Past Life Psychology, How Past Life Imprints Subconsciously Still Dictate Our Lives Today

In this Soul teaching on past life psychology and how past life imprints subconsciously still dictate our lives today you will learn:

• Why we need to expand past solely science-based healing modalities
• What role past lives can play in our psychological wellbeing
• How our past live wounding subconsciously still dictates our lives today
• Why past life psychology should be taught in school and to medical professionals
• And more…

The success rate of conventional therapy

‘The placebo effect success rate ranges from being around 15% up to 72% effective. Typically the placebo effect has around 30% success rate. What does that mean? That a typical placebo is as effective as psychotherapy, and the best placebos are more than twice as effective.

The success rate across the board of psychotherapies is embarrassingly low (10%–30%).”

Recent evidence suggests that psychological approaches may be less effective than a placebo. Research into IAPT outcomes (Improved Access to Psychological Therapies – in the UK) found that only around 10% of people using psychological services showed any improvement.’
Source: psychreg.org

Could past life psychology be the missing piece to our healing?

‘In recent years the subject of ‘past-life’ experiences has become a major focus in several modes of therapy, and both local and overseas therapists now regard it as having a vital and dynamic role to play in the process of transformation and healing of the individual psyche.

Many therapists claim that ‘past-life’ work is one of the most powerful and concentrated tools available to therapy short of psychedelic drugs.’
Source: journals.sagepub.com

This has certainly also been my personal experience and that of hundreds of my clients as well. In this Soul teaching on past life psychology, we will explore the benefits of past life therapy as a psychological tool to create lasting positive results within one’s psyche.

Having worked with over a thousand clients in the past 7+ years using past life therapy I have found that the answer to our current life struggles is found in the past life conditioning that we brought in from previous lifetimes. I don’t mean just one lifetime, but a series of lifetimes based on past life trauma that have deeply engrained our subconscious patterns and personality traits to be what they are today.

If you are a professional in mental health services such as a psychologist, psychiatrist, or trained in another allopathic or alternative modality you will want to read this teaching to expand your understanding of how past lives mold our personalities and predisposition us to the issues (including trauma) that we struggle with in our current life.

But you do not need to be a professional to benefit from what is shared within this teaching, as on an individual level past life work is beneficial for everyone seeking to heal themselves on the deepest level.

This is because our past life experiences are at the root cause of our current-day struggles in a way that is not collectively recognized yet but leads to groundbreaking results when addressed at this level of depth. Results that are unique within the healing industry and go far beyond results achieved in more traditional therapeutic methods, perhaps because the past life aspect (read origin) is not taken into account in most contemporary therapeutic methods.

Past life controversy

Past lives are a controversial subject no matter how you look at it, whether it’s from a scientific or religious viewpoint or even from the viewpoint of public understanding. It triggers all kinds of emotions from intrigue, to fear, and sensationalism, as well as harsh rejection and judgment. When it comes to past lives, reactions can become really extreme from either fully embracing or being open to them to rejecting or ridiculing the concept altogether which has various different origins such as religious belief systems, scientific limitations to prove their existence as well as ‘otherism’ and other remnants of colonial supremacism.

However, the systems which have long embraced and worked with past lives such as Hinduism and Buddhism have built religious-scientific models around them that go deep into the human psyche to not only bring about mental and emotional equilibrium but also the fulfillment of one’s full spiritual potential. These systems and models are thousands of years old and go way further than the parts of them that we have adopted such as yoga, mantras, and meditation.

But rather than seeing past lives as something that belongs to Hinduism and Buddhism alone, it is necessary to see it as a Universal principle that applies to all of humanity. We can embrace the concept of reincarnation without believing in multiple gods or believing that there’s no external god at all such as the Buddhists. We know this is true because although Hinduism and Buddhism both embrace the concept of reincarnation, karma, dharma, and moksha (freedom from death and rebirth) the rest of their religions are in various ways different – even though Buddhism itself originated in India as well.

In other words, in order to embrace past life psychology and work with the healing aspects of past lives we do not need to embrace other gods or other religions. In the same way, we don’t need to change our religious beliefs to enjoy the benefits of yoga and meditation. Nor does one need to believe in reincarnation to be able to access past lives.

‘‘Past-life’ experiences have often been inextricably connected to the concept of reincarnation, yet recent research reflects that belief in reincarnation is not a necessary prerequisite for its occurrence, for often these experiences occur in therapy despite the disbelief of both client and therapist.’ Source: journals.sagepub.com

Past lives demystified

A veil of mystery surrounds the concept of past lives. Although past life regression has found its way into mainstream psychology, few studies prove its effectiveness. This is primarily because there’s no way to verify if what is seen during regression is factually accurate. There’s no way of proving what the client is seeing actually happened, making it a difficult concept for science to measure. However, as we have seen in the opening quote even psychotherapy which is considered the method of choice at this time has a surprisingly low efficacy rate.

Add to this the popularity of past lives in occultism, spiritualism, New Age, Hinduism, Buddhism, tarot, and among psychics making it an even more problematic concept for many a scientific-oriented mind to take seriously. Not to mention, that it challenges most Abrahamic doctrines around Heaven and Hell, because if you reincarnate; your current life deeds do not decide your fate in the way these religions teach. To keep their flock on the straight and narrow religious leaders have often demonized other belief systems that contradict their own. Just look at the above list of groups that have embraced the concept of past lives and you will understand why all of them clash with the three biggest religious groups which are Christianity, Islam, and the Non-religious.

This leaves us on the one hand, with little scientific research done on the effectiveness of past life therapy, and on the other hand, a large group that is not helping further the reputation of past life credibility by using it for sensationalism and to blow smoke up people’s arses. Plus of course, religious programming one way or the other – makes it difficult for many people to embrace the concept of past lives for different reasons.

One thing is for sure, past lives challenge people’s belief systems both in the sense of what is religiously possible, as well as scientifically possible, and the often over-enthusiasm to embrace these concepts and embellish them by what are often considered fringe groups doesn’t help. Nor does the fact that these are concepts deeply rooted in other religious cultures such as Hinduism and Buddhism help in giving past life therapy the status it needs to be fully embraced by the world at large as a key to one’s psychological well-being.

Therapists that venture out into the past life arena, whether for personal use or professional use need to be open to a little woo (spirituality) in order to feel comfortable working with such modalities. Luckily this is a big trend at the moment, where we see many science trained therapists add spiritual components to their work in order to create better results for themselves and their clients.

What past life work is not about

Past life work is not about sensationalism or somehow being special, whether it’s through being an old soul or through being historically famous. There’s zero therapeutic value to knowing that you were rich, powerful, or famous in a previous lifetime. That’s all just fodder for the ego to fuel its insatiable desire to feel special and superior to others. It’s a great gimmick to get people to dig deep into their purses and spend money but such information provided it’s even true, is useless.

It only serves ego-driven personalities to try and gain importance from their past-life status, an importance they potentially don’t have in this lifetime which only creates more illusions and psychological problems. It’s also not really a thing because as I will explain further on, we aren’t actually our past life selves. There’s no spiritual clout to be gained from past lives because, in the end, we are who we are today and not the past life expression of our soul that is being shown to us.

It’s also not about the easy connections where current life trauma is explained by past life trauma, which can have a healing effect to a certain extent but doesn’t scratch the surface of the deeper reasons why you were playing out the same theme in multiple lifetimes. There’s a deeper layer to past life work that is not touched in past life regression and is certainly seldom touched by people reading your energy field or using other methods of intuitive feeling, knowing, hearing, or seeing (the Clair senses) simply because they haven’t been trained to go to these depths.

I will even go as far as to say that past life work or therapy, is not about past lives at all. We merely use the past life stories to find the deeper underlying patterns, fears, and false beliefs that are still playing out in one’s life today that create suffering and/or the dysfunctional behaviors that people are seeking to heal whether consciously or subconsciously. Often clients don’t know what the real issue is, but come to therapy and healing because they no longer want to live the consequences of certain patterns and behaviors and need help finding them.

The Carl Jung quote “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.” is especially true for past lives as hardly anyone is aware of the true extent to which our current reality is dictated by our unresolved past life pain and trauma that we bring into each new life we live when we reincarnate.

Many a psychic or other types of ‘readers’ are in way over their head when it comes to past lives, because they don’t understand the underlying principles which has them making wrong conclusions or interpreting them through their own level of understanding and trauma filters which corrupts the insights to be gained. To many people this may seem counterintuitive, but the most reliable source of past life knowledge is accessible through the client itself and methods that aim to see/feel/hear or know for the client often lack depth and tend to be skewed merely because they are filtered through someone else’s frame of reference (level of understanding and trauma filter).

What is past life psychology?

Within Hinduism and Buddhism, there’s a pretty scientific model for how past life imprints including trauma and karma are passed on from lifetime to lifetime. I have studied neither of these models, yet have intuitively come to the same conclusions.

This is the basis of past life psychology:

The causal body

Outside the mental, emotional, physical, and vibrational body, each human has a causal body or sometimes called a karmic body. The causal body isn’t a ‘real’ body in the sense that the others are gross and subtle energy bodies, the causal body is a seed sustained by karma. When we die, it’s the causal body that follows us from lifetime to lifetime, it transports the essence of the individual from one life into the next incarnation. It’s also the causal body that creates the mental, emotional, physical, and vibrational body for each new lifetime from the information it has carried in from previous lifetimes.

The causal body is like a database that stores all the experiences across all incarnations throughout our complete soul’s journey. It is composed of various elements, to keep things simple we will only name a few. The causal body is composed of our Ahamkara, our samskaras, and our karma. It downloads certain predispositions and programming into the current incarnation and the current incarnation uploads the complete experience of its life back up to the causal body, this includes lessons learned but also what was left unresolved within the lived experience such as unresolved pain, trauma, fears and false beliefs.

Ahamkara is our sense of separateness or the higher ego, samskaras are mental conformations or latent karmic tendencies shaping one’s present life and karma is where our actions went against our soul essence. Karma is not tracked externally by a force outside of us, but internally by ourselves and held in the karmic templates we carry within the causal body. Also, our samskaras are stored within the karmic templates, however, it’s important to remember that karma does not equal punishment. Our karma merely refers to where we are out of alignment with our soul truth.

Karmic templates

The karmic templates affect all aspects of the creation of the subtle and physical bodies. This includes deformities, looks, and intelligence, as well as mental and emotional tendencies, as it sets the stage to allow us to bring in the parts of us that we want to heal (bring back into alignment with our soul truth) within the current incarnation.

Just as the body has an innate healing system that heals our bodies when we are sick or heals our broken bones, the ‘self’ has an innate healing system as well that subconsciously pulls in the people, situations, and experiences it needs to play out the unresolved pain it brought in from previous timelines, whether they are ancestral or past life. In fact, both ancestral as well as childhood wounding have their roots in past life unresolved wounds. That being said, this does not mean that people who hurt or abuse children or adults should not face the consequences of their actions. You cannot twist spiritual law to condone immoral or illegal behavior.

It’s healing our karmic imprints (our karma and samskaras) that restores us back to our original soul blueprint (Divine blueprint) and when all karma is depleted, the causal body (which is a seed energy sustained by karma) dissolves. Releasing the person’s individual consciousness to merge back into the ocean of pure consciousness (into Oneness). It is through the causal body that we know God or the Divine, and that we experience our deepest connection to that which is greater than our separate selves.

In this way, past-life psychology offers a more cohesive view of the development of the ‘self’ than contemporary psychology which only takes into account the current incarnation and its experiences.

A definition of the self

The soul is the only true self, although even that statement is technically incorrect because separation doesn’t exist within the soul realm, therefore there cannot be a separate self. So when we talk about the self, we are automatically talking about the separate sense of self which is the ego.

This is where things get interesting. Within the causal body, we have the higher ego (Ahamkara) which is our initial sense of separation. The higher ego doesn’t incarnate, it stays within the causal body. The lower ego develops within the incarnation (this is the ego that psychology focuses on).

The higher ego gathers all the experiences of the incarnated self as if they were its own in the causal body ‘database’ of all the previous incarnations. They were experiences of the ‘self’ remembered by the ‘self’ and uploaded to the collective memory of the ‘self’ as if they were experienced by the ‘self’. Or perhaps easier to grasp the lower ego identifying as the ‘self’ shares it experiences with the higher ego who also identifies as the ‘self’, the higher ego is the macro version of the lower ego and their consciousnesses are interlinked.

This not only applies to uploading experiences but also to downloading experiences of the ‘self’. In this way, past life experiences can feel as if they are our own when we the current incarnation never lived this experience. This identification of the ‘self’ however, is misleading, they are experiences of our past life predecessors, in the same way, that we are not our ancestral predecessors (read this Soul teaching on reincarnation for a full explanation) – we are not our past life expression of our soul. We merely inherit their unresolved trauma and pain in the same way we ‘inherit’ unresolved trauma and pain from our ancestral lineages, which is also called transgenerational trauma or ancestral trauma. Read more about this type of trauma here.

This also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that the survival knowledge gathered (on a soul path level) by our past life predecessors would be passed on to future incarnations, in the same way that this is true on an ancestral lineage level (incarnation level) where such information is also passed down to future generations.

Conscious vs. subconscious

The subconscious mind doesn’t know the concept of time and it doesn’t know anyone but the self, which is why everything that it believes is applied to the current life ‘self’ as if it belongs to it. This is because it taps into the collective memory database of the ‘self’ within the causal body. These are the earlier mentioned samskaras the mental conformations or latent karmic tendencies shaping one’s present life.

This means that any false beliefs or fears that it has inherited from a past life’s predecessor are still considered true today on a subconscious level. Even if the current life expression of the ‘self’ has evolved and holds more modern beliefs that contradict the old beliefs, the subconscious beliefs overwrite the conscious beliefs. This is because the subconscious mind is infinitely more powerful than the conscious mind, creating 95% of our reality experience. This is also why we cannot use the conscious mind to forcefully reprogram the subconscious mind because our subconscious mind is wired to keep us safe. Part of that safety or protection programming is to not act on a whim to conscious thoughts and decisions as they could be caused by a temporary lapse in judgment.

Instead, we need to go back to the lifetime in the past that holds the original wound and see the experience of the ‘self’ from the soul’s perspective. The original wound is always based on a misinterpretation of the experience or something we are still holding against ourselves. Seeing the soul truth that was not seen before, heals the unresolved pain from that lifetime and reprograms the fear or false belief automatically.

This is because once a belief is created it becomes automated and slips into the subconscious, never to be checked again. By bringing up the situation or experience that created the fear or false belief, we can assess if it is still true for us today. When we decide that it is no longer true for us, the subconscious mind discards (deletes) it. This is not possible without seeing the original wound that created the fear or false belief (a false belief is a belief that contradicts our soul truth). You need to as it were come with evidence for the subconscious mind to be willing to reprogram the belief.

As long as a fear or false belief is active or even dormant within the subconscious it will continue to co-create our reality.

The wounded ego

The total sum of the unresolved pain and trauma that we carry with us from lifetime to lifetime is what is called the wounded ego. The more wounded the ego is, the more it will try to separate and isolate itself as a protection mechanism. The more healed the ego becomes, the more it can embody the soul’s truth. Because the higher and the lower ego are interconnected, the healing that takes place in the lower ego works through to the higher ego and vice versa.

What makes it tricky is that the ego sees itself, life, and the other through the filter of its unresolved trauma and pain – the trauma filter. In order to heal the wounded ego and come into inner union with the soul, we need to heal the unresolved pain and trauma that is distorting its perception of reality. The more we wipe its trauma filter clean, the more healed the ego becomes, allowing the ego and the soul to come onto the same page and start working together. In the wounded state, the ego is in a constant tug of war with the soul. Our ability to truly trust is a great indication of where the ego is, does it still believe it’s the only one looking out for numero uno or does it trust the soul to guide the embodiment. It’s this first state that fuels its tug of war with the soul.

The soul

The soul is never wounded and remains whole within the soul realm, it stays completely unscathed by the incarnation process. In gamer analogy, the soul is the gamer playing the incarnation game while the ego is the gaming avatar. The gamer is never in the game, only the gaming avatar is actually inside the game. The soul is a reflection of the Divine, like a drop in the ocean it is made of the same essence as the Divine which is part of its soul or Divine blueprint.

The accumulation of unresolved trauma and pain (our karma and samskaras) creates distortions on our Divine blueprint, which like the soul stays immaculate in the soul realm. It doesn’t change the Divine blueprint, but it distorts the manifestation of the soul blueprint within the physical realm. It’s like a corrupted hologram, that distorts our soul truth yet never alters that truth because our soul truth is everlasting.

This is because our experiences within the incarnation game are an illusion, they are Māyā as it is called in Sanskrit. The word Māyā refers to that which is constantly changing and thus is spiritually unreal. Only what is outside of the incarnation game is spiritually real. Even the ego itself is but a temporary attribute that the soul has created in order to be able to play the incarnation game, our sense of separateness is not spiritually real even though it of course feels real within our experience.

The end goal

The end goal of past life psychology is to heal the wounded ego which simultaneously clears out the karmic and samskaric imprints within the causal body. Doing so allows for the embodiment of one’s soul essence and in the end, the merging back into Oneness with all that is.

The journey of healing the wounded ego leads to a better life quality and improvements in all areas of one’s life such as; self-image, relationships, romantic love, health, money, business, success, etc. Because this healing happens at a root cause level, it’s very potent and long-lasting. This is because dysfunctional patterns and behaviors are pulled out by the root (past life cause) which fully eliminates the past life imprint from which it originated.

Getting the ego and the soul on the same page and joining forces increases one’s consciousness, vibrational state, and the ability to consciously co-create one’s reality without the subconscious mind dragging in the unresolved past that it is still seeking to heal.

Some people think that because we have had thousands of past lives that our wounds are never-ending, but this is incorrect. First of all, we only imprint and need to heal the experiences that we still carry unresolved pain around. Secondly, we have over the centuries and millennia narrowed it down to a couple of the themes (wounds) that we have on rinse and repeat. People often confuse never done healing, with never done growing and although we never stop growing in consciousness and understanding, it’s not true that we are never done healing.

We can heal past our past life trauma and become fully trauma-free, the reason most people don’t do this is because they don’t know that it is possible. Even those familiar with past life healing, often only go as far as improving their current life issues. Yet similarly to ancestral work, everything we clear out now is not passed on to future generations or in this case future incarnations of the ‘self’.

Why past life psychology should be taught in school

The difference between our current focus in psychology and viewing it from the past life perspective is that one merely looks at fulfilling our potential on an incarnation level, while the other looks at fulfilling our potential on a soul path level, which includes the current incarnation level. This shift in focus can greatly shift our society as a whole because it’s this feeling of disconnection (separation/isolation) that is behind much of our current life’s dysfunctional behaviors and patterns.

The more wounded the ego, the more it separates and isolates itself in an attempt to protect itself. Restoring the connection to self, the true self or soul brings the ego out of separation and isolation and back into connection.

Disconnection is in a way the biggest issue we face in our current times, even though we are better connected to each other than ever digitally, we have never been as alone and isolated as we are in this day and age. This is even more true for people living in the West, according to Western norms. Perhaps, however, these are the best circumstances possible to reconnect to our inner self provided we don’t distract ourselves with superficial emotional (dopamine) ‘fixes’.

At the same time, these times also call for a different approach to psychological well-being. It calls for methods that go deeper, have a higher efficacy rate, and address our problems at their root cause and not just on a surface level. The fact that many therapists claim that ‘past-life’ work is one of the most powerful and concentrated tools available to therapy short of psychedelic drugs, is an indication that it’s increasing in popularity. Yet many of the methods being used, still focus on one or two lifetimes and their connection to our current life instead of the original wound that created the karmic pattern. Nor do most methods look at the connection between childhood, ancestral and past life wounding which are often deeply entangled. Within the Soul Embodiment® Therapy method, we really drop into these deeper layers to shift our perspectives from the ego to the soul’s perspective.

Perhaps science cannot offer this past life piece in the same way that spirituality (not religion) can. Science in and of itself tends to disconnect and separate pieces in order to zoom in on it when on a spiritual level things are seen as a whole and interconnected with everything else. I think in general that is the problem with most approaches, although still extremely valuable, they address but one aspect of the whole, and although there’s not one single healing modality that can address all issues what is often missing is the understanding of how all the different parts are interconnected.

Neither childhood wounding nor ancestral wounding stands on its own, they both have past life roots and our childhood wounding can have ancestral roots as well on top of the past life roots. This is because we use our family lineages to assist each other in healing mutual soul themes and similar past life wounding. When we are unaware of this we can be angry at our families of origin for everything we feel was done to us and everything we feel generations before us failed to address and have therefore burdened us with, But to some extent, this is missing the bigger picture, which doesn’t mean that if you’re angry with your parents or family that you are not allowed to feel that way. Feeling our emotions is an important aspect of healing, staying stuck in our emotions, however, is counterproductive

The reason we are missing the bigger picture when we shift the blame to others is simply because what we will find time and time again is that we have a soul history of similar wounding in previous lifetimes or that our current life experiences occurred in an attempt to heal past life trauma this time around. This is of course difficult to conceptualize when we have not yet seen these connections between past lives and our current experiences but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. We have simply not looked at it with the right tools, similar to how the microscope opened our eyes to bacteria. Viruses and bacteria were always there, we merely didn’t have the right tools to see them.

To be crystal clear, this does not excuse child abuse. Children always need our protection, it’s never for the child’s ‘highest good’ to allow abuse to continue once it has been detected. That would be insane because trauma is never ‘good’ for someone. Yet, if it has already happened we need to heal from it. It’s also important to note that this is not about victim blaming, nobody consciously creates painful experiences. It’s a subconscious process, which means that it happens outside of the victim’s conscious awareness. Blame doesn’t exist in the higher dimensional realities, but you can of course not blame someone for something they have no conscious control over.

Reliving our unresolved past is not something that we can consciously control, especially not at a young age. But it is something that we can clear out, through doing past life healing work.

I pray this teaching has helped you understand how past life healing can be a key to greatly improving our psychological well-being. The understanding of past life psychology I believe can be a powerful tool for everyone looking to deepen their own personal healing journey as well as expand and deepen their offer to their clients. If you are looking to expand your skill set as a therapist or healer, we offer a certification program for the Soul Embodiment® Therapy modality.