Today I had the opportunity to catch part of a wonderful show broadcast from Philadelphia's NPR station called Voices in the Family. It runs on WHYY 91FM each weekday. It's moderated by a compassionate and brilliant fellow named Dr. Dan Gottleib. This man is a true healer who guides discussions in a marvelous way. I really admire his work. The topic of today's show was how different generations heal from the trauma of the Holocaust and how survivors, their children, and grandchildren face unique challenges in processing the impact of those horrific events. Today marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of many of the concentration camps, so this was a timely discussion.

As I listened to Dr. Gottleib interview two eloquent speakers whose parents were Holocaust survivors, I was reflecting on how the monstrous acts committed didn't just affect the psyches of the immediate victims, but these events also traumatized countless other souls.

There are many people on the planet right now who feel a strong psychic resonance with the Holocaust, not because they are Jewish or because they have any family ties to the Holocaust experience, but because they experienced the Holocaust in a past life. I am one of these people.

Reincarnation Doesn't Always Happen in a Straight Line

Combing through past lives and learning what wounds need to be healed from those realities takes a lot of personal detective work. But if you're someone who likes to meditate, pray, and access wisdom from the spiritual realms, it's highly likely that at some point you'll stumble across information about yourself that stems from other lifetimes you have lived.

I don't personally believe that our spirits endlessly progress from one incarnation to the next without having other options between lives. My beliefs are more aligned with the research performed by a remote viewer (who formerly worked for the CIA - not the most spiritual place!) His name is Lyn Buchanan. In his book The Seventh Sense he describes remote viewing sessions he did on what happened to people's souls after they died. What he found was really interesting. Some people seemed to return to their families of origin, spending time with deceased loved ones. Others appeared to merge with the Light, an all-encompassing, blinding energy that could be said to be God or a higher dimension. Others went to a very dark place, a place so dark it lacked color, substance, or any familiar shape or form. It was "the void," perhaps what is commonly thought of as hell. And other souls he viewed seemed to be born again into different bodies on the physical plane, often with a brief break of a decade or more between incarnations.

The most intriguing thing Buchanan found was that some souls appeared to journey backwards in time. So for instance, a person who died in 1985 could come back into a physical body again BUT IN A PAST TIME. He was seeing many modern-day souls reincarnating into a past period like the 1920's or the 1800's. Isn't that interesting?

That piece of the puzzle really resonated with me, because I've long sensed that the conventional wisdom about reincarnation is off-base. It's a piece of New Age dogma now, this inflexible view that we just keep reincarnating over and over again in a linear sequence. Frankly, the very thought of doing that makes me tired! Surely, there must be other places for the soul to journey, other adventures for the spirit to seek out. I know, for instance, that souls can incarnate on different planets, which makes things really interesting. Every once in a while I come across someone who simply isn't from this world, although they were born into a regular human body here on Earth. As an energy sensitive, I can see their psychic wiring, and it's configured for a different type of body. Weird stuff! The ET's have landed, folks, and they're already living among us! (Some of them are negative in spiritual orientation, others are positive - but that's another story.)

Healing the Trauma of Past Life Death Wounds

I've been able to access a lot of information over the years about my various lifetimes. And no, I wasn't Cleopatra, although everyone seems to claim that they were her! I've pieced this information together gradually and painstakingly, because things tend to reveal themselves slowly. The world of spirit seems to show us things about past lives on a "need to know" basis, only revealing stuff if it's pertinent to issues we're trying to work through in our current life.

My most recent lifetime before this one was as a little boy of about six years old. He lived in Amsterdam and was on a bus filled with other children who were being transported to safety outside the city. The city was under intense attack, and much of the city was being bombed. This little boy was caught in an attack, and the bus he was riding on was blown up. The boy received a death wound in his abdomen which essentially cut him in two. Mercifully, he died almost immediately.

This boy's last moments were very clear when they came to me, and it wasn't something I relived intellectually. I could feel myself looking out at the world through that six year old's eyes. I experienced the horrific confusion of being in the midst of the bombings and felt the terrible sadness of being separated from my mother. I didn't know where she was or whether I'd ever see her again. In fact, it's quite possible that I was already an orphan but didn't know it. There didn't seem to be many other adults with the children on the bus, so we could have been a group of orphans being sent to safety.

In the healing work I've done for myself and on behalf of others, I've discovered that past life death wounds leave terrible scars on the energy body. The energy body is a hologram, a three-dimensional (actually, four-dimensional) field that contains all of the information about what that spirit has experienced in various lives. While the pleasant memories are there, the traumatic ones are, too.

Sometimes the death wound someone suffered from a past life will make itself known in the current body of the person. I know a man who shot himself in the temple in a past life, and he has a small mole at the side of his temple in the exact spot where that death blow affected his energy field. I've known people with birthmarks or other bodily quirks that were discovered to be an echo of past life wounds.

Even if you don't carry physical scars in this life from past life wounds, you generally have holes and wounds in the energy field of your current body that reflect these wounds. In my case, I've had a heck of a time getting my lower chakras and my upper chakras to work together in this lifetime. I tend to be "top heavy," accessing tons of inspirational energy through my upper chakras but having troubles grounding those ideas into physical form. This has impacted on my money issues in this lifetime, too. The lower chakras like the base chakra, the sex chakra, and the navel chakra need to be fully intact and functioning for a person to manifest financial stability, and I've had a tendency to spring "leaks" because the energy tends to pour out through the holes.

I've been blessed to receive work from other healers that has healed most of these leaks, and I've learned a lot about my "trick spots." But each of us can benefit from doing the detective work of combing through our past lives and gradually clearing out the energy effects of past life wounds and death wounds. Doing this work can improve our lives on a physical, emotional, and interpersonal level.

For instance, it's common for women who are infertile in this lifetime to have experienced severe trauma giving birth in a past life. Many times, a person will resist getting pregnant because on a subconscious level the woman is still processing the trauma of having died in childbirth in a past life. Since something like one out of every four women died in childbirth up until the last 100 years or so, and women were pressured to have large families - thereby increasing their risk of death - you can imagine that there are a lot of people carrying this trauma around in their energy field. And you can be carrying childbirth trauma in your current energy field even if you're a man in this life - if you were born as a woman in a past life. Most of us switch sexes over time, so men who are infertile in this life are sometimes unconsciously avoiding childbirth trauma because of past life cellular memory that's still embedded in their energy field in their current life. This can manifest as issues with fertility for the man even if he really wants to father children on a conscious level.

Ways to Unearth Past Life Information

I believe that the best way to unearth past life information for yourself is to ask your Higher Self for wisdom about what you need to heal from other lifetimes in order to function better in this current life. Then pay attention to your dreams, your daydreams, and the things that you're drawn to in your daily life. Information will gradually surface that will help you to start piecing things together, and you may even have moments of total recall that give you more glimpses of the picture.

I didn't always know that I was that little boy in Amsterdam who died during the Nazi bombing. But up until the age of twelve or so in this life, I had a horrific aversion to planes flying overhead. Whenever a plane flew overhead, I identified these as "bombers" and found myself reflexively preparing for the airplanes to drop a bomb. I would hold my breath, waiting for the explosion, until the plane finally went past. Since we lived in a town with lots of air traffic, this created a certain amount of tension in my daily life! Also, I would incorporate the "bombers" into my play with other children. We'd be in the middle of building a fort or playing space invaders or Nancy Drew, and if a plane flew overhead, I'd tell everyone to duck until the bomber passed by.

There was no reason for me to react in this way, as my parents weren't Jewish and no one in my social circle or immediate family had experienced the horrors of World War II bombings. ( I did have great-uncles who fought in the war, but I wasn't raised knowing these men and had no first-hand knowledge of their experiences.) But somehow, this reflexive awareness of the danger of a passing plane was constantly retriggered for me.

And I didn't have this response because of watching too many war movies on TV, either. I absolutely abhorred ANY movies about World War II and refused to watch them. I still feel a strong aversion to movies or historic shows about that era to this day. I just can't watch them. As I grew to adulthood, I realized that the reactions I had to planes as a kid and my odd aversion to World War II stories and movies were really behaviors you'd normally associate with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Then I began to unlock the deeper mystery of these behaviors, and my memories of being the little boy in Amsterdam began to come back.

There is an overall order and coherence to the experiences our souls choose. I never felt regret about having died as that little boy. He led a short, brief, and mostly happy life, and his death was mercifully quick. I also could see how, after coming out of that life, I oriented myself in a different way coming into my current life. I was born as an only child to two loving parents who surrounded me with so much love and stability that this more than compensated for the "lack" that I'd experienced in that earlier, tragic life. I was given the blessing of being able to have a longer childhood than usual as my parents gave me plenty of time, support, and encouragement coming to maturity. There were no disruptions here, no traumas. I truly think I was so "lucky" in this life to make up for the absence of stable family life that I experienced as that little boy.

Unraveling the spiritual threads stemming from past lives takes a while, and I'm still uncovering important things that have relevance to my current life. While listening to Dr. Gottleib's show today, I put together another piece of the puzzle.

The Dream That Wasn't A Dream

Some months ago I had a vivid dream which wasn't a dream. Have you ever had a dream where you were another person? This was that type of a dream. In such dreams, it's like you are remote viewing through another person's eyes, experiencing things through somebody else's psyche. When I experience these dreams, they usually prove to be incredibly psychic. I can often verify information I gathered in the dream later on. Sometimes these dreams are really distressing, too. I've dreamt about victims of terrible tragedies in Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance, and I've experienced the suffering of people in various parts of Africa in this way. I often feel powerless after these dreams, filled with compassion for these peoples' plight but wondering how I can make a difference in the lives of these individuals who live half-way around the world.

Anyway, this particular dream was odd. In the dream "I" was a young 20-something woman in a bright, pretty dress that was of a style worn by middle-class women in the 1940's. I was somewhat excited because I was with a bunch of people taking a train trip. I had the sense that I wasn't someone who ever had the opportunity to travel, and while I didn't know exactly what was going to happen at my destination, I was excited to be dressed up in my nicest dress and spending time with other well-dressed people. I had that vanity that comes with being that age and wanting to see my image reflected back in other people's eyes. I had the sense of being someone who was bright but not highly intelligent, a nice young woman who had a people-pleasing personality and a somewhat conservative mindset. I was aware of having brown hair and being of medium height.

The scene shifted, and I was disembarking with other people in a strange place. There was a flurry of luggage and a large crowd . And that was when the sadness hit. I don't know how much I was aware of at this point, but it suddenly flashed over me that maybe I would never see home again, and that I didn't entirely trust the people who were in charge. And I felt a real wave of sadness about family I'd left back home.

That was the end of the dream. I woke up from it wondering how and why I'd tuned into a young woman in the 1940's headed on a train somewhere. It seemed like an important vision, something that I would later figure out.

As I listened to Dr. Gottleib's radio broadcast today, his two guests were talking about some of the experiences of their Holocaust survivor parents and other experiences they had gathered from other survivors and their families. And then it hit me.

That dream I had had was a dream about my mother from that lifetime. And she had been taken off to a concentration camp. She didn't know she was being taken there until it was too late. They hadn't told her her ultimate destination when she had gotten on the train. She just thought she was going to some temporary relocation center.

I suddenly knew this, without a doubt. I could feel the truth of it vibrating through my bones.

I'm not sure how I had this remote viewing dream about her, but it stands to reason that there would still be a psychic connection with this lady if she really had been my mother in that past life. I would have had strong ties to her when I was her little boy in Holland. And she was the one I lost. I knew this now. Somehow, I was certain that she never came back from the camps, and I may have already been an orphan at the time those well-intended people put me on a bus, trying to transport me to safety outside the ravaged city.

No wonder I chose to die. No wonder the bomb hit our bus. I think, on a higher level, that little boy didn't want to continue life in a war-torn world without his mother. Dying was better.

The ties that bind us to loved ones reach throughout time and reality and remain strong on a psychic level. Whether you're trying to piece together information about past life death wounds so you can heal them in this life or if you're interested in figuring out more about your family bonds from other realities, this information can be revealed. Just keep doing your spiritual homework and keep praying for more clarity and wisdom about your heritage, your lineage, and your destiny.

And if you feel a strong resonance and sense of connection to the horrors of the Holocaust, maybe you lived in those terrible times, too.