are past lives real? yes!

I’ve always had what I think of as past-life-low-self-esteem. By that I mean that in group past life regressions, once they’re over and people are recounting their so-often glamorous and historic lives, I’ve never shared my little experiences because they’ve seemed so mundane, so ordinary.

Obviously, someone has to be the washerwoman or the peasant, but in the face of countless Indian princesses, multiple Napoleons and Queen Marys, my several young Native American boys and a white-robed being alone in the woods seemed to pale.

One of the past lives spent as a teenage boy was among the first encounters I had. It was brief but very specific: In the regression, I can see myself as a young native man, probably 18 or 19, and I’m down in a valley surrounded by cliff dwellings. In the vision, I’m the only one in sight, but I’m aware that there are others all around me. I’m in the midst of a lush plot of vegetables and I’m using some kind of tool to stir up the soil, clear the weeds. I’m doing this for my community, as a service, and I’m very, very happy. 

Then it’s over.

One feature of my brain this lifetime is that I don’t visualize in color. Images that I call to mind with intention are various shades of gray, very hazy and amorphous. That used to feel like a handicap until I recognized what a gift it is: I can easily discern what’s arising from within my own brain from what’s coming from outside of it. Did I make it up? Not if it’s in color. 

My young gardener from a past life appeared to me in full color. The setting looked like the western US: Arizona, New Mexico, like that. It was vivid and unforgettable, both the imagery and the feelings of contentment and happiness he had. That vision was shown to me in the autumn of 2013, in a group regression at a Unity church, a place I’d become involved with in an effort to recover from the death of my husband the year before.

Fast forward to 2015. With Mike’s departure three years in the past, I was doing better. My life had changed as a result of my efforts to find proof that he was still alive in some form. Grief was still overwhelming at times, but I had hope and, better, I’d learned to connect with him and experience his presence in meditation. 

In October of that year, traveling from Tulsa to Arizona, I decided I would take a small handful of Mike’s ashes to leave at a place where he’d had a profound spiritual experience in the mid-1990s.

Traveling to New Mexico back then with Mike, his brother, and his parents, we’d all gone out for a day to visit the natural and archaeological wonders between Santa Fe and Taos. Chief among the ones we were drawn to was the Puye Cliff Dwellings, home to Pueblo Indians who’d lived there from about 900 to 1400. 

It is a powerful experience to stand in a place where ancient civilizations once thrived. There’s something holy in imagining those lives lived, communities expanding and declining, leaving an imprint on the natural world and, with time, crumbling once again into the surrounding landscape. 

We all admired the remnants of the cliff dwellings from below. It was easy to envision how the people lived hundreds of years before. At the time of our visit, there were ladders to climb to the different levels of dwellings, and then to the top where remnants of village structures remained. Mike and his brother Pat decided to take that challenging route, while I agreed to drive the elderly parents up the winding road to the top. 

The parents and I arrived at the cliff’s edge a bit after Mike and Pat had climbed straight up. I saw Mike standing completely still at the edge of the cliff, looking out over the rim at the surrounding landscape and I went to him. 

He was wide-eyed. He looked stunned. Alarmed, I asked, “What happened to you?” And I will never forget what he said, my rational-minded though deeply spiritual husband: “I don’t know but when I got to the top of the cliff, something swept me to my knees. I was overwhelmed with the presence of God and I knew that I had been here before, that I had lived here once.” 

That unexpected spiritually transformative experience changed us both. Being knocked to one’s knees by the presence of a higher power is a gift in itself. It is moving from concept to reality. Yes, God is. That’s one thing. But the energy of a power so immense it causes one to fall? Entirely different. And for Mike, the certainty that he had been there before went a long way toward resolving the skepticism he felt about anything suggesting a life before or after this one. 

It was only the second mention my husband ever made of past lives, the first being on our first date in 1992. Walking the streets of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, we’d been talking nonstop for hours and hours when he looked at me and said “we must have had another life together, doesn’t it seem so?” It did. 

Our being together commenced from that beautiful spring day. If there were ever true soulmates, we were that. It seemed for years that we were on an enchanted path, that nothing bad could befall us as long as we had each other. Though we didn’t speak of it, we both felt that we had found each other not just there, in 1992, but again, in time. 

We were happy and spiritual and free and then, in 2012, Mike was killed by indifferent medical personnel. If that sounds dramatic, so be it. Neglect killed my husband. It took me years ~ and a profound STE ~ to recover from it, but by the time of my trip in 2015, I was well on a path to healing. 

Scattering Mike’s ashes at the Puye Cliffs, where he’d been so deeply moved, where he was convinced he’d had a past life, seemed a perfect way to continue to move forward and to honor that sacred memory.

The ruins had changed in almost 20 years. No longer were there ladders to the top, and I had to seek permission to drive up there. I’d brought with me a camp chair and a few meaningful objects along with his ashes.

Sitting at the edge of the cliff, I closed my eyes to focus on the sun warming my body. I felt once again the loss of him, my truest love. I was taken back to the afternoon he died, sitting in a room at the hospital, the sun so bright through the window, warming me just as I was experiencing here at the cliff’s edge. I could see people moving in the courtyard below, as if it were any other day, as if the world had not just ended. 

It was an impossible thing. My husband was alive and then he wasn’t. As I lay with my head on his chest, I could hear his heartbeat slowing, slowing, slowing and then it stopped. Here. Not here. Mike was my sweetheart, my best friend, my constant, and in a nanosecond, he was gone. It is still one of the most profound experiences of my life. I remembered all of that, could feel all of it sitting in the sun on the cliff’s edge and, no surprise, tears came. 

But I was there to recapture the feeling of that time long ago, when an immense presence had swept Mike from his feet, when he’d known without doubt that he’d lived in that place before, and we had both been so deeply moved and changed by that knowing.

I began a meditation asking him to be with me. I was only just beginning to consistently feel his presence as a result of my meditation practice and voracious reading of every kind of spiritual book I could find. I’d also had a number of mediumship readings, and all had led me to a place where I could, at times, connect with his essence. Most remarkably, I’d found the work of my (now) friend Suzanne and the evidential basis of her work with spirit had transformed my understanding of life and death.

Time passed and, meditation finished, I opened my eyes. What I saw stunned me. Whereas before I’d been looking down on a valley populated with a gift shop and welcome center, parking lots, and a few smaller structures, I was now seeing with my open eyes something entirely different. 

The center was gone, the roads and parking lot had vanished. There was nothing there but a few different, ancient-looking but fully formed dwellings like the ruins behind me, and a thriving garden. 

It was that same garden, my garden, the very one I’d been shown in my past life regression. It was the actual location of what I was shown to me in 2013. It was proof of why Mike and I had felt from the beginning that we were soulmates of 1000 lifetimes, that we’d been together before. Why he was so overcome after climbing up the cliffs, and why I shared that sense of awe and wonder with him. 

I had lived in that place. He had too. Even writing this I am covered with shivers I have come to know are waves of confirmation that what I’m understanding, the insights I’m having, are truth. 

Mike was knocked to his knees at the top of that cliff, certain he had been there before, a certainty that defeated the hopeful skepticism he’d lived with his entire life. Could there be something beyond this material world? Is it possible this world we see and experience with our human senses is not all there is? 

I was shown in 2013 a vision of a young man in a place that on this day was revealed to be the very same one, the very place where Mike recognized he had once lived. I’d never have dreamed I could imagine how the Puye Ruins had looked when a thriving community existed there, hundreds of years before.

But in that instant at the cliff’s edge, I saw it and I recognized it ~ because I’d been there myself. No imagination necessary. It was divine. It was healing and glorious, one more brick of certainty in the new life I was coming to know, where this human experience is not the only one. 

This affirmation of love that crosses all boundaries, including the end of one life and the advent of another, is the fuel for the healing of broken hearts. It will never be okay that our people are gone, but knowing they’re not lost to us for eternity? That helps. It does.