The Rice Farmer, The Herb Collector, and Why They Met Again

She lived alone outside the town. She collected herbs. She knew things, and the people who needed what she knew came to her in secret at night when no one would see. Then they found out about the affair, and they stood in the square and watched her burn. The man who loved her most, the one who told someone in the town because he wholly believed it would protect her, took her body down from the stake, wrapped it in herbs, and buried her under a tree. He kept coming back season after season with flowers as she waited for him on the other side. When he finally crossed over, he laughed at her for staying. Of course, of course you waited for me. This was my second session with a real client in the work that I do. My first had been a little bit safer. It was with a family member who came in as a complete skeptic and left being unable to explain what had happened to him. The session worked. But he knew me and he trusted me before we even started. So this session was different. This was with someone I had never met with that was meeting with me, trusting me to take her somewhere that neither of us had been before. I was extremely nervous, and I want to say that plainly because I think it matters for what I'm about to tell you. When things started happening in the session that I didn't recognize or didn't understand, I wasn't a seasoned practitioner with a protocol for every challenge and situation. I was someone in only their second session doing their best to stay present and trust what was coming through. Her name isn't mine to share, of course, and I'll just call her Sarah. So she had arrived carrying a lot with her depression, exhaustion, a creative and spiritual block that she couldn't get rid of. She taught yoga, but couldn't find peace in her own practice. She had survived serious trauma across her childhood and young adulthood. And she had a question about a man, I'll call him Daniel, that she'd been carrying for years. Someone she felt an inexplicable pull towards, but also someone she couldn't be around. A connection that made no sense and wouldn't let either of them go. On the day of her session, She came in and was actually not well, suffering from an infection. Yet I still walked her through the induction and she was able to relax. And then almost immediately, I made my first mistake. I had forgotten to have her dim the lights in the room, which is helpful for hypnosis, and her higher self caught it before I did, before we went anywhere. Something came through her and told me it was too bright for her. So I got up and I closed the shades. And that's when her body was telling me something I hadn't quite asked it yet. She began getting very hot and it wasn't a gentle warmth that sometimes comes with these types of sessions. It was something more urgent than that. Her skin flushed visibly. She started pulling off her hoodie and I asked, what's happening? And she said it felt like she was physically burning. We got the blanket off and she had some relief and then she started squinting these small repetitive flinches in her eyes. Not dramatic. It was more like a tic where someone just blinking against wind or air blowing in their face over and over. I asked if she normally did that. She said her eyes were just doing it on their own and she didn't know why. I held the uncertainty quietly and I just kept going. I had no idea of what any of it meant yet. After the cloud, she found herself in darkness, not a frightening sense of darkness, just a particular darkness of someone who just hadn't quite arrived somewhere yet. And couldn't see where they were. And then in that darkness, something began to appear, some type of object that was spinning. And she described it like a many-sided dice, a shape with multiple faces turning around and around. Each face held a different person. And I asked what she thought they were or who they were. And she wasn't sure. Something in me that I couldn't have told you why, decided to ask her if she thought they might be lifetimes, lives she had lived. She considered that for a moment. She thought they might be. I told her to wait, to let the object just keep turning, to notice if maybe one of the faces seemed to call her in some way, if one of them felt like the right door. And then she found it. And I asked her to try touching it and she said, okay. A few moments passed and then all of a sudden she went somewhere I didn't expect. She wasn't in a past lifetime. She was in a living room and the living room felt familiar, not to me, but to her. She knew this room. And in the room, sitting on the couch was a very young girl. The girl in fact was her as a child. She was sad and trouble. Her father, he was laughing at her. I'd heard of clients encountering their own childhood selves in sessions. I understood what to do, but in practice, in that moment, something about it required a kind of gentleness I had to find in real time. I told her that she could go up to the girl if she wanted to. She could comfort her. So she did. She went over to the young girl, the young version of herself, and held her while she cried. I sat with that for a moment, and then I told her she could look through the girl's eyes if she wanted to. She could be inside of that child rather than watching from the outside. She said, okay, and shifted. Suddenly she was describing things very differently. Her voice had completely changed, not dramatically, but noticeably younger and softer, more innocent. And she could see her feet sticking out in front of her from the couch because her legs are too short to reach the floor. Colorful clothing. Little feet that didn't touch the ground. Daddy was being mean. He was laughing at her and she didn't understand why. I let her be there for a moment. Then I asked very gently, the way you might ask a child, if she could go outside, if she was allowed to, could she go outside and tell me what she saw? She said, yes. And then without warning, she was somewhere else entirely. The contrast was so stark that she was disoriented for a moment. One second she had been sitting as a small girl on a couch with her feet not touching the floor. And the next there was water and she was standing in that water and it was stormy and there were reeds and jungle nearby. The air felt completely different from anything that had come before. She was wearing some type of cotton clothing, a woven bamboo hat. Her hair was long and black, and she was holding a baby. I assumed I was listening to a woman describe herself, and I was wrong. The figure holding the baby was in fact a man. A rice farmer, young with a wife and land. The days made sense. The rice grew, the seasons moved, and he had the kind of contentment that doesn't announce itself because it doesn't need to. The quiet shit of a life that matches the shape of the person living it. And then it was another scene. Strangers appeared, men who were dressed all alike. Coordinated in their appearance that he really had no understanding for. And they spoke in these sounds that carried authority but translated nothing. Not a word was able to really cross the gap between their world and his. And these men arrived and began taking people. His wife was taken. He was taken. They were ultimately separated and he had no way to know where she went. What struck me as Sarah described all of this was the quality of the telling. There was no terror in it, no dramatic reconstruction of what it felt like to have his whole world seized and taken. And everything described the way that you describe the weather. Things happened, clouds come in, he was in them, and then there was no framework for catastrophe, no story that this was the worst thing that happened, no architecture that we're required him just to collapse. He just moved through it, one moment meeting the next. He ended up being put in a dark cell with rats, no light, little food, but then water torture began. Not the kind of pain that breaks a person quickly. It was another kind where the drip doesn't stop and it lands in the same spot of the forehead. Again and again, he barely slept. The drip was always there. As Sarah described this, I noticed something about her. The eye twitching that had been going on since the very beginning of the session was intensifying. Her eyelids were fluttering and responding to a drip that had been falling in that cell that was falling right now. Simultaneously, in the same moment, her body had known where we were going before her conscious mind knew. I didn't fully understand that yet. I just noticed it and I kept going. Then the news arrived. He was still in the prison when it came. Someone told him through the same impossible language gap, through sounds that carried meaning to him that he had to piece together from tone and gesture and the particular weight of what was being communicated to him. It was that his wife had died. She died in a fire and she had been pregnant and he had been in prison for years. So the pregnancy could not have been his. She delivered this detail very calmly and without emphasis, moving past it almost before I registered what she said. It was only later, sitting alone with my notes, that the full weight of this arrived. His wife had been burned. He received that news. It gave him nothing to work with, no language to ask the questions that he needed to. And no way to demand an explanation. Something happened partway through that I want to mention briefly, because it's part of how sessions sometimes unfold. Sarah jumped mid-session without transition. She was suddenly whisked away, away somewhere else. She was a woman standing in front of a mirror with this long red gown, wearing chunky gold necklace with rubies. It was a completely different lifetime, a completely different world. It arrived without warning and felt completely unrelated to what we've been doing. This happens sometimes, I've come to understand. There are different reasons for it too. Sometimes the higher self is deliberately taking a client forward to see something else that they've already seen what they need to see in a lifetime. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes the mind finds an escape from something that it might not want to see, taking it away from the awareness of the lifetime that it doesn't want to fully inhabit. I asked Sarah whether she felt she needed to stay in that lifetime or whether we should go back to the rice farmer. She chose to go back. That choice matters. She was willing to stay inside what was difficult. Eventually he was released from the prison, older by then, and he walked out into a world he couldn't navigate back from. Likely he had been hooded on the journey to the prison, which meant the geography of his old life was completely gone. He had nowhere to return to, and he wandered. And one day near the jungle, at the edge of some coastal area, he found an infant abandoned on the ground and alive. He picked it up. No reason, no practical argument, older, without resources, barely surviving in the rain. Nothing required this of him. He just picked up the baby and the baby became his son. And raising that son became the remaining shape of his life. Higher selves have told me across sessions that adopted and found children choose their parents, not as a way of speaking, but as a description of what actually happens. Before that child's lifetime begins, it was already at the edge of the jungle and already made that decision, the farmer just had to say yes. And he did without a reason, without waiting for the circumstances to justify it. His son became extremely wealthy and prosperous. He would come visit often, would bring him, his father, all these gifts that his father turned away because he had enough. What he had was a boy he picked up for no reason at all. And everything that had grown from that. Unreasoned, yes. He died peacefully. His son and grandchildren were present, and on the spirit side, his wife was waiting for him, holding the baby, his family now complete. He received it all as one thing. The lesson the higher self would later confirm was this: Joy moves through pain without waiting for pain to finish. Love doesn't require the circumstances to make sense before it acts. It just says yes. After a lifetime ends, I take the client through what I think of as the closing of the room. What was the lesson? What was the purpose? Is there anyone waiting on the other side to greet them? Then we moved toward the higher self, or sometimes towards another lifetime if the moment calls for it. I asked Sarah what the lifetime had shown her. She was still settling into the spirit side, still feeling the particular relief of a body set down after a long time of carrying it. And I was ready to bring her forward, to move her forward. And she said, wait, I stopped. That's not common. I said, okay, is, is there something else? She said, I don't think I'm supposed to leave yet. For some reason, I feel like I need to go somewhere else to see something else. I paused for a moment. I wasn't sure what this meant exactly and what to do, but I followed my intuition. Do we need to see the lifetime where the burning is coming from? She paused. I don't know. I decided to take the initiative and take her to another life. And I asked to— well, took her to the one with the burning. Immediately, she was a woman alone outside of a town with a kind of freedom that carried its own specific risk. She made special mixtures and treatments for others. She knew what plants could do. The people who needed that knowledge came to her in private after dark, when no one else was watching. She gave without conditions, without keeping score, keeping track, without making anyone feel diminished for needing what the official world couldn't provide to them. Aside to animals outside of her small cabin, she had only one friend who came in daylight openly. And it was a man who brought her things, small things like books that she absorbed almost immediately, small things that she needed, like bottles and tools. And even though she didn't live in the woods, he brought her flowers. He came because he wanted to be near her. Not because he needed anything from her. She knew he felt more than he would admit, and she held a quiet distance from it. Not unkindly. It was more because she considered her— considered him something closer to her brother. She had a life that she'd made entirely on her own terms, and she wasn't looking for what he was offering quietly. That Self-sufficiency perhaps is what made the other man who came into her life so disarming, the one from the town who told her he was not married. She believed him, and by the time the truth surfaced, the damage was already set in motion. The rumors that she was a witch had been circulating long before that. That affair, as they tend to around women who live outside the prescribed lines and don't apologize for doing so. She lived alone. She knew things. She kept to herself. The affair handed the rumors a very specific target. The married man's reputation obviously needed protecting. Hers had always hung in a sort of mystery. What was left unspoken in the dark of the night. They took her to the town square and ended up burning her alive. I want to pause here because of something that was happening in Sarah's body as this lifetime unfolded. The burning sensation that had arrived at the very beginning of the session The flushing, the overheating, the need to throw off the blanket and her hoodie had returned, but now it was her face specifically. Her skin was reddening visibly as she described it. She was feeling the fire in her body as she witnessed it in the lifetime. If you've been with this show since the beginning, There's a thread worth naming here. In episode 1, there were women, a different client, a different session, a different lifetime, accused of witchcraft, drowned, hung, and burned, and then gathered on the spirit side and formed this golden sphere of light and just said that the world wasn't ready yet. And now here we are again. Another woman living outside the lines of society, another false accusation, and another fire. And the farmer's wife who had died in the fire while he was still in prison, and she was carrying a child whose existence was received through a translation gap, filed quietly alongside everything else he had. To carry with him. 3 fires, 1 session. The higher self doesn't surface these things by accident. What she felt from the spirit side watching it happen was far from rage. And I, I want to stay with that because it's one of the most striking aspects of this session and all the years of doing this work. The people In that square, most of them had come to her at night when no one could see. They had taken what she knew and carried it home with them and used it. And yet there they stood. She looked at them and felt something I can only describe as awe. Not fury and bitterness, just a genuine awe at what fear can do to people and what the distance between love and its expression in the world looks like from the spirit side, at how a person can receive the gift in the dark and stand in the light and choose the craft. She understood it. She had lived long enough among them to know what that kind of fear felt like from the inside. She was very clear-eyed and she was heartbroken. She looked back at her body and she said it looked like a piece of meat, not with horror, as a fact, the thing that they had made of her. And then, and this is where I thought the lifetime was truly over. She said, wait. I said, what's wrong? What's happening? She said, the crowd left, but there's, there's a man still there. I asked if she thought he was someone important. She said that she thought he might be. I asked what he was doing. She said, he's taking my body down. I asked what he was doing with her body. She said that he was wrapping it in oils and herbs carefully, like he had actually come prepared for exactly this moment. I told her she could follow him if she wanted, in spirit form, just to see what he did. She said, okay. I asked, "Can you see where he's taking you?" And she said that he was carrying her somewhere away from the town square towards the edge of the town. I asked, "Can you see his face? Can you get a little closer?" A pause. And then the tears came all at once before she said a single word. She wasn't able to speak for a moment or two. She was just crying from somewhere deep within. I said, what, what do you see? Who is it? The way she said his name wasn't surprise. It was recognition. It was the tone of someone who had just understood something they should have seen a long, long time ago. Like a slow exhale, like, of course it was him. I should have known it. I should have known it was him this whole time. It was Daniel, not the man in the lifetime. Daniel, the person that she knew in this one. The face on the man taking her body down was his face, the same soul, the one who had been bringing books and flowers, the one she'd kept at a gentle distance, seeing him as a brother rather than anything more. He buried her under a tree at the edge of the town. And he came back season after season, left flowers, never stopped. She told me then, she tell me then what had actually happened, what had set all this in motion. That he had been the one who told someone about the affair. And it wasn't from a place of jealousy or spite. He loved her and the lie felt toxic. And he believed that if the truth came out, it would free her. He handed information to a world he thought he understood. He didn't know what that world would do with what he gave. That's why he was at the edge of the crowd, not as a bystander or the audience, as a person who had set this in motion, standing in the only position still available to him, doing the one thing left that he could do. I asked her what she did after he buried her, and she said she just wandered the hills, the town. She just moved through the place in spirit form, did small things, made her presence felt in small ways. I asked what she meant by that. Weren't you in spirit? What kind of small things? She smiled. I asked because I generally wanted to know, and because my family has a history of playing scare pranks in real life. And the possibility made me overly curious. Were you trying to scare people like a haunting? She laughed. No, she said, nothing like that. Just small things to let people know that she was still there. So they'd remember her, what she did for them and what they did to her. She wandered like that for a very long time, waiting. When Daniel, when Daniel finally died and crossed over, she was there to meet him. And he just laughed at her for staying. Of course he waited. Of course. I expected what usually follows when someone waits that long for someone that they love. I expected a reunion. What I got was more complicated than that. She hadn't just waited. She had watched. From the spirit side, she witnessed his whole life unfold, his marriage, his children, the seasons, the flowers he kept leaving at her grave, even as he built a life that had nothing to do with her anymore. She was there for all of it, present and invisible and still there. And when Daniel finally crossed over and found her waiting after everything, after all that time, after watching a whole life she hadn't been part of, he laughed at her for staying. She was not charmed by it, to say the least. I asked what happened next. Did they go into the light together? She said no. I said, what do you mean? Did you stay there? She said no, he was already gone. He moved straight into another lifetime. No life review. No resting place, no sitting down together to plan what came next, just crossed over, laughed, and left. In my experience, people who cross over and back to spirit, they go possibly to Source. They typically move through a process of review of the lifetime that they've just lived, time with others who shared it. Eventually the planning of what comes next, possibly another lifetime. The idea of someone stepping off the spirit side and straight into a new lifetime that, that quickly is very unusual. I don't have a complete explanation for it. I'm not sure there's one exists or that it's mine to give. What I do know is this. The push and the pull Sarah described in this lifetime, the recognition and the friction and the road trip called off after 3 days of yelling at each other from the very first morning. It was already there on the spirit side. After everything she watched his whole life, he left flowers, he built something new. And when he finally arrived, he laughed. Some connections are ancient and genuine and still somehow, even across hundreds of lifetimes, not quite resolved. After the lifetimes ended, the higher self came through, and I have to tell you, after everything we had just moved through in both lifetimes. This— the fact that it had a sense of humor was generally welcome. The burning in Sarah's face went away, the eye twitching just stopped, and her body had been in those rooms but now was back in this one. When I asked the higher self about Daniel, I wasn't really sure what to expect. She and Daniel had found each other in this lifetime through the particular series of choices and movements that bring two people to— into proximity in a world of billions. And when they met, the recognition arrived before anything else did. Ancient knowing, the sense of There you are. But nothing about being together had held. The push matched the pull. They spent years in orbit of that one question, both of them holding real portions of their lives in suspension while they tried to understand what this was and whether it was going somewhere, anywhere. The road trip was the latest test 3 days before they called it off. At each other's throats from the very first morning. A philosophy teacher I had early in my life wrote 2 words on the board one day and left them there without explanation. To pray, P-R-A-Y, and to prey, P-R-E-Y. She didn't define them. She just let them sit for a while until we eventually talked about how they sometimes end up being interchangeable. I've carried that forward for decades because it appears in so many ways, including in spirituality, even in the work that I do. There's a version of spiritual seeking that is genuinely open. That goes looking without expecting or knowing what it will find. It surrenders to the process and doesn't need a particular answer or explanation. And then there's another version that looks identical from the outside, but moves differently with the person who holds it. A form of avoidance, the question kept carefully in motion so it never has to be answered, forever seeking the answers someone wants for themselves over the one that is inescapably true, or even using their knowledge to create fear and control in others, making themselves necessary, positioning themselves as the only option. The only door. The higher self has no gatekeepers. Anyone can walk through. No credentials, no special access, no particular expertise required. What I offer isn't myself as the authority. It's the door. The wisdom and the healing comes from you, from your own higher self, which is not some separate entity. It is you. The people who use spirituality to make themselves necessary, to position themselves as the gatekeepers of something that was never anyone's to gatekeep, that's the work of predator and prey. The genuine version asks nothing of the person except the willingness to listen, to what they already carry with them. Sarah had been doing genuine work on herself, following her own direction, building something real. But the Daniel question was that one place where all of that momentum just stopped. The question kept carefully in motion so it never had to be answered. So I asked the higher self, what, what is this? Is this supposed to go somewhere between them? The higher self said, they were not supposed to meet in this lifetime. I pushed back. I thought that there were no accidents, and the higher self smiled through her. Then it said, we come into a lifetime with a plan. We write the screenplay before we get here, but we come in with free will, and so does everyone else. And free will means that the plan is a map, but not a fixed track. When you drift from the path, there will be nudges. Something feels off, a door closes that you expected to open. The nudges are genuine. They can also be overridden. Anytime Daniel and Sarah had found each other through the, their own accumulation of choices, the recognition was genuine and the hundreds of lifetimes were genuine. The ancient knowing was real and their plan for this lifetime had actually not included each other. Each of them had arrived with something specific to do. Something that required a certain freedom. This connection was quietly consuming. The meeting hadn't been arranged, that it happened through their free will. And what felt like a cosmic directive was actually two very old friends who had crossed paths when they weren't supposed to. The push was the nudge, patient redirecting. The pull was also genuine. It just, it wasn't pointing forward. It was pointing at what had already been. The higher self doesn't punish departures from the plan. It watches, it gives nudges, it continues. But what the higher self most wanted Sarah to hear is that if we don't find our way back to what we came here to do, that we'd have to come back again and it would be harder, not as punishment, just because an unlearned lesson doesn't disappear. It assigns itself more demanding circumstances, a more demanding classroom. The plan doesn't expire. It just waits. When the session ended, Sarah felt tremendous relief. The relief of a story that just finally named something that had been unnamed for so long. Not exactly that the answer she had hoped for or expected, and the higher self hadn't given it to her, but rather something more useful. Clarity about the question, what it had been costing her. I'd asked, Higher Selves about time and about how all lifetimes exist simultaneously in the same moment. The answer I've received more than once is simple. It's not for us to really understand. It's not important in the bigger picture, and time really doesn't exist outside of our own construction of it. That answer stopped me, not because it was dismissive. It wasn't, it was actually freeing. And because it was honest about the limits of the frame that I was asking from at the time. But here's what it means for this session about what I've been describing. The heat in Sarah's body at the very beginning, before anything in lifetime occurred, before I had any idea where we were going. That wasn't her nervous system misfiring. It was the fact that her body was already in contact with the rooms that exist now alongside this one. The water torture and the burning weren't memories stored somewhere waiting to be retrieved or discovered. They, they were always present, living, touching her from the other side of a wall she just hadn't walked through yet. And the healing that happened when she did walk through, that didn't only move forward into her life, it moved in every direction all at once. The herb collector waited for Daniel on the spirit side, the rice farmer who said yes to an abandoned infant, the wife who greeted him holding the baby. All of these rooms received something from what happened in that session. That's what this work actually is. It's not a trip into the past, an opening into what already exists. I keep returning to that rice farmer, the man who received impossible news through a translation gap that gave him nothing to work with, who walked out of years of imprisonment and torture into a world he couldn't navigate back from, who found a baby at the edge of a jungle and said yes anyway, not despite everything, but without a framework that would've told him not to. He gave what was available to give. From inside the middle of the life that had taken everything. And that giving became a whole life. The woman who healed in the shadows, who built something genuinely hers, who gave freely to people who came to her in the dark and couldn't afford to acknowledge her in the light, who looked at the fire and the crowd and the whole complicated human machinery of fear and chose awe over bitterness and rage. Both of them were paying the price the world sometimes exacts from people it can't contain. Both of them keeping their essential nature intact through everything that was done to them. The fires didn't reach that. Sarah already had it before the session, before the lifetimes, before any of this. The yes that matters most is not the yes that we give to another person. It's the yes we give to ourselves, to the knowledge we carry, that belongs to us whether or not anyone is ready to receive it, to the life that's already whole and waiting, not ahead of us, not contingent on circumstances resolving, already here in the room right alongside this one. The healer woman knew that. The rice farmer lived it without a name for it. The man with the flowers pointed toward it every time he came back to that grace. The answer is always saying yes to yourself. Before I close, something to hold rather than to answer. Think about the thing you keep circling, the version of yourself you keep approaching and stepping back from, putting on hold. What if it's not waiting ahead of you? What if it's already existing right now alongside you in a room you assumed has been locked all along? This is One Door, Many Rooms. I'm Jason Tempinski. In the next episode, this season, I want to tell you about a session I did on myself, about a woman who put on armor and walked out to meet the army anyway, and what her lifetime revealed about the constraints that we're still carrying from rooms we're no longer locked inside. When you're ready to explore your your own story. I'd be honored to sew with you. The link to book with me is below. New episodes every week. I'll see you in the next row.