OftheSoul: Aspects of Past Lives: Balance and Resonance

"We are all diamonds, cleaning our facets, gaining wisdom, mastering compassion and returning to our spiritual home." --Brian Weiss, M.D., past life author, lecturer and therapist

Below are aspects of past lives that I've observed through many readings, and through my own personal regression experiences. I welcome your comments on any of this.

Balance

      The goal of souls who incarnate here as humans seems to be attaining balance in the dichotomy that is the existence of the Earth plane, to somehow reconcile life as a spirit living in a physical body situated in a physical world. In a nutshell, it appears that we incarnate here to learn what’s real (love), and what’s not (everything else, though they’re very convincing illusions). It can be quite a challenge!

        In some lifetimes we overshoot, trying to compensate for the acts of a previous lifetime, as a result swinging the pendulum way too far to the other side, usually out of guilt --a warrior rebirths as a slave, a rapist as a victim of abuse, etc. In other lifetimes we undershoot, unwilling to change and grow in order to live to our full potential because certain tendencies of the previous lifetime(s) became too comfortably ingrained in us. They're the devil we know, and we'd rather stick with the familiar, whatever the cost to our growth may be.

     And still in other lifetimes, we get it right. We hit the target, excelling in mastery over our soul lessons, attaining hard-won balance, and the wisdom it brings. We share that wisdom with others, as we move forward to new lessons.

        Eventually, we step out of the Earth game, we outgrow it. We sometimes call those who have transcended the Earth's karmic lessons “ascended masters.”

        But I consider all of us ascended masters-in-the-making, each at a different phase of his or her ascension process, each learning a different aspect of what it means to rise above aversions and attachments, to love unconditionally. I touch on this a bit in another blog post titled, Personal Ascension [click here to read article]. It's a difficult, lonely, wonderfully fulfilling process.

Resonances

Seemingly born with a microphone in
his hand, able to interpret songs with
a maturity beyond his years while still
a very young child, Michael Jackson
changed the world with his stunning
talent. No doubt, this wasn't his first
go-round with music on this planet!

Resonances are echoes of our past life experiences that we bring forward into new lifetimes. Past life expert Doris Cohen calls them "repetitions," due to the way they repeat in different lifetimes. We tend to either bless the world with them, or struggle with them as tools of soul growth. Resonances are pieces of our former personalities that we’re not done with yet. When we choose to bring them forward as contributions to the world, society may refer to them as “gifts.” We have pronounced skills or penchants in this lifetime, “natural” talents or inclinations. We can look to the “prodigies” around us to see examples of this.

Some resonances, however, tend to be “attachments” to ways of being, a reluctance to let go of what’s most familiar and comfortable out of fear, usually to our detriment. Others are extreme "aversions" to people, places or things. Either way, we find it easier and safer to keep doing things as we know to do them, rather than fearlessly learning new ways of being, and transcending.

It's very common now that many people
who rebirthed here today, and purposed
to do spiritual work of some sort, are reluc-
tant to begin it, due to a torturous past
life in which they were persecuted for their
spiritual work. They seem to suffer from a
sort of post traumatic stress disorder. I en-
counter this a lot.

But if we don’t let go of the past, our old tendencies could, at best, bring about stagnancy in our lives, and at worst, be harshly toxic to ourselves and others. It may be painful to let go of attachments and aversions, but the painful things we struggle with are valuable gifts of growth for our own souls. Though we usually try our best to, we shouldn’t avoid or ignore them. Often they, more than anything, have the most to teach us.  

Resonant Souls

Many relationships that seem randomly
magical, are instead the result of many
lifetimes of dedicated hard work, two souls
honing and refining their differences, until
they get it right. Love, more than anything,
facilitates the Personal Ascension process.

We can see the phenomena of resonances with some of the people we know, as well, who may be part of our “soul group.” With some souls, we’ve mastered a certain equilibrium, a result of one or more lifetimes of working together. When we meet (again) in this lifetime, it seems like we just pick up where we left off. We mysteriously feel as though we’ve “known each other forever.” These relationships tend to effortlessly polish and support our natural good qualities and talents, so that we really shine. We enjoy our lives to a fuller, deeper depth with these people in them.  

Past life regressionist Dr. Brian Weiss
describes how hateful aversions to others
bring them closer to us, in one of my all-
time favorite passages from his books,
which I titled, "A Jew, a Nazi, and
an Arab" [click here to read article].

With other members of our soul group, however, there may likewise be a measure of instant familiarity, but the difference is that things feel instantly antagonistic rather than cordial. We sense something we don’t like about them the moment we lay eyes on them, and during our entire acquaintance with them there’s always tension in the air. But these relationships can be quite instructive, and contribute a lot to our inner growth, perhaps even moreso than the cordial relationships. Our ability to love is tested, stretched and redefined in these relationships. Believe it or not, our souls will actually choose to be reborn with (or as) these people, again and again, until we get it right and transcend our differences.

One of the great benefits of past life information is the peace and balance which comes from understanding the resonant echoes of the lives we've lived, and the resultant dynamics they create in our lives today.

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Resources:

Here's an insightful interview, recorded in April, 2010 by Tami Simon, with U.K. psychic Ainslie MacLeod, who specializes in doing past life readings for others: Ainslie McLeod: Healing Past Life Fears [click here to listen]

Ainslie has written a series of books with practical tips on how to raise your consciousness by working through and clearing past life lessons: