CHAPTER 1
What good does it do to look into your past?

"I'VE ENOUGH PROBLEMS in this life, without adding to them with problems I had in past lives!" I've often had these words thrown at me by people who would very likely benefit by looking into their own distant history. If you're someone who might have protested like that, then you probably think that by finding out about your past problems, you'll only add to the ones you already know about from this lifetime. But in fact quite the reverse is true. Problems from today are invariably caused by those in our past, and therefore our current problems have the potential to be healed by understanding the past. It's an ongoing situation.

Understanding the progression of your soul, and 'observing the scenarios' that led you to where you are today, enables you to make sense of it all and move forward with confidence and direction. Rather than adding to your current problems, remembering the unfinished business and emotional battle scars from past life traumas and hang-ups, can resolve them. Understanding why your problems of today exist, gives you the means to re-write your current life to a different, more palatable, script.

The problems you bring through may encompass relationship issues, a run of 'bad luck', career problems, health issues, a feeling that something is missing, depression, weight problems, phobias, obsessions, family disputes, compulsions, nightmares, ghosts - the list is endless!

The reason that recalling past lives can resolve these problems is that remembering them helps you understand why you act and think the way you do, and why you're going through what you're going through today. Truly understanding yourself is paramount. Knowledge really is power. Past lives are often responsible for glitches in your psyche. Regression to past lives, and re-living key experiences, gives you an opportunity to heal traumas and open up your current life to different behaviour patterns, removing destructive, self-sabotaging habits.

Your Master Plan - that which you came into this life to accomplish, and so essential to create any feeling of fulfillment, can suddenly be revealed to an open mind that has knowledge. Only by fulfilling this master plan will you find true happiness (that which comes from inside you), and achieve your full potential.

Happiness that comes from inside cannot be destroyed by outside events. Of course you'll still experience problems, because no one's life is 100% perfect 100% of the time, but the problems you encounter won't be able to destroy that inner core of deep happiness, the knowing that you're here for a purpose.

Making sense of life goes a very long way to enabling you to enjoy every moment of it. Once you take a step on your rightful path, with the right state of mind, other things will unblock and fall into place. Doors once closed will open, and difficulties that once seemed insurmountable will fade away.

The secret of happiness and curing 'bad luck' is inside each and every one of you. So-called 'bad luck' comes because you have some lessons to learn. Lessons, once understood, will be removed from your path, and guidance, once accepted, will put you on the road to a happy future. You must go back into your own history in order to understand your lessons. You must accept guidance so that you can walk forward with trust that you will be led to the right place. By seeking help to remember the lives that have shaped your current one, you can achieve both these things.

During my role as past life advisor in magazine columns, in books, and on television and radio, I've witnessed many hundreds of past life regressions. These have varied from those done under hypnosis, by myself or by other therapists, by self hypnosis, and through the use of my Past Life Meditation CD.

I'm always swamped with requests for help, and can't possibly deal with every single one on a one-to-one basis, so I have to be selective. Out of the many hundreds of people who write to me, I choose which people to help personally, based on the particular and well-defined problems they're experiencing, selecting the most common-place past life 'carry-overs', so that their problems and the resolution of them will help as wide a field of readers as possible.

It has been fascinating to see how - once people re-experience these logical scenarios that explain everything they feel is wrong with their current life - they are able to have secure relationships, where before there was only hurt, mistrust and confusion. They feel safer and more secure in their everyday lives and family situations, whereas before they felt only doubt and danger. They are able to understand their own personality, whereas before they were a complete mystery to themselves.

In the following chapters you'll see how people from all walks of life, suffering from all kinds of very common problems, were able to see themselves in a whole new light. Understanding and rationalizing previously inexplicable feelings of deep guilt and lack of self-worth have been replaced by feelings of contentment and a belief that each person deserves to be happy.

Removing unnecessary guilt from the person's mind is a truly miraculous way to release them from a life of torment. Even more amazing, once the soul is cleansed in this way, people are able to see clearly, often for the first time, how they have been creating their own punishment and apparent misfortune in a misguided attempt to atone for a crime they did not even remember committing.

Some people have asked me, "if these memories are so important to us, why don't we remember automatically and save ourselves from all this misery?"

That very conundrum is the challenge. You come here fragmented, mind and soul split apart, in mortal form, subject to all the trials, hurts and tribulations of being human. You come to experience all that you can only experience in physical bodies, and at the same time you accept the challenge of reuniting your mind and soul. If you can overcome all that life throws at you, all the ways that parents and peers, bosses and teachers, partners and offspring, misguidedly use to change you and shape you to fit into society, without losing your real 'shape', you have a chance of succeeding.

If you can endure all this and still find your way back to a spiritual unity, then you will have overcome the odds and beaten the challenge you set yourself.

Winning in this way leads you on to a greater spiritual plane. Failing in this task and continuing to make the same mistakes, without ever looking for, or finding the reasons, leads you back to the cycle, back onto the merry-go-round that you call life. Until you succeed in seeing your whole self for the first time, you will continue going round and round, repeating the same mistakes, often with the same group of people.

Somewhere in the following pages you'll recognize aspects of yourself, and the problems you're struggling with, which will lead you on a voyage of self-discovery. Welcome to the journey of your lives.

CHAPTER 16
Your Child and Past Lives

Some of the best documented and well-proven incidences of past life recall have come from the testimony of children as young as two years old.

For instance the story of six-year-old James Leininger was reported on ABC's TV show Primetime in the USA, and it caused a huge response. As a two-year-old, James only ever wanted to play with toy planes. No cowboys, no soldiers or swords or pistols, just planes.

This kind of phenomena is called 'gathering the familiar'. It occurs when people feel unnaturally comfortable with artifacts from certain times or events, or in certain places. At the same age he started to have terrible nightmares, and he would wake up screaming, "Airplane crash on fire, little man can't get out," which was of course alarming for his parents. James was dreaming of being in a plane that was shot down.

James' mother Andrea, was first awoken to the possibility that the increasingly violent nightmares stemmed from a past life, by her own mother. She suggested that Andrea should get in touch with Carol Bowman, an expert on children's past life memories. In one video of James, taken at the time, he went over a toy plane as if he was giving it a pre-flight check. Another time Andrea bought James a toy plane, and pointed out what appeared to be a bomb on its underside. James corrected her, and told her it was a drop tank, which she had never heard of. It turned out that a drop tank was an extra petrol tank, which was strapped to the underside of the wings of an aircraft in WWII, to increase its flight range. Once empty it would be 'dropped'.

It was these incidents that prompted Andrea to talk to Carol Bowman, despite her husband Bruce's skepticism, and Carol instructed her on how to question her son to discover if this was indeed a past life.

Once Andrea started having detailed conversations with James about his nightmares, they started to become less frequent, but he became able to talk about his past life while he was awake. This meant that details he came up with could be checked as facts. It was starting to look very convincing that this was indeed a past life.

James said that his plane had taken off from an aircraft carrier, which he named as the Natoma, and that he had flown a Corsair aircraft, with a man called Jack Larson. James complained that the Corsair was always getting flat tires. He said he had died in a plane that had been shot down by the Japanese.

Research showed that the Natoma Bay was in fact a small aircraft carrier in WWII, and that a man called Jack Larson had flown from it. However, the name 'Corsair' didn't seem to be right at the time, although it was known that they were prone to suffer flat tires on landing.

At that point James' sceptical father Bruce became obsessed with trying to disprove the past life theory, but everything he did just seemed to confirm it instead. James told him that he had been shot down at Iwo Jima, and labeled his drawings of himself as 'James 3'. To his amazement, Bruce discovered that not only had the ship been at Iwo Jima, but that the only pilot killed from the squadron that flew from it was James Huston Jnr. James also said that his plane had sustained a direct hit on the engine. Ralph Clarbour, a rear gunner on a U.S. airplane that flew off the Natoma Bay, says his plane was right next to one flown by James M. Huston Jr. during a raid near Iwo Jima on March 3, 1945. Clarbour said he saw Huston's plane struck by anti-aircraft fire. "I would say he was hit head on, right in the middle of the engine," he said.

Bruce clung to the apparently incorrect fact that James had said he flew a Corsair, because Huston had been shot down in a FM2 Wildcat fighter plane! and there was no mention anywhere of Corsairs. This apparent inaccuracy gave him hope that everything was just a series of coincidences.

Just to make sure, Bruce tried to find members of Huston's family. In February of 2003 he made contact with Anne Huston Barron, Huston's sister, who now lives in Los Gatos, California. Through several phone conversations, they became friends, and she agreed to send Bruce photos of her brother during his military service. The packages of photos arrived in February and March of 2003.

In one of the packages was a photo of Huston standing in front of a Corsair fighter plane - the same kind of plane James had mentioned over and over. According to declassified U.S. military records, before Huston joined up with the Natoma Bay and VC-81, he was part of an elite special squadron, which test-flew Corsairs for carrier use.

When he learned this, Bruce says, all of his skepticism vanished. He is now totally convinced that his son had a past life in which he was James M. Huston Jr. Anne Barron believes it too, and calls him James 3, while James refers to the 86-year-old woman as his sister.

James' vivid recollections are starting to fade as he gets older, and this is what normally happens. However, he is never far away from two of his most precious possessions, which his 'sister' Anne sent him; a bust of George Washington and a model of a Corsair aircraft. They were among the personal effects of James Huston, which were sent home to his family after the war.

James had three G.I. Joe dolls and called them Leon, Walter and Billie. According to U.S. Pacific Fleet records, Lt. Leon Stevens Conner, Ensign Walter John Devlin and Ensign Billie Rufus Peeler were among the fatalities from the Natoma Bay.

When asked why he gave the dolls those names, James answered, "Because they greeted me when I went to heaven."

Recognizing Your Children's Past Life Memories
There are several signs that would indicate your child is remembering a real past life, as opposed to merely exercising a fertile imagination:

1. The child won't use an excited tone of voice, but will speak of what they remember in a down to earth and relaxed way, just as if they were describing something that happened to them yesterday.
    
   My friend's son announced to his mother, while they were driving over a bridge in Kent, England, "Last time I drove over a bridge, I was a lady, and the car fell into the water and I died."
    
   To his mother's amazement she discovered that a woman had indeed crashed her car on the bridge and drowned when it fell into the deep river below. There is no logical reason why this boy should have said that he was a woman, or that he had died, except that it was a past life he was referring to.
    
2. If your child repeats the story many times, as they will do with real memories, it should remain consistent and details shouldn't vary. It's a good idea for that reason to make notes. Most children's memories fade as they reach around age seven, so it's good to have the notes anyway for your child's future reference.
    
3. If your child seems to have knowledge beyond his years, for instance playing complicated music from a very early age, or knowing how to assemble a carburetor or being able to paint, then these skills will very likely be something that's been brought through from a previous lifetime.
    
4. If your child tells you that once he or she was injured or killed in a past life in a specific way, such as by bullet, they might well have a corresponding scar or birthmark relating to it. Or if they claim to have been a dog-handler in a previous life, see how dogs relate to them. If dogs are naturally respectful of the child and inclined to automatically treat them as pack leaders, then it's likely your child is right.

So, if you think your child has a genuine past life memory, what should you do? The most important thing is not to scare the child or make them think they're doing something strange or wrong. Let them talk at their own pace and just interject with simple, non-prompting questions if necessary, such as, "What were you feeling at the time?" "What happened after that?" It's OK to ask for details, such as, "Do you know how old you were then?" "Do you know the year when that happened?" "Do you know what your name was?"

If the child has said that they remember dying, like my friend's son did, they probably won't be scared of the concept, and this is a very good opportunity to stop them becoming afraid of death later in life, so try not to be freaked out about it, and just discuss it dispassionately.

A good question to ask to consolidate this natural feeling about death is to ask them what happened afterwards. This will bring the child the much-needed understanding that death is not the end of their existence, and that is something everyone would like to have total faith in.

Of course another reason that children's past life memories are important is that the other people they claimed to have shared a life with are often still alive. This means that facts can be corroborated. There have even been recorded cases where a mother has found her children from her previous life, alive in this life. The children accepted her proof that she had been their mother once, even though she was now of course younger than they were.

Another fascinating subject when it comes to children's past lives especially is xenoglossy, the ability to speak a language they have not been taught. This is more common in children than in adults. One child I know of spoke very strangely when he was first learning to talk. It was to his parents as if he was speaking his own made-up language. They soon recognized that when he said the word, 'poto' he wanted a drink. They indulged what they thought was his little idiosyncrasy, until one day a Greek-speaking friend called round and told them that 'poto' was in fact Greek for 'drink'. It turned out that most of the little boy's 'made up language', was also perfect Greek.

Xenoglossy is one of the greatest proofs offered for past life memories, and gives skeptics the hardest time, whether encountered in children or adults. It discounts other commonly-used dismissive evidence.

First you need to rule out telepathy, by testing. Next you have to investigate the possibility of genetic (inherited) memory. For instance, if you are born able to speak French, and yet you can trace your family back for hundreds of years, until you go back past the date of your memories, without encountering any French blood, then you didn't inherit the memory from your ancestors. If that's the case then this 'foreign' language has to come from a genuine past life memory.

© 2009, Jenny Smedley, All Rights Reserved

To order this book from Amazon.com,
click on the cover image above.

Excerpted from How To Be Happy: Finding A Future In Your Past, by Jenny Smedley, © 2008. Reprinted with permission of O Books, Winchester, UK and Washington, USA. Available at all bookstores or online.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jenny Smedley is an author, TV and radio presenter/guest, international columnise, and spiritual consultant, specialising in the subject of past lives. Her field of expertise began to develop thirteen years ago, after her own amazing past life experience, chronicled in another of her O Books titles, Souls Don't Lie.