My most recent sighting of the Northern Lights around my home, Derbyshire May 2024
March 2023. Suddenly I’m aware that my feet are cold. Past life regression therapist Debbie Eggerton's words are circling around me, but my mind is drifting. I want blankets, I feel an urgent need to cocoon myself against the incoming cold. My body, I am discovering, knows where it is going before my mind.
I am shivering all over now. A perfectly cosy room minutes ago, feels icy. Debbie has talked me through what to expect and checks in again with me before inviting me to lie down under a blanket. Would I like another? Yes. Another? Yes. I don't think there can ever be enough blankets.
Debbie has warned me she will alter her voice to help me into my journey and soon I begin to drift, between a state of panic that nothing will happen and fear that it will. A voice I no longer recognise asks me to look at my feet. I look down and to my suprise I am standing on snow. The voice asks me what I can see. I have large feet, boots covered in white fur. Man legs.
Shit. I am a man.
For a while I try to push aside the voice’s gentle questions, so transfixed I am by the beauty of my surroundings. Crisp white snow and a sky lit by the Northern Lights. Intense greens blues, pinks and purples fill the entire sky. The feeling of peace within me is profound, rather than looking I feel like I am simply part of nature. A feeling of belonging so all consuming that I do not want to answer any questions about my family.
Debbie pre warned me I may not want to answer her if I am busy looking and that’s fine. Eventually I mumble that I love my wife and two children, but it feels like a given I don’t have much to say about. I sense that my true love is nature and solitude, the vast universe of stars and lights around me is where I experience my deepest sense of belonging. Fuck it's so beautiful here.
I walk back to the village carrying fish, to a small shelter covered in hides and fur. My wife, son and a baby daughter are waiting. Unintelligible words fall from my mouth in response to Debbie’s questions. Names are on the tip of my tongue. And when I look up what I mumbled later - Ana, Anuka, Anouka - I find Anaana can mean Mother, Nuka youngest sibling in Inuit, Anouka is an Innuit name, Nanook means polar bear. The latter becomes important as the journey continues.
Debbie asks if I want to go back a little in time and I find myself telling her about when I was a young boy leaving the safety of my parent’s home to hunt alone for the first time. The tears pouring down my cheeks, the fear of leaving, combined with the adrenaline and excitement, I am using the Hunter constellation to guide me, I know it will keep me safe.
Debbie prompts me for another key moment in my life. This time I have been chosen by the chief, who respects my hunting skills, to kill the polar bear that has been taking all the food from the village. I am paddling along in my canoe, silently tracking the bear.
I look at his white fur, he turns to look me in the eyes. I can see into his soul. His spirit. As our eyes lock I silently asked his permission to take his body for the village. He gives permission. Such a peaceful moment.
I spear him and watch his blood cover the ice and seep into the water. I call to the villagers to help gut him. I am overjoyed to take a piece of his fur for my newborn daughter’s bed. Later I clean his skull and put it on a stick.
As I came out of that life momentarily, I drifted high in the sky and saw other lives…below me a lighthouse, off the cliffs of Britain in the 1940s, a dark haired man in rounded boots and a roll neck jumper with a cheeky smile waving to me. This lighthouse has come to me before, in so many guided mediations, sound baths, reiki sessions. I drift past a medieval queen and her jester in the clouds. Immediate fear, I tell Debbie I don’t want to go there. A glimmer of an Egyptian goddess.
Debbie says we need to go back again, to complete the journey. To this life's deathbed.
I died of old age in this life, peacefully, surrounded by my family. My son I had taught to hunt, stabbing and spearing fish from the canoe. He had his own family. It wasn’t our first lifetime together perhaps, and I felt a sense that the stars would continue to connect us. My daughter was more community minded, her role like that of a diplomat, making peace with other communities. I felt so proud of her. I was sorry to leave my wife, she was younger than me, but I knew the village would look after her.
Afterwards, Debbie spent a lot of time reintegrating me, helping me feel physically grounded. We then talked through the experience, exploring the psychological symbolism and themes that related to my present life.
Some people believe past life regression is tapping into a past life, others that it is accessing another powerful level of the subconscious mind. On whatever level you wish to engage, and Debbie validates both, I would argue it was an incredible journey. And as someone who has always resisted getting out of her head on drugs..a healthy way to have a wild experience!
I may use my imagination lots in creative writing, and over time I may have collected some very vague snippets of knowledge about Inuit lives, but this felt different, the ease and confidence with which knowledge, names, people and events came to me, and the vividness was on a different scale.
I went initially, because I had a really vivid deja vu in Lisbon and some strong images of a life as a sailor which I was dying to know more about and potentially write about. This didn’t come up at all, you don’t get to choose which past life will be explored, but I was definitely struck with the potential to discover and deeply connect to new stories to tell as a writer.
Afterwards I spent some time writing up my experience and finding images to remember it by. It felt important to honour and document it while it was fresh in my mind.
I finally started to write this up as a blog post yesterday, and bizarrely, overnight the Northern Lights appeared for the first time, above my house here in Derbyshire. I spend a lot of time on the fence between spirituality and science, but I was reminded of just how essential awe moments and nature appreciation have always been to me.
Have you had a past life experience? Have you/would you try past life regression?
More info: Debbie Eggerton