Are we born more than once  in this earth? In fact there are claims that we are born many times and that in some cases past life memories do exist.

Sometimes when a child screams or cry we might not understand why. There are times the parents rush their children to the clinic when they start screaming or crying uncontrollably, for no apparent reason. A child might even stop crying all of a sudden in the same way it started  even before the doctor attend to the child. Well, of course the doctor might also not able to ‘diagnose’ the cause or identify the problem since it could be beyond our human reasoning or understanding.

Below is case extracted from the book “Children’s Past Lives” by Carol Bowman. She relates a verified story of how Past live memories affects a child.

The Story of  Nicola’s Catharsis

One story in particular sparked me the most. Of an of the Harrisons’ great cases, the case of Nicola was the only one that described a catharsis and a healing.

On her second birthday Nicola was surprised with a gift from her parents, a little toy dog. She got very excited and told her mother the toy reminded her of her dog Muff, “the same as the other dog I had before.” Nicola’s mother, Kathleen, thought her daughter’s fantasy play was amusing but soon forgot it.  But in the days that followed, she noticed that Nicola had regular conversations with the toy dog, asking if he remembered the fun they had shared in the past. Kathleen noticed because Nicola’s persistence in this “fantasy” was most unusual.  

 One day Kathleen was taken completely off guard when Nicola asked her, in a gush, why she wasn’t a boy this time like she was before when Mrs. Benson was her mommy and she played with Muff. This time Kathleen encouraged Nicola to tell he tell her more. That was all Nicola needed for the story of her past life to pour out.

 She said her family had lived in a gray stone house that was in the “middle of four houses joined together in a row”  and next to railway tracks; her mother wore long skirts, the same Victorian style clothing her dolly wore now, and the town they lived in was Haworth; she and her dog roamed the fields around her house and her  “other Mummy” always warned her not to play near the railway tracks, but one day she was playing on the railway tracks when a tram “came up fast and knocked me over.”  Men took her to a hospital where “I went to sleep and died and I saw God in  Heaven before I was born. But I didn’t really die. I came to you instead and you got to be my other Mummy.”

This flood of detail couldn’t be ignored. Little Nicola’s story was so convincing that Kathleen took her to Haworth, a short drive away, to see if her daughter would recognize anything. Neither Nicola nor Kathleen had ever been to Haworth, but as soon as they got there, Nicola skipped down streets and unmarked lanes leading to the outskirts of town. She took her mother directly to the house she had described: one in the middle of four graystone townhouses. Everything matched Nicola’s  description perfectly, including the surrounding fields and the railway tracks.

Kathleen pursued her daughter’s past life memory. Since she had a name and an address as leads, she decided to check the records of the parish church to see if she could verify the accuracy of Nicola’s recollection. She opened the yellowed pages of the old census book and her heart “skipped a beat.” She found the “Benon family listed (an unusual name for that parish). They had one son, who was born in 1875. But the next census, taken six years later, listed the same Benson family with two young girls, aged three years and six months-but no son! Since the census required that each family member always be listed, Kathleen concluded that the little boy Nicola remembered must have died when he was between five and six years old.

Nicola’s was a remarkable case of spontaneous memory, with details that could be verified by her mother. But her story goes beyond mere recollection of derails.

One night, soon after their expedition to Haworth, Nicola’s family was sitting around the television watching a movie. On the screen appeared a train thundering down the tracks. Immediately Nicola went into hysterics. Threw herself down on the floor and thrashed about wildly, gasping for air. Kathleen ran to her, panicked, not knowing what had come over her little girl so suddenly. Nicola was inconsolable and started crying out repeatedly, “The train, the train!” Kathleen turned off the TV, and  Nicola immediately stopped screaming, but continued to cry. Cathleen understood in an instant that the sight of the train had reminded Nicola of her death when she was the Benson boy. And she understood that Nicola was reliving that terrifying death. Because Kathleen knew what was happening, she let Nicola cry it out in her arms, not denying her fear of the train. After a while Nicola calmed down and was fine.

Nicola was never afraid of trains again. By the age of live she had forgotten almost everything about her life as the Benson boy-with one exception. She never forgot her pet dog, Muff.

What had happened with little Nicola?  I was struck by what could be verified through historical records, Kathleen believed beyond a doubt that Nicola had lived before as the Benson boy and had been killed by a train. So when Nicola was re-experiencing her death on the living room floor, yelling hysterically about the train, Kathleen didn’t mistake her daughter’s fit for random hysteria. She knew without taking the time to think that it was a consequence of her daughter’s past life memory. She immediately saw the connection, knew it was true, and gave Nicola her loving support. She didn’t hamper the process with doubt. The memory ran its natural course, culminating in catharsis, giving Nicola a chance to finally vent the terror that had been trapped in her since the train ran her down so long ago. Then the memory faded and disappeared. 

Many things have been said about reincarnation. After some reading and from the evidences given (not proof) I too beginning to ponder whether some of the special talents  some of them poses in this life  are inherited from the previous lives. One of the best evidences of reincarnation could be referred in the book “Children Who Remember Previous Lives” by Ian Stevenson, M.D. It is said that children especially between the ages of two and five seem to remember their previous lives. Normally when they are above seven the memories are said to fade.

Carol Bowman who hold M.S. in counselling is also an author, therapist and has been studying on reincarnation. She has also authored the book ‘Return from Heaven’.  I found this book interesting. To know more about this book  you can refer to  the menu ‘Books’  – sub heading ‘Reincarnation’.

In another book ‘Children’s Past Lives’ – How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child,  Carol Bowman  shares her own and her children’s past life regression experiences under Norman (a Hypnotherapist) and that she eventually started carrying out past life regressions on her own. Below is one of the results of past life regression which she has carried out.

The Flower People

 Amanda Dickey, was eleven when I regressed her. She had particularly vivid recall of an Englishwoman by the name  Elizabeth C. (she couldn’t remember the last name) who, lived in London with her mother and brother in the mid-1800s. Elizabeth would often sit in a garden near her townhouse and talk to the “flower people,” little spirits who came out from behind the flowers and advised her whenever she had a problem in her life. Elizabeth wrote stories about these “flower people,” which were published in a London newspaper and became quite popular as a serial. She married and had a son. Widowed at an  early age, she and her son emigrated to America. She continued  to support herself with her writing until she died of a disease Amanda couldn’t identify. Her life was marred only by an irreconcilable quarrel she had with her brother.

 I was curious about Elizabeth. Was she someone we could trace? I asked Amanda if Elizabeth had published any books.  According to Amanda, her stories had only been serialized in newspapers. That sounded authentic: I recalled that serializing  stories was very common in the nineteenth century because books  were too expensive for most people. Would Amanda have known this as an eleven-year-old? The rest of Amanda’s story rang true as well; the details of her life as Elizabeth were realistic and came to her readily. And it resonated with present-day Amanda. Who , does have an uncanny facility with words.

But “flower people” – where had that come from? Amanda, down-to-earth and sophisticated, was embarrassed by this seemingly incongruous embellishment to the story. I decided it was probably a fantasy fragment. Norman Inge (Hypnotherapist)  had taught me that fragments of fantasy, or present-life experience, sometimes seep into the stream of past life recall because, as he explained, past life recall is filtered through the subconscious mind, the repository of all stored memory from this and other lives. It is not leakproof. But, he warned, don’t let one inconsistency throw you , into thinking the whole thing is fantasy if the rest seems true.  Evaluate the story as a whole. With Amanda, the rest  the story,  felt and sounded genuine, so I accepted it as true, not wanting to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Later, that year Amanda won a writing contest in her school.  When I congratulated her, I said. “See. you do have this talent  from the past, don’t you.” Amanda just rolled her eyes at me and laughed nervously. She still wasn’t sure about the regression, especially the “flower people.”  

Amanda and her family moved out of state the next year. She and Sarah (Carol Bowman’s daughter) stayed in touch, visiting each other during school vacations. This gave me the opportunity to follow her progress as a writer. She said she wrote short stories and poetry all the time and had joined the literary magazine at school. She admitted to me once that she still pondered her memory of Elizabeth, the writer in her past.

Almost five years after her regression, Amanda wrote to me with a most unusual epilogue:

“One of the strangest incidents happened to me about a year  ago on my vacation in England. I had never been to England before. When my parents and I got off the plane at London airport, we got a cab to our hotel. Our cab driver was extremely talkative and was willing to talk about anything. As we passed the first street of townhouses, my mother commented on all of the flower gardens. The driver told us that almost everyone in London had a garden. He said that Londoners used gardening as a way to escape from the pressures of their lives and that he, and, other people he knew, liked to talk to the flower people in their gardens. My jaw dropped. And my eyes nearly popped out of my head when heard that. Flower people, I thought. What a coincidence”.