Re-incarnate, to become physical, carnal, carna.........I was told by a psychic this summer that I should write. When I asked about what, he said I should write about my life.......

But what part of that highly subjective story should I write about? Lately I've been thinking that the deepest, most timeless moments, outside of moments in awe of beauty and the many intimacies and conflicts and discourses of relationships,....are for me the visionary moments I have been privileged to experience. In the realms of visioning, art manifests to the imagination, and many-layered answers and truths reveal themselves in ways that cannot always be understood in a concrete, "in-carnated" sort of way. Or even in an immediately temporal way.

There was a time in the 80's when I was very interested in re-incarnation. I belonged to a group that met weekly to do meditation work, I worked with a psychic who did past life regression, I tranced with the our group using Robert Monroe (the Monroe Institute) tapes, and I read anything I could get my hands on, from Edgar Cayce to Roger Woolger*** and numerous others. The most meaningful discoveries I made on that subject I have continued to learn from as one learns from dreams, they remain and return. Dreams exist outside of time or space as we understand it, and I think time and space is much of what the "in-carnate" experience is all about. And dreams, like visioning, remain for me as vivid and lucid in memory now as they were 30 years ago or longer. They are.......footnotes on the unfolding story perhaps. Their meaning unravels as the story unwinds, the story being my life.

"The Demon Lover" (1980)

What made reincarnation work striking for me was how very mundane what surfaced usually was. I have an excellent imagination as a trained artist, but alas, I never turned up a lifetime as Cleopatra, or a priestess of lost Atlantis, or a great Renaissance artist. What came up were scenes of impoverished lifetimes, short lifetimes, and almost always, lifetimes in which I was a servant, slave, or otherwise indentured to a group or individuals. Which, when you think about it, is basically what most human lives are and have always been. Only a few elite have ever had the freedom to define their own lives and/or the lives of others in powerful or creative ways, and if you were a woman or a minority of some kind, your chances were even less so. Perhaps, I might add, consensus and egalitarianism was more so in tribal societies, or pre-patriarchal societies. But certainly, for what little we know of history and the advance of civilizations, for the commoner, life was pretty constrained.

I remember very clearly, for example, a regression to a lifetime as a young foot soldier. The regressionist asked that I look at my legs, and I saw that I wore some kind of knee length tunic, had sandals and brown skinned, hairy legs. When I was asked to go to an important event, I found myself at a rough table in some kind of smoky, dark room. I was with a group of young men, all dark eyed and black haired. We were drinking some kind of beer, and were joined by an older man with a beard (he actually could have only been about 30 or so, but I was in awe of him). I was completely delighted that this person of authority would join us.

Later in the regression, I saw myself killed by a spear at about the age of 17. I hadn't done anything in that short life really, and it says something that the most exciting thing that ever happened was I got to drink beer with a Captain. Now that is a lot more convincing than had I seen myself on a throne surrounded with gold. And there were other regressions along those lines with very little self-determination, and much hunger.

"Light is the Left Hand of Darkness" (1986)

I sound grim, I suppose, remembering this subject. But actually I think the lives that surfaced in doing that work, and at a time when I was getting my Master's Degree, were important to the empowerment and sense of self I sought as I struggled to become a professional artist and teacher. It was as if Divine Wisdom needed me to look at those lifetimes, which brings one to the idea that we need to balance or heal traumas not only from this life, but perhaps from others as well, that their are patterns that persist within the integral "story" of our souls.

There was a very intense regressive process that occurred with a psychic we worked with as a group in Sedona. She took each of us into a trance state separately, and in my case, I found myself a young girl of about 16 in what seemed to be 17th century France (and it's interesting that I've always been in love with the French language, and pronunciation comes easily to me). Essentially what happened was that the girl was a peasant in a country estate, and was taken to the manor house by a youngish aristocrat to become his servant and occasional mistress, of whom he quickly tired. She didn't have many choices about the situation. He was married, and the girl (me) became a nanny to his children. There was a fire, the wife was killed, and the aristocrat and family, along with servants, moved to a city, where I continued my life as a servant. Eventually he found another wife, a young woman I felt great affection and sympathy for, as he was both negligent and abusive to her. When carried to the time of death, I was apparently in my 50's, alone and exhausted in a grey room. I felt "grey".

"Spirals" (1985)

The therapist called that an "unclaimed life", that I had cared for other people's husband, other people's children, lived in a house that was not mine, had no value other than as a servant. She said it came up because I needed to understand what it would be like to have "my own" life now, to claim "my own" power so to speak. This was a theme in these sessions, and now, with the perspective of some 60 years, I see that it has been a theme running through the life of Lauren Raine. And the lives of many others, of course.

There were some surprising regressions that I still ponder over. In 1987 I began working with crystals, and making crystal jewelry. One regression that I did with our group (we would share our experiences after trancing) was entirely inexplicable, and yet, still strikes me as very lovely. I seemed to be an old person who was a kind of village shaman or herbalist. I was so old, or perhaps so on the periphery of the tribe I lived with, that my sex didn't even matter, I couldn't tell if I was male or female. and it didn't matter. I seemed to live in a hut of some kind that had lots of herbs and bones and rocks I had gathered.

There was a woman who came to us, a teacher. She was so different from us, racially, and also she was from a much more sophisticated culture. She had fair skin, she was tall with dark hair, and wore black, and I was completely in awe of her. She taught me that everything I believed was wrong, was naive. And one of the things I saw her do was she sat down with a big crystal, and placing her hands on it and concentrating, she "dematerialized" - she and the crystal just disappeared. And then she came back. I still have that vision clearly in my mind, and the deep reverence "I" felt for this person. The last part of that regression concerned me watching her die. I was with a lot of people, and we were gathered around her, and strangely, I could hear what she was thinking. Which must mean that I was not incarnate myself. She was very frustrated to be dying! She keep thinking that her work wasn't finished, while a multitude of souls were gathered around her in love and in respect.

I still think on this priestess or whatever she was, and wonder. Was she from Atlantis? Was there an Atlantis? Did people know how to "dematerialize" with crystals? Was it all just from imagination? One of those elegant mysteries.

"Me" (1979)

***Roger Woolger was a psychologist, therapist, and researcher into Past Lives Therapy, Buddhism, and metaphysics. His many articles and books are well worth reading. He also collaborated with his former wife, Jennifer Barker Woolger, in one of my favorite books about the Goddess and Goddess Archetypes. Roger Woolger died in 2011. And there is a story I could tell about Jennifer Barker Woolger that concerns synchronicity and the Goddess, but I'll tell that later.

The Goddess Within: A Guide to the Eternal Myths that Shape Women's Lives

by Jennifer Barker Woolger, Roger J. Woolger

Two Jungian psychologists discuss the influence the classic Greek goddesses have on a woman's psyche and how women can bring the different goddess energies into harmony for greater strength and new insights into their lives.