The truth behind past lives, parallel lives and future lives

I enjoyed reading our writers talk about their belief systems regarding past lives, parallel lives and future lives this week.  The topic has always been one of great interest to me.

Some people simply believe in reincarnation—from a young age there’s an innate understanding that they’ve been here before, or known things they have no business knowing.  For me this manifested in a few simple moments throughout  my childhood.

Me and my soul kitten, Briar Rose

I recall being four or five and thinking, fiercely, that I was so happy I had been born a human rather than a cat (which at that time, and in many ways still is my favorite animal).  I had no concept of reincarnation… but I felt certain at that moment that I had once been a cat and was happy to now be human.

I was sheltered in a small Catholic school, but even as a tween I recall arguing with a friend that there was no such thing as hell.  That a god that loved us as much as our god surely wouldn’t send us to hell, but would be more likely to send us back to Earth until we got it right.  Also, I continued, if a truly good person went to heaven but didn’t feel as if they had completed their work here and wanted to return to do more good for others, why would God keep them in heaven instead of letting them return.  Surely an all-powerful God would have the ability to send someone back if s/he wanted.  And by the same token, how could someone who felt an incredible need to do more good on Earth be at peace in a place that is supposed to be all-peace?

These were things I not only intuitively knew in my heart to be true, but that I felt fiercely about.  There were no books or readings or influence from anyone in my life to give me insights like this.  Instead it simply made sense to my adolescent brain… and it still does.

Future lives, on the other hand, have their own flavor.  They began to make sense to me after watching the series “Lost.”  Don’t laugh.  The way I look at time, the timeline of my life, and the possibility of past, present, parallel and future lives shifted immensely, and the show (which I Netflixed all at once over the course of a couple months) put a lot of the pieces of my multiple belief systems together. 

When we experience a lifetime has absolutely nothing to do with when that life happens chronologically.  Our future lives may have already happened, or may be happening now.  Changing our past doesn’t change our future… changing our life changes our life.  Period.

As for parallel lives, I have my mother to thank for that… as I couldn’t even wrap my brain around the concept until she said one day in passing, “maybe that woman seems so familiar because you know her in a parallel life.”  That statement had me strung up for days.  But in the end, parallel lives aren’t that conceptually difficult for a dreamer and a writer like me.  I live many lives at once… and who’s to say I remember them all?  Part of me believes I am the guide for some of my most powerful guides in a parallel life where they are physical, and I visit in spirit.  And who’s to say it’s not true?

Me and my soul sisters, Grace and Carol

Other instances have confirmed my belief in past and parallel lives.  Incredible emotional upheavals as a result of scenes in books, television and film, intense moments of deja vu, people I know too well after having known for only moments (you know who you are!), and partners that I know I’ve worked with before, over and over.  There are the visions, too… like the time I walked down a pier off a boat, having stepped foot in Seattle for the first time ever (someplace I’d wanted to visit for no particular reason since I was a young child)… how curious that my first step in Seattle was off a boat and my vision was of walking down a pier to meet my husband, Pat. Except in my vision he wasn’t my husband, we looked completely different, and there was an incredible sorrow of loving him but not being able to be with him.  The feeling almost brought me to my knees… and even Pat agreed that it was a strange feeling walking down that pier together.

our first view of Seattle

Then there are the parallel lives when friends and I meet in dreams, have similar dreams on the same night… but those are stories for another blog…

What are your experiences of deja vu, past lives, or your understanding of parallel lives?  The more we share our unbelievable beliefs, the clearer the picture becomes.

The Old Soul

When our third son was born and we looked into his eyes, we could feel it.  Jakob had an old soul.

Our first two boys were normal (and awesome, of course) babies.  New, cuddly, and learning things for the first time.  With Jakob it was different.  Jake knew and still knows things before his time. 

Jake, studying for the 2008 election

He was walking at eight months, because I think he expected it of himself.  Being surrounded by so many walking people, he figured he should be doing that, so he did.  He decided he should walk down stairs at eight and a half months.  He biffed it big time, but he reached up, grabbed the railing and stepped off into nothingness like he knew exactly what he was doing.  At four, he told me how my foot bath worked and that the moving water was a current.  He also, while helping his big brother change his brakes, explained how the brake calipers pushed against that thing which pushed against the wheel to create friction to slow down the truck.  At six, he explained how my hairdryer worked after looking at it for ten seconds.

Jake the goalie

I know this sounds like just a seriously smart dude who showed it at an early age.  But again, Jake is different.  I don’t know how, exactly, but he is.  When you look in his eyes, even now at 13 (if you can get past the teenaged boredom,) you can see years of life experience that a thirteen year old hasn’t yet lived.

Generally, while I do consider myself a spiritual person, I was never much for the theory of reincarnation until Jake was born.  There was just no way for Jake to know some of the things and understand such lofty theories as he does without some sort of prior knowledge (in my opinion.)  Plus, he just radiates awareness and intelligence.

Jake getting ready to leave for Peru.  He's so put upon!

With all of that seemingly prior knowledge, I feel like his straight Bs are beneath him as he didn’t have to work for them.  I want him to work hard and experience life!  We paid for him to visit Peru this last Spring Break with a group from his school district.  

Because he’s such a cool kid and great traveler, he’s been invited to attend an international youth conference in Spain and Amsterdam next summer with the same district group.  I guess opportunity is what you get by having an old soul! 

Do you know anyone whose soul seems particularly “new” or “old”?

Past life regressions and future life progressions - what they are and how they help!

“… Death is merely a pause to reflect on the progress of your eternal self so far." –VERONICA

This quote has been excerpted from Inner Whisper, Volume 1, Issue 15 by April Crawford, a Open Deep Trance Channel for an entity named Veronica

(http://www.innerwhispers.net/transition15.html).

Reincarnation by Dana Bree

Whether you believe someone can channel a spiritual entity or not, the words are something to be considered and give us a degree of confidence when considering our own inevitable death.

In Past Life Regression, I assist persons who seek to understand and release the karmic reasons for their present fears, proclivities or idiosyncrasies. Is that scar on your back the result of a wound from a past life?  Does your fear of water that has been with you for as long as you can remember, the result of an experience in a prior lifetime?  Exploring these issues can release the fears and the pains of psychic wounds.

But sometimes clients are just curious.  Curious about where their soul has been, if anything they find will resonate with their own present selves, like an interest in Celtic culture or an affinity for the arts,  or if they have known their friends or lover in another lifetime.  These aren’t monumental questions but people are seekers and I am happy to assist them on their journey.

When I do a regression it is as if I am viewing a movie and the client is the star.  If it wouldn’t be distracting to the process, I would probably bring popcorn.  

And then there is Future Life Progression. There are different meanings for Future Life Progression. Some Future Life Progressionists bring their clients forward to a future lifetime in which they were successful in mastering all their lessons and living their true life’s purpose. Then the client brings the energy of that future lifetime back into this lifetime to help them accelerate spiritual growth.

When I work with a client in Future Life Progression, I do it differently.  I have the client imagine looking back to the present from their own future. I show the client what their life will be like at some point in the future, a future in which they have achieved everything they want. The client is then asked to 'enter into' that future self, to get into the mind of that future self and to learn what that future self did in order to make it all happen. By visualizing the future and thinking about how it was achieved, the client becomes open to change their life. You can create your own future and change your life.  Wouldn’t you like to take a peek at your future or possible future and pick the one you want to enter.  Future Life Progression permits you to do that and then assess the skills you needed to acquire to get there.

I see my role as a coach to help my clients achieve their dreams by recognizing they possess the knowledge they need to move forward.  I am so blessed to be able to help people in this way.

The Connection of Parallel Lives

I’ve never been sold on the whole ‘you live, you die, and that is it!’ idea.  As a very young child I’ve felt a connection to some higher force, a spiritual being who watched over me and had a plan for my life.  At that age I didn’t know what it was or what it meant, and it took several years of self discovery and spiritual journeys to finally realize where my beliefs stood.  I’ve met countless people that cover both ends of the spectrum; from adamant atheists to deeply devoted Christians.  I’ve also met Hindus and Muslims, New Age spiritualists, Pagans, and others who simply didn’t wish to be labeled but walk on their own spiritual path.  We may be different from each other, but there’s a common thread connecting us all.  The belief that life is precious and unpredictable.

What is the meaning of a lifetime?  Can it be measured in more than moments or years?  Does the lifetime we currently live have more meaning than what we witness from day to day?

To most historians or scientists, a lifetime is a linear progression of a living being.  I like to look at lifetimes in a more detailed observation.  Lifetimes are happening millions of times through the spectrum of time and space.  Our life is parallel to billions of others, each one running its course on tracks that never meet or that clash head first into one another.  Our bodies live this current lifetime and label it the present, but the continuum of our entire existence isn’t limited to the restraint of time.  The past is what we see when we look as far back to the day we were born.  Our future is the years we have yet to live until we reach the end of our journey. But is there more?

My personal faith system has given me many answers to the span of life as a whole.  As a Catholic, I’ve embraced the promise made on a a cross.  This belief shows me that lifespans as we understand them aren’t entirely precise.  My afterlife is a continuation of my earthly pilgrimage and it has no end in sight.  That means that while my body will cease to exist in the earthly realm, my soul—which has been in me even before my birth [“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5)]”—will travel throughout time in a new, infinite realm.  But, if one looks at this with the traditional lifetime glasses, then it’s easy to label this idea as present (our current life) and future (new, eternal realm).  This is where I go back to ‘my soul has been me even before my birth’.  I believe that God has had a plan for us before conception and birth.  This plan revolves around lives living in parallel unity with millions of others, many dependent on mine. 

It’s pretty overwhelming to think how our lives are intricately entwined with others.  In the spectrum of life spans, the choices we make or do not make, directly impact others and their current and future lives.  This means that by our decisions we influence parallel lives that are strictly dependent on our own journey.  We carry a huge responsibility on our shoulders, yet we can’t consciously begin to understand that phenomena.  But that’s the beauty of it all, isn’t it?  To be part of something so great and so incomprehensible is one of the many parts that make up our life journey. 

In a Nutshell: Meet the Community

Last week, we met several new members of the Mind Key Community.

In Meet the Community: Dr. Kevin Hall, Dr. Kevin talks about his views on his health modalities.  “There are people that looked up at the starts and just saw stars, then there are those that looked up and saw constellations,” Kevin said.  “I’m a constellation seer.”  Read more about Dr. Hall on his website, Do Well Be Well.



In Bringing Visions to Life: The Dream art of Dana Bree, we got to know artist and graphic/website designer Dana Bree.  “I have always loved to make art, draw and paint what I see in real life as well as give voice and image to my dreams,” Dana said. “I have always had a very active, colorful and memorable dream life.  I seem to be moving in more interesting circles and vibrations these days and it is reflected in my happiness and my art.”




We met Sarah Loukos.  “I can’t read your mind,” she says. But as an empath, she can energetically read the emotional signals each person’s body and aura transmits. In The Mind Key Community: Meet Sarah, we learn that Sarah's been a practicing psychic for 22 years.  She's is also a novice
medium and is certified in Buddhist Meditation, trained in Kauai, Hawaii under the guidance of Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami.



Tara Ann Lesko is another Mind Key Community member featured this week in Meet The Community: Tara Ann Lesko.  A talented
writer, teacher, tutor, poet and artist, Tara says, “When I am not working, I do everything in my power to wrap my life around art, music, and literature. Those outlets for disconnection are what helps me reconnect to what identifies me, beyond what I do for a living.”

More bio and an excerpt of Tara's writing can be found at About The Golden Skillet and The Juice Box Incident - An excerpt from The Golden Skillet

This week, your Mind Key writers will be exploring the connection of parallel, past and future lives.  Make sure you stay tuned for the great writing!

Read more about the Community:

Meet the Community: Dr. Kevin Hall
 Do Well Be Well

Bringing Visions to Life: The Dream art of Dana Bree
dana-dreamart.com

The Mind Key Community: Meet Sarah
Sarah Loukos

Meet The Community: Tara Ann Lesko
About The Golden Skillet
The Juice Box Incident - An excerpt from The Golden Skillet
by Tara Ann Lesko

The Juice Box Incident, from the memoir "The Golden Skillet" by Tara Ann Lesko

Ignore them and they will stop when they see they can’t get the reaction they want out of you. Another commonly used and utterly false declaration. Nuisances don’t care about being ignored by one person because there is always going to be a group of sheep bleating behind them in support.

So I sat at the table with my head down. My tiresome lunch looking up at me – the scent of chocolate milk, fruit cups, and mozzarella cheese swirled around my throbbing head. I looked at my juice box that was slightly crunched since it was mostly empty. Juice boxes are all fine and dandy, but there is only problem with them. They are never enough. Your thirst is vaguely quenched once you reach the point where there is nothing left but air.

I was thirsty. I was on fire. I grabbed the juice box and pointed it at Prospero’s head while barely looking at him. I wasn’t expecting anything to shoot out except maybe a gentle mist. But what actually came out was a perfect, unbroken stream of red cranberry juice – like a line of blood firing out of a severed artery. Where the stream landed was even more astonishing – directly into Prospero’s right ear canal.

The visual of his reaction will stay with me forever. He looked like he had been bludgeoned across the head with a Twizzler. His high-pitched squeal immediately caught the attention of a gruff lunch room aide.

“What’s going on at this table?” In a burly voice that reeked of familiar annoyance, as if our table was always a problem.

“Tara squirted juice in my ear!” yelled Prospero, pushing out as many tears as he could. He looked more constipated than distraught.

I munched on a carrot and looked at the robust lunch lady with white hair. She was still handing out the school lunches not far from our table. She was the only lunch lady that always looked unruffled and complacent. I wasn’t sure if she even had a voice. We never spoke, but I wanted to stand by her and help her pass out the warm chocolate milks and the purple Sun Cups.

“Excuse me? Is that true young lady?” Her eyes were freakishly wide – like Large Marge in Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure.

I didn’t get in trouble. I was the kid who clapped the erasers together instead of banging them against the building. I was the kid who wanted to go to the “Think Tank” in the back of the room when all of my assignments were done. When I was told by my teachers to stop biting my nails, I stopped, and they were the only ones who could stop me. I wrote book reports for fun. I was seen before heard.
I had no idea how to react to an authority figure questioning my behavior.

After the aide exaggeratedly comforted the weepy Prospero, she walked both of us back to our classroom where our teacher was trying to eat her turkey sandwich in solitude. Mrs. Bush’s gray blue eyes quickly became wide with astonishment. Tara was taken out of the lunchroom?

“Mrs. Bush we have a situation here,” began the lunch aide in a solid baritone, “it seems like Miss Tara over here decided to squirt juice into this young man’s ear. He could get an infection from this, and all because he was laughing with his friends.”

She used Kleenex and a pudgy finger to wipe out his cranberry-tainted ear, and he piled it on thick with multiple, loud grunts. Mrs. Bush thanked the lunch aide, and the aide departed but not without one last disappointed glance. Kids like Prospero were removed constantly for bad behavior. It was expected, accepted, and damn near respected – made a lot of the adults’ jobs more fun. Kids like me - we acted up, we faced yellow-slip-sent-home crucifixion.

“Prospero, what happened? Why did Tara shoot juice into your ear?” I liked how Mrs. Bush used the word shoot, made it sound cooler. But her voice was calm and collective which was typical for her. She never needed to be loud to be acknowledged. If she wasn’t a teacher, she could have been a psychologist.

“I was eating my lunch and joking around with Danny and Nick.” Intense hiccups were slowing down his speech at this point. “And Tara said I was making fun of her clothes and being poor and I wasn’t and she squirted me. And now my ear is really itchyyyy.”

This was only a segment of his dramatic tale. He tugged on his right ear lobe and hit the Water Works on his Monopoly board of drama. Mrs. Bush only rubbed Prospero’s shoulder a little – her face a grayish-white sheet of nonchalance.

“Ok, Tara. Now what do you have to say about that?”

Even though the mood and the tone in the almost empty classroom couldn’t have been more serene, I felt as if running chainsaws in desperate need of oil surrounded me. Fears of disappointment or banishment typically lead to breathy tears. Hell, that still happens from time to time. But at that particular moment, I became infuriated.

Before Mrs. Bush gently asked for my side of the story, I had inexplicably picked up a new, full box of crayons from one of the classroom shelves. While Prospero was milking it for all it was worth, I opened the lid to the box and ran my fingers across the unused crayon tips. The only kind of crayons that felt soothing to the touch were brand new ones. The colors were arranged decorously, and once a crayon box has been used a few times, the colors are never organized the same way. The papers that hugged and labeled each color were a vivid hue. For a moment, within that box of Crayola’s, the world made sense again…for a moment.

“I FUCKING HATE THIS SCHOOL!” I sent the box flying through the air. It hit the chalkboard, and an array of untainted colors scattered all over the teal, linoleum floor. Mrs. Bush’s eyes engorged from the shock, and Prospero shut up quickly. I remember the flutter I felt in my stomach when I screamed, and it was more than likely not the first time I yelled “fuck” aloud. The tears poured down like rain from a holey gutter, and my fists clenched tightly as they often do, leaving bluish crescent moons on my palms.

“I hate being called stupid! I hate that I can’t talk right to people! I hate that you are always bothering me and calling me poor! I’m not the one who lives in an army trailer, you jerk!” My hometown of Eatontown was home to Ft. Monmouth until it shut down in 2012. Prospero, along with countless other Eatontowners, called the base home until they were transferred to another state or to another country. I didn’t know much geography at that time, but wherever the farthest country was, that is where I wanted Prospero to go.

“Oh, and by the way, I know you’re not related to Daisy Fuentes, so stop lying! My Mom said, “Do you know how many Fuentes’ there are in the world!”

“Tara,” Mrs. Bush moved me away from Mr. Fuentes before I could get any closer to his face and his bottle-cap thick glasses. “Let’s try to take a breath and come down. Prospero, I would like to speak to Tara alone, please.”

“But is she going to get in trouble?” he asked meekly before I gave him one last patented Lesko look of fiery death.

“Prospero, go,” she answered assertively.

Mrs. Bush led me to one of the kidney-shaped tables in the classroom. There was a period of necessary silence before anyone spoke. I was still having those fits of agonizing, tantrum-induced hiccups that kids always get. All I wanted to do once my breath came back to me was read aloud for Mrs. Bush the way I always did at that table. We read early-reader books that may have been two or three grades below my level, but I was “neurologically impaired” so that’s the way it had to be. Jan or Pam always sat with a cat or a hat in her lap, or something to that effect. Sometimes Dan, or Jan, or Pam ate ham, and I would often look at Mrs. Bush’s soft, rosy mouth that reminded me of grandma's. When Mrs. Bush read the word “ham” with me, her lips always looked like they were about to taste a soft piece of Hillshire Farms. She wasn’t the most riveting teacher in the world to me, but she did have that going for her.

“I’m incredibly disappointed but even more concerned about your behavior today. What has made you so upset?”

I thought for sure the first thing she was going to bring up was the f-word, but she was genuinely more concerned with what spurred on the profanity. In those days, saying “fuck” in front of a teacher simply didn’t happen, so she knew that whatever was going on in my head was startling.

“I don’t want to be called poor. I want a calzone too (gasp). I don’t want to be slow anymore. I just want to go to a real class and have lunch (sniff/snort) with the cool kids…I’m sorry I threw the crayons,” I blubbered almost inaudibly, forgetting I was more than likely getting in trouble for cursing and the attempt to deafen a peer with juice from concentrate.

“Hmmm…I wouldn’t want to be called those things either, honey. Do you think you’re poor or slow?”

“I got my own boom box and clothes from the Gap for Christmas. None of the girls have said anything though.” I pulled down on my red Gap cardigan that had shrunk in the wash and was a little too short for my unusually tall and stroppy frame.

“Ok,” she chuckled a little which I thought was weird. She rarely laughed. “What do you think when someone calls you slow? What does that mean?” She gave me a quizzical brow.

"Lindsay said that I have trouble speaking. That's why I am in the special class."

"Well, you're shy. You always are. That doesn't mean your slow or can't speak."

"Umm, I guess not."

"And you're not poor, and your not broke," she smiled. We had read Not Poor, Just Broke around that time - one of many thematic children's stories that are often lost on entitled youth.

"No way, my Mom goes to Atlantic City, and we eat out a lot."

I laughed when she laughed, acknowledging the humor in all of it, even at the age of eight, even if it were only a minute. We spent the rest of the lunch period together talking about her cats and how colorful my book reports had been. I watched her eat apple slices and whole almonds in a sandwich bag. She thankfully shared a few slices of her huge Granny Smith with me, since I was only able to finish a quarter of my boring, brown-bagged lunch that started all of the drama.

Eating lunch with a teacher was a pleasant experience, so I learned. At the time, it solidified my childish illusion that teachers didn't exist outside their classrooms. In my mind, knowing that Mrs. Bush had cats and children of her own didn't allow her to escape the confounds of my classroom's reading corners and Think Tanks. There was something about watching her read, watching her eat, and watching her move along the chalkboard then back to her kidney table. It all gave me hope. One day I was going to have short gray hair and look good in it. One day I was going to want to eat a healthy, grown-up lunch of fruits and nuts. One day my mouth would always be soft and my jaw always loose, and I would look and sound fabulous when I read aloud. Nothing anyone did or said would waver my poise.

"Are you going to tell my parents what I did?" I asked looking down at my stained Gap khakis.

"No, I am not. I'm sure his ear is just fine. But let's find a better way to get your anger out besides throwing things and swearing."

"I will. I won't do it again. I promise."

Yeah, well...so much for promises.