You Are A Wicked Witch. Yes, You!

Since it's Halloween, I was watching Halloween-type shows. Well, of course I was! At some point in The Haunted History of Halloween, someone said that the word witch came from the word wicca which meant "wise woman".

Wait a minute... how did wise women turn into ugly, spell wielding crones? I'm guessing because we (I'm gonna claim the title of wise woman here) used herbs and oils to help cure people. I'm also going to guess that some people who were counting on us to cure someone got really upset if we couldn't. "She didn't cure my dying wife! She's a witch!"

Today I have umpteen friends who sell essential oils (and who aren't allowed to claim they have any medicinal purpose whatsoever). Are they all witches? Well, I think they're wise, so... probably! You can now buy essential oils and herbs at Walmart for goodness sake. They're everywhere, man. Are we in for a resurgence of witch trials? Or are modern restrictions on claims of benefits the equivalent? I could go on an entire tangent here about big pharma vs. wise women, but I won't. Hopefully the resurgence of using things from the earth to help us heal naturally is a growing trend with no negative effects and an increasingly substantial following.

Last week I printed out this scavenger hunt of Halloween facts for my kids. One of them said that if you wear your clothes inside-out and walk backward at midnight, you'll see a witch. What?! Exactly who determined that? I'm envisioning some guy in 1692 hastily dressing in the dark and in the middle of the night, watching his lady love in the doorway as he sneaked back to his own home. Probably his wife didn't like that much and declared her husband's lover a witch. Maybe. I'm having a hard time thinking of any other logical reason for that weird bit of folklore. Is this why men who've fallen in love call themselves "bewitched"?

So, what have we got here? Some wise women who help people heal and possibly bewitch other women's husbands got a bad rap, and we've been paying for it ever since. Darnit!

Have you ever used natural remedies? Anyone ever told you that you were "bewitching" or that you must have "cast a spell" on them? Uh huh. I knew it! You're a witch too!

Happy Halloween!

Why We Don't Remember Our Past Lives - Example One

Looking For a Product or Packaging That No Longer Exists

In home-school social studies this month we are studying early colonization in North America. As a fun activity, we are doing quill writing. Unfortunately, we don't keep quills in our house, nor ink for quill writing.

Luckily, calligraphy is still enough of an art that even Walmart had a quill pen with several different nibs all in one package. Still pricey enough that I only bought one. They can take turns! But ink? Not so much. Now, I ask you: how are you supposed to do quill writing without ink? There should be something right with the quill pens that says "quill ink" or something.

Photo credit:
The Morgan Library & Museum
http://www.themorgan.org/

In my head I was thinking "India ink". I have no idea why. (I vaguely recall doing some project with India ink in 7th grade art class.) So I'm looking around for India ink and I can't find any. I can't even find a small bottle of "calligraphy ink". What the heck? I went to a craft store and the only ink was a package of three different colors - about 15 ml each for 20.00. I didn't really want to spend 20.00 for ink for one project. I'm pretty sure Jane Austen never paid that much! Plus, not one of the colors in the package was black.

So I started wondering what I could use in lieu of actual India ink. Then I realized I had some stamp pad refill ink that would probably do.

And then I realized I had been looking for the wrong thing. We have new technology. Look where we use ink today!

I also realized I had actually been looking for a small ceramic stoppered container like this:

Not a modern container like this:

I had to laugh at myself. I guess when you've had enough past life regressions, the memories seem like they come from the same pool as your current life. You can get a little mixed up. I was definitely confused as to why I couldn't find something so readily available in my Victorian life. Or my who-knows-which life that my conscious mind hasn't remembered, but my sub-conscious or super-conscious knows very well.

The point at which I realized I was looking for the wrong thing was when I started to tell my kids what the package looked like that we needed. "It's about this big, white, ceramic..." Wait a minute. We don't have ceramic packaging for anything anymore. Too expensive. Plastic is the thing now. Hmmm... Ah HA! Wrong life!  

So, yeah. Example one of why we don't normally remember our past lives: so we don't look for things that don't exist anymore.  :-)

Have you ever done something similar and didn't know why? Let me know!

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Are My Children Remembering Past Lives?

I'm pretty open minded about a lot of things. I mean, I'm a past life regressionist for goodness sake. You have to be pretty open minded to go with that, right? But occasionally my children say things that take me by surprise and leave me wondering what the heck is going on.

Apparently there are a lot of children around the world who seem to remember things from another lifetime. Their "memories" certainly are not from their current lives. Usually, it's children under six who chatter about things that have happened and people they used to know. This has become so prevalent these days that there are whole TV series based on this very theme, such as The Ghost Inside My Child.

I wonder if it's even more far reaching than we think. What if children are giving us clues to previous lives and we are brushing their stories off or deciding they must have heard it from someone else? I'm sure there are plenty of parents out there who just say "don't be silly" and so their children stop sharing.

My daughter's artwork.
Unrelated to the story, but cute.

This morning, my six year old daughter came into the kitchen with two of her dolls in a toy stroller. One was larger and looked more like a little girl, and the other was a baby doll. Usually, she will come in and tell me it is one of her doll's birthday, or that one of them was being mean to the other one. These are common themes. But this morning, she told a much different, stranger story.

She pointed to the older doll and said this was her baby first, but she didn't know about it in the beginning because that one was just a baby when there was a war. She said that she (my daughter) wanted to go, so she left and another lady took care of the baby. Then she had another baby when the lady who had the first baby came to give her back. My daughter said at first she didn't believe the baby was hers, but then she did and took her back. She then went on to explain that she was buying her 1st child lots of toys.

I asked her what made her think of going to war. She basically just reiterated the story of wanting to go, and then added "but it's okay, I survived".

What makes this particular tale stand out is that women usually know when they've had a baby, right? And I don't think it's typical for a woman to leave an infant and voluntarily go off to war. So... what the heck? Is she remembering being a man from another life who left a wife or sweetheart at home who he didn't know was expecting a child? Could be anything from WWII to some Scottish highland skirmish for all I can guess. Could have been anyone anywhere I suppose. Very interesting.

My younger son's art.
The look on my face after
they shared their stories.

When my 2nd son was about 4 or 5 he used to talk about his "other mother". I was thankful when he told me I was younger than she was (he he). I wouldn't have thought anything of it, except that one day he told me that she set a fire under the porch and the whole house burned.  The boys' bedroom is in the front of the house and looks out onto the porch, so he had few nights of worry about the fire. You know, that fire that never happened in this life.

Oh, but wait... there's more.

When my oldest was about three, I guess, he was playing on the floor one day when I heard him pretend whimpering. I looked over and he had a toy held up to his eye like a spyglass and he was looking all around at the floor with it.  I asked what was wrong, thinking he was pretending something. What he said took me by surprise. He said "I can't find John in the water". John? Who the heck is John? We didn't know anyone by that name at that time and I couldn't think of any Disney TV shows we watched with characters named John. Super bizarre. Plus, for a long time after that, he called every boy that was older than him John.

That one was mild in comparison to the next one he came out with.

A year or two later we were watching an episode of Sponge Bob and suddenly he turned and looked at me with an odd expression and said "Remember when Daddy cut my neck like this?" He then proceeded to drag a finger across his throat. My eyes went huge. "Uh... NO. Daddy never did anything like that" I said. "Yes he did" he replied calmly. "They tried to take me to the hospital, but it was dark and it was closed and I died. Then they digged me in the dirt." As you might imagine, I freaked completely out inside. He was only four or five. We absolutely do not watch any adult TV in front of the kids. They were limited to cartoons and Disney movies. We didn't even have cable at that point and watched everything on Netflix. Where in the heck would he have come up with that?! He's now ten and doesn't remember ever having said any of that.

So that's it. I'm sure I could think of ways to rationalize it all away. They heard it from a friend at school, they saw something on TV, they overheard a conversation. Who knows. These particular incidents sure stand out though. And there are thousands more kids like mine all over the world who tell similar stories. What about yours?

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"Channeling" Is a Scary Word

There seems to be a common theme among people who meditate for a long time, or a lot - like daily for an hour, for a year or more. Something weird happens. They get access to things we aren't supposed to see or know. They can suddenly hear dead relatives. They suddenly have big picture answers. They know the future or know details about people they've never even met. It's so... weird! How does this happen? Do they just go crazy? Or do they unlock a part of their consciousness that we all actually have access to, but have never been taught how to use?

Look, our culture is not about being intuitive and tapping into knowledge we've never had access to before. We're told to obey. Obey laws (federal, state, religious, etc.) that have been passed down to us. We're also taught to fear what will happen if we don't. We're all cruising along in the safety of "this isn't really what I want in an ideal world, but at least it isn't torture". We're all accepting "good enough" when we really would like amazing. We're just told it's not possible.

My point is, we don't meddle in what else might be out there because we have a fear ingrained in us that says what else might be out there (when we're chasing that mystical rainbow) is a saber tooth tiger who will literally eat us for lunch. Only the modern day saber tooth tiger is the potential loss of loved ones and friends and a trip to your friendly neighborhood psychologist for some new pharmaceuticals to take. Or a one-way ticket to Hell.

Edgar Cayce
aka "the sleeping prophet"

Thankfully, today we can look back to the "way-showers" and pioneers (like Edgar Cayce and Jane Roberts) and review the copious helpful information their "work" provided. Also, we have modern way-showers like Abraham-Hicks, Bashar and now thousands of others. If you haven't seen the movie "Tuning In", it's on Netflix right now and also available free on YouTube. It features several well known channelers and the stories of how they got started. It's fascinating.

So, we have this whole pool of people who have stepped out into the unknown weirdness who are highly sought after for their spiritual and big picture knowledge (but also their practical advice). Suddenly, walking toward that strange but beautiful mystical rainbow seems more "okay" than it used to be. I personally am still keeping my eyes peeled for that tiger, but maybe there isn't one. Maybe they don't exist anymore and I'm being fearful for nothing.

A year ago I borrowed a book from a friend called "Opening To Channel". I'm not sure why that seemed appealing to me at the time. Maybe because meditating seemed beyond my reach. I had read that you have to clear your mind of all thoughts. Do you know how difficult it is to not have any thoughts? How 'bout impossible? I tried. But during my hypnosis training and certification I realized all you need is a focused state of attention. That alone is so powerful in gaining new insight. I think it's the same for channeling except that instead of focusing on a thing, you focus on receiving some words or thoughts or ideas (kinda like free association). It's really not that difficult. I think everyone can do it.

Hypnosis is one way to help you gain access for yourself: to solve your problems based on your conscious and subconscious ideas. I believe you also have access to a lot more that people don't even realize we have a name for. I believe we can tap into all of the experiences that anyone has ever had throughout time. Now that is a resource!

But some people don't want that experience, or don't have enough practical knowledge to be able to get to it (or maybe they're too fearful), so they need someone else to access it and pass along the information that's needed. In Victorian times, psychics and mediums were all the rage. Today we think there aren't terribly many that we trust are "for real". And channelers aren't well known unless they have a huge YouTube following or a documentary made about them.

I now consider myself a channeler - though I hate to call it that. I'm more like a conscious version of Edgar Cayce. I put myself into a hypnotic state and I wait for the words, thought concepts and images to show up and then I sort of translate what "they" send me. It doesn't seem weird, because I've already experienced, through hypnosis, the process of allowing information to just show up. In hypnosis we assume it's coming from the subconscious and we're okay with that. With channeling, we assume the information is coming from the super conscious - or the collective experience that all of us have had (and will ever have) throughout all time. Unfortunately, mainstream science hasn't adopted or accepted the idea of the super conscious just yet. I believe it's only a matter of time.

We really need a new word for channeling. Maybe it needs the word quantum in it to make it sound more sciency and less woo-woo crazy. I cringe to use "channeling", but I do it because I don't know of anything better yet.

This process could be so helpful to so many people if we could just de-woo it. Until we think of something, or until science catches up, I'll be over here asking questions and getting really great, practical answers for my friends and I.

If you have a question, please send me a message or an email and I'll ask it in one of my sessions and let you know what "they" say. I'm being encouraged to offer this as a paid service, but frankly, that terrifies me at the moment. So feel free to take advantage of that and ask away now! My friends think it is really helpful (and so do I) and I do love to help.

__________________________________
Resources:

Bashar:
http://basharchanneledbydarrylanka.org/videos/
https://www.youtube.com/user/BasharCommunications

Abraham-Hicks:
http://www.abraham-hicks.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/AbrahamHicks

Edgar Cayce:
http://www.edgarcayce.org/

Jane Roberts/Seth:
http://www.sethlearningcenter.org/


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Elsewhere: A View to the Other Side

When my parents were 20-somethings years ago, they made a pact with their friends: If any of them died before New Year's Eve 1999, they would come back and show the others proof that there is life after death. They lost one friend in the mid 70's and then my Mom in 1997. My Mom didn't wait for 1999.

A few weeks after Mom died, my brothers and now ex-sisters-in-laws and I got together to "celebrate" my little brother's birthday - as much as you can celebrate when your Mother just died. After dinner and cake and ice cream, we did what we sometimes did and pulled out the Ouija board. We never did anything serious with it. Just "what's your name, how old are you, when did you die, blah blah blah". Most of the time we didn't get anything that made any sense - just a string of random letters or numbers. But this day was different.

Patricia Howard Huber
10-11-1942 to 8-7-1997

I think we had tried combinations of us together and just weren't getting much. I always thought it moved better with my brothers and I on it at the same time, so we did that. It moved. We asked what the spirit's name was. "Pat". I shrugged.  Doesn't mean it's our Mom. Could be anyone named Pat. But when we asked for death date, birthdate, etc. we got all of Mom's details. We were still suspicious. "What are our birthdays?" one of us asked. The planchette easily moved through the dates of all of our birthdays in order. Hmmm...

Okay, so what do you ask your Mom after she's died and you didn't expect to be able to "talk" to her again, much less get answers? I think it was my younger brother who asked "Where are you?" The planchette started moving and I was riveted waiting to see what she said.

E - L - S - E - W - H- E - R - E

Well that sounded like my Mom!

If I know my Mom (and I do), what I think she was trying to convey - short and sweet - was that nothing she could spell out to us would be sufficient for us to understand the complexity of where/who/what/when she was. Incidentally, she also told us that their friend who had died in the 70's was now the grand-daughter of one of their friends. I guess she was fulfilling their pact with that additional info. Mind blown.

So... "Elsewhere" is complicated? I think I got my own glimpse of it during a past life regression recently. I wrote about that regression here. During a hypnosis session in which I was exploring whether I'd had a past life with a friend of mine, I went past my death scene and ended up somewhere else. Yep, "Elsewhere" is appropriate when it's nothing like you've experienced before.

I was in a void or darkness, but not scary. There just wasn't any scenery. Actually, now that I think of it, not even a floor. It's like we were on a plane. Not the kind that flies through the air, but some invisible plane on which we all "stood" just then. Beside me was someone I perceived to be a guide or advisor. He looked like a kind older man, and honestly kinda looked like someone from ancient Greece - robe-like clothing and all. He emanated kindness, understanding, and lots of happiness. In front of me and to my right were a group of souls who were made of white light and had human shapes, but I couldn't make out any features. They weren't scary either. We were there with a purpose, and that was to plan the life I had just seen in my regression.

I knew that we had just worked out all the details of what the individual souls in that group and I were going to do or "work on" in that life. We had all agreed. This particular life had a big lesson in it. I'm not going to pretend to know precisely what that was, but I know it was an option for me and I had decided (somewhat naively, maybe) to take it. So after negotiating all the little details, it was time for figuring out who was going to work with me on the big experience. Just then another light... person zipped up in front of my guide and I. He volunteered.

When I say he volunteered, it's not like he walked up and said "I'll do it" in a human voice or anything. In this place where I was, thoughts are conveyed, but they contain emotions too. So I knew his intention. He wanted to help, and he also wanted the opportunity for himself. He hoped I would allow him to do that. I would say he was anxious, but in that place there isn't really any negative emotion or thought. I'd say he was more eager, but also cautious because he wasn't sure what I would want. It was really remarkable that all this information sort of downloaded into my brain in a scene that probably lasted about 10 seconds in real time.

I remember when he came forward, all of the others in the group looked like they were talking to each other and some of them seemed surprised. I'm not sure why. I don't know if it was because it was something about him, or because they didn't know what we had planned until that moment. I just felt they were maybe a bit shocked and discussing it among themselves as if it were a rare thing. I should tell you, if you haven't read the regression story, that he was a really bad dude in that life. Not nice things happened to me and he was the perpetrator - and that's what we had planned. Maybe that was the shocker. Maybe that's not a normal thing in Elsewhere. Anyway, my guide seemed okay with it and like I said, I felt kind of naive. I was also made of the glowing white light and I felt like I was just taking the suggestions my guide offered. Maybe I was a young soul at that time. I donno.

The only other time I saw Elsewhere was after I experienced another death in yet another past life regression. This was a life where I was burned at the stake. Yikes! After floating up out of that body, I found myself stepping out of a room - and I felt like it was the room where all of that whole life had just happened. As I closed the door and turned to face down the white hallway, my friend (who looked nothing like my friend does today) came down the hallway telling me with great enthusiasm how great I did in that life. That I had stuck to my convictions and did everything as I had planned (while my conscious mind was saying "uh.. yeah, but I died"). I remember feeling like it was going to take me some time to process everything that had just happened and we started walking down the hallway. I didn't look like myself today in that "scene" either. I wasn't a light being either. I don't know who I looked like. Just a young woman with brown hair. Maybe what I had looked like in that life.

I'm not sure why that vision was so different from the life planning one. Maybe the more lives you spend on Earth, the more you identify with your physical self. Or maybe right after you come out of a life, it takes awhile to remember who you really are, and to give up the illusion of being a human. I'm looking forward to experiencing more regressions and exploring Elsewhere. There are lots of accounts from several famous past life regressionist's sessions, but they seem inconsistent to me. I'd love to find out what makes them that way. And yes, it could just be because it's our subconscious mind making it all up. Either way it's pretty fascinating.

Stay tuned and I'll post when I have more info to share. You can check out the past life experiences I've written up so far on my hypnosis website: http://www.timetravelhypnosis.com/category/my-past-lives/

Why Am I Here?!

Can you see your path?

It's a question we all ask ourselves eventually. What am I here to do? What's my purpose in life? What's going on? We read books and get coaching and subscribe to newsletters and youtube channels. But even with all the helpful information out there, there may still be a knawing inside you that says "But what about me specifically? What am I supposed to be doing?" We want to know our purpose. We want to know if we're on the right track. Otherwise we feel like we're just listing - going nowhere. We see no direction. But... you can figure out your purpose and it's really pretty simple.

The first question to ask yourself is: What do I love doing? Or more specifically, what do I love doing that helps other people, or helps to make other people happier?

What do you do daily that makes your heart all warm and fuzzy? When I worked as a salesperson at J. C. Penney years ago, I liked it when angry people came in to return something. Why? Because we had an amazing policy that a customer could return anything at any time for any reason. I loved saying "I'm sorry, would you like to replace it, or would you just like your money back?" Some people came in prepared for battle - expecting to have to justify their return, but an apology, some chit-chat and a refund later and they were smiling as they left the store. I loved that. Any time I could take an unhappy person and make them happy, I loved the opportunity!

The second question to ask is: When you look back, what have people thanked you for, or what have people seemed grateful to you about? I'm not talking about "thanks for helping me move" although, that is really kind of you! I'm talking about something that made a difference in a person's life in a moment when they needed just that little extra something.

How do you help?

When I was in high school, we had a new girl in band. One night at a ballgame, she turned to me and said she missed her old friends and her old school because they were like family. I looked at her and said "I'm sorry you're sad, but we're your family now". I don't even know where that came from. I didn't know her well and to be honest, it felt a little weird because I wasn't one to say things like that. But she smiled, and it was like I could see a little of the sadness slide right out of her. When I look back, there are lots of times people have told me that I said something to make them feel better (years later). I had no idea I had done anything at all at the time. But it sure feels good to know I helped. So, looking back, what do people tell you they appreciate you saying or doing that helped them?

So what are you saying, Amanda? That everyone is here to make everyone else feel better? Well, that'd be nice, but... nah. Not necessarily. You could be here to be strong for the people around you. You could be here to show people strength by example. You could be here to teach people empathy for others through advocating for animals. There are so many possibilities. Look back at your life so far and see if any patterns show up.

Once you discover a pattern, make sure it resonates with you. If you see a pattern of helping animals, for example, but that doesn't sound like something you really want to do every day, then keep looking. When you figure it out, it feels right. It's kinda like trying to analyze a dream you've had. Other people can offer interpretations, but if it doesn't resonate, you know that's not what it means. And when you finally figure it out - ding! That's it! Ha!

Hypnosis = bridge to
your path.

When you get to that place where you're pretty sure you know what your purpose is, you can cement that knowing in with a good hypnosis session. What that does is puts you squarely on the "right" path for you - the one that feels amazing and purposeful. And you finally find that peace that is "I'm doing what I was meant to do". Ahhhhh...

I did all of this completely backward. I did several hypnosis sessions for myself in which I saw, felt, and knew why I was here and then looked back on my whole life and saw the pattern there. This was particularly impactful because one that I saw was the planning of a past life that really wasn't very nice (you can read about that here). But what I saw and felt through this chain of sessions was how we are connected with the people in our lives and how we plan to help each other (for you woo-woo'ers, these are called "soul contracts"). If you aren't "into" past lives, consider it a visualization of your life planning for this life. However you want to think about it, it'll help.

You can read about some of my personal past life regressions, setup a hypnosis session, or just check out info about hypnosis on my website: www.timetravelhypnosis.com

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