Historical Figures Reincarnated

Does Everyone Have a Past Life?

2011-11-25T19:52:00.000-08:00

An argument that is commonly brought up against the possibility of reincarnation is that there are as many, if not more people currently alive than the sum total of everyone who has ever lived throughout history. That’s a fair observation. It’s even more so when you consider that not everyone who has had a life in the past could possible be alive right now. Some souls are in the resting stage between incarnations. Others have not crossed to the other side yet and are still hanging around as ghosts. Reincarnationists have suggested a few theories to explain this.

The first one is that some of each person’s past lives were lived in an alternate universe. If you are a fan of Fringe, the idea of alternate universes should already be familiar to you, but of course the concept has been around far longer. This multiverse theory also gets expanded into more exotic tangents. Some people believe that we can incarnate as different forms of life. I have met people who claimed to be reincarnations from alien species. Other psychics have told me that I had past lives as a fairy and as a lesser Norse goddess. I’m not sure how much I believe that, but the psychics in question are very gifted in general. Others believe in the concept of the multiverse, but use it to claim that reincarnation doesn’t exist at all. They say that what we consider to be past lives are actually lives being lived concurrently in alternate universes.

Another theory is that people’s souls can split, such that a single person can live several lives simultaneously, but that they would all be lived in the same universe. This is the theory that I have the least belief in. I tend to go by the mindset of “as above, so below,” or put more plainly, the spiritual world and physical world work on the same basic principles. In the physical world, it is a rare person who can multitask and truly do each simultaneous activity as well as when doing them each individually. Why would anyone be in such a rush to get through their life lessons that they would risk doing a poor job by taking on more than one life at once? I already see people who have taken on more than they can comfortably handle in just one lifetime. Most people I know are exhausted enough as is.

The theory that makes the most sense to me is that there are a lot more people now because new souls have cycled in. It is generally believed that once a soul has mastered all of the lessons that they wish to learn on the physical plane, they stop incarnating. Just as new human bodies enter the physical world as babies to balance out the old ones that are leaving through death, it makes sense that new souls would also be choosing to incarnate for the first time. That would likewise explain why the world never seems to grow as a whole on the spiritual level. If no new souls cycled in, one would expect that as we all lived successive lives over the millennia and learned through each one to be better people, by this point humanity should be nothing but sweetness and light.

BTW, this is Nellie writing this. Jessica will be following up with her viewpoint. Neither one of us claims to have all the answers. This is just being presented to give you all some food for thought.

Free Past Life Hypnosis Webinar

2011-08-08T13:08:00.000-07:00

I was very pleased last month to see an announcement from Dick Sutphen on his FaceBook page that he and his fiance, medium Roberta Witter, would be offering a free webinar where they would take the viewers through a few hypnosis sessions to look into some of their past lives. That is wonderfully generous of them. Dick Sutphen has been writing about reincarnation since the 1970s and is one of my earliest influences in metaphysical studies. He has an online radio show on Contact Talk Radio that I enjoy, as he radiates joy and inquisitiveness on it. I wasn't able to attend the live seminar, so I was even more pleased when they announced that they would be making available as a streaming download after the fact.

The webinar is available at http://dicksutphen.com/html/webinar7-11lker47.html

As I've mentioned in an earlier blog, I think it is helpful to try various approaches to figure out your past lives. I have already done a one on one session with a local hypnotist and done the online hypnosis that Brian Weiss does through Hay House. Over the weekend, I had a chance to do this one as well.

What I liked about it is that Dick and Roberta walked everyone through an exercise first to give you a better idea of what to expect when under hypnosis. Most people probably assume that it is like being in a different time and place as clearly as if you were actually there. It is actually more like daydreaming. They then take your through 3 past life regressions. The first one is done in a single hypnosis session. They have a break, followed by the other 2 regressions in the same hypnosis session. The focus in the hypnosis is to find out how your related in the past to key people in your current life.

I found it helpful. You obviously aren't going to get a full view of your various past lives in a short period of time, but this can be a good starting point. Roberta mentioned that this often opens the doorway for other memories to come through later for her. There were some things that came up in the regression that caught me off guard. I always take that as a good sign that I'm not just making it up.

Give it a try and see what you think. The whole webinar takes about 2 hours and 20 minutes, so plan accordingly.

Reincarnation Forensics - What Makes a Case Compelling?

2011-07-21T18:48:00.000-07:00

In the world of HFR, it is not unusual to come across completing claims of people who believe themselves to be the reincarnation of famous people from the past. Trying to figure out who has the more legitimate claim can be a challenge. I won't read for someone if I am front-loaded with suggestions on who they might have been, so I consider a list of factors that I call my reincarnation forensics check list. The more factors that fit the case in the higher categories, the more compelling I find the case to be:

Strong indicators (highly individualistic factors, aside from the last one):

- moles and scars at sites on the body where the past life body was injured
- same handwriting as the past life persona
- same speech patterns as the past life persona
- key players in their current life who fit other roles found in the past life and also score high on the reincarnation forensics checklist to the corresponding people in that person's past life
- major natural talent in a skill that the past life persona excelled in, with the same stylistic idiosyncrasies that the past life persona had
- desire to not be the person they think they were, even when there was nothing particularly negative about that person

Moderate indicators (could indicate being from the same time period and culture, happened to have similar but common life events, or had a strong emotional attachment to the past life person in their previous life)

- love or hatred of a certain time period or culture starting at an early age

- deep seated fears that correspond with major negative life events in the past life (such as fear of abandonment in this life, orphaned at a young age in the past, fear of water now, drowned in a past life, ect.)

- dealing with issues in current life that were not resolved in the past one

- similar personality traits to the past life persona

- easily picked up a language spoken in the past life

- strong resonance to the past life person when they first learned about him/her

Extra Clues (factors that are too common to base an identification on and don't happen in every legitimate case, but can be a wink from the universe to let you know that you are on the right rack)

- physical resemblance

- parallels in dates of major life events

I will probably add more as I think about it longer, but that's the quick and dirty list. After looking at those factors, there are also a couple of factors I sometimes see that lead me to believe that the person is not who they think they were.

Contraindicators

- belief that they had several HFR lifetimes

- pronounced need to feel important in the current life

- self-promoting, or has some financial stake in it (such as claiming to be the reincarnation of Theda Bara to draw attention to one's faltering attempts to become a sexpot movie actress)

- having found out about one's HFR past life from a psychic who likewise seems to be trying to make their reputation ($$$) off of it.

How to Find Out About Your Past Lives Redux

2011-04-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

Since we have gotten some new visitors after our interview on Darkness Radio, I thought it might be helpful to direct the newcomers to an earlier blog about how to find out about your past lives. I would like to point out that Jessica is now having a major sale on her past life readings - only $10 each! In the meanwhile, I (Nellie) have had to discontinue doing readings as I need more down time to get some health issues under control. You can still download the free past life regression mp3 I made, though. Please download it instead of listening to it online to help keep my bandwidth use down.

Thanks, and good luck with your past life explorations!

Historical Records: Proof vs. Validity

2011-04-11T06:27:00.000-07:00

One of the things I struggle with as a reincarnationist is that, unlike Jessica, I have no documentation of any of my past lives. Every now and then, I get challenged on the validity of my beliefs because I can’t prove it. From a purely skeptical, scientific point of view, I can see where that would be a problem. From the spiritual point of view, I don’t think it matters.

Most lives in the past are documented only in the sketchiest of manners if they are documented at all. Even for 19th and 20th century America, the ability to find out about the lives of the common person can be quite a challenge. I don’t know how many genealogists I’ve talked to who have said that they know the name of an ancestor but they simply cannot find evidence of them in the historic records. There are so many different reasons for this.

In earlier centuries, records keeping was a lot more loosey goosey than it is today. For example, birth and death records were not kept at a government level at all until after the Civil War in my home state of Ohio. Births occurred at home during that time period, so there is no guarantee that they were reported at all.

Regardless of the time period, mistakes happen. A name may be misspelled, a woman’s death may have been reported as Mrs. John Smith, so her name ends up in the index as “John Smith” instead of “Mary Smith,” or the clerk may have had an off day and neglected to copy the name into the index. A person may be known by a nickname, only for their legal name to be something quite different. One historic person I study is consistently called “May” in all the family records, but her legal name was “Amelia.”

Aside from the errors within the records themselves, entire series of records have been lost to fire and flood. What’s a researcher to do?!

Logically, if someone isn’t found in the historical records, does that mean that they never existed? Of course not. If you can’t document who you were, my advice is to not sweat it. It is nice to have the validation of historical documentation, but not being able to back it up with historical records in no way means that you are just making your past life up.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People - A Reincarnationist's View

2010-12-18T07:06:00.000-08:00

This past year has been particularly hard on a lot of people I know. It's heartbreaking to see them suffering almost to their breaking point and wondering "Why me? What did I do to deserve this?"

A lot of traditional views on reincarnation would tell you that you were a rotten person in a past life and that your current suffering is payback. Personally, I don't believe that. From what I've learned over the years, the real reason is more complex and surprisingly hopeful.

The current theory in Western views of reincarnation is that people choose the challenges that they go through in life. Before you reincarnate, you sit down with your spirit guides and work out a life plan that will help you learn certain lessons to help your spiritual progress. There is often a kind of karma involved, but it is more of a learning tool, not an instrument of punishment. For example, if you were as a rail baron in a past life, using your power to effectively steal from the less fortunate, you may find yourself hit hard by self serving practices by the banking industry this time around. The intent is not payback for past wrongs, but instead it is intended to help you to fully understand the effect your previous life actions had on others.

If you keep running into the same basic problem again and again, it may be that there is a lesson there that you had intended to learn and you just weren't quite getting it. In my own life, I had a string of jobs from hell over a 25 year period. I kept finding myself in work situations where my bosses were abusive jerks, sometimes going as far as to cheat me out of pay. One was even a true sociopath. I would change jobs, only to feel like I went from the frying pan to the fire. If I did manage to get a good boss, he or she would move on quickly to be replaced by a jerk. Finally several years ago, I put my foot down and stood up in a major way to the worst boss I ever had. It didn't change that job situation any, but I did then manage to move on to another company. Ever since then, my bosses have been fantastic.

Traumatic problems in your life may also be the universe's way of kicking you in the pants to get you to move on to a much better place. I had worked one job for several years that, despite a bad boss, was something that I was very attached to. Unfortunately, I was also making some destructive decisions about how to handle a certain situation there. It reached a point at which it was unhealthy for me to be there at all. There was no way that I was voluntarily leaving that job, so the universe stepped in and I got laid off. I was devastated. However, I eventually realized how being removed from that job saved me from my own stupid actions. The next job turned out to be hellish, but I am grateful for it, anyway, in the long run. While there, I met someone who ended up being pivotal in the direction of my life and changed it profoundly for the better. I can honestly say that I would not be here writing about reincarnation now if I had not met this person.

One thing that a lot of people struggle with is why someone would purposely chose a life where they feel like they are in over their heads. Surely they wouldn't have chosen a life like that, would they? I agree to an extent. In my own life, in addition to the job problems, I spent a couple of years dealing with my young spouse suffering from a major, usually terminal illness, extreme debt resulting from that, and being laid off during the worst of the financial crisis. As soon as things started looking up, I would get hit with yet another devastating blow. I had many dark nights of the soul during that period. Then I considered my own personality type. I am one of those people who is always trying to take on more than I could reasonably handle. It makes sense that I would be that way on the spiritual level, too. So, when people are being hit with more than their fair share of normal life issues (serious health and financial problems, loss of loved ones,etc.), I tend to expect that they are also overachievers.

I still have not been able to fully reconcile how someone would possibly have chosen to go through something horrific, such as being raped and tortured to death as a two year old or any of the other atrocities that have happened to people since the beginning of time. Miriam Slozberg, author of My Five Biographies, gave me some insight into that. She had been a Jewish girl who had been used for medical experiments and killed during the Holocaust. Miriam said that while she had discussed living a life as a Jew in Europe in the 1930's with her spirit guides to understand what prejudice was like, she wasn't fully aware of what all she was getting into. Her guides tried to warn her away from that, saying that it was going to be a very, very bad time to do that. However, she wanted a challenging life and took the risk. So, while it was her choice, it was made based on not knowing the full picture.

The general theory of choice makes more sense of why bad things tend to happen to good people while bad people often live trouble free lives. Realistically, you are more likely to choose a difficult life if you are an advanced soul. Just like someone who has lifted weights for a long time, you are better able to handle the heavy ones. A newbie, on the other hand, will stick to the easier ones that are within their ability to handle. If you've lived a lot of lives, you are also likely to be someone who treats others better, having developed empathy through your own past life experiences.

The good thing about the "you chose your life" theory is that it is ultimately encouraging. Yes, suicide exists, so there are obviously cases where people are in over their heads. However, for the most part, people are able to handle the challenges that life brings them. If you are in the thick of hard times, take heart in the fact that you would not have set yourself up for this if you and your guides didn't think that you could handle it.

Are My Memories Real?

2010-12-04T18:50:00.000-08:00

The latest question that seems to be on everyone's mind is how to determine if a past life memory is real. There are several ways to try to confirm that. Some techniques are a matter of finding the answer within yourself while others rely on outside sources.   In general, if you can get outside confirmation, that is your best bet.

One way is to ask the universe to give you a sign if you are on the right track. Try asking for 3 signs within 24 hours that are really obvious, then keep your eyes out for odd coincidences.   For example, if you think you were a blacksmith in a past life, you might all of the sudden keep seeing or hearing references to anvils, horse shoes, and wrought iron. The signs can come in many ways. You could overhear it in the conversation of someone you are standing in line near, catch it in the lyrics of some song on the radio, or even see it on a billboard. If you don’t get signs confirming what you are expecting, next try asking for signs to let you know if that isn’t the case. If you start picking up on a lot of comments like “try again” or “you aren’t who I thought you were,” then that’s a good sign that you are not on the right track.

Another technique is the use of oracles such as flipping coins or using oracle cards.   These methods tend to be more limited in that many of them can only provide answers to yes or no questions. Avoid methods like using pendulums or dowsing rods that you have to have physical contact with the whole time. Those may be accurate for some kind of readings, but are iffy for anything that you have a personal stake in. It’s too hard to guarantee that you aren’t subconsciously moving them the way you want them to answer instead of allowing them to do what they would on their own. Likewise, no matter what method you use, only ask the question once, and go with whatever answer you get. The normal human tendency is to keep trying until you get the answer you want. Asking repeatedly will only muddy the waters for you worse.

Your gut feeling is usually a good indicator, but again, you have to be careful to make sure that you aren’t letting your own hopes and fears override what is coming through. Remote viewer Lyn Buchanan has pointed out that the human body is the go between that helps the higher self communicate with the normal consciousness. In order to make sure that you are hearing your gut right, try this exercise from Denise Linn first. Focus your attention on the part of your stomach between your heart and your navel. Tell yourself something that is true and pay attention to how your body feels. Now tell yourself a lie, and again pay attention to how your body reacts. Keep doing this until you can tell the difference between your body’s reaction to truth and to lies. Now make statements about what you think your past life was like and see how your body reacts to it.

Obviously having a past life reader confirm aspects of your past life would be a great validation. However, there are caveats with that. You have to be very careful not to frontload the reader with suggestions about your life. When you arrange for the reading, give as little information about what your suspicions are. It’s OK to ask them to try to tune into a certain time period or culture, but try not to go beyond that. The reading, even with a talented reader, may also turn out to be more vague than you would like. What comes through to the reader is usually controlled by the person’s spirit guides. They tend to focus on what you were supposed to learn from the life, not the less spiritually relevant aspects of who you were. You may have been the king of France, but the reader is more likely to pick up on the fact that you and your dad didn’t get along. They aren’t likely to pick up on specific incidences, either, unless they had a profound effect on your life. And, of course, readers come in various skill levels. You may want to refer to the previous blog on how to evaluate a reading to make sure that they were giving you solid information to begin with.

Finally, write down everything you remember about your past life and see if it matches up to the historical record. Be honest about how much you studied the person or time period before you started having memories about it. Having a predisposition to be interested in things related to what you later discover is a past life can be a double edged sword. On the plus side, people do tend to be either greatly attracted to or greatly repelled by things from their past lives, so having an interest in them could very well be an indication that you did live then. Learning more about the past can also help jog memories. On the minus side, there is the risk that your subconscious will borrow details that you have read about and use them to falsely fill in gaps in your memory. Again, paying attention to your gut feeling when you find matches will help you determine what is really going on.

One last word of advice in all this is to not get all wound up fussing about whether a past life memory is true. People get their best insights when they are relaxed. It won’t help you to figure things out if you over worry the matter. Just think of it as like reading a good mystery novel. Sure, you could read the first chapter, then skip to the very end, but what fun would that be?

Major Disasters, the Titanic, and Reincarnation

2010-10-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

A long forgotten tragedy happened in Peshtigo, Wisconsin and the surrounding communities 139 years ago. On October 8, 1871, a massive fire started that killed somewhere between 1,200 to 2,400 people. The records of who was living there at the time were also lost in the fire, so the true total may never be known. Despite the massive loss of life, the tragedy has remained largely unheard of, overshadowed by the concurrent Great Chicago Fire.

A quick search on the internet reveals that there are many stories about the hauntings caused by the multitude of deaths there. That is not surprising.

What I do find intriguing is the comparative number of past life cases I have heard of from people claiming to be the reincarnation of people who died in the Peshtigo Fire (one) versus the number who claim to have died on the Titanic (hundreds), even though the number of people who died in each of those tragedies is roughly the same. For that matter, the number of people who claim to remember having been on the Titanic seems disproportionate to the average percentage of people who died in any given circumstance. For example, I've probably come across as many people who think that they were on the Titanic when it sunk as I have people who recall being victims of the Holocaust. That begs the question of why? Are many of these people suffering from false memories, or is there something more going on?

In the greater scheme of all reincarnation cases, it makes sense that someone who died suddenly in a tragic manner might be more likey to remember the trauma attached to their death. However, the terror of dying on the Titanic does not seem any worse than seeing a mile high wall of flame engulf your town as what happened in Peshtigo. There may be some heightened sense of horror in the case of the Titanic due to the difference in their expectations starting the journey compared to how it ended.

One possibility may be that the Titanic reincarnations, assuming that their memories are real, were spurred by all of the memory cues available. Despite that the tragedy happened almost 100 years ago, the Titanic has continually been brought to the attention of modern people the popular James Cameron movie, the traveling exhibition, and by new discoveries that researchers have made in recent years about the sinking. With so many reminders around, it is plausible that more past life memories would be stirred up.

It may also be causing people to misidentify what shipwreck they actually died in. As with "Cleopatra's handmaiden" syndrome, the natural tendency is to attach past life memories to the best known person or situation instead of a similar but lesser known one. The Titanic is hardly the only ship to have ever sunk with civilian passengers aboard. It is likely that the chaos and fear experienced by the passengers on the Titanic was along the same lines of what anyone who has ever died on a sinking passenger ship went through.

All the interest in the Titanic is a double edged sword in other ways as well. There is now a wealth of accurate information about the events of that fatal night that is readily available to the average person. While these can prompt past life memories to come to the surface, they can also get absorbed into the subconscious and cause false memories.

I wish there was some way to compare reports of Titanic past life memories after earlier movies about the sinking with the most recent one. I would be curious to see how many people had past life memories crop up after each movie came out and how their memories compared with the accuracy of the movies. In the case of the movies where the accuracy level was low, did the reincarnatees have that "hey, that's not right!" response? Did people suddenly have past life memories of the Titanic after seeing a highly accurate movie like "A Night to Remember" more than after less accurate ones or after ones like James Cameron's film that had a glamorous, romantic edge to them?

Unfortunately, that would probably be like comparing apples to oranges. There are some factors that inherently skew the number of past life memories to the past decade or so. Titanic victims could have been reborn any time starting after the boat sank. Considering that the current lifetimes of people reborn starting shortly after the Titanic sunk would probably overlap with the lives of those reborn much later, statistically you are likely to have a greater number of Titanic reincarnatees alive at the same time peaking at a later time period rather than earlier. Also, due to the normal lag time between death and rebirth, one would expect that more people currently alive could potentially be reincarnations of Titanic victims than in previous decades.

In an ideal world, I would love to to do a study on people who remember being the reincarnations of folks who died in major disasters.That could potentially provide more clues both to sorting out false memories from true ones and to understanding more of the mechanics of reincarnation in general. In the meanwhile, if you remember dying in a major disaster and feel comfortable talking about it, please either post about it here or send us an e-mail.

How to Find Out About Your Past Lives

2010-09-05T17:36:00.000-07:00

There are a few different ways to find out about your past lives.

The first is to explore them on your own through meditation. There are a lot of guided meditations out there. The standard practice seems to be having you imagine walking through a long tunnel or fog, then once you come out, looking at your feet to see what you are wearing. I have prepared a guided meditation available for download (free for a limited time!) on my personal website. Beyond that, you can find scripts for such meditations on the web or purchase guided meditations. I know iTunes carries some past life guided meditations by Denise Linn.

I have also used a series of exercises on the Past Life Exploration group on Yahoo Groups. The strong point in that is that Rev. Mehitabel, the group owner, gets people to think about various aspects of their current lives to search for clues to their past. Once you make a connection to one aspect of your past, that connection can be a spring board to help you remember more. I've found Rev. Mehitabel's techniques to be very helpful in remembering my past. For more tips on meditating in general, check out the Psychic Development page on the Eerie Canal website.

Denise Linn has an excellent book out called Past Lives Present Miracles. It contains a long questionaire to help narrow down when and where you lived in past lives and what those lives were like. That may likewise help jog some memories of those past lives. Sandra Anne Taylor also has a new book on the subject called The Hidden Power of Your Past Lives, which is very good. It includes a cd of meditations to help you find out about your past lives and release issues from them that are negatively affecting your current life.

Then there are psychics. This is the quickest way to get information on your past lives. If you have any question as to whether a psychic is telling you the truth or just telling you a pretty story, pay attention to your gut reaction to it. If what you are being told is true, it will feel right to you on some level. Ask other people for recommendations to find a good one. I can personally recommend Jessica Jewett. There may be a bit of a wait before she can do a reading for you at this point in time. However, she's good enough that the wait is worth it.

Another technique is regression by a hypnotherapist. A friend of mine who is a hypnotherapist recommends this method only if you suspect that you have past life trauma issues affecting your current life that you want to resolve. I did try a session with a hypnotherapist and have an article about it here. My hypnotherapist friend also wrote an article from his point of view. Brian Weiss has an interesting workshop on this that is available for audio download. It includes a hypnosis session that I found helpful. However, it will not guide you as well into discovering things about your past life as working live with a hypnotherapist would.

Should you try it yourself or go through a psychic or therapist? I've heard the idea that you should always try to find out about it on your own because the memories will feel more real to you that way. Having tried to learn about my past lives on my own, I'm not sure how true that is. I had just as many doubts that my mind was pulling up some fantasy as I would if some stranger had told me about them. Personally, I think it makes sense to use a combination of techniques. If you have some memories on your own, then a psychic tells you the same thing, it's a lot easier to believe.

Also, what should you expect when finding out about your past lives? No matter which method you use, you probably aren't going to get a lot of names, dates, or other historically verifiable information. The point in learning about your past lives is to help you incorporate the lessons you learned in them or still need to learn in your current life. Knowing the details of who you were, where you lived, etc. can be a distraction from what the universe wants you to focus on in knowing your past life. I personally remember 10 of my past lives and have no clue of what my name even was except for one of them.

When I do past life readings for people, I am usually shown scenes from their past life that are significant to what they need to know for the current life. For one acquaintance, I was shown her drowning in a pond as a little girl, and was told by her after the reading that she had an intense fear of water. For another, I was shown Henry III, which was an indicator of the time period, and then her as a navigator on a ship, who used the stars to guide her. She is now a professional astrologer. There is always a connection between what I see and their current life.

Good luck with your explorations, and I hope you learn something useful!

copyright Nellie Kampmann, 2008 (updated 2011)

How Long Between Lives?

2010-08-28T06:15:00.000-07:00

The question came up about what determines whether a soul moves on to the next life, or hangs around, and if there's a time limit.

From what I can tell, it's up to the individual soul for the most part. You don't have to reincarnate if you don't want to. I get the sense that the afterlife is kind of like being on summer vacation, though. It's a great break, but after awhile, you get antsy to be in an environment that challenges you more. Of the people I have read personally, the amount of time people spend in the afterlife has ranged from around 200 to 15 years, with 70 or 80 years being the norm. I've noticed that with people who are pretty spiritual in this life, the amount of time between lives gets shorter and shorter, like they are anxious to get back in the "classroom." Really short turn around times also tend to be chosen by people who died young or traumatically in their previous life. I have heard about someone reincarnating less than a year after he died in the Holocaust.

In terms of what challenges the soul faces in the next life, that seems to be decided by the individual with a lot of advice from a committee of advisers. They base it on what the individual wants to focus on and what they did or did not master in their previous lives.

BTW, the old Albert Brooks movie, Defending Your Life, has an interesting take on reincarnation. The gist of it is that in our incarnations, we are here to overcome our fears, including the fear that we aren't good enough. That part is pretty accurate. I suspect there was some divine inspiration involved in writing that movie.

Free Past Life Meditation Download

2010-08-16T05:45:00.000-07:00

For a limited time, Nellie's past life regression meditation will be available for free download. All I ask is that you heed the copyright notice. After the last time I caught someone stealing my work and presenting it as their own, I will take legal action to protect the copyright (sorry to sound so touchy about that, but I'm sure you understand!). You can download it at:

The Attic Past Life Meditation

Please let us know if you find the meditation helpful or if I need to include longer pauses during the regression part.

Thank you, and enjoy!

Nellie

HFR Case Criteria

2010-07-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

Cases here at Historical Figures Reincarnated are typically held to higher standards than the average reincarnation case. The reason that we have higher standards is a desire for consistency, documentation, and substantial proof to show the world that the soul is deathless and reincarnation is a fact of life. Of course not every case will have evidence in all of these categories but the more pieces of evidence fit into these categories, the stronger the cases. When you consider your own reincarnation cases, test these categories and see what surprising information comes to you.

Physical Resemblance - Although this can be an important piece of evidence, it is not the only piece of evidence, nor is it the most important. In conjunction with other evidence, however, it can add to a compelling case. In many examples of well-known reincarnation cases, people bear varying degrees of physical resemblance to their historical counterparts. The most striking of these is the case of Jeffrey Keene and his past life of General John B. Gordon. The theory is that physical resemblance is one part of many red flags that serve as markers to help people make the connection between their present and past selves.

Personality Traits, Talents and Habits - In a great many documented past life cases, people will often find that major personality traits such as stubbornness, specific insecurities and so forth can be passed from life to life until the negative traits are either resolved or traits are no longer necessary. Talents for art, music, intellectual pursuits, athletics and so forth can also carry over from life to life. For example, Jessica Jewett has been an artist and music aficionado in multiple lifetimes, displaying such talents at an extremely young age.

Repetitive Dates and Names - It is a widely reported phenomena that important dates will repeat from life to life, although why is unclear. Significant events in a soul's life often fall on certain dates, creating a pattern that connects lives together. For example, in Jessica Jewett's past life history, the dates October 16, September 8, February 4, November 29, October 18 and November 18 all display significant repetitive events in multiple lifetimes. People have also been known to feel attachment or revulsion to names that were significant to them in past lives.

Linguistics and Handwriting - A newer phenomena used to connect past lives to the present is analysis of linguistic patterns and handwriting styles. These are apparently habits inherent to the soul to a certain degree as it has been found that there have been striking resemblances with sentence structure and vocabulary. Some cases of handwriting analysis have shown that the handwriting of a person's past life compared with handwriting of the present life are nearly identical.

Knowledge of Private Events - Of course the most common form of evidence of any reincarnation case is knowledge of people, places, events and feelings previously unknown to the person in the present life. Spontaneous past life memories or memories acquired through meditation or hypnosis bring about things that a person could have only known had they lived that life. When Jessica Jewett visited her home from a past life, she told her companions where people sat in the church and a few minutes later, a church employee told them the exact same information, despite the fact that Jessica hadn't visited before and couldn't have known it.

Exploring Past Lives for the Right Reasons

2010-07-23T16:06:00.001-07:00

by Jessica Jewett

A lot of people demand proof of reincarnation. Not only that but they demand proof of who you were on a historical documentation level -- if the person you claim is not written down on paper somewhere, then they must not be real. Or if events you remember are not written down or historically iffy, then you must be making it up. I don't encounter this so much with Fanny Chamberlain as I do with Celine or my Elizabethan life. Celine (as of right now) is not a documented person that I can prove on a historical level, but on the other hand, I have not tried to search for her on that historical level either. It doesn't really occur to me to do that because I know it as fact inside of me that I lived at that time whether I find her on execution lists or not (if there is such a thing as execution lists). I truthfully don't need historical documentation to tell me where and when I lived.

I wish I could give everyone that kind of solid foundation in their belief systems because I see a lot of people questioning and second guessing things that they subconsciously know to be true about themselves. I think my solid foundation comes from the fact that I went through this process with Fanny. I had feelings, flashbacks, etc., that I had no historical basis for, but as soon as I started researching her, I found out that 95% of the things I knew as truth inside of me were provable documented facts from Fanny's life. I learned to trust my instincts about myself and I haven't really questioned myself since then. Through the process of learning about Fanny internally and externally, I learned to tell the difference between genuine past life recall and simple "what if" flights of fancy. I apply what I learned in the Fanny process to what I go through now with exploring Celine's life, as well as my Elizabethan life, and I think sometimes people might see me as stubborn or arrogant or prone to exaggeration because I am completely immovable in knowing who I am and what happened to me. If people knew what I went through -- the blood, sweat and tears for years of struggling to accept Fanny and prove it to myself that I was her and she is me -- it would be easy to see why I am so solid in my belief system. I worked hard to achieve my beliefs and understanding of who I am.

Celine may be a documented person and she may not. I know she existed. I know Celine was probably a nickname for a longer name like Joceline, but do I have a last name? No. I don't feel like it makes much of a difference. Names don't really change things for me because exploring past lives is supposed to be about figuring out who you are as a soul, where you are headed on your path, and what lessons and relationships you still may need to resolve to advance your path, not entertaining the desire to be "somebody." I always tell people that if their interests lie in trying to find a "famous" past life, don't bother looking, because that is a rather useless reason to explore past lives. Don't explore it if you just want to chase the documentation trail. What happens when you find your name on a census or perhaps find an image of yourself? If you just wanted to look to prove you were there, it turns into a dead end experience and a rather empty one at that.

This is not to say I will never look for Celine. I probably will someday, just for my own curiosity. I doubt there would be any surviving paintings of her but I would like to have one like I do of Fanny. I feel like Celine was only about 22 when she was executed with her family so there won't be a lot of documentation at all about such a short life. Looking for your previous identities is a very personal decision that should not be made because you want to prove yourself to other people or you want to "be somebody important." I do not consider Celine or Fanny or my Elizabethan life "important" in the sense that they are known worldwide like Cleopatra or Marie Antoinette. Outside of the Civil War enthusiast community, Fanny is virtually unknown. Celine is not known at all. Her TIME and the EVENTS she witnessed are what give her the illusion of importance. And outside of Elizabethan enthusiasts in England, that particular life of mine is virtually unknown as well. What I am over and over again is a woman deeply hidden in the shadow of greater people - Queen Marie Antoinette, Queen Elizabeth I, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Not that he is on the level of royalty but he is far more well-known than Fanny. My point is, "importance" or "fame" is a fickle thing that is really in the eye of the beholder. Important to one person is totally useless to another person. There has to be a deeper reason for exploring your past lives than the desire to be somebody famous. It can be a burden to be reincarnated from semi-famous or famous figures, so be careful what you wish for.

I talk a lot about parallels and connections between who you are today and who you were in past lives. Until recently I had completely overlooked the fact that your different past lives will have connections and parallels between each other outside of who you are today. The more you learn about yourself and your past, the more you see that things will connect like a big spider web, not only between you and your other selves, but between you and other people in your soul group.

It is important to understand that who you were in the past is not who you are today as well. A lot of people get so wrapped up in their past lives that they forget to live for today, or they view people in current lives as who they were in the past, which can be dangerous to current relationships. With that in mind, it is also important to understand that the decisions you make will impact decisions you make in future lives. It is a delicate balance in a lot of deeper things besides, "Wow, cool, I lived during the French Revolution," or, "Awesome, I know who I was when the first Elizabeth was queen," or any other time period.

Although we all are different people with different life experiences each time, there are characteristics in people that carry from life to life unless these sometimes harmful characteristics can be unlearned. Forgiveness and removing yourself from harmful situations are equally important in order to advance as a soul. When you remove yourself from repetitively bad relationships, please remember to forgive that person on the way out. You can forgive and still recognize that some people are unhealthy to your journey. Lovers in previous lives may only be meant to be fleeting presences in this life but past life connections are not solid enough reasons to keep potentially harmful people around now. Some of the hardest lessons we have to learn are when to let go and when to forgive. These principles must go hand in hand.

Behaviors and common patterns can follow people from life to life. I will give you some very elementary examples from my past four lives to illustrate what I'm talking about. There is a principle of the "anniversary phenomena," which is one of many parts of proof that all lives are connected and built upon each other. It goes a lot deeper than this but I'm keeping it very simple for you.

The year ending in 93:
Celine was executed in 1793.
Fanny went blind in 1893.
I was declared legally blind in 1993.

The date September 8:
My Elizabethan life ended on September 8.
Fanny's husband was born on September 8.
My ex-fiance was born on September 8.

The date October 16:
Celine's hero, Queen Marie Antoinette, was executed on October 16.
Fanny's daughter, Grace, was born on October 16.
I miscarried on October 16.
My brother is getting married on October 16.

Names:
My past four nicknames all rhyme and are two syllables and spelled very similarly.

Fanny named her last child Gertrude Lorraine, not Loraine. Lorraine is in Marie Antoinette's formal French name.

Elizabethan Me had sisters names Anne and Frances. My current middle name is Ann and my name used to be Frances.

Miscellaneous parallels:
My Elizabethan husband was pardoned from execution on October 18.
Fanny died on October 18.

February 4 (my current birthday), Elizabethan Husband's father granted property in Yarmouth (England) to us. Yarmouth is also a place in Maine that Fanny often visited.

Elizabethan Husband became Joint-Steward of the Manor of Rising and constable of the castle on December 7, which was the date of Fanny and Lawrence's wedding.

Elizabethan Me was known for spending large sums of money on dresses, which is a trait that Fanny and Celine had. I often spend beyond my means on clothes.

Fanny decorated her Brunswick home in a very French way with pieces very similar to things found in Versailles. She also spent a summer abroad in Paris, where Celine lived, and she spoke fluent French.

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Those are just some of the examples. I do have a lot more that run into a lot of personal things with other people who don't need to be dragged into the limelight. What kind of parallels can you find between your lives?

An Overview of the Basic Principles of Reincarnation

2010-07-23T16:04:00.000-07:00

by Jessica Jewett

The study of reincarnation, among other topics relating to the development and journey of the soul, has actively been part of my life for about ten years. In most cases, spontaneous memory recall begins so early that a child may not yet have the verbal abilities to convey those memories to their families. Spontaneous memory recall happened for me as a toddler, long before I could ever begin to understand the implications of what I remembered. Children typically begin suppression when they enter school age. Unsupportive parents, teachers and peers reinforce the media by drilling it into a child's head that things like ghosts and reincarnation are not real, that it's all make believe and fun for Halloween. Children who express knowledge of paranormal matters are typically ridiculed and told that it's all just their imagination.

Personally, I resisted the idea of reincarnation in general for so many years due to trying to be "normal" that it contributed to bouts of serious depression as well as an anxiety disorder. Eventual acceptance and exploration into who I am led to a huge relief in my depression and anxiety disorder symptoms (although I don't want to be mistaken by saying it's a cure because it's most definitely not), leading to the tools through meditation that allowed me to control my symptoms. Exploration of past lives allows people to see the progression of their souls and reads like a road map of where you have been and what you need to do to improve the journey ahead. In my experience, I have only encountered a few people who are less than five lives into their journey. The vast majority of people have lived multiple lives. Spotting a new soul is fairly easy because they tend to be extremely naive, even as adults, they have an extremely difficult time coping with everyday stress, they are flightly and exhibit selfish behavior without truly understanding why it is selfish behavior. As we progress and develop into more lives, the negative, infantile characteristics give way to a greater understanding and empathy for things bigger than the self.

For some, getting so wrapped up in the past prevents them from living in the present, which is a huge reason for why I do readings and spiritual counseling. I teach people how to release negativity from their pasts so that they can fulfill the purposes in who they are today. While reflection on where you have been in the past is important, it's more important to understand why you are exploring your past. Motivations must lie in deeper spiritual understanding of yourself and where your journey is headed, not a mere curiosity to do for the fun of it. Everybody has done bad things in their pasts -- everybody -- and I do not shrink away from describing the bad things because it's important to understand every facet of the soul. Many intuitives like to be the sunshine and roses, everything is wonderful, type of readers but I'm a very strong advocate of deep self-exploration. You cannot improve who you are if you ignore the bad because the good is more fun.

The purpose of reincarnation is to learn through predetermined lessons how to be more tolerant, generous, humble and loving souls. Free will exists in the afterlife as well as life. Before birth, we plan out our own obstacles and how we react to those obstacles in life will determine success or failure, happiness or unhappiness. We choose the look and health of our bodies for various reasons, we enter into agreements with other souls to be our family, friends and enemies, and so on. We all incarnate into soul groups. A soul group is a group of souls that incarnates together in life after life, switching roles in order to teach and learn from each other. Some of the most common role switches are siblings to spouses, parent/child to friends/enemies, friends to enemies, enemies to friends, etc. Within the soul group, there are different levels:

Twin Flame - We each have one Twin Flame and the term is often mixed up with Soulmates. Most believe that Twin Flames began their existence as one soul. The soul split into two, became individuals and became like Yin to Yang, plus to minus, male to female (typically, but there are same-sex Twin Flames). Twin Flames rarely incarnate together but when they do, it is always a romantic connection that serves a greater purpose to humanity. When they incarnate together, it is a lifetime commitment and one will feel completely empty and lost without the other. It's not unlike feeling like your literal other half is missing. Examples of Twin Flame connections are John Lennon/Yoko Ono, Marie Antoinette/Louis XVI, Fanny Chamberlain/Joshua L. Chamberlain (my own case).

Soulmates - We have multiple Soulmates, which are not limited to romantic connections. Soulmates are the souls with whom you have shared so many lives that you recognize each other instantly and you often feel like you've known each other forever. A Soulmate can be a lover, a family member or a friend. Soulmates do not have to be permanent lifelong connections as with Twin Flames but they do have to have a major impact on the development of your soul. People born to multiples pregnancies have built-in, ready-made Soulmates, for example. Oprah and Gayle as best friends are Soulmates, for another example. The five members of New Kids on the Block are Soulmates to each other, for a third example.

General Souls - General Souls are the most numerous within the soul group. There is a connection and a certain level of recognition but you don't always incarnate in the same life, so the impact is not as strong. It's very much like the extended family members that you don't see very often but they are still family, so there is some connection. These souls fulfill functional roles in each others' lives but do not exhibit the same impact that will be found with Twin Flames or Soulmates.

Each soul has a dominant gender, meaning the soul will prefer to incarnate most often as either male or female. There will be lifetimes in which the soul will choose to incarnate into the opposite gender in order to gain life experience from a perspective that could not be attained from the dominant gender. According to research done by Dr. Walter Semkiw (www.johnadams.net), which corresponds with my own research, the switch to the opposite gender happens about 10-20% of the time during the soul's total journey through life.

I'm often asked how homosexuality or transgenderedism figures into the scheme of reincarnation. My experience with my gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered clients has led me to believe that most of the time, it is a choice the soul makes prior to being born, for a variety of reasons, just as anyone chooses how they look, who their family members are, and obstacles and lessons. It is not a "lifestyle" or something that can be "cured." It is who they are in the life they're living and it is always for a greater purpose. Most GLBT people that I work with made plans prior to birth to use that specific lifetime to teach a higher level of tolerance and acceptance to humanity, or they are trying to improve their own self-worth and personal acceptance. Transgendered people that I have worked with describe feeling like a male/female trapped in the opposite body. I'm not sure if this is another pre-birth lesson they set for themselves and society, or if the soul's dominant gender simply rejects the opposite body it inhabits. One thing I know for certain is that being GLBT is not an accident, it's not immoral and it's not a mistake.

One question I struggled with for 25 years was how on Earth do people end up with severe physical and developmental disabilities? I have learned that with all "obstacles" people face that place them outside of "normal society," it's most often an act of free will to do for the greater good of humanity. I was once read by Kevin Ryerson (www.kevinryerson.com), who explained that my present disability was my choice prior to my birth. I absorbed the suffering of others in my soul group during the Civil War as a physical manifestation of protest against war today. People like me with various disabilities are here to show that the world should be putting its resources toward eliminating suffering rather than creating more suffering and destruction. And as with any soul choosing to exist within a "minority," there is an element of teaching tolerance and acceptance simply through this existence.

When people are exploring their past lives, there is always some evidence already in us. Certain personality traits and tastes remain from life to life. Regarding physical appearance, to quote Dr. Walter Semkiw: "Facial architecture, the shape and proportions of the face, appears to be consistent from lifetime to lifetime. Physical habits, such as postures, hand gestures and the type of jewelry worn, can also be consistent from lifetime to lifetime. Even poses struck in portraits and photographs are often uncannily similar from one lifetime to another. Body types can be consistent from lifetime to lifetime, though the size of the body can vary. An individual can have a slight physique in one lifetime and a powerful one in the next. One can be short in one incarnation and tall in another, though facial features, postures and gestures, appear to remain the same." He also writes: "Just as personality traits remain consistent from lifetime to lifetime, a person's manner of expression seems to be similar from one lifetime to another. Some variation in writing style, of course, will be observed due to differing customs of various eras. Still, consistencies in modes of expression and in content are observed. Just as portraits allow us to see how one's appearance is the same from lifetime to lifetime, historical documents, diaries and other available documentation allow us to study writing style across incarnations. Formal linguistic analysis has been utilized in studying one case in our series and in the future I believe it will be regularly used as a tool to help delineate past-life cases."

Also in identifying and validating past lives, there will be reccurring symbols, synchronistic events and anniversary phenomena. As Dr. Semkiw writes: "A common feature in past-life research is that symbols from a prior lifetime are found in the person's contemporary incarnation. For eleven years I worked for Unocal 76, also known as Union 76, an oil company whose slogan is 'The Spirit of 1776.' The company name and slogan reflect my participation in the American Revolution as John Adams. We shall see that others who contributed to forming the American nation, including John Quincy Adams, his Vice-President, John Calhoun, and the great explorer, John Charles Fremont, also worked at Union 76. Another feature we find in past-life cases is that of symbolic synchronistic events. In William Barnes' book, Thomas Andrews, A Voyage into History, Mr. Barnes relates how he came to uncover his past-life as Thomas Andrews, the designer of the Titanic, who died on the ship. Appropriately, William Barnes was born on the anniversary date of the Titanics' sinking, 41 years after the tragedy occurred. In many of our cases, we will observe similar anniversary phenomena."

Three-quarters of this planet includes reincarnation, ghosts and the soul as part of their belief systems. That's four billion people. Hundreds of books, thousands of first-hand accounts, and thousands more of unrecorded experiences exist out there. The Western world is the last group still dragging its feet in accepting that not all things can be explained by known science. When you look at facts such as 96% of DNA being called "junk DNA" and 90% of our brains allegedly being "unused," it begs the question of how can we be arrogant enough to claim to understand all aspects of life, death and everything in between?

Ancient Past Lives

2010-07-21T19:54:00.000-07:00

by Nellie Kampmann

One thing many people have noticed is that they are more likely to remember past lives that were in the more recent past and don't remember any from ancient times at all. There are a few possibilities I can think of to explain that.

The first is that you are more likely to remember the past lives that are the most relevant to what you need to learn in this life. This is like when you are learning lessons in school. when you are in 10th grade, you might have to go back and review something you learned in 9th grade, but you would never review something you learned in first grade. The lessons we need to learn aren't necessarily as progressive as the ones we learned in school, each dependent on having learned the previous lesson. However, people often don't manage to learn the lesson in one life and need to address it again in the next life or two to get it under their belt. Hopefully, a lesson you tried to learn in life 2 is something you've mastered by the time you've gotten to life 8. Of course this theory is dependent on the concept of lives having to be lived in a linear time order.

Another theory dependent on linear time is that the person just may not have lived many lives yet. If you just started having lives in the Elizabethan era, of course you aren't going to remember any from Ancient Egypt.

Regardless of how time truly functions, we do experience it in a linear fashion in this plane of existence. That leads to a third possibility is that there are just more cues to remind you of lives that were lived in more recent sections of linear time. If you live in a world where you see more reminders of the Victorian era than the Dark Ages, you are going to have more things around to trigger memories of a life in the Victorian era than of one in the Dark Ages. The same goes for past life readers as well as people remembering their own past lives. This is also especially true for people in places like the United States where the cultural heritage of this country for the majority population has only been around for a four hundred years.

The Complexities of Soul Groups

2010-07-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

by Nellie Kampmann with additional commentary by Jessica Jewett

In doing past life research, one hears a lot about soul groups. The general concept of soul groups is that you reincarnate with the same group of people every life, switching off roles like actors so in small theatrical groups. For example, in one life, you may be someone's brother, and in the next, his daughter. This gets a little more complicated, as you obviously have important dealings with people beyond your immediate family. Sometimes you have short term relationships with people that have a profound effect on your life. Often there are people in you loved ones' lives who are important to them but you have never had any interaction with. How does that fit in?

I would propose that in addition to soul groups, there are also soul communities. As in present life, there are going to be groups that overlap, and even entire communities of groups that overlap. So, while you still may interact on a soul level most closely with the same small group of people, there will still be others who have been in your past lives who are also in the current one but have their own soul groups. These various intersecting groups and communities may not overlap the same for you as they do for someone close to you, and also may overlap differently from life to life.

One of the more interesting situations I have come across in my research is that of a soul group in which the members are closely related in some lives, but are only tangentially connected if at all in other lives. A set of 3 siblings in one life ended up being separated by politics and geography in a later life. One of them was completely separated from the other two, and those two were only connected through their husbands' impersonal interactions with each other. As far as I can tell, none of the siblings had any personal interaction with each other that whole life. They are all connected again currently, but are leading widely disparate lives in different states, only reunited through the wonders of the internet. One of them is even a ghost, still in the incarnation that he had when they were completely separated.

Since that is such an unusual situation, I've been trying to figure it out. The most likely explanation is that they decided that they could learn even more by splitting up. They lived in a tumultuous time, and may have felt that the only way to fully experience it was to lead very different lives from each others. If that is the case, though, it is still intriguing that one doesn't hear of such cases more often.

I have also heard of cases where a soul decided not to incarnate with their soul group again because the experience they had with them in the previous life had been so harrowing. That brings up more questions, too. The going theory is that on the other side, all is forgiven and any hardships caused by other souls are looked at as a favor to help them with their spiritual growth. At that rate, being still upset with your soul group after you've crossed should not be an issue. Perhaps it is just a matter of the damaged soul needing more time to be healed before they are able to accept what happened and rejoin the group.

Additional thoughts from Jessica Jewett:

Don't forget about enemies. Soul groups are not limited to just the people that we love or family members or close friends. People who have a deep, profound, negative affect on you, often creating an enemy relationship, are people that are part of your soul group as well. Enemies today could have been lovers and family in past lives, or will be lovers and family again in future lives. A true enemy soul group relationship will teach you things about yourself and humanity, despite the breakdown of the interpersonal relationship.

Simply defined - a member of your soul group is someone that has a profound, deep and intense impact on your life, whether positive or negative. The person can be in your life for five minutes or your entire life. Time is not a consideration because the things you agree to accomplish before you were born into these lives will play out as they are intended.

Our spirit guides are also part of our soul groups. Not everybody in the soul group has to incarnate at the same time either. It all depends on the agreements made in the afterlife during the life-planning process. Lawrence chose not to take a body this time because my goal for this life was to learn to live independently. As long as he is physically with me, I will be too dependent upon him and never learn this important lesson. So he sacrificed a life for himself this time to give me a life of my own. These are not such strange ideas - it happens to every set twin flames.

Explosion of Remembering Past Lives

2010-07-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

by Nellie Kampmann

It has been pointed out that it's a little weird that there seems to be an explosion for people remembering past lives lately on MySpace. That begs the question as to whether the memories are valid or some bizarre group fantasy. I've been thinking about it believe there is actually a logical explanation for it.

In a situation I've been watching lately, various members of a soul group who were interconnected in a certain period of time in a specific place are all suddenly remembering their lives from that period. The members currently live lives that had been very disconnected from each other. Many had been separated from each other by at least one other life time. Now they have found each other again through their participation on MySpace.

This whole situation reminds me of a high school reunion, where folks meet up who haven't seen each other in 25 years. At first, everyone has changed enough that they don't recognize each other. Then a couple of them finally make the connection and start talking about the good old days. As they remember more, other people's memories get jogged and they join in the conversation. Suddenly, you have a whole group of people getting together and talking about things that they haven't even thought of in decades.

That begs the question of why doesn't that happen more often within soul groups? I think we have a unique situation here on MySpace where the members of the soul group are meeting again for the first time in this incarnation. In most soul groups, you grow up knowing many of your other soul group members as they are in this incarnation. It's harder to recognize your sister from a previous life when your relationship with her is so deeply ingrained in this life as Uncle Freddie. Basically, the current life knowledge muddies the waters. Even if they come into your life later, again you are so enmeshed in your current incarnation that running into a single past life member every now and then isn't enough to jog your memory. But running into a whole bunch of them at once is a different story.

Likewise, this situation echoed a lot of experiences I've had with psychics. Over the years, I've noticed that their abilities tend to amplify when they get in a group. You see this energy boost in other situations, too, like church services, where the total energy is greater than the combined energy of the individuals. Indeed, many members of this soul group do have pronounced psychic abilities which may be playing into their ability to remember.

How to Validate a Reading

2010-07-21T19:41:00.000-07:00

by Nellie Kampmann

Lately, I’ve been running into a lot of folks who have been getting conflicting information from various psychics. Here’s some tips I use when determining the validity of readings myself.

1. Trust your gut. Does what the reader says resonate with you, or does it feel wrong? Pay attention if either is the case. If you don’t feel anything one way or the other, that doesn’t mean that the reading is wrong. Be sure that what you feel is a gut reaction and not an emotional reaction, though. Sometimes readers will tell you something you either really want to hear or don’t want to hear, so don’t base it on your desires.

2. Did you front load the psychic with information about who you thought you were? Legitimate psychics want to give you an unbiased reading. Whether they mean to or not, they can subconsciously pull some things that you told them into the reading that aren’t really true. Whenever you go for a reading, it is best to not tell them anything more than a general time period or issue that you want them to focus on.

3. How generic was the reading? Recently, I saw someone swear up and down that some vague computerized past life reading she paid $17 for was absolutely correct. I could have sworn that I got the EXACT same reading myself once (for free!). It played up her spirituality. OK, it's really common for people who are drawn to look into their past lives to have strong spiritual leanings. It said that she lived on Atlantis. Again, that’s the kind of thing that often appeals to people who are interested in reincarnation. It was also extremely flattering to her. There were no specifics about when she lived, what time period, or what the major issues were in any of her lives. In short, it was flattering, vague baloney designed to appeal to anyone in the vendor’s target New Agey audience.

4. If a reading plays up to your ego, there’s a higher likelihood that the reader is just telling you what they think you want to hear. This might not even be a conscious effort on their part, as it is human nature to want to please one’s customers. That goes along with the subconscious problems of front loading. And there are unscrupulous readers like the vendor above that will tell you happy nonsense on purpose just to keep you coming back or even just to make themselves look good. Of course, that doesn't mean that a positive reading is necessarily a bunch of hokum, either. This factor is something I only worry about if there are other problematic factors or if the reader makes me out to be an insanely rich, drop dead gorgeous version of Mother Teresa.

This aspect gets tricky, as I know that many of the people reading this did legitimately have past lives as well-known, and often well loved people. In cases like that, I would look for details in the reading that discuss flaws in your character, mistakes you may have made in your life, etc. – anything that doesn’t make you out to be a shining example of virtue. I would also see if the reader told you what you were like before telling you who you were. Most psychics I know have to tune into the readee for a bit before they start getting specific information like that.

5. What is the reputation of the psychic doing the reading? Red flags go up for me when I see psychics bashing other psychics. When their ego is obviously involved in the reading, you know that what you are getting is not unbiased information. It may be a bit off or it may be complete baloney. More often than not, it's the latter.

6. Did the reader tell you anything they couldn’t possibly have known? I had a reading last summer in which the reader encouraged me to write a book, saying that I had an unusual slant on the subject, and that “it’s haunting you!” As it happens, I had been kicking around writing a book about my own case of reincarnation that I was told about by a ghost – bingo on all three counts! (Update: a year and a half after I got that reading, I was approached out of the blue by History Press to write a book of local ghosts stories for them. The book is supposed to have a heavy slant on the historical background behind the hauntings.)

In readings that I have done for other people, I know I’m getting solid information when quirky details come through. In one case, I kept seeing a pink autograph book with Davy Jones’ (from The Monkees) autograph in it in a reading for a woman who died young in the 1960’s. I couldn’t figure out why I was being shown that because it had nothing to do with the issue I had been asked to focus on. When I told the readee about it, she got all excited. It turns out that even though she was so young I wouldn’t have expected her to have even known about Davy Jones, she had a big crush on him in high school. Another time, a spirit whom the readee had known in that life popped in and kept calling her Margaret. The ghost pronounced it in a very distinctive fashion, drawing out each of the 3 syllable. The readee was surprised, as that was the way she tended to pronounce it, too.

The bottom line is, it's worth taking the time to give some critical thought to your reading. Legitimate readers fully acknowledge that we aren't infallible, and aren't going to be offended if don't blindly accept everything we tell you.

The Life Purpose of Ghosts

2010-07-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

by Nellie Kampmann

An acquaintance of mine was pondering whether the experience of being a ghost is part of a person's life plan. I've been told by spiritually aware friends that no, people are never meant to become ghosts. It's just some sort of cosmic glitch that they don't automatically go into the light.

Based on my experiences, I have to question that. Sure, some ghosts do seem to just have taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque . In other cases like that of Oscar, the ghost of my husband from the Civil War, it does seem to be part of their spiritual journey, though. He and his ghost family continue to live their lives roughly the same as if they still had bodies. Why would they not be continuing to learn from that as well? I can think of a few things Oscar could be learning from his experience as a ghost just in the couple of years that we've been interacting with each other, things he couldn't have learned while still in his body. What I'm really finding amazing is that now that I am starting to learn about my past lives more, he is also remembering his own. Surely integrating those memories into how he is dealing with his afterlife has got to be some sort of spiritual progress.

I'd also heard of another haunting where a very pious man was furious that God left him behind as a ghost instead of whisking him off to heaven after his death. He became a very angry ghost, and garnered a lot of attention. It seems to me that there was some purpose in him being a ghost under the circumstances. If he hadn't gotten so angry and made a big ruckus about it, no one would have ever heard of the haunting. Instead, this case has been shown on international tv. The average person is more likely to watch a tv show about ghosts, whether they believe in them or not, than they are to watch a program about spirituality in general. So, in a way, he is helping to open other people's eyes to their own spirituality by getting them to consider that maybe life does extend beyond death. I think there may be some element of that in all hauntings. Is the average person really going to blindly accept that their spirit continues to live after death if they never have any evidence that that is the case?

My Experience With Hypnotic Regression

2010-07-21T19:33:00.000-07:00

by Nellie Kampmann

Since I’m obsessed with my Civil War era life and want more answers about it, I decided to give hypnotic regression a try. The results were worthwhile.

The hypnotist, Chel Hamilton, spent the first half hour of the session talking to me about how hypnosis works and doing some tests to see how well I would react to it. I found it interesting that there were some parallels to what goes on in a psychic past life reading. She said that sometimes people want to focus on a specific past life, but their subconscious decides that it’s more important for them to know about a different one and steers them to that instead. Heaven knows, that can happen with psychic readings. The old song by the Rolling Stones sums it up nicely.

“You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you might find
You get what you need".

Next she put me under. First, I got the giggles when she told me that my eyelids were getting heavy. Apparently, that’s a common reaction. Then she made my arm feel like cooked spaghetti, which elicited another round of giggles. I don’t know why I found that so funny, but it was hysterical at the time.

Then we started visiting scenes from my past life. It started off when I was about 11. What I really appreciated about it was that Chel would ask questions throughout to spur me to say who I was dealing, what relationship we had, with and where I was. She knew that my goal for the session was to get details that could be historically verified, so I’m not sure if this much emphasis would be put on that in a usual past life regression session. The good news is that she said that she got a lot of details out of me, more so than the average subject. The bad news is that I am not entirely sure that with some of the more important details, like my name, I wasn’t just spitting out names that had already come up before in psychic readings. The name I gave did feel right, though. I did get some new information that may give me some leads, although I haven’t had much chance to research them yet.

In the course of an hour, we went through 7 or 8 scenes from my past life. Some of them were ones that I had already touched on in my past life meditations, others were new, and some took me completely by surprise. I have to say, it was very odd remembering giving birth to a breach baby and feeling the midwife’s hands inside me moving the baby around. I was not expecting that!

In another event, I remembered waking up in a deserted part of the city near the canal at night, being confused about why I was there, and feeling a lump on my head like I had been conked out. That memory led to additional memories after the regression was over, giving me a fuller picture as to what had happened and some new leads to research. A couple of weeks later, I came across a period photograph of a strip along the canal that matched what I had seen in the regression. I checked all of the books I had used in my previous research to see if maybe I had just seen that picture before and somehow incorporated that into my memory. While I did find a single photograph of the canal in them, it was not not taken from this particular section of the canal. The photograph in the new book was from a private collection and thus not something that is likely to have been published before regardless.

Another thing that caught me by surprise was how tired I was by the time it was over. From what I’d read about hypnosis, I was expecting more of a feeling of detachment. Not that having the emotions was a bad thing. The experience felt more real that way. Still, it’s pretty intense going back and feeling how utterly lost and pain filled I was after the love of my life was killed, and even experiencing the fearful premonitions I had about it beforehand.

Overall, I’d say it was worth it. Even if the details don’t lead to me being able to finally get some validation in the historical records, it did jog some new memories that explain some things about my attitudes in the current life. Every bit of information I get on that is of value.

Reincarnation of Ghosts

2010-07-21T19:25:00.000-07:00

by Nellie Kampmann

Someone asked me that if a ghost of a person has been seen, could that person also be reincarnated?
Interestingly, this comes right on the heels of a reading I'd done for a friend of mine, who suspected that she might be some B-List historical figure (well known enough in historical circles, but no one the average joe has ever heard of). In doing the reading, I was surprised to have a vision of her hanging around for several years as a ghost, haunting her creepy husband. I was even more shocked when she told me that there had been documented sightings of her ghost in the years after her death, but none recently. One tale even mentions her husband seeing her. The haunting itself is relatively obscure and occurred in a foreign country. It's extremely unlikely that I would have heard about the haunting before and was subconsciously plugging that into the reading. So on that count, I'd say yes, just because you are a ghost for awhile doesn't mean that you can't eventually go into the light and be reincarnated. I am also getting that from Oscar, the ghost of my husband from the Civil War. He has every intention of going into the light with me when I die so that we can be reincarnated together in a future life.

But what if the ghost is around during the same time the person is supposedly reincarnated? In the world of paranormal research, hauntings are broken into 2 categories – intelligent hauntings and residual hauntings. The intelligent hauntings are ones where the spirit is aware of its existence and interacts with people or objects from the current time. Residual hauntings are where a strong emotional moment gets somehow recorded into the fabric of the universe and replays itself over the years when the conditions are right. The ghosts in these are not self aware beings anymore than the images I see on the screen in a cinema are when I go to the movies. This is what is probably happening if the ghost of a currently reincarnated person is seen.

The other possibility is that it is an intelligent haunting, but the ghost was misidentified. It's far more romantic for people to believe that they saw the ghost of Queen Elizabeth, for example, than it would be for them to see the ghost of one of her ladies in waiting. Anyone who studies ghost stories can tell you that the stories behind them often get scrambled. I know of one haunted mill where ghost stories from the same village about a jilted bride and a little girl who died got mixed together and attributed to the nearby mill where neither of them had traditionally been seen. Ironically, the mill is haunted, but by the spirit of a murder victim and the young man who was hung after being falsely accused of the crime.

Reincarnation of Holocaust Victims

2010-07-21T19:23:00.000-07:00

by Nellie Kampmann

I just started reading Beyond the Ashes: Cases of Reincarnation from the Holocaust by Rabbi Yonassan Gershom. I am only two chapters into it, but it has been fascinating so far. Whether or not one has any particular interest in the Holocaust, this gives a lot of interesting insight into how reincarnation works and the choices souls make when choosing their lives. I thought I'd better write about it now while this part was fresh in my mind.

I first heard about this book a year ago when it was mentioned on one of the paranormal radio shows I listen to. They mentiones Rabbi Gershom's findings that it's common for Holocaust victims, especially those that died as children, to reincarnate as blonde haired, blue-eyed non-Jews as a way of protecting themselves. Several years earlier, a blonde haired, blue-eyed Protestant friend of mine had told me that she believed herself to be the reincarnation of a Holocaust victim. Lately, another blonde haired, blue-eyed friend also mentioned the same thing. That intrigued me.

Gershom is quick to point out, though, that these Aryan type reicarnatees are only a subset of people he's found who seem to be true reincarnations of Holocaust victims. From a research point of view, they make more compelling subjects. It's harder to blow off past life memories of the Holocaust by people who grew up in a rural parts of the U.S. in the 1950's and 60's with no exposure to Jewish culture, when these people also automatically engaged in activities distinctive to Jewish culture from the time they were small children. He gave some examples of having a strong urge to light candles on Friday evenings, sprinkling salt on their bread, and toddlers getting upset if milk and meat were on the table at the same time.

One of the things that struck me was the theory that all children who die in war tend to reincarnate quickly. Of the ones Gershom studied, all were reborn between 1939 to 1970, with the vast majority between 1947 to 1953. It was noted that this generation was also the generation that caused so much social change in the 1960's and 70's, pushing for peace over war, questioning authority, and fighting racial and gender inequalities. I know there were other reasons playing into those changes, but this also makes a heck of a lot of sense.

Be forewarned. This is a hard read, despite that the information is presented in a way that it is easy to comprehend. He gets into a lot of memories people had about their experiences. Those are heart and gut wrenching. Gershom included this not to emphasize how horrific those experiences were, but to use them to illustrate how some people knew details about the events that, for the most part, only historians and survivors were aware of.

I will probably have more comments on this book as I get through it. The next section of the book covers the concept of reincarnation in Jewish mysticism. That should be enlightening as well.

The Reincarnation of Famous People

2010-07-21T19:21:00.000-07:00

by Nellie Kampmann

Many people cast a fisheye towards the concept of reincarnation because they've heard claims from people who believe themselves to be the reincarnation of some well-known historic figure. We've all heard the jokes about everyone who thinks they are the reincarnation of Cleopatra or Napoleon. It's hard for people to take reincarnation seriously when they think belief in one's own past lives is just an ego-driven need to feel important.

In all fairness, there are people out there like that. A few years ago, I met a woman on one of the paranormal forums I'm on who claimed to be the reincarnation of a highly romanticized historical figure from centuries ago. The story she told was what you would expect to see in a supernatural themed romance novel – very dramatic and very flattering to her. That was questionable enough, but she also displayed a serious need to be the center of attention. I hate to say it, but whenever she posted, an intense feeling of neediness radiated through. This became a problem for me when I was later confronted with evidence of my own past life during the Civil War. Instead of being able to consider the evidence neutrally, all I could think was "Please God, don't let me be self-deluded attention hound like that other woman!"

Since then, I have talked with a lot of very down to earth people who also believe themselves to be reincarnations. The evidence they presented was compelling and their judgment in general seemed to be good. It was a relief to find that most people who believe in reincarnation are actually sensible, well-balanced folks. However, I found it odd that such a high percentage of them seemed to be reincarnations of famous people from the past.

That begged the question as to why.

After thinking about it, the answer appears to be fairly simple – validation. Dr. Walter Semkiw is currently doing a lot of research into reincarnation, and his focus is on historic personages. That makes sense because he can find a lot more evidence to back up the claims when the historic person's life was well documented. If someone is having memories of a past life, it's much easier to validate when they were in the public eye to the point where their lives were written about in the newspapers of the time and when their personal letters are available to read in some archive. Compare that to trying to validate the life of some farm woman in England from the early 18th century where the only documentation of her life was a few notations in the local church records or possibly taxation rolls.

It's the same for the average person. When people start having memories of past lives, it's a lot easier to believe when they can back it up with historical evidence. When you've got memories of a past life that you can't possibly back up with historical documentation, it's common for folks to brush it off as daydreams or their imagination. However, when you've got documentation staring you in the face that matches up with your memories and you are a dead ringer for contemporary portraits of that person, you are a lot more likely to accept it as reality. Thus, it makes sense that people who were well known figures in history would be more accepting of their past lives and would feel more confident talking about it publicly.

Getting back to the Cleopatra and Napoleon complex, I recently heard a logical explanation for that as well. On a paranormal radio show (I wish that I could remember which one so that I could properly attribute this theory), an interviewee suggested that people who thought they were famous people in the past may have just been closely connected to those people. So if you were Cleopatra's personal servant, you would remember being in ancient Egypt, being in the palace, having contact with Julius Cesar and the name of Cleopatra would be important to you. It's understandable that those memories might get scrambled enough for one to believe that they were the famous person and not the servant. No one expects to be the reincarnation of the servant who trimmed Napoleon's nose and ear hair for him!

So how do you know that you were the famous person instead of their maid? Another thing I've found intriguing is that so many of the people who claim to be reincarnations of famous people do indeed bear a strong physical resemblance to them. I have memories of being in very different body types from the one I have now, so I had always taken it for granted that people didn't necessarily look like they did in past lives. Looking like someone from the past could easily be a coincidence. However, there are cases like that of Jessica Jewett where not only does she resemble Fanny Chamberlain, the woman she is the reincarnation of, many of her friends and loved ones also bear a strong resemblance to people who were also friends and family of Fanny's. While I still don't believe that one has to look like they did in the past, if you were meant to remember a past life, it would make sense that the universe would give you a big clue by making you look like you did in your previous life.

Shopping for a Psychic

2010-07-21T19:19:00.000-07:00

by Nellie Kampmann

I have been hearing some problematic things lately about people's experiences with psychics. It occurs to me that it might be helpful to give you some pointers on how to shop for one. In general, I would say go with recommendations from people you trust, but of course, not everyone knows someone who knows someone. So, here are some commonalities I've noticed in good psychics and bad psychics:

Good Psychics

1. Are willing to give references. I am talking about actually letting you talk to someone who has had a reading from them, not just posting testimonials on their web page.

2. Treat their fellow psychics as colleagues, not competition. Psychics who have confidence in their own abilities do not feel threatened by the fact that there are other equally good psychics out there. It's actually common to hear good psychics openly praising other psychics that they respect. You may not realize this, but most psychics go through other psychics to have readings done for them. It is incredibly hard for psychics to read for themselves, as their own hopes and fears can muddy the reading for them.

3. Are always looking to become better psychics. If you hear a psychic saying that they would like feedback or are taking a workshop to improve their psychic abilities, that means that they want to do the best possible job for you.

Bad Psychics

1. Are blow hards. If you see a psychic claiming that they are soooo much better than anyone else, they are full of crap. The truth of the matter is that there are quite a lot of excellent psychics out there who are capable of giving verifiable information in their readings. I have yet to come across any one person who is head and shoulders above the rest.

2. Bash other psychics. If they are that afraid of competition, there's a reason for it.

3. Give you a hinky feeling. Yup - trust your gut. Even if someone recommends a psychic but they still don't feel quite right to you, don't use them. A couple of years ago, I was looking for groups to join to help me develop my psychic skills. A good friend and fellow psychic recommended a certain group that she had found helpful. When I looked at the group's page, there was a warning from the psychic who headed the group about people joining the group as spies. Spies?!!! I knew that wasn't the kind of energy that I wanted to be around, so I steered clear of it. That turned out to be a very wise choice.

Neutral Factors

1. How much they charge. There are differing opinions by psychics on whether they should charge low fees to make their services more accessible, fees that are higher but consistent with other professional services, fees that seem outrageously high but are a fair market rate given the high demand for their services, or not even charging at all. I know people who have gotten excellent readings from psychics who charged anything from $0 to $1,500 an hour and people who have gotten lousy readings from all of those groups as well. As far as I can tell, how much a psychic charges has no bearing on their quality.

2. Testimonials. Legitimate psychics put up true testimonials. If someone is a fake psychic, they will have no qualms about putting up fake testimonials.

3. Won't give you a sample reading to prove how good they are. I'm sorry but that's just tacky to ask for. Would you also expect a plumber to fix your leaky faucet for free to prove that he has the skills to put in a new toilet for you?

I'm sure that there are some other factors as well, but that will have to do it for now.