These books were the beginning of a new life. Aside from Light Between Us, there were no other books nearly as impactful to my journey as Michael Netwon’s books.
I had been introduced to the idea of past lives and past life regression by my co-worker. She always told me that her initial step into a bigger world was reading Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss.
I may have mentioned already, that the idea of past lives made me very uncomfortable. At the time, I was afraid that multiple lives meant that the connections we made on Earth were meaningless. I go through this life and then I die and come back again and do it all over again with different people and would for all of eternity. What about me as a person? Do the relationships that we have survive? How does that make the life I live right now important? Are all connections meaningless?
Additional to the discomfort this caused, I had trouble grasping past lives and reincarnation because it felt like it contradicted my Catholic upbringing. I had two lenses in which I viewed the world. I had my materialistic science view and my taught perception of religion. Even other religions that held beliefs in reincarnation were completely different than what I was about to uncover. These two lenses were polarized, but they were the only two options that I had seen up until that point.
These two books broke everything for me, and that forced me into a really uncomfortable state. These books challenged my ideas of science and religion. These books challenged my belief and understanding of the world. My fundamental understanding of life was obliterated. I didn’t know what to believe, and that can be very scary. If you don’t believe so, imagine what you’d do if something you believed was 100% true was realized as false. What else does that mean you had wrong? Is anything true? That is a scary place to be. The beliefs that emerged after reading these books allowed the balance and harmony between science and religion. This was my beginning.
Michael Newton was a hypnotherapist that accidentally stumbled into past life regression. That is key to me because throughout everything he did he always stayed skeptical. I think this is why I enjoy the books so much. Skeptics make the best reporters. After thousands of regressions, he began to open up to these new ideas. Once he did, his books became even more profound.
While past life regression is fascinating in its own right, Michael Newton started to find the answers to what happened between lives. This is what he eventually called Life Between Lives regression.
The idea of our soul journey is that we plan our lives and who we come here to be with. The souls we choose to incarnate with are carefully selected. They are our soul group or soul family. We have incarnated countless times with these people and often times they accompany us out of pure love. In his book, Michael Newton explains that we connect so easily with people that we have incarnated many lives with. It is oftentimes accompanied by a feeling that you have known someone longer than you actually have. In reality, you have known them longer because you have incarnated through multiple lives with them.
I remember the story that broke down any preconceived understandings of right and wrong for me. In this regression, this woman was abused by her uncle. Her uncle had since passed away and was on the other side. During her Life Between Life regression, the woman was greeted by her soul group. She saw the soul of her uncle approaching and she panicked. She had no interest in seeing the uncle. The uncle came and gave her a big hug. He said to her that this was the hardest thing that he ever did, but he played the role of the abuser for her so that she could learn the lessons she sought to learn.
This idea had huge ramifications on my psyche. If this idea was true, then every action that someone does can have hidden deeper meanings. People are not bad. Maybe sometimes they fall off their intended path or maybe sometimes its because we asked for them to do something for us. At that point, it is not worth judging another soul for what they have done. We have all lived lives that we did horrible things. Sometimes we did it because we were asked, but there were plenty of times that we made mistakes and did bad things because we were learning how to be human.
I think these books really started my journey into truly loving others. I saw that the connections we have with one another here are truly important and powerful, both when those connections are perceived as good or bad. Because I saw that every one that came into my life had an impact on who I am today, they all became teachers. I understood that the people I once believed to hurt me actually came to teach me lessons into self-love. I could not be who I was without them, and therefore I recognized that they could only have done so out of love. These people I began to have extreme gratitude for which began to heal my grudges.
I think I recognized one of my first paradoxes. I knew that we could not truly love other people without loving ourselves. This is something I learned in high school. However, I also began to realize that we could not truly have unconditional love for ourselves without recognizing that everyone around us is extremely perfect. Even with their imperfections, a person’s undesirable traits assist them to grow or assist us to grow, therefore becoming perfect imperfections. By recognizing that in others, I was better able to accept it within myself. Since we are our greatest judge and jury, this can sometimes be very challenging to accept. However, by accepting it in everyone else we begin to accept that our shortcomings could have a profound impact on those around us.
I want to be clear that this does not give us a pass to be complete assholes but it does give us a little bit more reason to forgive ourselves and move on. There is always some way that what we do helps another person grow, and sometimes we may be doing something we don’t physically realize that impacts other people in such a deep way that we may never know. Let that one sink in a little bit…
