Remembering my past lives

Terrifying pictures would pop into my brain in my childhood. The pictures were really more like moving images and sounds. When these images were triggered, like a war veteran with PTSD, I would cower in fear and become totally paralyzed.

The first time this happened I was 3 years old. I had traveled with my parents to a small town in Texas. It was the lobby of the hotel or perhaps it was a restaurant, it doesn't really matter because suddenly it was on fire.

Fire was all around me. My parents were sitting by the fire place, coaxing me to come closer to "get warm," I froze. Fire, smoke, screaming in my ears, and fear completely surrounded me.

As a child I suffered from many different types of nightmares. Everything from bugs on my pillow, to furniture that walked, stalking me around my room, to Grandpa from the Munsters staring at me as I was sleeping.

But my most common, reoccurring nightmare was about fire.

I would often sit up in bed screaming as the flames seem to becoming in the window.

I was tasked at the age of about 7 or 8 to take the trash to the incinerator in the back yard.

This was all fine and good until it was time to light the match. I was so desperately afraid of a flame at the end of my fingers, I could never master it. Before I even thought there was a spark I would throw the match into the incinerator.

My parents could not understand it. To them my fear of fire was an irrational fear.

Tuesdays were Camp Fire Girls after school. Each meeting consisted of the traditional lighting of the Wo He Lo candles. Thankfully there were enough girls in the group to keep my turn from coming around very often. When it was my turn, I usually just made excuses.

Eventually the leader seemed to feel that I had to light the candles at least one time. It wasn't easy to fool my mom, but I actually faked being sick so I could stay home from school, just so I wouldn't have to attend that Camp Fire Girl meeting.

Although my grandmother spoke often about reincarnation, she also spoke of writing down her dreams and the impact of numerology. The family tended to write my grandma off as being a bit weird.

For some reason at the age of 14, my beloved grandmother gave me a book called. "A World Beyond" by Ruth Montgomery.

As I read this book It was like puzzle pieces falling from the sky and landing on the table perfectly connected to form a picture. It became so abundantly clear to me that this whole time I was remembering a past life!

As I continued to read, "A World Beyond," the puzzle pieces became pictures that began to tell a story.

The first piece that fell into place was remembering 3 archways within a wall.

My mind was like a camara, gradually zooming out to begin to see a bigger picture. This was a process. As I read, I would remember a little more each day. Eventually I remembered even more over the years.

The arches were in a partial wall that divided a great room into two rooms. On one side, there was a fire place at an angle at the far end of the room.

On this same side was a couch that was seated facing the wall adjacent to the fireplace. The back of the couch sat against the wall with the arches.

On the other side of the wall with the arches, was a large wooden staircase.

The first archway was the one I crawled into trying to escape the fire. This is where I died.

I started high school at the age of 15. By this time I had completed the book and I was no longer afraid of fire.

In fact, I embraced fire. I had incense and candles in my room and "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple blared from my speakers.

My poor parents still didn't understand.

During a hypnosis session years later, I went back to this life time again. This regression started outside.

Walking uphill, my hook button shoes hurt my feet and it was cold . I was with my brother and our father, who was in a hurry to get us home so he could meet his buddies at the tavern. My hurting six year old feet struggled to keep up with the long strides of my father.

The next thing I knew my brother and I were inside the home, and my brother was trying to light a fire so we could get warm.

As the fire started to get out of control, I kept running up the stairs to try to get our mom.

During the regression, my hypnotherapist asked me, "What happened next?" I was floating on the ceiling and I could see my father, with his head in his hands, grieving.

I could feel his grief as he thought our mother had been home when he dropped us off.

I recognized him! I was absolutely stunned to see that my father in that lifetime was my ex-husband in this life.

I pondered this regression in the weeks and months to come, and I came to realize that my brother who lit the fire to keep me warm, was my son in this lifetime.

About a year after this regression, my son who was about four years old at the time, out of the blue asked me, "Do you remember when you kept running up the stairs to get our mom?"

Many years later, in my early 30's I studied hypnotherapy and practiced past life regressions.

It seemed as if I had completely healed from the traumas of that lifetime, which gave me the freedom and the space to explore more past lives.