There’s a question that keeps coming up in the sessions I do with people. Not always in words. Sometimes it’s just a feeling that surfaces mid-regression, a kind of stunned recognition on someone’s face as they arrive somewhere they’ve never been in this life and yet somehow already know.
The question underneath it all is always the same: have I been here before?
And the longer I do this work, the less I feel the need to answer that definitively. What interests me more is what we do with the experiences that keep pointing in that direction. The ones that don’t fit neatly into what the body and the mind can explain.
Something Beyond the Body and the Mind
Most of us move through life inside two dimensions. The body feels everything first: the gut drop, the chest tightening, the way certain rooms make you want to leave before you know why. The mind then comes in to make sense of it, to build a story around what the body already registered.
But there’s a third thing. A dimension that doesn’t quite fit inside either of those two. The soul, or spirit, whatever word sits better with you. It’s the part of a person that feels larger than the person themselves. It holds no real attachments. It doesn’t follow the same rules. And if you follow the thread of what mystics, spiritual traditions, and certain researchers have been pointing at for a very long time, it doesn’t end when the body does.
It keeps going. It keeps learning. And at some point, it comes back.
The Question of Whether Any of This Is Real
Here’s where it gets interesting to me, because I don’t think belief is the most useful starting point for this conversation.
The more interesting question is what we do with the experiences people keep having, across cultures, across centuries, that point in the same direction. Children who remember previous lives with verifiable detail they couldn’t have been exposed to. Adults under hypnosis describing spaces between lives with a consistency that’s hard to dismiss. The sense of recognition you get with certain people, the feeling that you know someone before you’ve had a single conversation with them.
I’ve sat across from hundreds of people in past life regression sessions. What keeps striking me isn’t the dramatic material, though there’s plenty of that. It’s the small things. The person who starts crying the moment they arrive at a past life scene, before I’ve said a word. The one who describes, in detail, a relationship dynamic from centuries ago that maps onto the most painful relationship in their current life. The one who surfaces from the session looking lighter than when they came in, because something they couldn’t name finally has a shape.
You can call that many things. But it’s difficult, after a while, to keep calling it coincidence.
Michael Newton and What Happens Between Lives
Michael Newton was an American hypnotherapist who stumbled into something he hadn’t expected. He’d been doing standard hypnosis work when his patients started describing, unprompted, what it was like between lives. Not past lives, but the space between them. He spent decades documenting these accounts across thousands of sessions, and wrote about it in Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls.
What makes his work hard to dismiss is the consistency. People who’d never met each other, with no shared cultural framework, describing the same kinds of spaces, the same process, the same feeling of arriving somewhere familiar after leaving a body behind. You don’t have to take it as gospel. But it’s worth sitting with.
According to what Newton documented, a soul doesn’t reincarnate indefinitely. The rough count is 35 lifetimes, organized into five stages: infant, child, young, mature, and old soul. Each stage holds seven lives, each one carrying a deeper layer of lessons than the last. An infant soul is still getting the basics of what it means to exist in physical form. An old soul has been here long enough to hold things loosely, to feel less pulled by ego and status and the need to prove anything.
The part I find most staggering is the intermission period, the space between lives, where a soul apparently chooses the blueprint of its next incarnation. Not at random. The family, the challenges, the people it’ll cross paths with. Like a chess player arranging the board before the game begins, already thinking several moves ahead.
I don’t know if Newton’s numbers are exact. Thirty-five lifetimes feels almost too tidy. But the idea underneath it, that the soul approaches each life as a student approaches a curriculum, with something specific to learn and a reason for being exactly where it is, that resonates with everything I’ve seen doing this work.
The People You Recognize Before You Know Them
Since I was about seven years old, I’ve had this experience with new groups of people. A kind of inner pointing. A knowing that arrives before any conversation has happened: this person is going to matter.
It’s never been dramatic. More like a soft certainty you don’t quite trust at first because it arrived so fast. But I’ve had it with every person who’s gone on to be significant in my life. Every close friendship. Every relationship that left a real mark. It hasn’t pointed me wrong once.
I’ve come to think of it as soul recognition. The part of us that’s been here before, looking across the room and thinking: ah, there you are. Like you’ve been circling each other across lifetimes and you’ve finally lined up again.
Whether or not that’s true in a literal sense, I can’t say for certain. What I can say is that the experience is real. And I’ve heard enough versions of it from enough different people to feel sure I’m not the only one.
A Memory I Keep Coming Back To
I have this image from childhood. One of the earliest memories I have.
I was maybe three or four years old, standing in front of a mirror. Looking at my face, my eyes, my body. And this thought arrived: Why am I here? Why have I chosen this body? Why am I here… again?
It didn’t frighten me. There was a strange inner calm to it, like these were the most natural questions in the world. Like I was watching my own reflection from somewhere above it, from some part of myself that was older and already knew things the three-year-old in the mirror didn’t. And then, just as fast as it came, it was gone.
I’ve turned that moment over in my mind for years. Was it a window of soul memory? A fragment of a previous life surfacing while I stared at my own face for too long? I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that it planted something. A curiosity that led me, eventually, to this work.
What Karma Actually Is
Karma has a branding problem.
Most people understand it as a punishment system. You do something wrong, the universe makes a note, and the boomerang comes back eventually. Which means a lot of us carry this low-level anxiety about what we might be “owed,” like there’s a ledger being kept somewhere against us.
But what if it’s something far less dramatic than that? What if karma is just a lesson that hasn’t been integrated yet?
The way I’ve come to see it: the soul keeps encountering the same pattern until it finally sees it clearly enough to move through it. Sometimes once is enough and something clicks. Other times you watch someone repeat the same relationship dynamic over and over, with different people who somehow produce the identical wound, and you realize they’re not unlucky. They’re circling something they haven’t been able to look at directly yet.
I’ve seen this in regressions in ways that still move me. Someone arrives carrying a pattern they’ve been trying to understand for years. We go back, and there it is. The same dynamic, a different century. The same soul lesson, dressed differently. And the recognition itself seems to shift something. Not always completely, not fast. But the pattern starts to loosen once it has a name and a shape.
Karma isn’t a ghost haunting you. It’s more like a teacher who keeps rescheduling the lesson you keep skipping. The longer you avoid it, the less gentle the classroom gets.
What It’s All For
This is the question I return to most. If the soul chooses its lives, arranges its lessons, comes back again and again to keep learning, then what’s the destination? What does “done” look like?
I think the answer is stranger and simpler than we expect. Joy. Flow. The ability to move through life without being destroyed by it. To hold people and experiences and outcomes with enough looseness that when they shift or leave, as everything does, you’re not shattered.
The soul’s deepest lesson across all of those lifetimes seems to be detachment. And I want to be careful with that word because it doesn’t mean not caring. It means caring fully and still being free. Loving someone and knowing you don’t own them. Building something and being at peace with the fact that it will eventually be gone.
That’s the work. It takes a long time.
But if any of this is true, you’ve already been at it for a while.
