The Mind-Body Connection – How The Body Reflects What We Subconsciously Think And Feel

In this Soul teaching on the mind-body connection you will learn:

• How our body shows us what wants to be healed mentally and emotionally
• Why psychosomatic doesn’t mean that it’s all just in your head
• How past lives can impact the mind-body connection
• How the body remembers what the mind has forgotten
• And more….

The mind-body connection

If you’ve been part of the spiritual community for a while, reading self-development books, and working on your healing you will have heard of the mind-body connection before. The mind-body connection is the idea that thoughts and emotions have an effect on the body in both a positive as well as negative sense. This means that the mind and our emotions can create both sickness as well as health in the body.

Our understanding of the mind-body connection has grown over the years and is now today much more accepted than say fifty or even twenty-five years ago when this connection was less acknowledged or even flat-out denied. At best it was acknowledged as psychosomatic, which often meant that there was no treatment because it was thought to only be created by the mind and not really exist in the body.

When you Google ‘psychosomatic therapy’ today you get a list of mental health solutions such as cognitive behavioral therapy, and medications, such as antidepressants. Mindfulness-based therapy. Referral to a specialist in mental health (for example, a psychiatrist or psychologist) and so on which only furthers the idea that ‘it’s all just in your head...’.

Especially women are told far more often than men that their symptoms are not real, this is due to medical bias and the fact that medicine was for hundreds of years practiced by men around the male body. Studies show that men tend to be taken more seriously in their symptoms than women because of their difference in gender behavior but also the difference in the manifestation of their symptoms.

My grandmother on my father’s side was one of the first female doctors in the Netherlands in 1925. Only in the last fifty years has this slowly started to shift as women have worked their way up, but even now my female clients who are for example Doctors in Psychiatry or other health care professionals still experience the medical field as male-oriented and male-dominant.

The holistic approach to the mind-body connection

A more holistic approach to the mind-body connection is the understanding that we have multiple bodies of existence. We have the physical body, but we also have a mental, emotional, and vibrational body – along with the astral and the causal body which holds our karmic templates and creates all the subtle and gross bodies anew for each new embodiment.

From this point of view, sickness doesn’t start in the physical body, but rather in the mental (thoughts) and emotional (emotions) body, and from there it trickles down into the physical body which manifests as discomfort and disease.

Although this viewpoint is not fully mainstream yet, it is more accepted today than say in the 80s and 90s. The fact that forgiveness therapy is being incorporated in the treatment of cancer patients shows us that even allopathic medicine is embracing the mind-body connection. According to research by Dr. Michael Barry, author of the book, The Forgiveness Project “Of all cancer patients, 61 percent have forgiveness issues, and of those, more than half are severe.”

It was people like Louise Hay (You Can Heal Your Life) and her predecessors often affiliated with the Unity Church such as Florence Scovel Shinn that put the metaphysical meaning of different states of diseases on the map. Although Louise Hay broke through internationally with her work, there are more in-depth resources out there that give us an even more accurate explanation of the mind-body connection and what the psychological origins are of the discomforts and diseases within the body.

A redefinition of psychosomatics

My all-time favorite work was written by a Belgian medium called Christiane Beerlandt, she was married to a doctor practicing general medicine. He was so impressed with the accuracy of her work that he gave up his practice and started a publishing company, to publish her work. She wrote an encyclopedia of psychosomatics titled The Key to Self-Liberation which is my ultimate go-to, to look up mind-body connections and how these manifest within the body. In this body of work, Beerlandt looks at the fundamental psychological origins of and solutions to 1.000 diseases and other phenomena.

Beerlandt goes even further than Louise Hay and looks at what disease means on a soul level, her conclusion is that all illnesses in the body are a manifestation of our inability to embody our soul truth due to the various wounds of the ego.

Her interpretation is that all ailments in the body, great or small are psychosomatic in nature – in the sense that they are created on a psychological (mental and emotional) level first before they appear in the body. So rather than, see the mind separate from the body it is understood that the physical symptoms within the body are a product of our mental and emotional states.

Christiane attempts to redefine the definition of psychosomatic to its potentially original meaning of relating to the interaction of mind and body which is still a secondary definition of the word. The primary definition is the allopathic one currently most used; (of a physical illness or other condition) caused or aggravated by a mental factor such as internal conflict or stress. I have to say that the English definition is already much more politically correct than for example the Dutch one that states ‘psychosomatic complaints are physical complaints that cannot or cannot be adequately explained by a physical disorder, but are aggravated by or are the result of a psychological problem.’

The difference in both viewpoints is seeing the mind-body as either connected or separated. When viewed as separate from each other it’s hard to see cause and effect. Yet, when seen in relation to each other and in interaction we can see how the mind-body connection starts working even before the effects manifest themselves in the physical (visible) realm. Beerlandt’s work is the most in-depth work I have come across thanks to one of my clients and students who recommended it to me.

My own recent mind-body connection experience

I recently experienced firsthand how deeply connected the mind and body are. In a session with a healer, I saw a lifetime when ‘I’* was a young woman in Lapland. It started with seeing colors like the aurora borealis and then hearing the word Lapland. I saw ‘myself’ on the ice in a snow-filled landscape playing with ‘my’ pet moose. The sun was shining, we were having great fun, and suddenly out of nowhere the ice broke under her feet and the girl hit the ice-cold water and drowned.

*Read this Soul Teaching on Reincarnation to understand why we are not our past life selves.

In my current life, this has been a pattern where on absolutely perfect days that you would never expect anything ‘bad’ to happen, fate would strike out of nowhere, and on one of those occasions I ended up in a nearly fatal car accident.

This car accident happened in my late twenties at the near end of my first marriage. My then-husband, myself, and my oldest son were on our way to visit my mother-in-law when on a back road he lost control of the steering wheel and we slipped off the mud-filled road onto the grass. My then-husband got the car to stop just before the side of a water-filled ditch and just as we looked at each other with a sigh of relief, the car tumbled upside down into the water. We were locked in our seatbelts upside down, drowning in basically a couple of inches of ice-cold dirty mud-filled water as the ditch wasn’t that deep.

The car horn was honking and if my then-husband and I wouldn’t have made it out of the car alive, our son seven years old at that time would have survived. He had been miraculously flipped in his seat belt and was the only one who ended up, with his head above water. Had this not been the case, my son would have been dead by the time I was able to get to him.

I remember the water being chilling cold. It was dark because all the windows of the car were underwater and the water itself was very muddy. I was completely disoriented because I was suspended upside down and although I was frantically searching for the handle to open the car door – I couldn’t find it.

I had only one clear thought running through my mind and that was:
‘No! We cannot die like this, I have not done what I came here to do!’

This was way before I was on my current path, or rather it was part of how I got on my current path.

As soon as I had that thought I was released from my seatbelt, I found the door handle got out of the car, and went to the back of the car to save my son. Shortly after I got out, my then-husband was able to get out of the car as well. His door had been blocked by the ditch wall and the only way out of the car was through the passenger side where I had been sitting.

We were taken to a farmhouse nearby and when the paramedics came I insisted they focus on my then-husband and son because they had been trapped in the car the longest. My son had been above the water with his head, but we had to cut him out of his seat belt and it took ten to fifteen minutes to flag down a car that actually had a knife to cut my son loose. My then-husband and son were treated for hypothermia and I went with them to the hospital but didn’t receive any treatment myself.

My past life experience in Lapland was so deeply connected to this car accident that I woke up the next morning with excruciating pain in the right side of my neck and my right shoulder. Talk about the mind-body connection.

My body remembered what the mind had forgotten

I went to my chiropractor for an emergency session because I was in so much pain. He treated me and the pain actually got worse, so he sent me to get a neck X-ray, and lo and behold he could see the remnants of an untreated neck injury. He pointed out that I had probably had an untreated whiplash and asked me if I had been in an accident at least fifteen years ago. I told him that I had been in a car accident even longer ago and that I could have definitely had whiplash from that accident because I had been suspended upside down in my seat belt when the car had flipped over on its roof. The injury on the X-ray corresponded with the car accident where I had worn my seatbelt from the right as the passenger.

My chiropractor told me I was lucky that I have had regular chiropractic care for almost all of my life because otherwise, this could have developed into a neck hernia. Talking to one of my friends who is a massage therapist before the diagnosis, she had already wondered if the chiropractor had asked for the X-rays because he thought it might be a hernia.

I looked up the psychological meaning behind this condition and it was of course bang on. It was all about being burdened by your past and not being able to carry this burden any longer together with needing to find your sense of safety within yourself. This corresponded directly with what I was working on psychologically. Providing such a mind-blowing example of the mind-body connection, it was as if the body remembered the pain of the physical and emotional trauma from this lifetime as well as lifetimes before that had been imprinted on a cellular level.

I remember that after the car accident, I was in shock for three days not sure if and how I had actually survived it. Although I hadn’t had any significant pain after the accident as far as I can remember, my three lower neck vertebrae had been misaligned ever since and it was only when I revisited this past life that they flared up and were treated.

It took me three weekly chiropractic visits to become pain-free when in between it got so bad that I had pain radiating out to my right arm. By the fourth session, I was ready to go back to bi-weekly visits and home exercises to help restore the curve in my neck that should be there, but that was almost absent on my X-rays.

Past lives don’t always trigger the mind-body connection

Just to be clear this is not a common response to past life work, it’s the first time this has happened to me and I have been doing past life work since 2007-ish. I have never had such an extreme physical reaction to past life work. On the other hand, I am very grateful I did because this allowed me to find a potential neck problem before it had fully manifested and spare myself a lot of pain and discomfort in the future. Through the chiropractic corrections and the home exercises, I can correct the issues in my neck before it became the issue it could have potentially become with a much longer road to recovery.

While taking a hot bath to ease the pain and soreness I was experiencing at that time, I got the intuitive hit to look at the corresponding chakra, which is of course the throat chakra. An imbalanced throat chakra can result in a sore throat, thyroid issues, neck and shoulder aches, hearing sensitivities, jaw pain, or TMJ. I get TMJ when I am stressed out, which has been so bad at times I could hardly open my mouth wide enough to eat for example. But also neck and shoulder issues are throat chakra related.

On mindbodygreen.com I found the missing piece to the puzzle. It stated that the shadow of the throat chakra is guilt. ‘This is not the kind of guilt we feel simply for letting someone else down. This is the guilt we feel for letting ourselves have it all. This the guilt we feel for TAKING UP SPACE in the world.’

These were themes I recognized such as fully being able to take up my space in the world and fully expressing the truth of who I am – as well as allowing myself to have it all which are all deeply throat chakra related. There was something to unlock here.

Finding the original wound underneath

I had gotten a beautiful baby blue turquoise-like silk scarf for my birthday a couple of years ago, that I started sleeping with around my neck to help me tap into what wanted to be seen there. My teenage son found it hilarious that I was walking around with this scarf on in the middle of the night. I had come to check on him when he was still up at 3 AM, but I didn’t let it disturb me even though he made fun of me and told his friend who he was talking to on the phone how crazy his mom is. I kept sleeping with the scarf asking for guidance and above all a breakthrough in the pattern I was healing.

I also got my Bach Flowers out and used Pine of course for guilt, Chestnut Bud as a pattern breaker, Walnut to help let go of the past, Star of Bethlehem to treat trauma even from long ago, and a couple of others that were relevant to my current process. I booked a session with a healer for two weeks later and used my time in between to deeper hone in on what was coming up to be healed.

When the session finally took place, it wasn’t easy to get to what wanted to be seen but we were able to access a lifetime in the end period of Atlantis during the fall, where ‘I’ had been a high priestess and had interpreted the fall which was accompanied by great natural disasters as punishment from the Gods for what I had felt was misusing my gift of sight in that lifetime. I hadn’t misused my powers really, I just hadn’t used them to their full potential. I was so focused on the micro level of things that I couldn’t see the macro level. I used my powers like a fortune teller only focusing on the personal.

I was shown that the high priestess hadn’t been able to see the bigger picture and when fate struck and her world was divulged by the sea it took her by surprise as she had not seen it coming.

As I explained in the Soul Teaching on childhood trauma about the Shattered Assumptions theory, deep down every human believes that only bad things happen to bad people and that being ‘good’ keeps us safe from ‘bad’ things happening to us. In that lifetime, that past life version of my soul interpreted her experience as a punishment of the Gods for what she felt was seen as her arrogance to be like the gods in her seeing powers. Punishment only happens to the guilty and therefore this high priestess saw herself as someone who had been bad (arrogant) and deserved to be punished.

Looking back on the history of humans, this woman’s relationship with the Divine comes as no surprise because the further we go back in time, the more we see these fearful relationships with God or the Gods depending on the civilization and time period we are looking at. Part of the reasons why some ancient civilizations practiced human and child sacrifice was to please and appease the Gods that they were fearful of and wanted to pacify or gain favor from.

It would seem that this Atlantean high priestess is at the root of my visibility wounding as well as my stepping out of power because it was that lifetime that made me decide to stay under the radar and not challenge anyone by making myself smaller (non-threatening) in order to stay safe.

The trauma of the experience created the false belief that to step into my greatness (power) meant to be punished.

How I had been reliving my unresolved past

There were two lines of past life and current life themes that I used to heal the repercussions of this lifetime. One was the shock and trauma of something happening out of the blue and the other was being hurt and in past lives even being killed for taking up too much space/being perceived as a threat.

The shock and trauma line was the high priestess’s lifetime, the lifetime in Lapland falling through the ice, hitting the water with a car on three different occasions in this lifetime including the near-fatal one. Recently (two years ago) breaking my foot on a stone staircase on my way to the beach, where again the emotional shock was much greater than that the fall warranted. These had all been connected to healing the emotional shock I still energetically carried in my energy field eons and eons after this high priestess lifetime in Atlantis.

On the other hand, there was the line that connected my incarnation wound lifetime where I had been demonized and permanently shut off my seeing gifts, a lifetime as Marie Antionette that ended at the guillotine, a lifetime as the Visionaire where my family put me into a mental asylum to protect the family fortune and my current life where as a very young child my nine years older half-sister choked me for ‘outshining’ her in front of our dad.

Even the former Twin Flame client who viciously attacked me when I transitioned out of the Twin Flame industry was connected to this pattern because she attacked me when I decided that I was done playing small – and that I was going to do what I came here to do which meant stepping up in my mission.

When all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place

It’s been really cool for me to experience this firsthand because this is what I do with my clients in one session. Merely seeing a past life has little value in the big scheme of things, because all lifetimes are part of a bigger context. In my own sessions, using the Soul Embodiment® Therapy I bring people to the original wound that they have been playing out over lifetimes and lifetimes. We will usually see a series of lifetimes and then after some digging find the original wound that created this pattern, This allows us to as it were literally yank the pattern out by the root.

In my own healing journey, I don’t know anyone who can facilitate this process yet (my certification students are still learning this process) and so I have had to piece together the information session by session for myself.

Sometimes, people are taken aback by my pricing because they can’t imagine a session being worth such an amount of money because they are used to this one session-at-a-time pacing. From my own experience and that of my clients I know that one session with me is the equivalent of multiple sessions with other healers because we look at the bigger picture, the macro view instead of only the micro view of the one single experience.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no merit or value to doing healing work on a micro level, it’s rather that the macro level of healing is missing for most people. There are simply not many healers or therapists who work on a soul path (macro) level, most healing modalities focus on the incarnation (micro) level even if they work with past lives.

To be honest, my investment in my own healing is much higher than what I charge my clients, this is because I have to do many more sessions to get the same results and because different healers charge different prices. For example, the session where I saw that my half-sister had choked me as a child was around $1400 for that single piece of information. Do I regret spending so much? No, because it was my current life reason for being afraid to take up too much space, perhaps paired with survivor’s guilt because my half-sister was much more abused than I was by our father. Her abuse had actually stopped my abuse.

The truth about false beliefs

The high priestess and the Egyptian boy’s (incarnation wound) lifetime had me disown my gift of sight. Even today my ability to see has been extremely limited, my gifts in this lifetime are clairsentience (feeling) and claircognizance (knowing). I can hear and see as well, but they are a lot less developed than the other two.

After this session where I saw the life of the high priestess, I realized that my reason for shutting off my seeing gifts no longer existed. The high priestess had only been able to see on a micro level and had lost sight of the macro level. In this my current lifetime, I can see the micro and the macro level and how they are interconnected. Not only can I see it, but I guide others to see it in their own soul journeys.

This means that I have reached a place in my soul evolution where I can fully carry the responsibilities of such a gift, which I had not felt ready for at that time. In the lifetime of the high priestess, I felt like Mickey Mouse the Sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia, who muddled with his master’s magic and all hell broke loose because of it. I felt like an imposter not worthy of the gift of the sight of the Gods – the fact that I had not seen disaster coming and interpreted the event and my inability to foresee it as a punishment by the Gods sealed the deal for my belief to sprout of being unworthy of such gifts and angering the Gods by having dared to take something that belonged only to them.

None of it was true, to begin with, but that is the problem with the subconscious mind – it doesn’t have to be true to be believed. You just need to believe that it’s 100% true in order for the subconscious to accept a false belief as true and that is what happened. The high priestess thought that she had unleashed the wrath of the Gods and their punishment had been to bury us in the sea – Atlantis was submerged in the ocean. I can now see that this wasn’t true and that her interpretation was a product of how humans at that time sought explanations for things they had no control over.

Like children, they had a very simplistic understanding of the world and I often tell my clients that these early human lifetimes were the child phase of our human development. Just as we go through the developmental stages on an incarnation (micro) level, on a soul path (macro) level we have gone through these same developmental stages, and in many ways, we were mentally underdeveloped in for example our Lemurian and Atlantean lifetimes.

Our human evolution process

Within the New Age thought form, there’s an erroneous belief that Lemuria and Atlantis were highly advanced civilizations. They were but not in the way we think. The Lemurians were the third root race within human development, while the Atlanteans were the fourth root race. We are currently the fifth root race and this is what we know about the third root race:

‘The mind of the late Third Root Race was young and innocent, and humans were more spiritual than intellectual. They developed a kind of nature-sound language to communicate with each other, but the essence of the communication between individuals was from mind to mind, by means of the spiritual “third eye” of which they were endowed. Because of this, the Third Root Race could perceive intuitively their connection with nature and the divine. In Blavatsky’s words: No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever-present as the ever to be unknown and invisible all, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself his inner God, each felt he was a Man-God in his nature, though an animal in his physical Self. (Secret Doctrine, 2.272)’ Source: Theosophical Society

You and I belong to the fifth root race and while the Atlanteans represented the successful incarnation into the physical, the 5th root race is the turning point in our human evolution. The sixth root race which is the next stage of our human evolution is on the ascending arc, it will “be rapidly growing out of its bonds of matter, and even of flesh” (SD II:446). This seems to suggest that the bodies or vehicles of the future races will return to becoming more ethereal and androgynous. Source: Theosophy World

However, this doesn’t mean that our Ascension depends on reincarnating as the sixth root race. We can Ascend right here and now through embodying on a micro level, the stages of the human development that we are going through on a macro level. In other words, when we heal the separation between the ego and the soul we can recover who we are on a soul level and embody this, our Soul or Divine Blueprint in the physical.

I agree with Blavatsky that the human incarnation process is a process of growing from unconscious Oneness to conscious Oneness of our own free will. Although the Lemurians and Atlanteans were a much higher advanced spiritual civilization, much closer to their true nature than we are now – at the same time they were much like children in their mental, emotional, and intellectual understanding of the world.

Reclaiming my inner greatness

The wound that the Atlantean high priestess showed me was the fear of fully embodying myself and reclaiming my inner greatness. This may initially sound presumptuous or grandiose, but we cannot reclaim our wholeness without reclaiming our greatness. Nor can we take in our rightful place in the world without also acknowledging our greatness.

I loved this Medium essay I found on it written by Ron Roesler.

‘The person God created in you is incredible beyond imagination. Most of us dwell within a tiny portion of the magnitude of the superb being we were each created to be. Fully claiming and expressing our God-given gifts and talents is to live wholeheartedly as uniquely beautiful and beloved individuals. Opening our minds to our magnificence enables us to step into a new world of possibility. Stepping through fear and reclaiming our greatness, our true self, and our light is more than an opportunity; it is the calling to reclaim our essential nature. To show up in our fullness. It’s about sharing our gifts. It’s about contributing to the greater good. It is about moving out of a self-imposed ‘comfort zone’ -isolation. It is about fully stepping through fear.’

Reclaiming our greatness is about our refusal to be, play or make ourselves small. As the Atlantean high priestess, I wasn’t able to balance the micro and the macro, the personal and the impersonal but I have now reached a place in my soul evolution where I am able to balance them. I don’t need to play small anymore and I certainly don’t need to subconsciously make myself smaller in order to be safe (not threaten others). I don’t need to remain under the radar in fear of punishment.

I will write a separate Soul Teaching on healing codependency, but this lifetime as the high priestess was the hook that laid the groundwork for the pattern of codependency that was created in my incarnation wound lifetime.

Tumbling down a flight of stairs

Wanting to make sure I got it all out I made an appointment for a more body-based therapy style that also looks at the root of a pattern. I didn’t resonate with what came out of that session because it contradicted everything I was working on and what was coming out of sessions with other healers but I was willing to keep an open mind. As I left to go home, I lost my balance on the steep stone staircase of the therapist’s home and I fell down all the way from the top to the bottom.

For such a huge fall in which my body ended up in the reversed position, I got off with minor injuries. I still had to stay in bed for one week, was bruised all over, had a light concussion and dizzy spells plus my 12th rib on the left side of my body was pretty bruised and potentially even broken. I also had to go to the ER for a couple of stitches in my chin, but it could have been so much worse. I was so incredibly protected during that fall, it was pure grace that I got out as unharmed as I have. Much like the near-fatal car accident, I could have died that day or really hurt myself but I was relatively fine.

I of course looked up all the hurt body parts to see what the overall message was and it was all about releasing false masks, false foundations, and false identifications. Falling from a staircase itself is about letting in love while broken or bruised ribs, as well as the lower last or 12th rib, represent your inability or the necessity TO TAKE UP YOUR SPACE.

Well, hello again.

During the first night, I was shown that I had fallen to break something energetically that could only be broken through such a big fall. I listened to an Allan Watts recording (1:45) talking about how the ego is not a physical organ or a thing, but as he described it this chronic habitual sense of muscular strain in anticipation of controlling its environment. I am paraphrasing a bit but that was what I understood from it.

Although that didn’t completely fit what I was looking for it did resonate. It felt as if the fall was connected to breaking something loose within the realm of the ego. What was interesting was that even though my body hurt, mentally and emotionally I felt better than ever. I felt really good inside.

The next day I got a message from the healer I had worked with before my tumble down her stairs and her interpretation was so incredibly far off that I immediately decided to never work with her again. This is not to say that I had not done incredibly valuable work with her in the past, but I reluctantly realized I had outgrown her in the five years that we had worked together and that I couldn’t continue to work with her as a therapist.

This became even more clear when I recognized her teacher’s thought forms in her interpretation of my fall. Her teacher and I are polar opposites – we do not get along. Her teacher runs an almost cult-like organization and I am not cult material. I had never before seen so clearly that this therapist was only seeing what she was told to see. Nor had it ever out-right bothered me the way it did now, this was because I realized that these thought forms prevented her from actually seeing the truth.

I saw that she was so deeply indoctrinated by these thought forms that they skewed her perception of reality – obscuring the very thing she was aiming to see. I saw that instead of seeing the truth, she could only see what her teacher had taught her to see. It was the first time I saw this so clearly and I instantly knew I couldn’t continue to work with her.

A Fall from Grace

In the meantime, my mentor pointed out that both the lifetime we had looked at as well as my tumble down a flight of stairs were about a fall, the fall of Atlantis, and my fall down the stairs. Then a third type of fall showed up to help me understand what wanted to be seen. I was led to an older publication about Father-daughter incest seen as a degradation ceremony,

A degradation ceremony is a ceremony that transforms or is intended to transform the identity or status of an individual into an identity or status lower down in the hierarchy of a group or institution.

In this publication, the author Raymond M. Bergner argues that father-daughter incest has the same degrading effect on the daughters as degradation ceremonies. In the excerpt, he lists five consequences of this experienced degradation and gives treatment suggestions for each of these consequences.

In the book he discusses how incest survivors subconsciously feel they have fallen in value even – because of the sexual abuse. I didn’t identify with all five of his points as strongly, but there were two that I deeply recognized. The first is the conclusion that being sexually abused means that you don’t deserve love or are somehow unlovable. I remember that this was one of the false beliefs I created as a young child in reaction to the incest by my father, the other one I recognized was the parentification by my mother as this was in a way also a dynamic that played out in my life.

Having done my past life work, I recognized that what had happened to the young Egyptian boy in the Incarnation Wound Lifetime was a degradation ceremony. He had been tricked into a ceremony where he thought he was entering the spiritual hierarchy within his community and instead, they performed a public exorcism on him claiming that he was possessed by demonic powers. After the ceremony, he was shunned by his community and was never able to reenter or belong to his tribe. Instead of rising in status, he was stripped of his status as a member of his community and exiled.

The fall in Atlantis had become a repetition of falling in status, in being degraded which I can see to be true throughout many of my past incarnations. Especially being forced down in status, or being degraded while being innocent. Perhaps, because the lifetime that all this was based on was innocent as well. I had condemned myself because I believed as the high priestess that the fall of Atlantis was because I had angered the Gods when in reality Atlantis fell not just once but multiple times as part of our human evolutionary process – it was never my punishment. I had always been innocent, it had never been my fault. Yet that had been the programming that I had on rinse and repeat because of my own misinterpretation of this experience.

The pain-body or our samskaras

With these new insights, I went into yet another session with my mentor who is the main healer I work with and this session was all about releasing my identification with being an abused person and therefore not worthy of God’s or the Divine’s love. This second-rate citizen dynamic that I had traced back all the way to the Atlantean high priestess.

When this false identification was released which could actually be best described as victim identification, all the hurt and pain connected to that programming was released as well. It was as if the pain-body as it is called by Eckhart Tolle released – all of the stuck emotions that I had wanted to release but somehow couldn’t let go of were now being moved out of the energy body. These were the stuck emotions that Christianne Beerlandt also talked about in the psychological causes behind the parts of my body that hurt.

The pain-body according to Eckhart is ‘an accumulation of a painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. It comes together with other energy forms from other instances, and so after some years you have a ‘pain-body,’ an energy entity consisting of old emotion.’

In Sanskrit, this is called samskaras which you can see as an accumulation of the scars of the past, from our trauma. When something happens to us that leaves deep emotional scars, it becomes imprinted into our nervous system. These imprints and how they affect us are called samskaras.

You could say that both the concept of the pain-body as well as samskaras refer to a separate energetic body of stuck emotions “outside” of the physical body and also not belonging to a healthy emotional body. In a way, it is the altered state of the emotional body, the disharmonious state in the same way that sickness in the body is a disharmonious state or that fears or false beliefs in the mental body are an altered or disharmonious state.

However, simply wanting to let go of the past cannot release these stuck unconscious emotions, they need to be made conscious and processed. When I was able to allow myself to release my victim identity, I could see that I had created this false belief because as the high priestess, I had thought that I had lost the right to Divine love because I had angered the Gods.

Just like little girls interpret incest as them not deserving love or being unlovable, the high priestess had interpreted her fate as losing favor (love) with/from the Gods.

The next day I had a session with one of the other healers I work with on a regular basis and this same theme came up in that session of reconnecting back into Divine love but now on an inter-stellar level going back to a pre-Earth life in the constellation of Orion. Reading the definition and unique traits of Orion Starseeds I could definitely recognize myself in them, although I would not go around banging myself on the chest because of it – which I often see people do.

We are all Starseeds, everyone is unique and special – not just some of us.

Breaking old patterns

Throughout my life, I have had a reoccurring pattern in which people create a wrong image of me towards others. This was true as a child, it was true in my first marriage, my second marriage, and it was still true up until even quite recently. This is also what happened in the Incarnation Wound Lifetime, where my then half-sister (who is now my current life mother) cast doubt on me. So this has been a recurring pattern throughout this lifetime and throughout my complete soul journey.

Monday, six days after my fall from the staircase my oldest son suddenly calls me to apologize for the hell he put us through as a teenager and young adult. In our conversation, he also thanked me for never giving up on him and always being the one that he could rely on. I would say this is not extremely extraordinary because you should be able to expect this of a parent even if you do your best to make it near to impossible for them to love you.

But what was interesting was that he said, “I would have never thought that you of all people would have had my back in the way you have.” Both of my two oldest children suffer from PAS (Parent Alienation Syndrome). In case you have never heard of it, parental alienation is a strategy whereby one parent intentionally displays to the child unjustified negativity aimed at the other parent. The purpose of this strategy is to damage the child’s relationship with the other parent and to turn the child’s emotions against that other parent. Source: NCSC.org

My oldest son is an adult now, so I said to him that the ONLY way that my lifetime support of him as his mother could surprise him is if someone had told him that I was different than I really am.

While I was showing up for every school meeting, at every facility he was housed while in juvenile hall, and talked to every psychologist or psychiatrist that was assigned to him when he developed drug-related psychosis – his father was never there. Yet every chance his father had to drag me through the mud he gladly took and while he couldn’t fool the people from CPS, he would sow doubt wherever he could so that I would always have to correct people’s image of me after they had spoken to him.

Over the years my son moved back in with me and his siblings three times, the last time I had to call the police because he went into a full psychosis and he was put back on the street the same afternoon with a bottle of pills that he, of course, wasn’t going to use because he was already too far gone. This would continue until he either got into trouble with the police or became such a threat to himself or society that they could put him in a medical facility and then once back on medication, he would reach out to me to help him get his life back on track.

When I left to travel the world with my youngest son and mother, I signed my home and furniture over to my oldest son to get him off the streets and his father refused to see him because how could he continue his narrative while I had given my son everything he needed to get back on his feet.

Up until then, his father had taken every opportunity to blame my son’s struggles on me, telling my son that if I wouldn’t have left his father none of this would have ever happened to him. He refused to see the children for four years but then told the children it was because I had taken them away from him. The first time he saw his children again was when I called him to tell him I was passing through the area and that it would be good for the kids to see him. He initially refused and hung up on me, but then called me back and agreed. That was the reality, but that was not the version of events that other people got to hear…

The problem is that there is no defense against this especially not with the children, because their father was a master in playing into their pain of having to grow up without him. All he had to do was weaponize that pain against me.

So it was a big moment for me after years of being indoctrinated by his father to see me in a certain way, that my oldest son finally called to tell me that he could see what I had done for him. His father died two years ago, but just now the image his father created of me is finally starting to crumble.

Being vilified and demonized

This same pattern of being ‘villainized’ was playing out that same week in a different way. For the past four to five years I have been working with two therapists trained by the same person (the teacher I mentioned before). I had also taken one of her programs and it wasn’t my cup of tea, although the two therapists were raving about it I personally found the level of teaching extremely low. In fact, quite quickly I decided that it was money flushed down the drain. The teacher and I also did not get along, like I said she had a very cult-like setup that I wasn’t interested in joining. I found the way her students fawned over her off-putting and I found her encouragement of such behavior repulsive.

Not willing to play along with this teacher’s powertrip I was told by her that I was arrogant, that I needed to learn to be more humble that I was disrespectful, etc. I understood where she was coming from and that as I refused to bow down to her that she wanted to strike out at me. I also saw that she was projecting her own unhealed wounding on me as she was extremely arrogant, anything but humble, and disrespectful as well. I found her teachings very shallow and hypocritical – almost virtue signaling in nature instead of truly authentically spiritual so I was happy to just agree to disagree and be on my way.

For a second I was afraid that my rejection of this teacher and her teachings may potentially cost me my friendship and working relationship with the two therapists but that seemed to not be the case. This was two years ago, but what I realized more and more and this is especially true in regards to the therapist I was also good friends with is that she is completely under the influence of this teacher. If you have ever dealt with people in cults, you know how deeply controlled the members can be and how high they put their leaders on a pedestal. All of a sudden I saw that rather than truly see me as I am, despite our five years of friendship this person could only see me as her teacher had told her to see me.

It became clear that rather than really assisting me in my process, she was seeing my process through the lens of her teacher’s assessment of me and her incredibly faulty teachings. All the teacher’s talking points were now being repeated to me in my sessions as part of the therapy. I had to make things smaller, be more humble, and stop believing that I know it all because to be spiritual is to know you know nothing, etc. The therapist brought everything up in such a way as if these were for example childhood patterns that I need to heal around this. I am pretty sure that she is convinced that this is what she is independently seeing, not realizing how much she is being influenced by her teacher’s perception of me.

Initially, I had been open to looking at things this way, I by no means think I am infallible which is why I work with other healers – unlike most healers in the spiritual industry who pretend they’re already healed when they’re not which leads to them projecting their unresolved issues on their clients.

It was the next bit that opened my eyes to how much her teacher was behind everything being said.

The teacher is a big Rudolf Steiner fan, which I am not despite having attended a Waldorf school and my youngest children going to the same school as well. Or maybe it’s because I have experienced the Antrosophy up close and personal that I know things aren’t what they are said to be, not to mention Steiner’s ideas about race that are truly offensive and spiritually incorrect. Steiner believed that there is a correlation between skin color and spiritual evolution and as Steiner was white himself you can guess who he thought to be more spiritually evolved based on the color of their skin. If Steiner were still alive today, he’d be canceled in a heartbeat.

After our last session, my friend sent me twelve pages from her teacher’s teachings talking about another Steiner concept, the dark forces of Ahriman and Lucifer. I don’t want to go too deep into this subject because it can quickly become a lengthy teaching of its own, so I’ll keep it short.

Believing in dark forces obstructing you is psychologically incorrect on two fronts;

• One, it perpetuates victim consciousness and encourages people to give away their power to external circumstances.
• Two, it allows you to subconsciously pick and choose which parts of you to disown or to accept, which we know is a mechanism that keeps us from fully accepting and integrating our wholeness. Say that there’s a part of yourself that you find difficult to accept, you can now assign it to the dark forces obstructing you rather than face the pain that is causing you to disown this part of you. This of course prevents you from actually healing it.

The concept of the dark forces is also spiritually incorrect because there is only ONE power in the Universe, not two, duality is an illusion (Māyā as it is called in Sanskrit) that only exists in the lower dimensional realities such as the reality of life in the physical realm.

This Universe is governed by the law of as above, so below; this means that which is true on a macro level, is true on a micro level.

• Light does not have a shadow. This is because light itself is a light source and therefore cannot fulfill the criteria of having a shadow. You need an object partially blocking the light to create a shadow.
• Darkness on the other hand does not exist by itself as a unique physical entity, but is simply the absence of light.

This is true on a physics level and this is true on a metaphysical level as well – light is the only true power as darkness is merely the absence of light.

This is why I can wholeheartedly say such teachings are incorrect as they encourage people to not face their deepest and most painful issues. In a way, putting the dark forces in between creates an obstacle to your own light reaching these hurt and painful parts inside yourself. Reading these so-called teachings made me realize I couldn’t continue working with this friend and then something happened that made me even decide to end the friendship.

The dynamics of a cult

During the program I did with this teacher, the teacher made a big fuss about loving communication over text messages. She had asked us to respond to all messages in the general chat so she could see who had seen it and who missed what she shared. She took offense to my simply writing ‘seen’ or ‘Yes’.

Instead, we had to be loving in our response (Help! Please get me out of here). It was all about appearing to be loving, which at that point I already felt was extremely hypocritical because you can be all dripping honey on text messages and still not be loving. It just seemed like virtue signaling to me, look at me being a ‘loving’ person.

That is exactly what happened next – my friend instead of being the loving persona she plays fuelled by this kind of faulty teachings, actually was incredibly uncompassionate with me which made me realize that we even couldn’t be friends anymore.

Once that decision was made it was as if I could see things I didn’t see before and I understood that I needed to break off with everyone connected to this cult and its teachings. I suddenly saw how this teacher’s image of me had continued to allow her to keep me small through the therapists that she trained and who truly believed that this teacher was a reincarnation of a Chinese Goddess who can make no mistakes (obviously because she had positioned herself as such).

I immediately sent a friend and another therapist a message letting them know that I was disconnecting and why. It was very interesting to get three exact same responses, which were exactly according to how this teacher had taught them to deal with the so-called dark forces. It had literally been described in the twelve pages of ‘teachings’ that my friend had sent me from her teacher after my fall.

Again you would have to understand the nature of cults, to not misinterpret this but when you ‘attack’ the ideology or the leader you become seen as the agent of the dark forces trying to bring down their ‘light’. It’s a typical reaction from cult members (I grew up in a cult which is why I know I am not cult material and arguably Steiner’s Antrosophy is a cult-like institution as well). Members of the cult each for their own reasons are deeply invested in the continuance of the cult because it’s where their sense of security, order, and structure lies. This will make them tune out or sometimes even turn against anyone that is seen as a threat to the bubble they live in.

Not all cults are suicide clubs or murderous or evil, quite often they are built on the best intentions and they tend to attract people that feel lost and who seek to create more meaning in their life. Being a member of a cult gives both a sense of meaning and a sense of importance as well as a sense of belonging. This can be hard to give up if you have not been taught to find these things inside yourself. A cult, however, will never teach you to find this inside yourself because it needs its member’s dependency in order to feed the dynamics on which it is based.

Spreading my wings

In this same week, for the first time ever I looked up how many sessions I had done with various healers over the past five to twelve years. I just looked to find the numbers for the three people I have worked with the most which were 73 sessions with this particular healer who was also a friend, 64 sessions with another healer I have worked with a lot since 2017, and then 200+ sessions with my mentor.

I have done many more sessions with other healers as well, but these are the three people I have worked with the most which adds up to 337+ sessions (a multiple 5-figure investment) to get to the level of healing and understanding I have come today.

This is also why I can take my clients so deep in one single session because I have gone so extremely deep into my own healing journey.

When I wrote my mentor how many sessions we have done together in the past twelve years, her response was ‘Wow! that many! Maybe, it’s time to spread your wings and fly?’ That right there is empowerment! That is how working with healers should be, it should bring you to a place where you can spread your wings and fly instead of becoming someone’s cash cow that they can continue (milking) selling to because you were never being prepared to fly out on your own.

So, my fall as painful as it was created a massive shift in me. I am exactly two weeks out from the fall now and my ribs still hurt. I still can’t sleep on my side, bend to pick things up, or drive my car because I am in too much pain, but I have made such a deep shift inside myself that I am very grateful for my fall as it brought me to a next level in my own spiritual evolution and empowerment that I was not at before.

Its message was loud and clear, it’s time to take up my space (rightful place) and I am still very much in the process of integrating this next step and shift. Of course, this pattern not only has past life roots, but it also has childhood roots. Here is an amazing resource that I found on the childhood aspect of this pattern that you can use in your healing journey.

I love this Urban Dictionary definition of ‘Taking up space’
‘Having the ability within yourself to feel visible, use your voice, and feel you belong in every room you’re in.’

I can now see so clearly how both my past lives as well as my childhood experiences had me believe that I didn’t have the right to take up my space like everyone else. Like I wasn’t as worthy or on the same level as others. This had been such a big theme in my life that has influenced me all across the board in my relationships, in my business, in my love life, in my finances, in my success, in my role as a mother, and more. I saw that as a consequence I derived my value from what I do instead of who I am and this fall really forced me to stop doing and fully relax into being which is another aspect of how this pattern has played out in my life.

When diving deep into the HOW of taking up your space, the whole imposter syndrome aspect came up again and that’s the thing with these patterns they don’t have to manifest in their most extreme form in order to limit you. You can be confident to a certain degree, but then still have these deep subconscious beliefs that you are completely unaware of that are holding you back nonetheless. You won’t find out until you go within and take a look inside.

In the end, you can see that even the people demonizing and vilifying me were helping me heal this pattern by mirroring back to me what I subconsciously believed about myself in my lifetime as the Atlantean high priestess and then lived as my experienced reality in the different lifetimes since. Their attempt to keep me small reflects my own decision to keep myself small in order to survive, by flying under the radar to avoid ‘punishment’. In the end, life is a game of Solitaire we are both the do-er and the done-to all rolled up into one.

I pray that sharing this very personal story with you helps you see how similar dynamics are at play in your own life, especially through the mind-body connection we can get glimpses of where we are in our own process and what wants to be healed next. I hope that the resources I have mentioned help you find the information you need, although keep in mind that the body is a physical entity that also needs physical care. In no way am I advocating for a solely spiritual approach to one’s healing, when I fell down the staircase I went straight to the ER where they stitched up my open chin with five stitches and checked if it was safe for me to go home or if I needed more medical care. The new paradigm is and/and, not either/or we can both look at the spiritual and psychological origins as well as treat the physical body – there’s no need to choose.

A client example of the mind-body connection

Before I go here’s just a little encore of what the mind-body connection can look like, I want to share this client story from a session I gave right in the wake of writing this teaching. It concerns a 7-figure businesswoman, with a very successful international business. When we started the session she had just come from the dentist where they had extracted the 2nd upper molar on the right.

As we got to the original wound in the session, we came to a lifetime in Atlantis that she carried deep guilt around and that she had continued to punish herself for ever since. We saw that every lifetime since she has tried to atone for the atrocities that were a consequence of her actions in that lifetime. It was a very powerful session, in which we removed the karmic heaviness around her soul legacy. She was already doing what she was meant to do, but she was still subconsciously doing it to make amends which led to patterns of overgiving and other ways she self-sabotaged herself because she couldn’t allow herself to fully enjoy what she had created for herself. Guilt seeks punishment and this doesn’t always mean that we won’t allow ourselves to have what we want, it can be as simple as not allowing ourselves to enjoy what we have.

In other words, her drive to make things right allowed her to create a business with BIG impact and also BIG rewards – but then her guilt wouldn’t let her fully enjoy the fruits of her labor. Healing this pattern of self-punishment allows her now to continue sharing her soul legacy without the wounding that was initially driving her – purifying her subconscious intentions, but it also allows her to have her cake and eat it too (obviously in a positive sense).

This will allow her to scale her business even further and truly have the ‘happy end’ she has been searching for throughout all the lifetimes between then and now, which were a lot. Seeing the suffering throughout all of those lifetimes really made her understand that she had paid her dues and decide that she was free to move on now.

After the session I looked up the metaphysical meaning of her extracted tooth and surprise, surprise it corresponded with the stuck emotions that came out in the session; fear and self-punishment! She had been treated for that tooth already three times before and on the day that we pulled out the root of this self-punishment pattern, this tooth had been pulled out by the root as well. Fancy such a synchronistic coming together of circumstances – another beautiful example of the mind-body connection.