Seeing my soul as being on one of a series of incarnations massively changed how I approach growth and healing. It’s given me a visceral sense of our greater Self journeying through time, and the overpowering Love that drives us to come back over and over again.
I grew up in a household that believed in reincarnation, but I only grasped the implications for crafting a map for this life around it in the last decade or so.
(BTW, this is something where I fully live as if reincarnation is real, while holding in my mind the paradox that it might not be, beacuse there’s way too much about the Cosmos we don’t know. )
The lens that’s helped me the most is well articulated by Dr. Roger Woolger, who was a regression therapist. In his book, Healing Your Past Lives, he wrote,
“Many of the problems that we take to our therapists can readily be traced to childhood—events such as losses, abuse, tragedy, and so on—but there are many issues that years of therapy never seem to touch. So many of my clients arrive with deep feelings of grief or with totally inexplicable phobias—a fear of drowning in a boat when they have never been to sea, for instance—that are totally unaccounted for in terms of their present life experience. Over and over again, they will remark that they have had such-and-such a feeling ever since they could remember, or that they have always had fantasies about particular countries, or thoughts about certain unpleasant ways of dying, or strong convictions of having been a different kind of human being in another era.”
From this approach, we find that there’ll be one or two (or a key handful) of lifetimes directly related to this life we’re in right now, in which we grappled with certain iconic issues that left a limiting, distorting, painful or traumatic mark on our soul.
These are known as “karmic complexes” — soul-scars, in other words, that keep echoing through this lifetime, blocking our agency to act out a new, better story. To fully embody our greatest Soul Love and Creativity, in other words.
Our astrological birth chart outlines the underlying themes from these complexes, along with multiple levels of prescriptions to resolve them, by “stepping beyond the logic/level of consciousness that created them”, to paraphrase.
And in resolving these scars, it’s not only our own soul that becomes more whole for it. We add to the healing and liberation possible for all beings on the planet.