Beyond Bragging Rights

by Anet Paulina

“We have to get those maggots out of your leg,” I tell Nathan. “The sooner, the better.” Nathan (not his real name) and I are at an energy healing practice group meeting. Although the method we are using typically does not involve past-life impressions, in about 80 percent of my sessions they come to me anyway. Usually I am not personally involved in the situations I “see,” but in this impression I play a role.

The scene is vivid in my mind. Nathan and I, the only surviving members of a small military unit that was nearly decimated, have been moving through the jungle for days. Both of us are male; he is older by a few years. I see Nathan as looking much the way he does in this lifetime, which may not be accurate but typically is the way I view people in past-life impressions, probably because it helps me identify them. I am a slight, serious faced, dark-haired young soldier who had the good fortune to be uninjured. Nathan was not so lucky; a deep wound in his left calf has become horribly infected. Delirious from the raging fever, he stumbles along as best he can while I try to lead us both to safety.

In present time, Nathan sits on the floor in the center of the room. I place one hand lightly on his left calf, the other a couple of inches in front of his solar plexus. The jungle scene is still running through my mind, but now I have an idea. There are plants nearby that I sense have antiseptic properties. I (as the soldier) use stones to crush the leaves into a paste, which I pack into the wound and then seal with mud. We rest for the night, and in the morning Nathan feels better. His fever has abated significantly, to the point that he is lucid and more ambulatory.

After the session, I describe to Nathan what I saw in my mind. He rolls up his left pant leg to show me an odd mark on his calf, which he does not know the origin of. He also tells me that for the past few years he has had a slight stiffness in the left leg that makes his gait uneven and causes lower back pain. The stiffness began after intense exertion in a road race he hadn’t prepared for adequately, and has persisted despite various treatments.

Is the scene I saw something that actually happened in another lifetime? I don’t know for sure, and there is no way to verify the impression. But clearly the energy block I picked up on in Nathan’s leg is valid, something that affects him on a daily basis.

Three weeks later Nathan reports that he is able to feel energy moving through his left leg more than he has in years, and also that he has been releasing emotional blocks that have troubled him for a long time. Although he isn’t sure what he believes about the existence of past lives, Nathan feels the session has helped him.

In metaphysical circles, I often have heard people comment that knowledge of their past (and future) lifetimes is irrelevant to them. Equally often, I’ve witnessed folks boasting about their “important” past lives, as if having been a well-known person in another life raises their status in this one. In such cases, I tend to agree with the folks who feel such information is irrelevant. To quote a friend of mine, “A list of my famous lifetimes and $3.50 will get me a cappuccino at my local coffee shop.”

As with almost any other subject, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In my experience, the importance of past-life information lies in its applicability to one’s current lifetime. Virtually every time I have spontaneously tapped into knowledge of other lifetimes, the information is relevant to me and/or the person I had the impression about. The very fact that I have accessed the data tells me that it is meaningful in some way; I have only to discover its applicability.

In another example, a man I worked with confessed that he hated small brown furry creatures, to the point that when he was a teenager he used a rifle to shoot the dozens of prairie dogs that lived in a field behind his house. “Mike” was otherwise a compassionate person; such behavior seemed incongruous with his personality. I already was aware that he had many past lives in Europe centuries ago, in which he typically was a member of the lower social classes. Suddenly it dawned on me that his aversion to brown furry creatures was a bleed-through of some very unpleasant altercations with rats in the Middle Ages!

Because Mike seemed to have largely conventional beliefs, I was hesitant to share such information with him. But one day when I encountered him standing in front of the elevator, I found myself telling him about my impression. To my relief, Mike was appreciative of my sharing the information and said it rang true for him. I don’t know for sure if knowledge of the source of his discomfort around prairie dogs, rabbits, and chipmunks improved his attitude toward such creatures, but I like to think it did.