Most of us are curious about reincarnation and whether we have come to this planet “before.”
“Who was I in my past life?” is a common question asked these days and there’s no shortage of answers available.
Do a quick Google search and you’ll find a handful of fun pop quizzes that narrow down what gender you were, what country you came from, what you did, and how you died.
Spiritual Wanderer Course:
Being a lone wolf and a spiritual wanderer is a sacred calling in life – a unique and alchemical path of awakening. You don’t need to feel lost, alone, or stuck on your journey any more. It’s time to meet your soul’s deep needs for clarity, self-acceptance, and empowerment. Let us show you how …
While these are fun ways to explore the topic, they are limited and shallow in their ability to really help us understand who we were in our past lives, and how we can use this knowledge to become more healed and whole people.
If you’re not that serious about answering the question, “Who was I in my past life?” I recommend taking the Past Life Regression Test I created instead of reading this article.
But if you’re serious about becoming a happier and more balanced person, keep reading.
First, we’ll explore what reincarnation really is.
Table of contents
Reincarnation Is Not What You Think It Is … Here’s Why
A few years ago I came to conclude that we are all divine fragments of God, Divinity, the Tao, Consciousness, or whatever you would like to call it.
I came to this life-changing realization via these 6 questions.
What Jesus, Buddha, Eckhart Tolle, Mooji, Adyashanti, Gangaji, Ramana Maharshi, and every wise “enlightened” man and woman through the ages have pointed to and spoken about is that the mind is limited. The self is an illusion. We are all One and the same at our very core.
Shadow & Light Membership:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐ "Shadow and Light’s weekly guidance always rings true to my heart. Thanks for acknowledging my shadows and inviting my inner light. I always get excited to open the Shadow and Light emails on Sunday!" – Angela M.
Therefore, if our identity is an illusion, how is it possible to reincarnate? As Sol wrote in a previous article, “Reincarnation of an ‘individual self’ is only as possible to the extent of believing that your sense of ‘self’ – your ego – is real.”
If you believe that you are your personality and are separate from everything and everyone else, you will believe what people traditionally say about reincarnation: that your identity will be reborn into a new body and circumstance.
Personally, I don’t at all believe that this is the case.
How is it possible for “you” to reincarnate, if there is no you (other than in your mind) in the first place?
This is yet another illusion innocently perpetrated by an ego that is obsessed with its survival. After all, why is reincarnation so appealing to many of us? Perhaps because it reassures us that our egos will live on after we die.
But if you’ve come to realize that the self is a dreamlike fantasy, you will realize that this isn’t the case.
So what exactly is reincarnation?
In my understanding, reincarnation is the process of recycling energy.
The Buddhists represent this in the Wheel of Dharma which reflects the repeating cycle of birth, life, and death (called “Samsara”).
From what I have learned, the conscious essence that animates us leaves the physical body after death and is “reborn” or remade into a new creation.
All of the memories, experiences, lessons, and wounds we develop during our lives are then left in a non-physical layer which Carl Jung referred to as the “Collective Unconscious” and others refer to as the “Akashic Records.”
Would you like to save this?
We'll email this article to you, so you can come back to it later!
Your information will never be shared.
Although this new being starts off with a “fresh slate” when it is born, as it matures its job is to heal the inherited core wounds of its predecessors.
Who Was I in My Past Life? (5 Ways to Find Out)
I’ve asked and searched for the answers to this question before too, but somehow always intuitively felt that I wasn’t asking the “right” question or looking in the right place. Have you felt this before?
While I don’t believe that our identities reincarnate, I do believe that we can discover who we were in past lives (because we are all One and share the same underlying consciousness).
More precisely, we have been every person that has ever existed, but for practical reasons, we each carry a unique imprint of inherited strengths and weaknesses.
Similar to transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (big words that describe the process of inheriting physical, mental, and emotional information from your ancestors that doesn’t influence your DNA), it is also possible for us to inherit spiritual maladies of many kinds.
As life itself is about evolving, advancing, and maturing, it can also be said that our emotional and spiritual lives are maturing as well.
Collectively, we are all evolving, and discovering what inherited core wounds we have is vital in order to become happier and more fulfilled people.
In discovering our transgenerational wounds, we also work to “raise the vibrations” of the world for this generation and future generations.
What is it that your ancestors suffered from in the past that you can heal in the present?
You may find that in the process of discovering who you were in your past life, you are linked to one specific person in a single era.
On the other hand, you may have many flashbacks from many lives that all possess the same theme.
Finally, you may not have any flashbacks at all, but instead, have an overwhelming sensation that you must learn to “resolve” a certain issue.
Here are some recommendations that will help you to discover who you were in your past life:
1. Examine what attracts, interests, or creates a sense of nostalgia in you
For example, you may carry a long-time interest in South American shamanism, you may be intensely attracted to ancient Asian culture, or you may feel a deep sense of longing and inexplicable nostalgia towards the English countryside.
Make sure you record your thoughts in a journal to keep track of the signs and synchronicities you find.
Spiritual Awakening Bundle:
Find your spiritual purpose. Deepen your self-understanding. Learn to embrace who you are. Let us show you how …
2. Pay attention to repetition in your dreams
Also, learn to distinguish between dreams that feel dreamlike, and dreams that feel distinctly life-like – these dreams may present doorways into the collective unconscious.
Repetitive dreams, in particular, carry important messages for they reveal what our minds on a subconscious level are fixated with.
For instance, if you frequently dream about being abandoned for no particular reason (i.e., no childhood abandonment issues), you may be carrying the inherited core wound of betrayal or the fear of aloneness.
Learn more about how to understand the meaning of your dreams.
3. Set an intention – repeat
You may like to set an intention before attempting to revisit your past life. Do this before going to sleep, meditating, or practicing self-hypnosis.
For instance, your intention may be “Who was I in my past life? Please be revealed” or simply, “I want to know who I was.”
Finally, it helps to repeat your intention several times before you settle into a sleep, meditation, or hypnosis state.
4. Reflect on the people you have attracted into your life
What harsh, but powerful lessons have your friends, family members, and/or romantic relationships taught you?
Can you sense any particular theme running through your life that has seemed to be there from the very start?
It is said that we all enter this life with a soul family which is a group of beings that collectively work to resolve accumulated karma.
5. Stare into a mirror or body of water
Use your reflection as a focal point to enter into an altered state of consciousness. Get into a comfortable position, and if possible, dim the lights. Keep your intention in mind, relax your eyes and gaze at your reflection. Hold gentle but solid eye contact.
You can do this for up to ten minutes to half an hour or more. As the minutes pass by, you will find that your face begins to morph and subtly change its appearance. What can you see?
Learn more about mirror work.
***
Use a combination of all the practices above to explore your past life and inherited core wounds. Please keep in mind that there are many other techniques out there, but these five are basic and easy for anyone to try out.
This Is What I Discovered …
As a result of putting into practice the above recommendations, I discovered that I have memories from Medieval Ireland, Persia/Middle East, Rome, and Greece. My most vivid and recurring memories appear to be of a great gothic castle, a home near the cliffs and ocean, grassy paddocks, and a ragged tent in a desert. The main core wound I seem to struggle with involves a loss of control which has helped me to resolve an immense number of issues in my life.
What about you? Have you discovered what your transgenerational wound is? What are your thoughts on reincarnation? I’d love to hear below.
If you need more help, we offer 3 powerful ways to guide you on your inner journey:
1. The Spiritual Wanderer Course: Feeling lost or uncertain about your path and purpose in life? Gain clarity and focus by learning about the five archetypes of awakening within you. Discover your deeper path and purpose using our in-depth psychospiritual map. Includes 3+ hours of audio-visual content, workbooks, meditations, and a premium test.
2. Shadow & Light Membership: Seeking ongoing support for your spiritual journey? Receive weekly intuitive guidance and learn to embrace your whole self, including your shadow side. Deepen your self-love and receive personal support from us.
3. Spiritual Awakening Bundle: Ready to soul search and dive deep? Access our complete "essentials" collection of beloved journals and eBooks. Includes five enlightening eBooks and seven guided journals, plus two special bonuses to further illuminate your path.
Hey this article was fab. I was just thinking.. since my belief has been in reincarnation..but that we are souls, or mm better yet something bigger that our mind can comprehend, all one, coming from the same place, but in a way we are having seperate excperiences , since in life on earth our journeys are different. So in our next life we shall have some of our past life things with us, the old sankaras from many lifetimes.. so in a way a part of our ego will come along or the karma..? So nothing of our identity but our conciousness would continue.. Are you saying that after we die from our fleshpuppets we will become perhaps stardust and be a stone for the rest of the internity and then my child will have my karmas and so on? Im curious…since lately in my practice ive gotten the strong sense of that we r nothing..indeed souls but like there would be no me. And what i mean by ’me’ would be that part who recognizes that i even had past lifes and was so and so person. Hmmm what i mean most likely is that my ego is very… Read more »
As others have noted, the test is not available when viewing the page. It does not come up when accessed through facebook and also when I go directly to your website. I really enjoy your site and would be sad if I can no longer access it. Also, even more odd, as I am typing this message, depending on which key I hit it will sometimes direct me to the bottom of the page and away from this message box!?! I do not experience this through any other websites.
If we are all one and there is no ‘you’, no individuality, then there’s no point to individual experiences.
My spiritual belief is in God, who made each if us unique and individual, and so is our journey. To say our experiences is one of many others (kind of like the Collective Borg) is to negate our own responsibility for ourselves. My experiences, and the responsibility for them are mine.
I have always been fascinated with past lives. I have the most unique dreams seeing myself mostly in the twenties. There was always a man in those dreams, who always seemed familiar, and until last year, I had never seen before. I have issues with my throat, and teeth that have no explanation, and doctors act like I am crazy when I mention it. I’ve always been afraid to talk to anyone about anything I have dealt with. Weird flashbacks of things I don’t remember happening, but seem so real…
This terrible sadness you’re feeling is the ego mourning, and because you’re so identified with it, you assume that it is you feeling this terrible sadness. It is normal to go through a mourning period when we truly and genuinely come to see how illusory the sense of “me” is. Really, there could be nothing more joyful or liberating than discovering that there IS no real death because what we are has always and forever been here and now, and forever will be. This is something you really must experience to understand fully, otherwise it seems terribly depressing.
I’ve always wondered what my past lives where because reincarnation is a very interesting subject. But it’s a strange things to talk about with others when they don’t believe in such things. Thanks for the methods i will try them!
I can’t explain it but for some reason I find these sorts of questions and thoughts to be deeply troubling. Even disturbing. I agree if our sense of self is an illusion then we cannot reincarnate in the sense that the same soul is moving from body to body. I do think we can occasionally inherit (or pass on) memories from our ancestors physically through the flesh, (some people receive memories through organ transplants!) but what really upsets me is that if our identity unravels upon death and our soul energy returns to the oneness, or the great divine, then in a sense isn’t there no real life after death? The oneness would go on as it has and does and always will, but me? I’m just… gone. This fills me with a terrible sadness.
Houses are my recurring dream theme…new, old, moving in moving out, revisiting houses from the past, exploring a house ,finding new rooms, etc.
I just came across your article and I really enjoyed it. I’ve been wanting to look into my past lives. I am very, very interested in the 60’s. The hippie movement and Woodstock to be exact. I feel like that’s home. I’m also very interested in the holocaust and ww11. Something about them intrigues me and I can’t pinpoint why.
I’ve been trying to do everything from watch the video on youtube, searching on google I try all the method but whenever I try my mind always confused and it make me dizzy. I hope that one day meet someone that can teach me or show me who am I in the past live.