As we engage in our trauma work, we may encounter unusual physical and emotional symptoms. These symptoms often come and go and are difficult to pin down in terms of a specific cause.
This is different from ancestral trauma that we are carrying from our blood lineage. Ancestral trauma often leads to physical symptoms that we can recognize as occurred in our parents, grandparents or great grandparents. With ancestral trauma we can often find a part of ourselves that holds the burden of trauma and the story that has been passed down from our parents and often originates further back in our lineage. We can then work with this part directly to release the trauma.
The physical expression of past life trauma symptoms often are different from personal or ancestral trauma symptoms. It is important to note that ‘past lives’ can often be used by protectors to deflect work from personal or ancestral trauma, so be wary of playing the ‘past life’ card.
The original traumatic event in our past life, creates an energetic echo that moves through time and space and imprints on our energetic and physical bodies. We carry energetic ‘receptors’ for these echos. The receptors are often in the location of a wound from the past life and hence we feel symptoms in that location. These symptoms are calls from spirit for resolution and wholeness.
When we inquire into these ‘past life’ symptoms, we can often become aware of the echo of energy going back into the past. The echos are difficult to track but important clues are often revealed in dreams, meditation or visions. Often we have recurring images of something that happened. These are often violent and may be of something that happened to us or that we did to others.
Working with the imprints, symptoms, and images we can connect to the past life source of trauma and we may encounter parts of ourselves that are frozen, especially around the areas of physical sensations / wounding. This work can be particularly challenging as a flood of ‘memories, sensations and feelings may flow through us. Past life trauma seems to often arise from violent death, intense emotional or physical suffering, torture etc. When we initially inquire into past life trauma we usually start with a time when we were a victim. However, with further inquiry we often realize that we were also a ‘perpetrator’ – sometimes in the same or followup life. Deeply wounded people wound others, and resolving past life trauma often requires working with both victim and moral injury trauma.
The most effective way to resolve past life trauma seems to be to take ourselves back into the originating traumatic incident and allow ourselves to re-experience the event(s) with presence, recognizing how at the time we protected ourselves by freezing, dissociating, (and all the other ways we adopt internally to traumatic experiences). If we can sit with, and truly feel what happened, without being re-traumatized the past life trauma will slowly release. This often requires sitting with suffering, grief and death. It is often wise to engage with these intense past situations in small increments – staying with them until we start to feel overwhelmed and then taking a break. Over time, protections break down, our ice starts to melt and energy starts to flow again. It takes courage to stay with the feelings that arise until they dissipate, then we’ll often find that our physical symptoms also dissipate.
As difficult as this work can be, it is often a significant step beyond trauma and into authenticity.