Reincarnation and past lives

[triron]

Wanting to hear from anyone with past life experience or recall.
Sometimes I feel strongly that I lived a recent life in Germany or the old Soviet republic; just intuition.

[Squinch]

1. As a very young child, I had clear "memories" and often spoke matter-of-factly

of a time when I was a nanny to my sister who is two years older than me.

[MLAA]

2. I have always inexplicably been deeply drawn to China.

I would like to believe in reincarnation as the alternative is pure randomness....some have wonderful lives and some have the most awful, difficult lives. And I wonder why I am so fortunate.

[Binkie The Clown]

3. As a toddler I remember looking at my hands and thinking "How strange it is to be small again."

I would also babble some nonsense words when I was learning to talk. A new neighbor who moved in next door was French-Canadian and told my folks my babbling was French. I recall quite vividly looking at my hands and thinking I was small again, but I don't recall anything of "French babbling". My mom told me about it when I was older.

Beyond that, no past life recall, no vague feelings nor intuitions. Nothing.

But I do recall when I went to Catholic school being quite shocked to find out that the nuns did not believe in past lives. I had simply always taken it for granted that everyone knew about that. I am a complete atheist, but I still take past lives for granted. I even wonder some times why everyone doesn't simply realize it the way I do.

[dweller]

4. not so much in past life or reincarnation, as such

but have come to accept rebirth as far as I can reason, within my own reasoning capabilities ... I accept I am a creature on a living creature that populates herself with extraordinary life forms of many species that just magically appear on a regular basis... so I accept my place in that magic...
ymmv ✌🏼️
poetry helps...

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
Sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
That brushes your heel as it turns going by,
The man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
Which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
But to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
Is the work; start there, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
Don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
And do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
For life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
From your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

Miguel de Unamuno

[Squinch]

8. Oh, my God! That is freaking beautiful! Thank you !!!

That's going on my desktop so I can read it often.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. Starting somewhere in my late teens, and continuing for several decades,

I'd have dreams about being hunted down while trying to protect my younger brother. In those dreams it was always clear it was Nazi Germany, possibly in a ghetto or a concentration camp. The dreams were always different, no two were ever alike, but the theme of being hunted by Nazis was always clear. And it was also clear to me that the brother in the dream was my youngest brother in this life.

I've had several past life regression sessions, and one went to that time. I was a Jewish girl, perhaps 14. My parents were gone (probably dead) and I was trying to keep myself and my younger brother alive. It did not end well. After that session, I never had those dreams again.

For me reincarnation makes enormous sense. Often (and it's happened here on DU), discussions about reincarnation have some people totally outraged that someone ends up with a dreadful life of some sort. Too many people see such things as punishment, and don't understand to what extent a soul might choose a particular life for learning purposes. In my understanding, we're never punished. We have opportunities to learn lessons, and some of those lessons can be difficult. It also makes vastly more sense to me than thinking we are born once and only once, because then the horrible injustice that occurs around the world is even (to me) far more difficult to stomach.

[ms liberty]

11. I agree. n/t

[solara]

6. Most definitely have had vivid dreams of past lives

which are different than regular dreams. I've experienced strong deja vu in places where I have never been before. I have instinctual knowledge of things and people I have never known before. I'm extremely drawn to some time periods, but not others. Some very specific wars.. WWI, WWII & Civil War...nothing at all glamorous.. Ive had life readings, so I am very much into reincarnation and past life studies. I have very strong connections to certain time periods and none at all to others. I have dreamed of actually dying many times.

None of this is unusual, it is just that many people discount these experiences as fantasies or some such thing.

[janterry]

7. I always wanted to be Jewish

(though as an adult, I am not - I'm Buddhist).

However, when I found my bio family, I discovered that they were Jewish and Catholic.

[WePurrsevere]

12. This 'could' also be a 'genetic memory'. I'm an adoptee also...

I used to have very vivid dreams of living in a stone house on a very large farm down a long dirt road. I've also been been very drawn to Ontario, Canada and interested in the English monarchy since I was very young.

Fast forward to last Summer/Fall when I found my own 'original' families and started learning about my families history/,lives and creating my family tree. My paternal side owned a stone house and farm that was down a long dirt road... In Ontario, Canada. One quarter of my maternal side were from Ontario, Canada. (All from the same general area even.)

There's quite a bit more but with all of this I went from thinking Jung's, genetic memories idea 'might' be possible, to 'knowing' they can be a real thing.

I believe in reincarnation/past lives too but now I think some of those might be 'genetic memory' which, from what I understand, is thought to be more of a cellular than soul thing.

[Squinch]

9. Great question, by the way.

[ms liberty]

10. When I was a child, I remember when learning to tie my shoes

Thinking to myself that I knew how to do this and had done it countless times before. From a small baby, I was terrified of heights, to the point that I would immediately become hysterical with fear and terror and could not be calmed except by removing me from the height. I am still afraid of them, and I've always felt it was due to a past life event. Like others in this thread, i am strongly drawn to certain time periods and certain areas. I've never had specific memories, but I don't need them to believe and now I believe even more strongly. My sister and my niece are now believers as well. Here's why.
My mother died in 93, when my niece was 6. My sister and I and my niece were with her when she basically dropped dead of a heart attack. It was sudden and very traumatic for us all; my mom and I were super close and it took a couple of years for me to get over it. After her death, my niece began being visited in her dreams by my mother, who was bringing and introducing her to family members who had passed before her. Eventually that quit happening, and my niece grew up. Four years ago she had a daughter, who was born three days after my mother's birthday. She named her after my mom; I had a little trepidation about it but she had not been born on Mother's birthday, so I didn't actively fight against the naming. I don't have kids of my own, and I love this child like she is my own; she is a joy. She and I have a connection and have since She was born. When she started talking and putting sentences together, she started telling us things...things she could not know. One of the first was when she was in the bath, she looked at my niece and said, "When I was big and you were little, I always washed your back in the bathtub." That was about a year or a bit more ago, and while she doesn't dwell on it, when she does talk about it she is very matter of fact, and she will say these kinds of things fairly often, sometimes with specifics.
At first we were a bit freaked about it...it's one thing to believe, but another to experience it in a child in a real world situation. Our approach has been to let her talk about it when she chooses, and we can ask open questions but no leading questions and no judgement, but we don't push her to talk about it, and we treat it as if it's a normal thing.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

18. You should read the books by Carol Bowman.

Children's Past Lives and Return from Heaven.

One of the points she makes in the books is that children often start talking at a very young age the way you've just described, and usually those memories fade away around the age of 5 or 6.

[CanSocDem]

13. The best book I ever read...

...on the subject by the famous author Jack London.

https://www.amazon.ca/Star-Rover-Jack-London/dp/1420939106

It's online here:

http://london.sonoma.edu/writings/StarRover/

excerpt:

ALL my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me. Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of your childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of forming�ay, of forming and forgetting.

You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these lines, you remember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places into which your child eyes peered. They seem dreams to you today. Yet, if they were dreams, dreamed then, whence the substance of them? Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest dreams is the stuff of our experiences. As a child, a wee child, you dreamed you fell great heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as things of the air fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and many-legged creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other faces nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than you know now, looking back, you ever looked upon.



.

[dflprincess]

14. No specific memories but I'm pretty sure I once lived in Manhattan

any time I'm there I can navigate around the city, rarely consulting a map and it just feels like I should be there.

Several years ago a friend and I were at a New Age Fair and, as we walked past one psychic's booth, she noticed my sweatshirt said "Boston" and commented "That may say Boston, but I see New York."

[Upthevibe]

15. I highly recommend a book

called Many Lives Many Masters by Brian Weiss.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

16. From very early childhood I've had what I've always thought of as

a displaced memory.

In it, I was with my father, and we were between two sets of boards, sort of like fences, and stones were being piled on top of us. I was always puzzled by that odd memory, and it wasn't until rather recently that in reading about people being pressed to death (you can look it up) that I suddenly understood what I was apparently remembering.

Of course, I have no way of validating that memory, but I've always had it. At least since I was three or four years old.

[triron]

17. Wow!

I recall being very anxious about death when I was very young (5 or 6). Don't know how uncommon this is.

[davsand]

19. I remembered being beaten to death by my husband in China.

He was accusing me of having been with another man, and he was beating me and screaming. I was on my knees in a dusty ditch, and I was watching my blood drip into the dirt while he beat me. Frankly speaking, that single memory made clear to me why I have always been so very careful in all my relationships NOT to give cause for jealousy. It goes deeper than a sense of ethics, it's been almost a paranoia for me.

I've had other memories, but they were nothing like the violence and betrayal of the memory of what happened in China. I have a personal theory that the phobias and peculiar reactions we all carry can possibly be connected to past life happenings. By example, I am terrified of heights. I have a memory of dying because I jumped off a high bank along a river, and I did not survive the fall. There was a group of men chasing me, and I knew they planned to kill me. I made the decision that jumping was my only chance to survive. I was wrong, and it killed me.

I think there is WAY more at work with any of us than we realize.

YMMV.


Laura