Photo credit: Kento Iemoto

“Your body can’t get pregnant,” my doctor said matter-of-factly last year, as if she was telling me I had a piece of lint on my shirt.

 

“Oh,” I said. “Ok,” as if picking the lint off and flicking it to the floor.  

 

I mirrored her matter-of-factness on the outside even though somewhere deep inside me, I was screaming. But the matter-of-fact Tree didn’t want to let screaming Tree out, so she pushed her down, shoved her back into the dark corner where no one, including myself, could see or hear her.

 

If a soul cries and no one’s there to hear it, does it still hurt?

 

You betcha!

 

When we push our emotions down, shove them aside, rationalize them away, dismiss, minimize or otherwise ignore them, we can bet they’re going to express themselves in some bigger way, shape or form eventually. Maybe not today, maybe not next month, but one day.

 

Screaming Tree took 9 months to get my attention again… just about enough time to have a baby.

 

Or not, in my case.

 

I wrote about taking time off to face screaming Tree in this post, What Dims Your Light?, so if you want to get the backstory, read that post first.

 

Since my time off, I’ve experienced some major shifts in my thinking, being and knowing. I feel like I was shedding my skin (hence, the skin problems), only it wasn’t just my physical skin, it was also my human skin, my human persona.

 

In other words, I grew out of Tree. Tree – the human personality, the author, entrepreneur, sister, daughter, girlfriend, coach, woman, mentor, goofball, dog lover, etc, and all the stories that come along with her.

 

The truth is we are eternal beings first and foremost. We are souls with a physical body, NOT the other way around.

 

While I had a deep spiritual practice prior to my awakening and knew this, I hadn’t been LIVING it. Most of my energy was taken up by human-based thoughts that revolved around me, my loved ones, our lives and the people I serve. I communed with God and meditated and did self-care practices, but then I went on with the rest of my day stuck in the human world of problems, challenges, achievements, desires and thoughts.

 

I was living more like a human with a soul rather than a soul with a human persona.

 

As part of my healing process, I had weekly sessions with a Cosmoenergy healer. During one of our sessions, I had a vision of a young girl, draped in black, standing alone on a dirt path. She was holding a bunch of red roses, filled with shame and sorrow. People were lined up toward her and when they got to her, they would hand her a red rose then walk away and the next person would do the same.

 

Before I continue, let me just say that I’ve never been a rose person. I don’t merely dislike them, in the way I don’t like potatoes. If I’m at a buffet and saw mashed potatoes, I won’t be repulsed and complain that they offer potatoes, I just won’t put them on my plate. I won’t even give it a second thought. But with roses, I have an unexplained repulsion to them. Can’t stand them. In my last home, I found out that aphids had taken over the rose bush that came with the house and I was secretly happy, wishing they’d kill off the bush for us so I wouldn’t have to look out the kitchen window and see the roses every day. Strange, I know, but roses have always been a thing with me, especially red ones. I never understood it until that healing session.

 

In the vision, I inherently knew the young girl to be me, even though we didn’t look the same and she was a different person, with a different life in a different time and place. I understood that this was some kind of a mourning ritual. The people lined up were paying their respects to her by offering a rose and her job was to quietly and graciously accept their offering with appreciation and thanks.

 

Except… she hated roses. And she was neither appreciative nor thankful. In fact, she didn’t want anything to do with it. She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to take the roses. She didn’t want to see the people. She didn’t want to mourn in the way they were making her mourn. She wasn’t allowed to mourn the way her soul so desperately yearned for and needed, that would’ve been against the rules. And she was clearly not allowed to break any more rules, she’d been enough trouble.

 

The more people handed her roses, the angrier she became. Finally, she couldn’t take the pretense anymore and in an uncharacteristic act of freedom, she did externally what she felt internally and ripped all the roses to pieces, red rose petals falling to the ground, bits and chunks of green leaves and stems scattering onto her long black dress before dropping onto the dirt.

 

The people were shocked and offended. But she didn’t care. She had had enough.

 

In this same vision, there was a boy. He was neither in line with the people nor beside her. He was off to the side, watching it all unfold. It’s the same boy I’ve known in spirit for many years. I used to think this boy was my unborn son, that it was the spirit of my future son coming to visit me before he was born. But now I understand that this boy WAS my son and he’d already been born. Except, not to me, Tree, in this lifetime, but to the young girl in the vision.

 

Me from a past life.

 

If you’re rolling your eyes because you don’t believe in past lives, I totally get it. I was once a skeptic about that too. But now I accept there are things in this Universe that we’ve only barely begun to know.

 

After the Cosmoenergy session ended, the healer and I opened our eyes, recentered ourselves back into the room and talked about what we each experienced. In case you’ve never had a Cosmoenergy session, you basically sit there for 45 minutes with your eyes closed while the healer’s sitting across from you doing whatever she’s doing, and neither of you are talking. When time’s up, then you talk.

 

As we compared notes, we realized that both of us had experienced similar visions. She told me her vision was that I was a young child of God in a past life, which she understood to be a nun, in the 1700s and had gotten pregnant. I was deeply ashamed at myself and angry at God for allowing this to happen. I felt betrayed and alone, shunned by the convent and everyone around me. The baby, a boy, was taken away from me, despite my pleadings, and in a powerful moment of utter desperation and pain, I vowed that I would never have kids again.

 

When we bridged our two visions together, it made complete sense. The people who had shunned me were offering me their condolences with the red rose and I was supposed to accept their offering even though they were not accepting of me. They were fake, their offering was inauthentic and I wanted no part of it.  They had ripped my baby away from me, in the name of God and in the name of doing what’s best for me, and now they wanted to give me a rose, as if that made up for my loss. An eye for an eye. A rose for a baby. Sorry we took your baby away, here, have a rose. There, feel better?

 

No wonder the young girl ripped the roses to shreds.

 

No wonder I had a repulsion to roses.

 

Had. Past tense. No wonder I HAD a repulsion to roses.

 

After that session, I allowed myself to fully mourn for not being able to have a baby in this lifetime. I took it easy on myself and thanked my body for everything else it does for me. I understood that there are sacred soul contracts and soul lessons to be learned, beyond my physical comprehension and limited awareness. I realized there are infinite layers and multidimensional levels of learning and growing and it’s not just about my one experience in this lifetime.

 

I envisioned the young girl, the broken child of God in the 1700s, and I invited her to use my body, my emotions, my life, to mourn and express everything she was not allowed to express when she was alive in her form. I invited her to heal through me.

 

I practiced the Ho’oponopono technique that I teach in my self-love course, a powerful forgiveness practice that I believe if done regularly could have incredibly transformational and transcendent results.

 

I bought a miniature peach rose plant (baby steps), set it on my nightstand and said goodnight to it before I went to sleep every night and good morning every time I woke up. My boyfriend asked me what was up with the plant and I told him I needed to make peace with roses. Like most of my spiritual whims, he didn’t exactly understand but he took me shopping a week later and we picked out beautiful rose bushes to plant in our garden. We spent a weekend getting on our knees, digging holes and carefully planting each rose bush. It took me another week to work my way up to get a red rose bush.

 

Now I love looking into our garden of colorful, blooming roses, especially the red ones.

I’ve learned that we come into this life with a set of pre-planned lessons, a blueprint if you will of potential opportunities to learn and grow and heal. Each soul carries experiences of its past lives into its new lives, in the same way that we carry our experiences from when we were 12 years old with us as we age and move through this particular life. I’ve always known this from an intellectual level but it’s only just beginning to sink in deeper and experientially.  

 

If there is unfinished business from a past life, it will carry over into the next. You may have unexplained, irrational phobias or repulsions or random ordinary things that trigger feelings in you, like the roses did for me. You don’t need to know WHY you have them, I don’t think it’s necessary to do a past-life regression to come to the source of it. But I think it’s important to face it and move toward healing or neutralizing it.

 

Earlier, I asked: If a soul cries and no one’s there to hear it, does it still hurt?

 

I invite you to listen to your soul’s cries.

 

You might be thinking, “All I ever do is cry! Cry, cry, cry! I’m tired of crying! Now I have to listen to my soul’s cries? No way!”

 

If this resonates with you, then maybe your soul is crying out for some laughter, lightheartedness, playfulness, a little bit of silliness in all the seriousness?

 

Maybe it’s not crying because it needs to release pain, maybe it’s crying because it needs to express joy?

 

Go deeper.

 

What does your soul need?

 

Most times, it just needs acknowledgment.

 

Sometimes, it needs your permission to be set free from the dark corners and invited to come out into the light.

 

Always, it needs love, forgiveness, kindness.

 

It needs to be witnessed.

 

What does your soul cry for?