TRAGIC PAST LIFE MEMORY & a Wake-Up Call

Once a year I’ve been going to Vancouver to do a 10-day intensive retreat. This year for the first time it was held instead on Salt Spring Island, an Island reachable from the mainland by ferry.

These retreats are always amazing, but this year I felt it on a new level. This beautiful magical island seems to support higher consciousness.

While on the Island I actually underwent a Dalian Method healing session for myself, alone in public! Something I’ve never done. (the process requires out loud verbal expression of our moment to moment truth and feelings).

It wasn’t in a busy area, but it was outside on the beach where anyone could walk by me or hear me from the nearby road. (not far from where I took the picture)

I felt totally supported doing this. There is much less fear in the energy and people on this Island than all the places I’ve been or lived (that I can recall).

It was so nice to be outside in the fresh ocean air and feeling the support of the earth under me and spacious expansiveness of the sky above me. To feel the movement and depth of the ocean in front of me too. The trees were there as my friends to help ground me as well.

I found a log to sit on facing the water and began the session. I knew I needed to do a session because something painful began surfacing the previous day and my thoughts were very dark around this pain. “I’d rather die” was a thought that was circulating in me.

What came up for me right away in the session was such a resistance to going into this pain and seeing what it was about. During the session I expressed and finally released the resistance and then the memory and source of pain revealed itself.

The memory was of a past life where I had 3 young children that had all died at the same time in a drowning accident. (hence the purpose of being in front of the water)

I initially assumed this was the pain I didn’t want to feel and the memory I didn’t want to face.

But it wasn’t. There was more.

I finally faced the agonizing truth that I didn’t have the strength to face. Until now.

That I was directly responsible for my three children dying. I was an extremely neglectful mother. It wasn’t a freak drowning accident. It was neglect of my very young children who needed their mother to look after them and protect them.

As the memories kept surfacing I saw that in that lifetime rather than face the agonizing guilt and the profound loss and try to search for what existence is trying to teach me (which would have eventually brought me out of my intense suffering), I decided to end my own life.

Suicide was my way out.

I died angry, bitter, and devastated.

Now, in this time and place, sitting on that beach on a magical island facing the water, was my chance to forgive myself and see the lesson in it.

I saw that I neglected, not just my children, but also myself by not being in my body. I wasn’t present at all. I didn’t want to be responsible for being ‘here’. Even though I had children, I didn’t want the burden of caring for those little lives. I just wanted to escape reality and have ‘fun’.

I realized I wasn’t being punished to learn this, it was my soul and the compassion of existence to give me this wake-up call. Life was trying to get me to be HERE. I wasn’t willing or able to listen at that particular point of my journey.

But now I am listening. I saw how I’m avoiding the responsibility to help through my sharing and authentic connecting, reducing it to occasional sharing online, small conversations with a select few or in just the healing sessions and workshops I provide. 

The responsibility though is not to fix or save anyone. It’s not a burden. It’s just how it is to be myself and to really be here. I’ve been pushing the snooze button for many years, snoozing on really being here. Snoozing on being a leader. Snoozing on sharing what I know and what I sense and feel. Snoozing on opening my heart to more and more people. Snoozing on standing up for myself and for truth.

I come out of my shell and am being myself for a while then I go back into procrastinating and sleep. I’ve been in this back and forth for a while now.

So now I think it will be more forth and less back.

**I dedicate this to those three little ones whom I’m sending blessings to. I hope the work I did on this will somehow benefit you, wherever you are right now.