I walk every day in my neighborhood, and because I help people lose weight, reduce stress and get healthy, I encourage all my clients to walk in their neighborhoods, too.  According to Andrew Weil, MD, walking is the easiest, most effective way to exercise because you always have your feet with you and the cross-hatching movement of your arms and legs stimulates both hemispheres of your brain simultaneously, and that creates connections between the two sides of your brain.  Besides that, you can smile and say, “Hi,” to all your neighbors, and that benefits your brain, too.  Homo sapiens, according to Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, are “hard wired” to be social and cooperate.  It’s why we’ve managed to dominate our amazing planet.

A few days ago, on my usual walk, I ran into a local photographer, who chain smokes.  There he was, sitting at his usual perch at a local sidewalk café, just enjoying his morning caffeine and nicotine hits.  Usually, I smile and tease him, because anyone who smokes these days (especially in California) probably has aspects of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.  And usually he teases me back about my work, because he knows that I do Past Life Regressions.  ”Why is it,” he asked, “that everyone who does a past life regression is always King James, or Queen Elizabeth or Marilyn Monroe?”

“That’s not true; I get lots of boring little lives.  Most of my clients have pretty pedestrian past lives,” I said.  “I’ve only encountered one king, and that story is really chilling.”
He wanted to know the story, so I told him.
A few years ago, a tall, handsome, fifty-year-old, Emmy award winning musician came to me because he’d had a dreadful childhood and a tragedy-filled adulthood.  He was born to a prostitute, who essentially gave him away to some men, who sexually abused him until he was old enough to fight back and flee.  Because of his talent, he became extremely successful, but his body stayed filled with searing rage.  He’d had years of talking therapy, and he’d taken the many drugs the psychiatrists prescribed, but still his resentment and rage refused to leave his body.  He was depressed and desperate and so he called me.
In one regression, he saw himself as a minor “king” in the early Middle Ages, he was somewhere in eastern Europe.  He felt the coldness of his stone castle, and he saw that he had many servants and serfs, who lived on the expansive, green, fertile lands that he ruled.
Now, on this land lived a young, newly married couple, and he knew they were deeply in love.   But, my client, as his King self, could feel his own jealousy because of their true happiness.  He was so jealous, in fact, that he demanded the beautiful, young wife be sent to his castle for his own sexual pleasure, even though he didn’t love her.

The new husband refused to give up his wife, so the king had him killed, and took the wife as a casual lover.  But then, he used her sexually, and threw her away.  Because of that, the young wife committed suicide.  And so, as this king, his abuse of power led to the destruction of those two young lives.

When the regression ended, I asked the musician what his soul needed to learn from the horrid events in his present lifetime.

“What it feels like to be totally helpless and to be abused by someone with complete and absolute power.”

“And did you learn that?” I asked.

“Oh, my god, yes!  I see it clearly now.  But what’s amazing, is that I feel it!  I can feel my rage and anger flowing out of me.  Wow.”

And that realization, that he himself was an abuser, allowed him to let go of his rage, and forgive his own abusers, and move beyond all those hatred filled years of “entitled victimhood.”

When I finished telling the photographer the story, he narrowed his eyes at me, clearly not believing a word I said.  He lit another cigarette, and said, “What if he was just making it up?”

“Who cares?  It all came from him subconscious, from his own brain.  If it’s a way for him to find happiness and wholeness, why would it matter?”  I smiled, and I went on with my walk, and left him to his drugs of choice, sitting in the California sun.