From the Counselor's Desk
By Jonathan Yorks, Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
Certified Life Between Lives® Facilitator, USA
It happens to all of us. You meet someone and instantly you feel as if you’ve known them forever. There’s no reason for it, yet the positive feeling of familiarity is inescapable. Or perhaps you’ve met someone where instead of a positive recognition, there is a feeling of caution or unease that moves through you. Welcome to soul mates. Each soul in agreement with you to activate in the other an experience through thought, feeling, or sensation, that points to a shared bond. Many of the souls that come and go in our life are what Dr. Newton titled, Affiliated Souls. Souls from the neighborhood that have varying significance and meaning for their presence in a life, yet not souls we typically journey with through lifetimes. Our soul mates through lifetimes come from our soul family. Souls we’ve share bonds with since our beginning. Our Soul Group.
What’s fun for me as a Life Between Lives Facilitator is hearing the descriptions of my clients’ afterlife memories. Not all afterlife memories are commonly experienced, and occasionally I get a client that describes something I had not heard of before. Early in my practice I had such a client. This client described to me the process through which he found himself pairing with his primary soul mates. It’s the only time in my practice I’ve heard of our initial introduction as souls in this way with the depth of detail this client provided. Just an aside before going further. I encourage all to read (or reread) the section in Destiny of Souls about the birthing of souls, pages 125-134. It’s a beautiful read.
My client’s spiritual name was Lah. Actually, it was a much longer sounding name, but he directed me to call him Lah after my futile attempt to sound it out. Lah’s first memory began following a period of incubation after being birthed as a soul. He reported being taken by a soft blue light being to a large area that mimicked a playground. There were long, loopy slides that went up and down, swings that moved in all directions, and things that looked like odd-shaped, undulating mushrooms to climb and jump on. He said it looked like something Dr. Suess had built. The playground was active with many white light souls moving from one activity to the other. Lah noted there were souls positioned on the periphery that he identified as playground attendants and souls involved in group placement. The Place of Play, as he called it, had a two-fold purpose. One purpose was to have newly created souls learn about their “energetic expressions” [his term]. For example, Lah described that to get on and off any of the playground apparatus he had to focus his energy to get on and shift it to get off. He described this as being equivalent to a baby learning to walk. The second purpose was to see which souls attract to each other. Lah stated this is one of the places where souls first pair up and bond to potentially become soul mates. He stated he bonded with two other souls at the playground that became his primary soul mates. These are souls he has journeyed with through the majority of his lifetimes, yet neither had made an appearance in his present life to that point.
Lah described meeting his soul mates at the playground. He stated that after arriving at the playground, the blue light being stood by him along the periphery emitting a sense of reassurance until Lah entered in on his own. He stated he was uncertain what to do at first until another white light soul showed him. He said some souls figure it out and some have to be shown and that the ones that figure it out help the ones that have to be shown. He said he felt a natural pull towards the soul that was helping him and they went on to play together. They met the third of what would be the beginning of their soul group when my client and his new friend helped another soul in the same way. From there Lah stated there was much more that followed before being placed in his soul group, but his session jumped forward to another aspect of his afterlife memory before we could explore further. It always fascinates me how our descriptions of places in the afterlife mimic places in our human lives. Or is it we mimic in our human lives the places we go to in the afterlife?
Our primary soul group, which is comprised of our primary and companion soul mates, is our soul family. And as in all families, we have souls that support us and souls that challenge us. As such, we engage each other to portray these relationships in our human lives. The souls that support us are always well received and loved. Yet, it’s the members of our soul family that challenge us that display a love that can only be understood from the soul level.
There is a quote by medical physiologist, Fred DeVito, that says, “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.” As souls, we know this intimately. This is why we incarnate. We are challenging ourselves to grow. Most lifetimes require souls willing to help us grow by activating conflict within us. It may be with a parent or sibling, a spouse or child, a longtime friend, boss or co-worker, or any other soul that would be considered significant or a consistent presence in our lives. Although these souls have taken roles that feel oppositional to us, they are in fact our greatest allies in disguise. These souls love us dearly for they are willing to risk developing negative karma with us, and by doing so, journey through multiple lifetimes with us to resolve it. As I often say to my clients, it is a tremendous gesture of love to willingly play such a role. Yet equally, we express our love back to our soul mates by playing our role for them.
A good example of my above talking point comes from a young female client with an eating disorder who had graduated from college and was living at home. After job searching for over six months, my client was offered a job out of the country to help plan and develop sustainable communities in Africa. She was overjoyed for the opportunity as it was a dream job for her, but she had one problem. My client’s entire family, including relatives, were completely against her going. Her parents refused to speak to her about it. My client felt that if she took the job, she’d lose her family. As such, she became depressed and her eating disorder intensified. She understood there was a link between her family and her eating disorder as she had been in therapy, but her impulse to purge was getting worse. A friend of hers told her about Journey of Souls. After reading it, my client sought a Life Between Lives session to get some answers.
My client was the youngest of seven children raised in a very close-knit, religious Italian family. Her uncles, aunts, and cousins from both sides of the family either lived on her street or near it. As an example of how extremely tight-knit her family was, her older brother and sister lived in the house they purchased across the street from their parents. After graduating from high school my client had hoped to live at college but couldn’t because of cost. This precipitated her eating disorder. Now, she had a chance to not only move out, but have a job that was deeply meaningful to her. Although, she was a bit younger than Dr. Newton recommends for a Life Between Lives regression, she received tremendous insight into the karmic reasons for her family’s attitude, and the teaching that was being emphasized in that moment of my client’s life.
My client’s spiritual name is Jeila. She was greeted by her guide, Misheff, when she crossed over from a short lifetime as a young girl that died from illness. At the end of her past life, she was unable to eat, which hastened her death. She left that life feeling guilt for leaving her family and felt sadness that her mother would be most challenged by the loss. Instead of a debriefing period with Misheff, which Jeila stated she usually did upon return, she spent time rejuvenating. After her period of rejuvenation, which Jeila described felt like taking a bath in a pool of liquid vibration that flowed over and through her, she debriefed with her guide.
Jeila noted her goal in her most recent past life was to be in service of others. By choosing to die young, she learned the lesson of sacrifice for others. It ends up Jeila was a rather indulgent soul that lived many lifetimes of entitlement where others were in service of her. As she refrained from helping those less fortunate than her in those lives, she took on a series of lives to learn to be in service of others. Her last lifetime was her first on this new path. Jeila said she wasn’t ready for a long life of service to others, so she chose a short life to begin with as a way to dip her toe into the pool.
After Jeila’s debriefing, she was brought to her soul group by Misheff. When she arrived the group was arranged in a cluster that closed around her, which Jeila described felt like a big group hug. Yet during the hug she received flashes of lifetimes she had shared with members of her soul group. The lifetime that stuck out for Jeila was a Native American life she shared with many of her group members. In that life her family was massacred by soldiers. They were a small family band living on the outskirts of the Iroquois nation. She equated her family’s proximity to the Iroquois capital to living in the countryside. Her family was ambushed by soldiers in the early morning and killed. She identified the family members in the present life that were with her during her Native life. Her mother and father were there, some of her siblings including the brother and sister who bought the house across the street from their parents, and an aunt on her mother’s side. It ends up Jeila did not die with her family in her Native life. Having wandered off in the early morning before the village woke, as Jeila stated was her thing to do before starting her chores for the day, she came back to the aftermath of the attack. She lived the rest of her life with survivor’s guilt believing she should have died with her family. There was more that transpired between Jeila and her soul group, yet there was one common message they all shared with her, they would always support her as they have and to trust herself [another issue my client was seeking an answer to].
My client came out of her Life Between Lives session feeling a sense of relief. She felt the Native American life explained the reason her family was so insistent she remain close by. She understood her reason for feeling so conflicted and that this was her way of challenging herself to overcome this karma.
For this client it was as simple as putting 1 and 1 together. In her post-session processing, my client found peace in seeing herself and her family through a deeper prism. She recognized that her family’s insistence that she remain nearby and her guilt for her thoughts of leaving was acting out past life energies. She was better able to understand her role in her soul group. Rather than guilt for leaving, she understood she was being given the opportunity to be an agent for healing for her and her family as all members will have to work through their karmic bias to grow. My client felt that by taking the job and living her life according to her dreams she will set herself on the intended path for her life and heal.
Epilogue: She took the job. Her eating disorder is a non-issue and interestingly, when she came back to visit her family, they would gather around her and hug. ♥
Jonathan Yorks is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and LBL facilitator in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, USA and online worldwide