Karma and Past Lives: Investigating a Core Challenge

Remember that when we talk about Karma, we don’t necessarily mean “good and bad, reward and punishment.” Karma generally has five things that can be involved: unbalanced energy, which is a neutral; healing; service; healing of beliefs; and contrast, learning about both sides of a situation. In the case below, we see how Freedom can be a core karmic challenge throughout many lifetimes.

A client presented me with this life challenge:

I need to know why I have had such an abusive life. I was always the child that no one paid attention to or wanted to be with. Even though I had three siblings I was always the one left out. When I would try to spend time with my mother, she said that she “didn’t like being badgered for attention” and she would lock me away in my playroom. To punish me (and it was always my fault things happened, never my brothers) she locked me in the basement or in the pantry and this went on until I was about 12. After that it got worse when my mother and father starting drinking. I would get hit, screamed at for hours, and my father who was an alcoholic would always go for his belt.

I had to run away from home at 17. Now I’m in my 40s and I’ve never been able to settle down with anyone or keep a job for very long if I don’t think the boss plays fair. How can I change this?

The two words I was immediately given were “escape artist.” Freedom has always been a byword for this client, in every life, and whether it was fighting to get it or fighting to keep it, they were always a fighter.

They didn’t do well in “calm lives” and they don’t schedule them often. I picked up several lives that had a direct bearing on their questions regarding this incarnation.

They have never wanted to be held down by rules, and because they insist on higher intelligence than normal in their incarnations, they were able to use that intellect to wiggle out of just about anything required of them.

16th century China. They were male, and made a living stealing babies. Most of these thefts were from lower-class houses that could do nothing about the theft, or actually didn’t care because the baby was another mouth to feed. How much a baby sold for and to whom they’d sell it depended on what the parents looked like (plain or beautiful), what kind of intelligence was noted in the parents, and how the baby’s siblings looked and behaved.

The plainer children were sold as slaves, servants or, if female, to bordellos to be used up young and tossed aside. The prettier ones, the ones who boded to think well and have talents, would be auctioned to families who could not have their own. The boy babies went for the most money, especially to women whose position in their husband’s household was precarious until they presented him with a boy child. There were enough soldiers and long-traveling traders that the little boy business was brisk.

17th century France. This was during the time of Louis XIV and his many mistresses, with reams and reams of court intrigue. The client was a small-time fortune teller who sold potions, including poisons, to the rich. They came by night, always dressed in dark blue, and masked. Anything that added to their mystery, they would add onto their legend.

They loved being outside the rules of society and having power over the more gullible and wealthy ladies and gentlemen who came to them. They were arrested and accused of assisting in a plot to kill a noble woman’s rival for her husband’s affection, as well as her children.

In order to escape their own death (which did not work) they implicated their mother (who had taught them everything) regarding her assisting the wealthy with abortions. She was arrested, tortured and killed — but so was my client. (This was the client’s mother this time, hence the constant “imprisonment” as a child.)

Mid 19th century Europe: My client was an absinthe maker, trained in France by Pernod. Absinthe was made by distilling the wormwood plant in alcohol with anise, hyssop, lemon balm, and other herbs, resulting in a very potent drink that had hallucinogenic properties. They moved to Britain where they had a very small but select clientele — wealthy British nobles who did not want to be seen patronizing France (the only place that was supposed to be making Absinthe by this formulation), but who loved the drink itself. To keep them coming back, rather than go to any other supplier, my client added bits of opium to the absinthe so that it was even more highly addictive.

They were able to stay in business for roughly 15 years until agents of Pernod discovered the illegal business; my client took the profits and ran. They ended up owning a small tavern in Cardiff, where they continued to doctor the alcohol to keep patrons coming back for more. (Thus this time the soul agreed to be the victim of alcoholics, to do a quick ‘wipe’ of the Karma.)

Southern California in the 1930s. My client was a mother who wanted to be something big — an artist, a writer, an actress. Living on a tiny farm on the outskirts of Hollywood (and yes, that’s how rural it was in those days!), they often saw movie stars riding past the farm in fancy cars, or saw them when the family went into the city.

My client was never able to realize their dream, because they married a man who wanted a big family. They quickly had three of their own while also taking care of two children by the husband’s late wife.

Because the husband worked very hard on the farm, in his small hardware store on the road into town (really not much more than a shed), and picked up what jobs he could — this was, after all, the Depression — my client had virtually no help and no adult company. It was kids, kids, kids 24/7.

My client went crazy because they were unable to have a moment’s peace. At one point they locked all the children in the coal cellar and just walked away. The kids were found a few days later, very weak from hunger but they survived. My client ended up begging and homeless, dying within the year from physical sickness and madness, yet believing right to the end that they had escaped a much more horrible fate.

What all of these lives show is that the Life Challenge this time was for my client to make it on their own, and yet do it within rules and boundaries. They had lived enough lives, had seen both the good and the bad side of things, and had the strength of will and imagination to stand up to the difficulties they faced.

I noted that things were likely to change if they moved less towards the “exciting” and “energetic” folks (who can often be mercurial in temperament) and more towards the calm, the rational, and the even-tempered. While it would take time to adjust to the difference in energy, swimming in calm waters instead of riding the rapids, as was done in so many lives, was more likely to bring the peace they sought.