Been There, Done That: is reincarnation real?

 Up until recently, I held similar beliefs to every other Protestant out there with only a few deviations. Kids change everything. That includes our belief systems. My daughter Wendy has changed the way I view life and death possibly. Strange that a three year old girl can have such an impact on my faith, but she has.

 My daughter developed a bizarre fear of...Muzak. Now, we all have opinions on the subject, but Wendy developed a PHOBIA about six months ago. Any store that had a tinny, piped in music system set her off into tears, the crocodile kind, and screaming.  We invariably ended up leaving the store because of what she called "Rexaphone" music.

 This bothered me like a burr. What the heck was going on? I am a stay at home mom, so everything going into my daughter's young mind is not only categorized but filtered. What was rexaphone music? The problem was getting worse, not better. Everywhere we went that piped in old fashioned music (Not new recognizable songs), she had a break down.

 My sister in law suggested we look it up, a very sound suggestion, and she did. She directed me to her findings.  Rexaphone is the brand name of an Edison Phonograph produced in the twenties and thirties. Pulling the picture up and leaving it on the computer clearly visible, I called my daughter to me. Carefully not saying a thing about the picture, I watched Wendy. She stared at it and looked at me then saying, "Hey, that's a rexaphone."

 "Is it?", I asked. Out poured a story about an angry woman and playing Polka on a rexaphone. We aren't big fans of the Polka, so that stood out.

  Now, I was thoroughly uncertain. This defied explanation for us, and, as I often told my husband and friends, I really didn't want to believe in reincarnation. However, I am built like a cat. Curiosity is my worst failing and greatest strength, so I set out to investigate. 

   I read Many Lives, Many Masters by Weiss and Children's Past Lives by Bowman. With these and many other accounts, I came to one conclusion. Everyone has different ideas on reincarnation, even though accounts of memory are strikingly uniform. It strikes me also that most of the world embraces the belief in many lives, and the idea of one life per soul is relatively new.

  This led me to begin regressing myself to see what I believed. Late one night a few weeks ago, I put everyone to bed and waited for them to sleep. I got out the Ipod and began. I had downloaded a hypnosis recording to travel back into my own "past".

  Regression works pretty simply. Concentrate on your breathing and do what you are told. A combination of rhythmic beats will count you down to trance. This was the approach I chose to use.

  Trance was a strange experiment. My brain was focused, alert and moving a mile a minute. The relaxation was total and complete, better than a massage, so it's worth ten bucks right there. The narrator of my trip down memory lane took me deep into that relaxation and then showed me "two roads diverging in a wood" and said to pick one. Apparently, hypnotherapists all have different devices they prefer. This was the device of the moment. 

  Suddenly, I was French!

  Even in hypnotic trance, I laughed. French is a second language for me , and my skeptic's brain mocked and pointed at the "memory" even as I had it. Ha, I thought. Thinking I had already drawn on my own study to "imagine" a scenario, I sat back to see where it went.

 I followed the life of a reasonably happy French girl up to the year 1515. My husband..her husband, Jean, was a childhood sweetheart and the joy of her/my life. We lived in Sologne, and he worked the vineyards picking grapes for our living. Sauvignon was being produced at the vineyard. A fact that I somehow just knew. Something happened, and Jean went to look for work. Here I passed a few months alone and with child, waiting. With Jean still gone, the woman/myself went into early labor deep in the night. Lying for days unable to give birth and unable to go get help, she finally died with her unborn child.  Alone.

 The confusion in the memory may be evident as you read that recounting. It was very real. 

 My skepticism pointed at this dying alone to prove the regression a fantasy as well.  One of my little fears has always been the idea of dying alone. Not unmarried or unloved. Alone. This was an expression of that fear, I told myself, even as I continued to investigate. 

 I confirmed a few things that I have had no access to in my lifetime within the next twenty four hours. Let me say this. In current days, I hate most wine. I only like Missouri wine, and never a white. Wine holds no interest for me at all.

 There was no way I could have known that Sauvignon was being produced as a new type of wine in the year 1515 across this region of France. It's never come up in any of my studies of the language or customs, and those studies are admittedly not extensive. Thus, I had yet another unexplained fact to contend with now.

 In three regressions, I have had two separate experiences of knowledge that I couldn't explain. Even though my doubt has mostly been expelled, I remain reluctant to embrace the idea wholly. I've asked myself why that is and cannot come up with a good reason.  

 Is it being Protestant in background? Am I afraid? Some part of me is so skeptical of everything that I have said in discussions before that nothing can be that easy, that reincarnation meant that there were no last chances. If what I have experienced is truth and not fiction, that argument is ridiculous to me now. There is nothing easy about do overs, I think. Life is hard, and it may require a certain bravery to do it again and again trying to learn the lessons you need.

 So the question remains; Have I been here and done this?  Maybe...