’ (later revealed as levels of consciousness) into the beautiful mountains, as well as a ‘graduation party’ she attended. Once up in the mountains, she feels beautiful openness and a connection to all nature and to all creation.
The beauty of reincarnational shadow work lies in the realisation that neither consciousness nor life are static. Living lives after lives, implies a process of change, and we can see that in the transformation of those areas of life that serve as evolutionary markers. Margaret’s being held back by her family, in past lives and this one, was at the same time a call for stepping into her own power. If we learn to see these transformational opportunities, we will be less scared to face any weakness in our character or setback in our lives. We are becoming alchemists, who see the challenge of transmuting ‘lower metals’ into ‘gold’ as life’s most worthy adventure. We will be able to face even those aspects of our existence that most of us are conditioned to simply look away from...
Margaret: The Owner of the Green Pendant
Margaret is an advanced spiritual practitioner, who has intelligence, healing and therapeutic talents, as well as a number of relevant qualifications, yet at the time we began her karmic explorations, she felt she could never put them fully to use. We have examined the challenges of her current life with the karmic imprints and resources she inherited from the past, as well as her dreams and visions to find her highest path.
Challenges of her current life
Margaret grew up in the tension field between an over-demanding father, who loved her conditionally, expecting her to be the best in everything, without receiving fair due for anything, and a jealous, bipolar, and violent mother who tried to keep her low. She had a hard time separating from an abusive first husband, as she has a challenging time now to decide on a current relationship with a nice but emotionally distant and spiritually incompatible husband. Even though she has been married most of her life and had a lover, Sergei, she was very attracted to, she felt lonely most of the time.
Karmic Imprints
- Magic under House-Arrest. In this past life, she found herself imprisoned at home by her own mother and the husband she had to marry, so that she would fit in. Even though the intention of her mother was basically good – she wanted to save her from being burned as a witch by the village – the situation became abusive: She was forced to stay at home for the best part of her life, while her husband and mother carried on an affair with each other.
- The Vain Princess. Visiting the Museum, Margaret found a bedroom where in a past life, she used to sleep as a Princess, who was incessantly waiting for her Prince to come. Yet, since no man was ever good enough for her, or even dared to try after a while, she remained alone for the rest of her life.
Resources from the Past
- Power and Love in the Egyptian Temple. In a past life, we explored in relation to her lover Sergei, she found herself in an Ancient Egyptian temple, as a god-like priestess. Her body felt light and amazing, with wings, not quite human. People came to her on telepathic invitation. Her lover at that time was a powerful human who came worshipping her in the temple, where they shared an amazing exchange. She gave him protection and love, while he was more about strength and courage. She helped him to unlock a universal power inside himself.
- Finding the Green Pendant. In the Antique Shop, Margaret was given a pendant with a green stone which she used to wear. This is how she remembered the life, in which the pendant belonged to her:
‘I used to wear the Pendant with the Green Stone, at a place that was full of light. I have a strange, elongated head; not sure what my body is like but my feet are not human. Then I moved back in time, when I learned to love. I moved very fast in space and realised that I was pure, bright light (like a bright star) and one with others. We are all one. There’s only love here, so bright and light. What a beautiful place! We are all together as one. One being. I don’t remember feeling this good ever in my life.
Then we were divided. We just knew, we had to do it. There’s this strong impression that I am a teacher now… not even walking… I’m in the air… moving around... There are other beings around me… I’m teaching them, without speaking, without even touching them… I just teach them love. These other beings, they didn’t know love. They were the survivors of the war. They stopped believing in love. I’m whispering into their ears, not necessarily words, but energy which makes the fears melt away.
There were so many places to visit after the war, to heal those places. After the war, after the holocaust, the survivors did not believe in anything, everything was washed out, feelings, colours… it was all black and white. We had to teach more than love. People did not believe that anything depended on them. They did not trust anyone, they could not trust each other. We have to teach them that they can change a lot. I had to bring their souls back – ask for their souls to come back and they did. I showed them that they do have a choice.’
Dreams of Ascension
Margaret’s karmic puzzle pieces started to come together in a series of dreams that featured a multi-tiered landscape. Down in a basement, some adoption papers were waiting for her to sign them, to adopt a little girl, in order to protect – like Sophie Scholl – the child. When she was preparing for signature, she realised that her (real) name, in her native language, actually consisted of the words ‘god’ and ‘fame or glory.’ That prompted her recognition that opening her third chakra personal power is a crucial evolutionary step in this lifetime, in order to ‘work in God’s name.’ She was called to boldly step into her power as a beyond-human, magical, helper, healer, teacher, and guide for others to raise their vibration and ascend. This was symbolised in her dream world as a climb upwards through a ‘production line’ (later revealed as levels of consciousness) into the beautiful mountains, as well as a ‘graduation party’ she attended. Once up in the mountains, she feels beautiful openness and a connection to all nature and to all creation.
The beauty of reincarnational shadow work lies in the realisation that neither consciousness nor life are static. Living lives after lives, implies a process of change, and we can see that in the transformation of those areas of life that serve as evolutionary markers. Margaret’s being held back by her family, in past lives and this one, was at the same time a call for stepping into her own power. If we learn to see these transformational opportunities, we will be less scared to face any weakness in our character or setback in our lives. We are becoming alchemists, who see the challenge of transmuting ‘lower metals’ into ‘gold’ as life’s most worthy adventure. We will be able to face even those aspects of our existence that most of us are conditioned to simply look away from...
Special Issues of the Shadow Realm
Suicide
Banned deep into the realms of the shadow remain some issues laden with so much judgement and negative religious connotation that we hardly ever dare to look at them. Many of them concern cases in which the pain and hopelessness of a person became so overwhelming that they took their own lives. Abrahamic religions see suicide as a sin; even today, the Catholic Church often denies a proper burial for those who killed themselves. In general, Dharmic religions also view suicide as spiritually unacceptable, although they leave greater room for exceptions.
In our past life work, we encountered a few cases in which individuals remembered committing suicide in a past life. These memories prompted us to examine such experiences more closely and explore the impact of past-life suicides on present lives. More broadly, we sought to understand how suicide influences the future evolution of consciousness. By learning from past-life experiences, we can gain insights into suicidal thoughts in the present – whether they arise personally, in loved ones, or in a therapeutic setting.
Irene had memories from a past life in which she jumped off a high building coming back to her gradually. First, the remembrance filled her with a sense of guilt and shame, as this was not something she would see as part of herself or would want to identify with.
Elena began to recall a past life in which she had jumped from a tall building. As the memory resurfaced gradually, it brought up in her a profound sense of guilt and shame. This past act was completely at odds with how she saw herself in her current life, making it difficult to reconcile with the memory or accept it as part of her broader identity.
Elena: The Abandoned ‘Princess’
Elena began to have memories of having been a ‘princess,’ even though she only had the lower rank of an aristocratic daughter, whose father died in battle when she was only 8 years old. Two years after that, her mother fell ill, While she had to watch her in desperation on her death bed, she started to feel her stomach churning. After becoming an orphan, Elena remained alone in the world, with only the servants taking care of her but without any emotional connections. Instead, they harboured unspoken jealousy and envy towards her as the privileged one. The young ‘princess,’ however, felt so ill and hopeless in her loneliness that one day she climbed up the tower of the castle, and jumped into her death from a three storeys height.
Elena, reflecting on her present life, noticed that a particular sentiment has always shadowed her. Regardless, how upbeat her current personality and upbringing was, she always carried some amargura (from her native Spanish, meaning sour bitterness). She identified this as the residue from the helplessness and abandonment the ‘Princess’ felt. Quite specifically, this amargura tends to emerge when she tries to sit down writing which is her talent and calling, yet so far has not been brought to fruition. The feeling of amargura holds her hostage in an aura of self-abandonment.
The physical killing of oneself and the spiritual killing of her potential by not pursuing a talent are related issues at different points of the scale. This is a tendency we can often observe when we compare various past lives of an individual: Until an issue is fully solved, it keeps coming back, although in milder or more subtle forms. (For instance, somebody who was burned at the stake for pagan beliefs may not experience the same level of persecution today, but still may feel inhibited by social pressure when it comes to practising herbal medicine.)
The residual energy of self-annihilation in Elena’s case was amplified by feelings of guilt. Her initial thoughts about her emerging memory were self-critical. She was almost ashamed having to associate with something so unlike her present self and struggled to forgive herself for committing suicide. However, as with every shadow encounter, the negative content she confronted also pointed towards a transformative light – that would help to overcome the limitations of the past.
The dark legacy of self-abandonment also had an external component that manifested in the abandonment by others. The ‘Princess’ experienced not only the loss of her parents; the servants who became the caretakers of the orphan, abandoned her emotionally. Not only did they fail to relate to her loneliness and vulnerability, they harboured feelings of envy and jealousy towards her. Even today, through meditation and experiences in altered states of consciousness, Elena is aware of the presence of non-physical entities in her life who intrude her energetic field. For instance, when she started teaching classes on multidimensional topics, Elena recalls voices telling her to ‘get out of this classroom’ as well as episodes of sudden sickness and anger that were meant to keep her from fulfilling her mission. All of this corresponded with her internal self-sabotage.
In order to work with these issues of amargura, abandonment, and self-sabotage, in the follow-up session, I asked Elena to visualise the energy of the ‘Princess’ who killed herself compared to the energy of her present life. She likened the energy of ‘Princess’ to a rock: very stable and dense, dark, rough, and hard. Her present energy is more like water: flexible, moving with ease, supporting life. The difference between these two types of energies signifies the evolutionary leap that occurred between then and now. Next, I asked Elena to visualise the same evolutionary leap yet again, into the future. This time, she perceived a light, cosmic energy that appeared as ‘sweet orange jelly’ symbolising for her the sweetness (dulcura) of existence.
Perceiving an energetic imprint of the future can be powerful. It does not require setting specific and detailed goals but shows a good direction like a lighthouse suddenly showing up on the shore. It can also serve as an evolutionary marker. For example, if a possibility or choice opens up in life, one can check it against the energetic imprint. If the decision feels in alignment with it, it marks an evolutionary step in the right direction.
The shadow carries its own counterpart: the light side of the same issue. In past life therapy, we can work with shadow issues by identifying and cultivating their opposite. Elena found dulcura (sweetness) of life to be the antidote for amargura (bitterness) which she began to increase in her life through cultivating a sweet, light sense of being. Her self-abandonment and judgmentalism could be counteracted through sharing her experiences through writing and teaching. As soon as she realised that the envious intrusion could only be dispelled by connecting both with others as well as her talents, Elena picked up the pen and got back into writing.
Like Elena, Landon has always felt some dark energies present in his life, which become more prevalent when things go wrong. He attended only one past life session and found the emerging memory ‘weirdly interesting’ but not in itself relevant and empowering. Some interesting conclusions, however, could be gained by scrutinising the memory against his present life experiences. He realised that he had to use all the resources available to him now – resources that had not been available to him once upon a time when he was a soldier who hung himself.
Landon: The Soldier Who Hung Himself
The past life recall began with a heartbreaking scene: a soldier forced to leave his injured horse behind on a scorched battlefield. The memory was charged with sorrow – not only for the loss but for the guilt of leading an innocent creature into the dangers of war. The soldier endured multiple traumatic events (explosions, fires, failed leadership, exhausting marches), culminating in severe post-traumatic stress. When the war ended, parades of flowers filled the streets, he felt only confusion, exhaustion, and detachment.
Later he saw himself at home with a woman (likely his wife) who constantly berated him for not doing enough, not being enough. Although aware of his shortcomings, he felt mentally unable to do more and also felt that he wasn’t getting credit for trying.
On a drunken, impulsive occasion, he decided ‘enough is enough,’ took some rope, went into the winter cold, and hung himself. He experienced his death as both ‘liberating and awful.’ After his consciousness left his body, he experienced a shift: His anger and resentment turned into guilt as he noticed his wife coming out in just a thin dress, facing the snow and the consequences of his actions. In the bardo state, his (present-life) mother appeared, urging him to work on and overcome what happened here.
Landon observed a role reversal in his present life, compared to the experience of the suicidal soldier. In his current life, his girlfriend is suffering from recurring anxiety, depression, and bouts of suicidal thoughts. He feels a desire, an almost obligatory urge to help her with the resources he has, yet also a burden from the recognition that he cannot do the internal work for her. Still, he believes his own experience gives him a deeper understanding of her struggles, making him less judgmental than others might be, and more understanding of the fact that such thoughts do not necessarily reflect the negation of life, but a natural urge to escape suffering.
In both cases, working with past life memories has dramatically shifted the evaluation of suicide, moving it away from being seen as shameful or sinful. Viewed through the lens of past lives, suicide can be understood as an unfortunate but temporary detour of evolution that occurs when an individual exhausts their resources. It does not result in eternal loss of the soul or damnation. It highlights, however, the danger inherent in all traumatic situations in which the individual unlearns to love themselves.
The following case is of Amélie, a psychotherapist in her 70s from the South coast of France, who came to hypnotherapy after she had been diagnosed with cancer. As someone who has already done a lot of internal work on herself, she came with the awareness of her tendency to judge quickly and feel resentment when others did not behave in ways her controlling ego would have liked. During our work together, it became increasingly apparent that a softer, more loving side of herself wanted to emerge – not only to love and serve others as she has intended throughout her life, but first and foremost to love and accept herself.
In our past life work, we encountered a few cases in which individuals remembered committing suicide in a past life. These memories prompted us to examine such experiences more closely and explore the impact of past-life suicides on present lives. More broadly, we sought to understand how suicide influences the future evolution of consciousness. By learning from past-life experiences, we can gain insights into suicidal thoughts in the present – whether they arise personally, in loved ones, or in a therapeutic setting.
Irene had memories from a past life in which she jumped off a high building coming back to her gradually. First, the remembrance filled her with a sense of guilt and shame, as this was not something she would see as part of herself or would want to identify with.
Elena began to recall a past life in which she had jumped from a tall building. As the memory resurfaced gradually, it brought up in her a profound sense of guilt and shame. This past act was completely at odds with how she saw herself in her current life, making it difficult to reconcile with the memory or accept it as part of her broader identity.
Elena: The Abandoned ‘Princess’
Elena began to have memories of having been a ‘princess,’ even though she only had the lower rank of an aristocratic daughter, whose father died in battle when she was only 8 years old. Two years after that, her mother fell ill, While she had to watch her in desperation on her death bed, she started to feel her stomach churning. After becoming an orphan, Elena remained alone in the world, with only the servants taking care of her but without any emotional connections. Instead, they harboured unspoken jealousy and envy towards her as the privileged one. The young ‘princess,’ however, felt so ill and hopeless in her loneliness that one day she climbed up the tower of the castle, and jumped into her death from a three storeys height.
Elena, reflecting on her present life, noticed that a particular sentiment has always shadowed her. Regardless, how upbeat her current personality and upbringing was, she always carried some amargura (from her native Spanish, meaning sour bitterness). She identified this as the residue from the helplessness and abandonment the ‘Princess’ felt. Quite specifically, this amargura tends to emerge when she tries to sit down writing which is her talent and calling, yet so far has not been brought to fruition. The feeling of amargura holds her hostage in an aura of self-abandonment.
The physical killing of oneself and the spiritual killing of her potential by not pursuing a talent are related issues at different points of the scale. This is a tendency we can often observe when we compare various past lives of an individual: Until an issue is fully solved, it keeps coming back, although in milder or more subtle forms. (For instance, somebody who was burned at the stake for pagan beliefs may not experience the same level of persecution today, but still may feel inhibited by social pressure when it comes to practising herbal medicine.)
The residual energy of self-annihilation in Elena’s case was amplified by feelings of guilt. Her initial thoughts about her emerging memory were self-critical. She was almost ashamed having to associate with something so unlike her present self and struggled to forgive herself for committing suicide. However, as with every shadow encounter, the negative content she confronted also pointed towards a transformative light – that would help to overcome the limitations of the past.
The dark legacy of self-abandonment also had an external component that manifested in the abandonment by others. The ‘Princess’ experienced not only the loss of her parents; the servants who became the caretakers of the orphan, abandoned her emotionally. Not only did they fail to relate to her loneliness and vulnerability, they harboured feelings of envy and jealousy towards her. Even today, through meditation and experiences in altered states of consciousness, Elena is aware of the presence of non-physical entities in her life who intrude her energetic field. For instance, when she started teaching classes on multidimensional topics, Elena recalls voices telling her to ‘get out of this classroom’ as well as episodes of sudden sickness and anger that were meant to keep her from fulfilling her mission. All of this corresponded with her internal self-sabotage.
In order to work with these issues of amargura, abandonment, and self-sabotage, in the follow-up session, I asked Elena to visualise the energy of the ‘Princess’ who killed herself compared to the energy of her present life. She likened the energy of ‘Princess’ to a rock: very stable and dense, dark, rough, and hard. Her present energy is more like water: flexible, moving with ease, supporting life. The difference between these two types of energies signifies the evolutionary leap that occurred between then and now. Next, I asked Elena to visualise the same evolutionary leap yet again, into the future. This time, she perceived a light, cosmic energy that appeared as ‘sweet orange jelly’ symbolising for her the sweetness (dulcura) of existence.
Perceiving an energetic imprint of the future can be powerful. It does not require setting specific and detailed goals but shows a good direction like a lighthouse suddenly showing up on the shore. It can also serve as an evolutionary marker. For example, if a possibility or choice opens up in life, one can check it against the energetic imprint. If the decision feels in alignment with it, it marks an evolutionary step in the right direction.
The shadow carries its own counterpart: the light side of the same issue. In past life therapy, we can work with shadow issues by identifying and cultivating their opposite. Elena found dulcura (sweetness) of life to be the antidote for amargura (bitterness) which she began to increase in her life through cultivating a sweet, light sense of being. Her self-abandonment and judgmentalism could be counteracted through sharing her experiences through writing and teaching. As soon as she realised that the envious intrusion could only be dispelled by connecting both with others as well as her talents, Elena picked up the pen and got back into writing.
Like Elena, Landon has always felt some dark energies present in his life, which become more prevalent when things go wrong. He attended only one past life session and found the emerging memory ‘weirdly interesting’ but not in itself relevant and empowering. Some interesting conclusions, however, could be gained by scrutinising the memory against his present life experiences. He realised that he had to use all the resources available to him now – resources that had not been available to him once upon a time when he was a soldier who hung himself.
Landon: The Soldier Who Hung Himself
The past life recall began with a heartbreaking scene: a soldier forced to leave his injured horse behind on a scorched battlefield. The memory was charged with sorrow – not only for the loss but for the guilt of leading an innocent creature into the dangers of war. The soldier endured multiple traumatic events (explosions, fires, failed leadership, exhausting marches), culminating in severe post-traumatic stress. When the war ended, parades of flowers filled the streets, he felt only confusion, exhaustion, and detachment.
Later he saw himself at home with a woman (likely his wife) who constantly berated him for not doing enough, not being enough. Although aware of his shortcomings, he felt mentally unable to do more and also felt that he wasn’t getting credit for trying.
On a drunken, impulsive occasion, he decided ‘enough is enough,’ took some rope, went into the winter cold, and hung himself. He experienced his death as both ‘liberating and awful.’ After his consciousness left his body, he experienced a shift: His anger and resentment turned into guilt as he noticed his wife coming out in just a thin dress, facing the snow and the consequences of his actions. In the bardo state, his (present-life) mother appeared, urging him to work on and overcome what happened here.
Landon observed a role reversal in his present life, compared to the experience of the suicidal soldier. In his current life, his girlfriend is suffering from recurring anxiety, depression, and bouts of suicidal thoughts. He feels a desire, an almost obligatory urge to help her with the resources he has, yet also a burden from the recognition that he cannot do the internal work for her. Still, he believes his own experience gives him a deeper understanding of her struggles, making him less judgmental than others might be, and more understanding of the fact that such thoughts do not necessarily reflect the negation of life, but a natural urge to escape suffering.
In both cases, working with past life memories has dramatically shifted the evaluation of suicide, moving it away from being seen as shameful or sinful. Viewed through the lens of past lives, suicide can be understood as an unfortunate but temporary detour of evolution that occurs when an individual exhausts their resources. It does not result in eternal loss of the soul or damnation. It highlights, however, the danger inherent in all traumatic situations in which the individual unlearns to love themselves.
The following case is of Amélie, a psychotherapist in her 70s from the South coast of France, who came to hypnotherapy after she had been diagnosed with cancer. As someone who has already done a lot of internal work on herself, she came with the awareness of her tendency to judge quickly and feel resentment when others did not behave in ways her controlling ego would have liked. During our work together, it became increasingly apparent that a softer, more loving side of herself wanted to emerge – not only to love and serve others as she has intended throughout her life, but first and foremost to love and accept herself.
Cancer Care
In our first session, dedicated to parts work, Amélie saw the same image she had seen 40 years ago in a psychosynthesis session: Next to the part of herself that appeared as a heart-centred, loving woman in a flowing dress, there was also the part looking like a ‘bulldozer.’ That part only wanted to get the job done, with a laser-like focus but rather inconsiderate of others.
In search of her personal cancer cure, we went in search for a synthesis, first by visiting a resource life, where Amélie met her future self as a wise old healer who gave her the following advice:
‘Engage in the sacred in your life. (Right now, you are too engaged in the outer world, in your work.) Actively welcome what you know is true. When you are in devotion, you’re the happiest. Expose and speak of your true nature. A beacon of love, that you are…’
Amélie: From Love to Self-love and Back
The next session, we began by formulating the question:
Where did this cancer originate from?
This focused intent led to a time and space, where she found herself walking across a dusty plain, towards a castle. She saw herself wearing pointy shoes and being around 12 years of age: a rather playful, agile, slender girl.
As nothing happened later that would change the course of this life, I asked her to go to the moment of her death, which she experienced in the circle of a loving husband and children. Yet, something was missing.
After that, we were bringing in her higher self, who confirmed that it was not the longing, but her own harsh judgment about herself that was the seed of cancer. This life we have seen was about opening to a spiritual reality, not necessarily about knowing. Everything comes at the right time and there is no need to make yourself sick over perceived failure. As soon as she has true self-acceptance, Amélie’s higher self said, there’s no need to have cancer in your body.
This need for self-acceptance has turned out to be the key to our therapy. We used various techniques to promote self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, and self-love. We used the Ho’oponopono mantra: I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you to be spoken to herself. We visited the internal realm of the Sun-healers, who helped her release all cancer, burden, bad energy into the Earth, while receiving new life force energy coming from above. We spoke to her body cells, which revealed that cancer cells were like non-cooperative tribal members, who haven’t been loved enough. In order to heal, she has to give herself permission to speak her truth, to be irritated, to be human. (Her cells rejoiced when she was “finally getting it.”)
During regressions into childhood – and other traumatic experiences, Amélie was able to send acknowledgement, love, and compassion to her former self, who has suppressed many of her own suffering for the benefit of others. The therapist here served as a witness for the acknowledgment of the wrong and suffering which happened to her, which is a first step to trauma healing. On the emotional level, it came as an epiphany that in any conflict and confrontation two people are suffering, never only one – and this became a training in raising the same level of compassion for oneself than for others.
Simultaneously, with these recognition came a shift in the language of the suggestions used in hypnosis for her. Amélie herself observed that her system is not responding well to aggressive anti-cancer affirmations and imagery that aimed at attacking cancer cells in order to destroy them. Rather, we developed a language that is extending self-love to every cell of the body, including the cancer cells, which were visualised as waking up from a bad dream and returning to be useful, healthy cells of the body. In line with the new personal paradigm of self-acceptance and allowance, the language of the affirmations became more permissive and surrendered, for example by saying that “natural, divine intelligence is returning my body to its natural, healthy blue-print.”
In search of her personal cancer cure, we went in search for a synthesis, first by visiting a resource life, where Amélie met her future self as a wise old healer who gave her the following advice:
‘Engage in the sacred in your life. (Right now, you are too engaged in the outer world, in your work.) Actively welcome what you know is true. When you are in devotion, you’re the happiest. Expose and speak of your true nature. A beacon of love, that you are…’
Amélie: From Love to Self-love and Back
The next session, we began by formulating the question:
Where did this cancer originate from?
This focused intent led to a time and space, where she found herself walking across a dusty plain, towards a castle. She saw herself wearing pointy shoes and being around 12 years of age: a rather playful, agile, slender girl.
- How is it that you belong to this castle?
- My parents are rulers of a large kingdom.
- How does that feel to you?
- They are always trying to get me calm, to act more appropriately. I would like to have some friends I could play with. I don’t notice having any brothers or sisters. My parents love me but with the expectation that soon I will assume my role. I don’t really like the prospect of that at all! I don’t want to be like my parents. It’s rigid and boring here, I’m not really free. I’m constantly wondering how I can get away from this.
- Is there anything else significant in your childhood?
- I play, whenever I can, with the servants’ children. We make up things outside in nature and walk into caves. Here, we have a sense of freedom: We are having fun, no one is telling me what to do, I can be myself.
- What is happening when you grow up?
- I’m sitting on a throne kind of thing. People are coming to me, asking for help, bringing their life issues. They feel that I’m more accessible than my parents were. I’m not so into formality.
- What sort of answers are you giving?
- I’m actually trying to help them, similar to what I do now.
- Do you have anyone who helps you?
- Yes, I was assigned a helper. (She’s my girlfriend in the current life.) She is a little bit shy because of the difference in our roles, but also playful. I can be more my natural self with her.
- How would you describe your natural self?
- I think, I have some confusion about who I really am. When I see all these people, who are kind of needy, I am in a different state.
- Does all of this make you feel lonely?
- Yeah, uncomfortably lonely. I still don’t have any friends, only this one helper. At times, this all feels like a trap. I feel trapped.
- Is there any time, when you’re trying or thinking of getting out of this trap?
- No, I wasn’t able to get out. Just thought about it. I wouldn’t have even known where to go. I was just doing what I was supposed to do.
- Did anything else significant happen in this life?
- I can’t really grab hold of it but different people came through: advisors, entertainers I was introduced to – but I couldn’t usually follow up on that. Once, a younger man came with a doctor, who stayed behind after the doctor found nothing wrong with me. He was of great spirit and began talking to me about things I haven’t thought about, metaphysical things. He was excited and happy about life, while I was sad and depressed. He got me excited with the idea that there was more to life than the world I was living in. I spoke to him each time the doctor came and he opened up something in me that has never been triggered before.
- What impact did that have on you?
- A longing. Within myself, I became more despairing. Even though I had everything, I didn’t really. I never realised that before.
As nothing happened later that would change the course of this life, I asked her to go to the moment of her death, which she experienced in the circle of a loving husband and children. Yet, something was missing.
- What is the predominant thought or feeling in the moment of your death?
- That I never found what I was longing for. I was aware of that, even then. On the outside, everything was fine, but I wished I had the courage to make the change I wanted. A voice is now telling me: And so the seed for the cancer was planted. It was not in the longing, but in the feeling of disappointment, that I failed myself.
After that, we were bringing in her higher self, who confirmed that it was not the longing, but her own harsh judgment about herself that was the seed of cancer. This life we have seen was about opening to a spiritual reality, not necessarily about knowing. Everything comes at the right time and there is no need to make yourself sick over perceived failure. As soon as she has true self-acceptance, Amélie’s higher self said, there’s no need to have cancer in your body.
This need for self-acceptance has turned out to be the key to our therapy. We used various techniques to promote self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, and self-love. We used the Ho’oponopono mantra: I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you to be spoken to herself. We visited the internal realm of the Sun-healers, who helped her release all cancer, burden, bad energy into the Earth, while receiving new life force energy coming from above. We spoke to her body cells, which revealed that cancer cells were like non-cooperative tribal members, who haven’t been loved enough. In order to heal, she has to give herself permission to speak her truth, to be irritated, to be human. (Her cells rejoiced when she was “finally getting it.”)
During regressions into childhood – and other traumatic experiences, Amélie was able to send acknowledgement, love, and compassion to her former self, who has suppressed many of her own suffering for the benefit of others. The therapist here served as a witness for the acknowledgment of the wrong and suffering which happened to her, which is a first step to trauma healing. On the emotional level, it came as an epiphany that in any conflict and confrontation two people are suffering, never only one – and this became a training in raising the same level of compassion for oneself than for others.
Simultaneously, with these recognition came a shift in the language of the suggestions used in hypnosis for her. Amélie herself observed that her system is not responding well to aggressive anti-cancer affirmations and imagery that aimed at attacking cancer cells in order to destroy them. Rather, we developed a language that is extending self-love to every cell of the body, including the cancer cells, which were visualised as waking up from a bad dream and returning to be useful, healthy cells of the body. In line with the new personal paradigm of self-acceptance and allowance, the language of the affirmations became more permissive and surrendered, for example by saying that “natural, divine intelligence is returning my body to its natural, healthy blue-print.”