The Passing of a Past Life

For years I have been engaging what I call "Dream Healing". I have always been fascinated and interested in the dream space, and have spent a good chunk of my life invested in research, ritual and practice in the practice of dream incubation.

Dream incubation is a fancy word for accessing a stronger relationship with non-physical energies and archetypes. It is a practice that aims to facilitate the preparation and container for the dream to unfold that we have set out to make conscious and enliven in our waking state. This practice has shown to offer a number of different blessings, the main in having been able to personally overcome several deep and core traumas that I did not have access to healing in any other way outside of me.

As I baby, still growing in my mothers womb, I felt the fear of life entering this world. My body still remembers the neglect and lack of support in my earliest growing stages. The fear of my mother in bringing two more children into the world as she already lacked support by the state. As a first generation college student, my family has been struggling to escape poverty and lack of resources for many generations.

As someone who was adopted at 14 months old, I didn't confirm many of the things about my birth and lineage until later in my life. At my first palm reading at age 27, the reader took my right hand and gasped.

At the line representing the start of life, "you've been kissed by death".

There was something oddly comforting about hearing this from someone. It gave explanation for some of the deep feelings I had in my body, that nothing around me could validate.

It was years later that I would learn that I "got stuck" in the birth canal, so much so that my twin sister passed me. It was believed that I almost "didn't want to come out". Of course no one could tell me the real reason I chose to potentially die rather than enter this world, but my guess is that I knew it would not be easy, I was scared and struggling to trust in the transition from this womb space into the world where I could feel in my bones was not safe. There was something perhaps, more comforting to me about the womb space of and with spirit.

I've heard bits and pieces of my story. My adoptive father tells me of a time we were "forgotten" at the park by my biological mother. At this time she had four other children, on top of the two twins she just gave birth to. She had no support, resources or help in addressing her addiction and generational trauma. My biological father would remain incarcerated for years. My adoptive father explained that as an infant, I had to develop a survival instinct in shepherding a crawl back to the stoop of our apartment for my twin and I. Soon after this instance, my twin sister and I were picked up and adopted. We had lice and were found in a cockroach invested third-story apartment with the window screens taken out, while my mother was on the street corner buying drugs. We were unsupervised other than by my eldest brother, age 6, who had taken on the caretaker role to myself and my now 5 other siblings younger than he. My brother, who later in his life developed, schizophrenia that plays a perpetual loop and paranoia that he has killed a baby. Again, a lack of resources in mental health and collective care for low and working class families. Care has been accessible only in ways that separate these traumas from a long lineage of traumas.

While I've been completely grateful for my adoptive parents my entire life, these early memories have always haunted me with a heavy sadness and granted me with a greater need to make space for allowing the passing of grief in my life.

Over the years I have incubated in a series of dreams that have helped me to heal many of the layers and return to myself again. If there is a succinct way I could describe what is happening in these dreaming rituals, is that it is a reclamation of self in connection to the “not-self”. Some call this spirit, god, the unconscious. It returns us to space dust where we transcend physical time. We learn to develop a more intimate relationship with time. One that embody energies and life-times we’ve never had access in physical reality. For a lot of us, this includes spiritual healing.

Most recently, I asked to be shown what I needed for healing to move into a space of following my dreams with more conviction, to share more of my healing gifts with the world? I dreamt of being at an airport, surrounded by the things of dreamt of most. I dreamt that I was going to need to check my baggage. In order to be fully prepared, to step into new heights, that this “baggage” needed to be addressed. To continue the incubation “dialogue”, the very next night I asked for that healing and checking of the baggage when setting the intention and container for incubation. By integrating and listening to what I had learned the night prior, I asked for healing. That night, it was as if the same story picked up, different chapter. I was surrounded by inklings of my dreams, my fears and the pattern of "hiding". In this space of "hiding" I was met with a spirit guide, another person who my mind's eye depicted as some sort of elder doula. She was warm and heavy with weight and grounded energy. She led me to a bathroom and then she began to help me begin to “pass” an old placenta. I had the intuitive feeling it was like a “clot” that needed to be passed and cleansed. After some time, I looked down into the toilet and saw an old placenta, swimming with life. An old life. I was led to understand that a doula in the spirit realm, perhaps this same one, is who helped me transition at birth almost 30 years ago when I needed to return to reality. This explains my deep trust in spirit today.

Upon awakening I was led to continue this ritual of cleansing and honoring the passing of an old placenta in my womb space. Placenta's in the dream space can show us our life-energy, and most especially, our earliest memories of life. It is this part of us that stores our histories and the energy of early life as well as how we may continue to relate with others through this energetic and biological story.

It didn't take long for me to put it together. I was "hiding" from showing up for my dreams, the same way I learned to "hide" in the womb when transitioning into a new life phase (being born). This is allowing me now to honor this lesson and the ways I can choose to enter this new phase of my life prepared, nurtured and abundant. There is no need now to hide.

This is just the most recent example of the profound potential of dream healing. As an attempt to continue to nurture this practice in myself, as well as share and teach others to do the same, I am inviting folks to please join me over on the Mystic Dawn Community. It is free and accessible to all and all are encouraged to engage in these topics. In the future there will be opportunity for meet ups and circles to help you foster your very own Dream Healing practice.

Join us at mysticdawn.org!