Iceland, Past Lives, & Synchronicity

When your immediate family consists of just three people, as ours does, there are few secrets, particularly once your son or daughter is an adult. And in our small clan, one of the pressing questions, at least for me, is about the life where the three of us have been together before that is connected most closely to this life. 

I think I have written part of this story before on the blog, but can’t seem to find it! To recap: when I was pregnant with Megan, I asked for a dream that would answer the question about our last life together that was most relevant to this current life.

I dreamed that I was standing in a large, empty warehouse, very pregnant, and that my water had broken. I was alone. Megan was born, I cut the umbilical cord somehow, and picked her up. She opened her eyes and said, “Iceland.”

I bolted out of the dream, Iceland on the tip of my tongue, and thought, Huh? It’s not as if Iceland was ever on any of my bucket lists. During the 1960s, you could get cheap flights to Europe by flying through Iceland. But that was the extent of my knowledge about the country. I filed this tidbit away.

When Megan was in college she became friends with a woman who was training to become a medium. She read for Megan on several occasions and, at the end of her junior year, Rob and I decided to have readings with her. I felt she hit some salient points in the reading, but when I told her about the dream I’d had and asked for specifics, things really got interesting. 

Her trance instantly deepened. Her eyes flicked rapidly back and forth beneath her lids, suggesting she was in an altered dreaming state. And then she started talking: the Iceland reference meant northern Europe, that was what she was seeing.

In that life, Rob and I were brother and sister, our parents had perished, and Megan, an aunt, adopted us. That life was difficult, there was never enough food, but Megan provided for us to the best of her ability. The medium continued with details about what we ate, how we looked, the clothes we wore, and most of it resonated for me.  It actually explained some things. 

I have been thin all of my life, can’t stand the sight of a nearly empty fridge, and eat constantly. I’m a grazer, always munching on something. If I have to go without food for a couple of hours, I start feeling this incessant gnawing in my stomach, a kind of panic that I absolutely must eat. So I keep almonds and peanut butter crackers in the glove compartment of my car. Three meals a day just don’t do it for me. Six or eight small meals are satisfying.

The medium mentioned that the three of us being together in this life, with Rob and I as Megan’s parents, presented many creative opportunities for her that weren’t available in that life in northern Europe. In this life she would realize those talents, use them, and that certainly seems to be happening.

After reading Flipside: A Tourist’s Guide on How to Navigate the Afterlife,  I thought back to the regressions I’ve had. The second was with a woman who was recently certified as a hypnotherapist. Her technique was good, her voice was smooth. But during the countdown into deep relaxation, she said, “When I say six, you won’t be able to raise your right arm.” It brought me right out of the state of mind needed for a regression. Never tell me what I can’t do. 

 My third attempt was with Carol Bowman. She had successfully regressed Rob to a life that impacted him emotionally, but I had a bad sinus infection and our attempt at a regression didn’t go anywhere.  But she also did a group regression at our house and during that regression, I found myself on a spaceship and quickly bolted out of it.

The early attempts were with Rob, who had been certified as a hypnotherapist. This happened a few months after we’d met  and I went under fast, easily, and was fully there in Paris in the 1920s with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Now, granted, I knew a lot about this period, about the writers of this period, and even as I was reliving these experiences, a part of me was thinking, You’re a novelist, you’re making this stuff up.

 But was I? In 1975, I made my first and only trip to Europe. Scotland was high on my list. As soon as I set foot in the city of Edinburgh, I knew my way around. I knew which street was coming up, I knew where I was going, I knew that city the way you can’t know a city from a travel guide. When I set eyes on Edinburgh Castle for the first time, I broke down in tears. I knew I was home. 

Years later, Rob and I figured out that he was traveling Edinburgh the same week that I was there.  What are the odds of this? During that reading with Megan’s medium friend, she mentioned that Rob and I had, before we’d been born, allowed ourselves three possible times for meeting: in the mid-seventies, in the early 80s when we did meet, and later, in the 21^st century. Megan’s soul agenda was what made the difference for when we met.

Some years ago when I read a book by physician Judith Orloff, she talked about the family she visited between lives. Her true family, she said, her soul family. This is similar to what Richard Martini talks about in his book, Flipside: A Tourist’s Guide on How to Navigate the Afterlife.  

 I finished Flipside recently and so did one of my friends to whom I recommended the book. She has already booked a past life regression with a Michael Newton-trained therapist. When I told Megan about the book, I described what Martini says about energy – that some portion of our personal energy, of who we are – remains in the nonphysical even after we incarnate.

“Mom,” Megan said. “That’s what Abraham talks about. It’s the vortex. It’s what we fill with our desires and intentions.”

It’s also very “Sethian,” from the Jane Roberts books that she channeled with an entity no longer focused in physical reality. So, in all these books, in all these various metaphysical systems, there seem to be truths that we can take away and apply to our own lives.

In essence, it seems we are multidimensional beings who live many lives and who, between lives, plan the specifics: who, what, where, when, and how.  And free will is our tool. As Martini states toward the end of his book:

There are no coincidences. What appears to be a matter of amazing coincidence, upon examination, turns out to be an incredible planned sequence, like a complex 3D chess or “second life” game being played on multiple planes where each move affects the other players.  As a butterfly’s wings in a rain forest may cause a hurricane in Asia, everything can be linked in cause and effect if one looks long and hard enough. And that, by the way, is the reason you’ve picked up this book.