Past Life Regression: The Mirror She Carried Into the Cellar #pastliferegression #spiritualawakening

So there's an assumption built into the way that most of us think about optimism, that it's something you can only afford when things are going well. A luxury, a disposition for people whose circumstances support it. And when things go badly, really badly, not inconveniently badly, but the kind of badly that strips everything away. We assume that optimism fades, that it has to, that the person who might just keep smiling when they should be breaking is just naive or in denial. I used to believe that too, in a loose kind of way, until I sat with a woman who dismantled it so completely. And yet so quietly that I've never thought about it the same way since. She didn't really argue with that idea and she didn't have a philosophy about it. She just lived differently than what that assumption required. In a lifetime that had no business producing the kind of person that she was, She was exactly that type of person anyway. This episode is about what it costs, what it's worth, and what it means that some people carry something across every possible terrain, whether it be drought, death, desertion, and the long, slow end of everything, and without ever putting it down. In the last episode, I told you about a woman who was finally told it was safe to stop fighting. This episode is different. This woman never needed to be told. She already knew. The question she's been sitting with, that I think she's been sitting with across more than one lifetime for sure, wasn't whether things would be okay. It was whether the people she loved would be. She came off of the cloud and into darkness, not frightening darkness, but it was that specific kind of darkness of a place that was underground where the air was cool and damp and smells of must and earth and old wood. She could feel the closeness of the walls around her. The rough texture of something beneath her feet. And then above her, she saw a crack of light. It was a cellar door. She pushed it open and stepped outside, and the heat hit her immediately. It was the kind of heat that has this weight to it that just presses down from above and rises from the ground at the same time. She looked around. And saw some type of farm, or what had been a farm, and the land was dry, cracked in places. There was a trough near where animals used to have been, and it was empty. The animals themselves were surely long gone, and the plow sat motionless in the middle of the field that hadn't been turned for a very long time. She herself was wearing a long dress, the fabric buttoned up to the chin, these long sleeves, all despite the heat, high-heeled pointed-toed boots laced all the way up. And these were the kind of shoes that were not made for this land and definitely not for this type of work. She looked down at her hands and they were dry, frail, the skin pulled tight in a way that skin does when it has been without water. For far too long. I asked if she felt healthy. She considered this just for a moment, not with alarm, but with a careful honesty of someone taking inventory. And she said quietly, I don't think I am. There was no distress in those words. It was just merely an observation, the way you might note that the weather has changed I had to find my way into this story slowly, the way that you navigate a room in the dark, reaching out, touching the edges and the walls before you finally find the center. I asked about the shack across the dry field. She said she knew it. She had helped make it. I asked, is there anyone there with her? There was a— not anymore. I decided to take her back to the beginning of the lifetime to get the full story, or rather I asked her to go back and she went the way that people do when it's very clear the higher self has decided that things need to be revealed in very strategic order. Her whole bearing changed. The careful stiffness of a woman on the dry farm gave way to something much lighter and brighter. A young woman standing in a parlor in a house that had many things in it. Good, beautiful things. Her family's things. She was about to marry well. Her husband-to-be was a good man, honest, and she described him The way women at that time described such things as a gentleman caller, it was a phrase that arrived with the casual precision of someone who had just grown up inside a world where that was the language that was used every day. He came to the parlor and ultimately made a favorable impression on her and her mother. And then something was coming, not for them specifically, to everyone, a sickness that began moving through the city, through the towns, through the people they knew. She described how everyone seemed to be catching it, a bad cough. Her mother eventually got ill, and I asked if it was the same thing that was taking everyone else. She smiled. "Oh, I don't think so," she said. "I know she'll be all right. They've been throwing around these words like consumption, but I don't pay it much mind." Her mother eventually died. I don't know if she knew that yet in the moment that she shared those words. I don't know if the smile was a sign of denial or faith or something so deeply settled in her that it looked like both. When they decided to go west, she and her husband, there was a sense, I think it was his idea, though she never said so directly, that a new start somewhere was the answer. That the land out there was open and honest and in a way that the city no longer was. They sold everything, the furniture, the dishes, the things accumulated over the life that they had started together. They were sold or left behind because there was only room on the wagon for what mattered most. She took two things. Her favorite rocking chair and the silver hand mirror her mother had given her when she was younger, the one that sat on her mother's dressing table, that she as a child had grown up looking into, that held in its reflection a version of her mother's face alongside her own. These were not practical things, not useful things. But these were things that meant something the way the rest didn't. They joined a wagon train heading west. The journey was long. People got horribly sick along the way. Her husband also became ill. He died before they ever arrived at the destination. And at that moment, she also revealed to me that she was glad she didn't have children. And I asked, why was this the case? She said, oh, the doctor told me I'm barren. And once again, she said, but that's okay. Nevertheless, she said he was a good man. And she moved on. I believed she loved him completely. But the thing was, was that grief for her was not a room to be entered and examined. It was like the weather. It came, you're in it, and then you're out of it and you just keep on going. The driver, another man on the wagon train, helped her. He was a kind man and she was very careful about that word kind, as though it was a very specific and important distinction from others. They found the abandoned farm. They built the shack into something that was a little bit livable, and they both planted potatoes when the ground was still willing. He was not her husband, and he was steady, and she was very grateful for that steadiness. She thought he might want to marry her. She wasn't interested, but was fine with that. But that's okay, she said in a particular way that she said everything, as though okay were not a sign of resignation, but a genuine assessment of the territory. And then the rain stopped. The drought came slowly, the way the droughts do, not as a single event, but as the accumulation of mornings without rain, of soil growing harder and plants thinning and then just disappearing. The animals died or had left. The well ran dry. She dug toward a spring that was underneath the land, not in desperation, but methodically, the way that she did everything, because there was water there and she needed water. And so she went to find it. One morning, the driver left for the nearest town. It was a long way, hours by wagon, and he made the trip every few weeks or so for supplies. She watched him leave in the morning. She had done this many times before, and she expected him back. He didn't come back. She didn't know why. She never found out why. He was there and then he wasn't. She was alone in the middle of this drought. No transportation, no way to reach anyone. And no one knew where she was. I want to stay with that for a moment because I think it's so easy to move past it. She had no phone, no road that led to anywhere quickly, no neighbors within reach. She had the farm, she had the shack, she had the dry well, the potatoes in the cellar, and the silver mirror that had belonged to her mother. That was her entire world. And she waited. Not passively. She, she was never passive. She kept the potatoes. She kept digging for what water she could find. She kept herself in the shack, sometimes in the cellar, out of the worst of the heat. She did what could be done, but underneath all of it, she was still waiting for the man to come back, for someone to come. For some sign the world she had come from still existed, still remembered who she was. Neither came, and her health continued to decline. The thirst was constant. The dried meats were too salty, and at some point she discovered she could squeeze some type of moisture from raw potatoes. It was not enough. But she described the squeezing of the juice from them and drinking, licking what came out. She knew it wasn't water, but doing it anyway, because doing something for her was still better than doing nothing. She did die in that cellar, that blank space where she had first emerged into the lifetime. I think the higher self chose to show her the cellar first so she wouldn't be afraid of it at the end. And when she arrived there, so she'd already know the way in. I asked her to look back at her body from the spirit side when she passed over. She looked and she was quiet for a moment. And then almost laughing, she said she looked like a corn husk, dried out, used up, done. And the reality was she was so glad to be free of it. Not relief. It was something closer to satisfaction, the way you feel when you've finished something very difficult and you did it as well as you could do. She had been in that body. And that life, and she handled it the way that she handled everything else. And now she was out of it. And that was fine too. On the spirit side, her husband was waiting. Her mother was also there, crossed a continent carrying a rocking chair and a silver mirror, because those were the things that mattered most. She wept when she saw her mother and husband, not from grief, but from the joy of being returned to something she thought was lost. When the higher self spoke, what it said was very simple. It said what she had learned in that lifetime was that unconditional love, true unconditional love, was all that mattered. That was what kept her moving forward. That was what kept her from breaking. And not optimism as a philosophy, and it wasn't a practice or discipline. It was the very ground that she stood on, the thing underneath everything that never shifted for her, no matter what was taken away above it. And the higher self wanted her to fully understand something about this current lifetime. She had been questioning herself. She had been wondering if she was asking too much of others, if the love that she believed in and knew, the uncomplicated, unconditional kind, the kind that doesn't keep score or require the right circumstances. If it was realistic, whether the people around her who seemed incapable of it were a sign that she had gotten the math wrong, she hadn't. She knew what that kind of love looked like because she had lived inside of it. She had carried it in a mirror from a mother who was exactly that kind of unconditional love, had been sustained by it through a drought and a desertion and a slow death in a cellar and smiling and saying it's okay. Because from where she stood, from the ground that she stood upon, it was. The people around her in this lifetime, they didn't love that way. Weren't evidence that she was wrong. Instead, they were the evidence that she had come here to show what it looked like, what it felt like, and what it meant. A higher self once told me after a session where a client actually chose to stay inside a lifetime of extreme physical suffering rather than stepping outside to observe it, It's said that we choose to feel pain, not as a form of punishment and not as masochism, but because the body sometimes needs to understand at the cellular memory level that is no longer in a lifetime, that the release requires this feeling. The healing requires contact. And she never left, not once. I don't think it was because she couldn't. I think it's because she knew somewhere beneath that conscious knowing that the only real way through was through. That the love that she carried wasn't something that she could access from the outside. It was lived in the full experience of the life, right down to the potatoes and the corn husk. And the moment she was finally free, she chose to feel all of it. And what came out the other side was someone completely intact. I want to say something carefully here, because I think it matters. The higher self didn't say her suffering was a good thing. Didn't say the drought was a lesson or the desertion was a teacher, or that dying alone in the cellar was somehow justified and necessary. The children's arrived time to confirm something that she had always carried, not to explain away the hardship. The love was real. The loss was also real. Both things were true. And the higher self didn't resolve, didn't resolve that tension. It honored it. That's one of the things that I have come to understand about this work. The higher self isn't in the business of making suffering make sense. It's in the business about showing us what we are made of. And sometimes what we're made of is so much more than what we've been willing or taught to believe. I've thought about the mirror many times since that session. She sold almost everything, yet she kept the chair because it was her favorite, because Even in a new and difficult life, she wanted one thing that felt like comfort, and she kept the mirror because it held her mother's face alongside her own, because looking into it was a way of being with someone she loved even after that person was gone. That mirror went into the cellar with her, was with her at the end. I like to think that she could see her mother's face in it one last time before she went to meet her on the other side. I'm not going to tell you what to take from this lifetime. That's not how this works. What I've seen sitting with people in these sessions is that What a story means depends entirely on who is listening. The same lifetime can land in 20 different places for 20 different people, and each landing is true. But I want to leave you with a question, not to answer right now, to carry with you in the way that she carried the mirror. Think about the love that you've been given in your life. Not the love that was easy or consistent or reliable. The love that was simply true. The love that didn't ask anything of you and didn't diminish when things got difficult. The love that looked like a mother handing her daughter a mirror. And saying in effect, take this with you. Remember this. I'll be here when you turn me over. Now think about whether you're letting that love do what it came here to do, or whether you've put it down somewhere along the way because things got heavy or something had to give. She never put it down. Not once, not even at the end. I've been in a lot of sessions and I've sat with a lot of lifetimes and the ones that stay with me the longest are not the most dramatic or the most cosmic or the most surprising. They're ones like this, the ordinary human ones. The ones where someone just keeps on going, where the brightness never dims, even when everything around it has gone dark. I don't fully understand how a person becomes that, and I'm not sure it's something that you can become. I think it might be something you just remember. In the first episode of the season, I told you about a woman who was finally told that the worst was over, who had spent lifetime after lifetime paying for the courage to exactly be who she was, and who needed to hear that she could stop now. This episode is different. The woman never needed to be told. The ground that she stood on never moved, was never shaken, no matter what was taken away from it. I've been sitting with these two stories side by side for a while now. And what strikes me is that they're asking the same question, just from opposite directions. One woman needed to know it was safe to reach for the life that she wanted. The other never stopped, never stopped reaching no matter what. This next episode in the season is about something else entirely, about what happens when the resources are right there and the eyes still can't find them, about a different kind of reaching and one that stands between a person and a thing that was always available to them. This is One Door, Many Rooms. I'm Jason Tempinski. If something in this episode opens up a question you want to follow and explore about your own story, your own lifetimes, the ground that you stand and walk upon. I'd be honored to sit with you. The link to learn more and book a session is below. See you in the next term.