I can’t pinpoint exactly when it was that I first got the sense I had been here before in other lifetimes, perhaps I have always had it…but then it came into its zenith when I set about healing myself from chronic pain these last few years. Along the path of that journey, layer upon layer of “memories” have surfaced; some very subtle, a feeling that there’s more to something than obviously meets the eye, like I’ve been there before. At other times, I’ve had quite vivid recollection of “other me”s going through certain experiences and even have a couple of lifetimes that I’ve been remembering in flashbacks, like pieces of a jigsaw, which now make up quite coherent pictures of other lives. One of these has helped inform some of my motivations in this lifetime, including the desire to be a painter. The  most powerful healing session of recent times brought multiple recollections of other experiences to the surface in a kind of wave of similarity…many many lifetimes of trauma, pain, loneliness and hiding that I had undergone as a woman…all surfacing through the very pinpoint of me as I am here and asking to be released now.

In having these experiences, I don’t believe I am in any way unusual except, perhaps, in being open to remembering as I do. I think that we all carry these multiple perspectives within the pinpoint of experience that we currently are and that these are available to be accessed and made use of as we choose (also, that we are accessing and using them anyway…whether we realise it or not). They manifest as the inexplicable triggers, the deeper layers of reactions, the déjà vus of our “normal” experience and yet most of us keep them there, happily buried under the surface of who we prefer to fixedly regard ourselves as in this lifetime. After all, one life alone can be quite enough to have to deal with for most people; why on earth would you volunteer to open up the whole can of worms of all your other lives as well? Yet I can’t help appreciating the evolutionary potential inherent in melding and merging so many layers of ourselves into one, bringing so many perspectives into a conscious, multi-perspective singularity that we get to be in a lifetime where we are open to experiencing this. Through being able to witness all the things in common, the cross-over themes, the repeated stuck-points and all the high points too, we get to take some major evolutionary leaps.

How does a multi-lifetime perspective contribute to an understanding of this one in ways that can be as healing as they are enlightening? I was shown how just today. A tragic accident unfolded outside our house last night, a little further down our road but near enough to see the police “do not enter” tape and all the blue flashing lights. For over three hours, all through traffic was turned away and an air-ambulance was at the scene pretty quickly, though it didn’t seem to take anyone away for over an hour. The fact of that gave me a pretty good idea how serious this accident was…I had been there before, knew graphically what serious injury looked like, just how tangled people can become with their vehicles when the impact is severe and it was like a leaden weight upon my evening. I spent my time quietly sending blessings to those involved and their families and had such a migraine, so much pain in my body all evening and long after I went to bed.

Just over a decade ago, at the point when my health suddenly crashed, I was a statement taker for a legal firm specialising in serious injuries. I did this work freelance and became so good at it over the course of four years that I was the only person other than a senior partner of the firm entrusted with these very sensitive cases, where I was interviewing the victims themselves (if they were still alive), their bereaved family members (if they weren’t) and any passengers, witnesses and so on ready for court proceedings. As well as gaining a detailed account of the accident, I would have to talk about their lives before and then afterwards, how their lives had been flipped over in a single moment; their ongoing injuries and pain, lost limbs, lost relationships, lost livelihood…so much loss.

Quite often I would telephone these people only to find that they had been made almost mute by their own trauma, didn’t know where to start or how to express it. They would be all locked-up in their pain, their anger and bewilderment and it was my job to gently establish what they were prepared to share. Other times it was like they had been waiting for my call, longing for someone to invite them to get it all off their chest; so they would forget I was just the statement taker and open up to me like I was a fully fledged trauma counsellor, telling me far more than I needed to know and, of course, there would be much sobbing and heart-break down the phone.

For the first two years, I was taking these statements during the daytime as it was my self-employed occupation. For the subsequent two, I was trying to fit it around a full-time job as I had been through my own small trauma of divorce and then trying against all the financial odds to keep my house and take care of a very young daughter on my own. I would get home after a long day that involved dropping my daughter at the childminder and commuting through the inevitable traffic jam to an office where I did a high-pressure job for 8 hours and then make the return trip through even bigger traffic jams to pick up my daughter from the after-school “club”. On the nights when I had a statement to take, she would be sat down in front of the TV with her food while, after hastily grabbing a so-called meal, I would shut myself into the next room to conduct these long and often harrowing interviews whilst keeping an ear out for my daughter. Meanwhile, I was sick to the stomach with worry about my own life, my finances, the ability to pay the mortgage, the up-and-down relationship I was currently in, the impact of this lifestyle upon my daughter, the guilt that I felt I was being a terrible parent as I was just so beat-up after my day that I struggled to engage properly with her, would be falling asleep with her on my knee when I was meant to be reading her a story…I was then waking at 4 am every morning, exhausted yet adrenalised by fear, ready to start the daily routine all over again.

That whole era of my life was something I now realise I sealed off as soon as it was over, dragging its own “do not enter” sign across the door. It was my very own car crash; the point when everything converged into such a horror and stress point that my health came tumbling down. Yes, I always knew that I was going through such a lot at the time that it tipped me over the edge (as surely as the fallen sheep of the walk I shared in my last post!) but I had never, quite, integrated the multi-lifetime aspect of it…that is, until today.

When I woke up this morning, last night’s road accident still on my mind, my thoughts wandered off to those statement-taking days and I found myself wondering, since it has all become such of a blur to me now, how did I take those statements down, did I type them? Then I remembered, no, actually I spoke them out loud; after the interview was finished and I had made my copious shorthand notes, I would sit there – often on my own bed late in the evening – and would speak the statements straight into a dictaphone. I would lie against my own pillows in a place that should have been the very sanctum of my life and, in a steady dead-pan voice that the typists could understand, would read out, in the first person, all these harrowing accounts of being crushed, trapped, loosing limbs, trapped under water, watching a loved-one die, losing my livlihood…whatever it was…like it was happening to me. Then, exhausted, I would put away my files, curl up on my bed, fall asleep…

Suddenly, there was a release. Tears. A tangible shift in my body. Realisation. Honouring myself for what I had been through. Tenderness. Understanding. Huge pieces falling into place. These are just a few of the rainbow sensations that coursed through my body as I lay there in that (same) bed this morning seeing this for the breakthrough that it was. In its way, it felt just like that healing I went through just a couple of months ago, the one where I had experienced myself as the convergence of so many lifetimes, so many pains, wounds, hurts, tears, losses, fears, sadnesses, disappointments, exclusions…all in one person. Here I was again only this had all happened in this one lifetime, I had brought it all together into one human experience, had directed the course of my life exactly thus (had had to go through an experience of many traumas some way or other without having to actually go through them) expressly so I could heal it all in one go. Because this is what the multi-lifetime perspective offers to all of life’s experiences…you start to glean the well-timed perfection inherent in all of it.

Why does our modern experience manifest as every increasing speed, so many more collisions, all the serious-injuries that pepper the roads of our everyday life? We have become the very car-crash of ourselves, all of us carrying more and more unseen burden and pain, in more and more of a rush to get to where we think we are going, crossing the paths of so many other beings to whom we remain largely oblivious though it turns out that they in the very “same place” in their “journey” as we are and then converging as the RTAs of our world. Our roads have become the living metaphor for where we are as a species; they are also one of the places that are literally asking for our most healing attention, you could say.  Sending blessings to last night’s latest “victim” – who I now know was a young motorcyclist with his L plates still on – is the very least I can do and the most; we could all use these tragic focal points for blessing ourselves back into a slower paced, less collision prone world.

What I had done in my own way through converging all this pain and experience inside of myself is what every empath, every healer does day after day and I know it. They bring the multi-experiences of every other being for whom they feel the pain and suffering all together into one form (themselves) so that they get to heal all of it as one and as they do this…knowingly or otherwise…they are also healing all the many layers of all their own multi-lifetimes too. They are like they great knot-tiers of human consciousness because what they do for others, just as they also do it for themselves, serves as a multi-dimensional experience node,a convergence point, across all time and space, healing exponentially in all directions and in ways we can only begin to fathom from our “little” human perspective. This is why it can feel so very hard to be the human caught up in the midst of these experience…but once we can see all the layers we are working upon, that pain starts to dissipate, becomes much less concentrated, dense or heavy; its vibration is raised. Our personal load becomes lighter as we newly realise how our breakthroughs, as we heal those layers of pain, serve this planet way beyond our own individuated experience, converging with so many other experiences to bring relief to all.

Had my health crisis of a decade been some sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome after all, a thought I had considered many times before but had just as quickly discounted because I felt I simply “hadn’t been through enough” to warrant such an extreme reaction? Just maybe my acceptance that there is some truth in this is the very healing my heart was asking for next as I newly honour all the many layers of experience that I have been through in this life and all the others. Perhaps our doing of this one simple thing – that is, honouring all the pain and trauma we have ever been through without even having to know what that involved – we all get to heal our deepest, most multi-layered wounds in a single moment. I am certainly feeling some sort of release in my own cells this morning, like a very heavy weight has been lifted…

When I came downstairs and opened the shutters, I saw an old-familiar face passing right by the window on the road that I find myself paying more attention to since last night’s accident; it was the the childminder I used to deliver my daughter to every morning “back in those days” of statement-taking that I had tried until now to blank out of my mind; someone I hadn’t seen for many, many years, her hair now as white as snow, still walking other people’s children to school. What are the chances…a knowing wink from the universe.