ANSWERS FROM THE PAST LIFE YOUTUBE

you can find anything online.

I haven’t seen the latest season of White Lotus, I’ve never even touched Severance.

To say I’m severely out the pop culture loop would be an understatement. I try to convince myself I’m not tragically unhip by conjuring this quote if you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. So if we’re going by Murakami’s rules, my thoughts must be very free.

In February, Boyfriend and I started The Sopranos. HBO prestige from 1999. The show easily worms under your skin, transferring the characters’ unprocessed guilt into the viewer’s bloodstream. Emotional osmosis through the eyeballs—it should be studied scientifically. If we watch an episode too close to bedtime, I wake up feeling sticky. Peeling away the murky membrane of actions I cannot claim. As a kid, I related deeply to mafia narratives. Maybe I was just excited by the concept of community gathered on the fringes of society. It got so deep, I really thought I had a past life as a mafia wife. Now that I’ve witnessed the gritty Soprano lifestyle, I’m not so sure.

My only experience with past life regression was self-administered. Last summer, I clicked this link my mother sent me. PAST LIFE HYPNOSIS REGRESSION GUIDED MEDITATION.

This sort of text is not wholly unusual. My mother loves to forward her latest spiritual research, as if she is crafting a massive dissertation and I’m her lazy co-author. Most recently, she sent patient testimony for Dr. Joe Dispensa’s method. Last month, it was a website on crystal magic. She’s always finding something to be excited about, which I honestly admire—even when I don’t have the bandwidth to research Atlantis…but this past life thing struck a chord in me. My mother declared great success with the meditation, drawing several lives to the surface. All of them orbited around a certain theme I won’t share here, because it is not my past to parcel out.

Except, I’ll tell you about this one flashback. My mother was walking in a desert, when who shows up? ME. We were walking and walking, wearing leather sandals. Some other stuff happened but again, not my past life to dish on. As she told me about our shared desert experience, I could only think: so we’ve been doing this for a while.

I’ve never had grand visions of my past life possibilities. Sure, I’ve had ideas—like a monk that never left the monastery. I’m fairly certain this path would be easy for me to adopt right now—if I didn’t have key earthly attachments. I’ve gotten in too deep with Boyfriend, parents that need my assistance and the best dog in the world. I’ve felt this monk thing since I was a kid, it’s really an internal feeling that I could step away. The world would go on and I wouldn’t miss much. The vast feeling of deep meditation is where I’ve always felt most comfortable, in the nothingness we find it all. (Yes, a vipassana is on my list for this year or next.) If anything, my current life is a lesson in engagement, finding the divine in the messiness of human experience, rather than shying away.

This is all to say, my past life fantasies are fairly modest. Mafia wife and monk. Maybe if I ponder it, a nurse…French with a bit of a funny charm. She makes tiny cloth dolls for her patients adorned with intricate embroidery. But no Van Gogh or Matisse. No saintly figures with lofty mythologies, inspiring mass-produced plastic sculptures evoking piety and grace. I’ve always been satisfied with these surface speculations. Be here now and all that.

Until my mother followed this past life YouTube meditation and found me in her history. I flinched with a competitive reflex. A desire to hold the keys to my own mystery. For so long, I was fine letting others open the doors, in fact, I thought that was the plan. Ease and flow, let the current take me where I need to go. Sounds good in theory. In practice, this only carries you so far. When I shrugged and went along with the general vibe, I honed some bits of personalized expression, but it wasn’t the full bloom experience. No one has the answers for me but me.

It seems obvious, but I needed to learn this time and again. A slow un-training. I was conditioned to see obedience as love. For decades, I would fall in line and feel so good because I assumed that my compliance guaranteed reciprocal love.

And yet we contain multitudes. There’s a deeply self-assured part of me, full of intuitive authority. This is the part of me that dropped out of high school. The part of me that found a new arts school across town and enrolled despite my parent’s fears about the distance. As a youth, this brazen part of me would emerge with a shock factor. Actions were delivered with a grand wildness, saving me from myself. I’d shake my head, adjust to the new path and eventually fall back into my people pleasing ways. Finding new avenues for compliance.

Good at being good. That was my thing. If you wanna steal that for a LinkedIn bio, credit me—or don’t, just take it. I think a lot about the statistic that more self-made millionaires are B and C students, than A students. I’m sure there’s a bunch of unaccounted factors clouding this data, but it’s still trippy. Grades aren’t a true indication of intelligence or a predictor of success. In most cases, they’re just a reflection of how many hours you were able to spend on schoolwork. I worked hard to get straight As, because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. Compliance with my environment. Turns out, those As were not a necessary component of my life path. When I graduated high school and started working at American Apparel the very next day, I was shocked to discover no one cared about my grades. An entire section of my personality broke off, sinking to the bottom of the ocean. When my senior AP test scores arrived in the mail, I couldn’t comprehend how something so important could suddenly be so meaningless. All 5s, thank you, but for what? The next day at work, I told the Assistant General Manager/My Crush about my stellar scores. He took a beat, hollowed out the light in his eyes, and said So? I scurried off to straighten the tangled rack of spaghetti strap camisoles. He was right. My value structure needed a total refresh.

It’s actually very mob wife to fall in line. I’m just building evidence for my past life case file. To do whatever someone else wants is so comfortable—until of course, it becomes deeply uncomfortable.

Then you got to wash your face, look in the mirror and remind your reflection discomfort is a sign of growth.

Watch your lips move, find the dilation in your own pupils. Totally.

Choosing to do this guided past life meditation was uncomfortable. I lay stiff on the bed, clicked the link and shut my eyes. A man’s soft voice swooshed into my ears. He promised to count down slowly, delicately dropping me into the past. The process was gradual. Let’s start in the current body, the life of the present. He asked me to draw upon my earliest memory. This was easy, I think about it whenever I drive beyond the LA County limits. The specific memory is just a glimpse: black oval husks with white stripes falling from my hand, tumbling onto the grey asphalt, bouncing on blurred white dots. We keep driving, leaving the sunflower seed shells behind.

I’m lucky it exists as a vivid moment. When the man’s voice asks me to zoom out and look around the memory, I see everything clearly. I’m two years old, sitting on my mother’s lap. We’re in a giant yellow moving van. Curled at her feet is our Irish Setter. I look over at my father behind the wheel, he looks so young. His skin is milky pale against his dark black hair, newly cut curls for the big trek west. We’ve just driven out of Nashville, the place I was born. My father is excited, but I can see a bit of anxiety shaking his smile. It’s a big deal, leaving this community of supportive artists, this low-cost of living, their sprawling backyard. Just so they can raise their baby girl with a west coast mentality. My parents met in Los Angeles, they moved all around before they had me. Hitting the road was different now. My mother had a tiny VHS television balanced on her knee so I could watch Barney.

Right away I felt a high voltage surge of emotions. It was tough when my parents landed in LA—a sudden sacrifice. Even though my mother was raised in its arms, the city’s moods were unpredictable. LA can be cold, even to its most loyal devotees.

Then the soft voice asked me to think back to my birth. What can I remember from that day? I’ve heard the stories. I was a C-section, I wouldn’t stop turning, never landing in the right position. My mother didn’t want to be opened up, she had surgery in that exact spot years before. But they had to get me out! As I thought about the many details of the day—the flowers rejoicing with springtime on the drive over, the busy delivery ward, the multiple shots of medication to numb mama’s lower half—more images filled my mind. Like my mother’s body on the operating table, my father’s eyes shifting from extreme worry to joy. Singing gently to my mother, trying to soothe her fears. And my mother’s face: panic, tears, strength, love, all blurring her features.

The pregnancy was an ordeal, and now this messy delivery. Mama couldn’t feel her legs for hours after they pulled me from her womb. It was so scary.

And I know some of this because she told me, I didn’t glean all of it from the meditation. But I did experience something new, these radiating sensations of fear. Joy was filtered in of course, but bringing me into this world wasn’t easy. As the man told me to move on from this memory, I realized I was crying crying crying with a heavy feeling.

Guilt found me. In this original moment. Guilt for being difficult, for causing pain, before I could even breathe. Who knows, but it was really something to feel it all so thoroughly. No wonder my impulse was compliance— a long winded attempt to rectify the guilt of being born. I know, it sounds a bit wacky. I tried to leave that moment and follow the man’s voice to the last door, but I couldn’t just shake those emotions. I stood at the past life door. Finally when I opened it, there was only a white void. I wasn’t ready to see any more.

I didn’t share this experience with my parents. They were, of course, highly involved in my birth, but something told me this insight was for me alone to process. Just as my mother’s meditations revealed a pattern that she’s working on healing in this life, I am working to identify the baseless threads of guilt woven through my actions. To understand the need to be obedient and give myself permission to cut those cords. It’s not the sort of emotion one should use to guide their life.

Working with this new awareness for the past year has shifted everything. Including the part of me relegated to strange bursts of transformation. I’ve learned this is my strength, something I can access everyday. That intuition was always trying to tell me I was enough. Adherence, compliance, obedience—it’s just the same as getting straight As. No one really cares. All that matters is the confidence to follow that inner current. To listen, to know it isn’t a wild zap, but a constant source of energy.

PAST LIFE HYPNOSIS REGRESSION GUIDED MEDITATION didn’t provide a full report. That’s ok, I saw what I needed to see right now. Maybe one day I’ll get some answers about the mafia wife.

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