Vivid Memories Of Past Lives

When I was a young child (in this current life!) I had a very clear "memory" of climbing out of what seemed to be a high bed, and walking in bare feet across a polished wood floor, to kneel on a window seat and look out at the snow. It was morning; and the light reflected off the snow was a chill blue colour. Snow was so deep that the conifers were almost completely covered up.
The room I was in seemed to be upstairs; the bed had a lovely patchwork quilt on it. I also remembered feeling the chill from the weather outside penetrating through the glass panes in the window and my bare feet feeling cold.
I cannot recall quite how young I was when I had this 'dream/memory' but I remember, when I was about 7 years old, asking my mother whether or not there had been such deep snow in any place we had lived before; obviously this "memory" kept reoccuring and puzzling me.
She looked at me with amazement, and said "we've never lived anywhere with snow at all! and the closest experience you would have seen was sleet when we went on a holiday up in the mountains in New South Wales".
Well, I clearly remembered that "sleet" episode but I was insistent we'd lived somewhere where snow had been at least 6 feet deep. Lots of snow. "Christmas trees"...
"No cannot be" replied my mother, now looking at me strangely. "But I remember it!" I had argued...
Then I started to think about it again, after her reply, and realized that the me I remembered had had long blonde hair. I also knew we'd never lived in a house that had an upstairs area, or a window seat...
In this life, as a child, I had short mousy brown hair. We'd lived in a few places by the time I was asking my mother about this "memory" and I could even recall the general decor and layout of a house we'd lived in when I had my third birthday...so I knew she was telling the truth.
At that point I realized I was remembering a past life.
Again, when I was about 12, my teacher asked us to choose a country to do a project on. He gave us all a choice of several countries, and I chose Canada. I wasn't particularly excited about this project, because I didn't quite know what was expected of me. However, after researching Canada over the weekend I started to feel as though I was homesick for that country (I was born in Australia), that I really missed it, and that somehow I should have been born there instead of where I was, because I found the Australian landscape so dull and boring! As soon as I started looking at images of Canada (this was before our regional area had television, and I had limited access to movies and libraries! a very small town!) I realized that the trees, the snow, the terrain, was just like my "memory" of looking out the window and seeing snow.

(For most of my childhood, I had lived in the far outback of Australia, with no movies, limited access to reading materials, in the main, and of course TV hadn't yet arrived or was simply unavailable due to distance from transmitters). People in the bigger towns and cities had access to TV and TV sets, but it wasn't until almost 1968 that our family actually got one, and the Canadian project occurred in 1966!

I cannot consciously recall, before being set the project on Canada, on ever seeing any images or photos anywhere of that country, except perhaps in school books and then more as a geography exercise, rather than the glossy travel images I was now accessing for my project (my mother obtained travel brochures from a travel agent to help me with my homework!)
The feeling I got when I started reading about Canada; huge amounts of grief and loss. I remember walking the two miles to school on that Monday, clutching my project, and crying, comparing the "dull" grey gumtree trunks with the vivid browns and autumnal leaves of forests and green undulating fields of grass...so unlike the place I now found myself in. I so wanted to go home, and this place didn't feel like home. The more I accessed this feeling/memory, the more I remembered my boredom with the flat skyline of the outback area I'd formerly lived in. How I longed for a snow capped mountain range! It was a very strange experience, and at some point I shared my feeling of being homesick with my mother, of feeling like I didn't "belong" in this country, the uninspiring scenery! Once again my mother was intrigued.

After a while, I resolved to appreciate where I was, and found a book in my little school library on eucalypts and gum trees, took it home one weekend and consciously went out into the bush around my house, identifying and learning to appreciate the local flora. The Australian bush has seemed much more interesting to me since, and after a while that longing to go 'home' to where I really belonged abated.

Many many years later, during meditation (I was meditating on why I felt so anxious whenever my children got a fever or were teething) I went back to a time as a woman in Canada. I had come from a moderately well-to-do family. I married a man who took me to the wilds of Canada, where we lived in isolation, pretty much. He went off to become a fur trapper, leaving me with six young children to care for by myself. He never returned and I never knew what happened to him (though I suspect he got caught up in the gold rush fever and probably died on the Alaskan trail - that info seemed to trickle in while I was meditating/remembering this life).
At any rate, a fever began sweeping through the area where I lived. I did have neighbours, but they were hours away, by horse and buggy. One after the other, my children died. It was apparently yellow fever, or that's what I got in meditation. Something to do with contaminated well water...I felt huge resentment towards my absent husband, and great exhaustion for having to do everything all by myself. Occasionally a neighbour would come and help with the really heavy chores, but on a day to day basis I had to do everything.
The last part of this memory was me getting into someone else's buggy, all dressed in black...and leaving that log cabin behind. I don't properly recall if any of the children survived. I was bitter, angry and resentful, and definitively thought that my husband had simply deserted his responsibilities (but on coming out of the meditation I consciously realized that he may have met an untimely end, not just gone off for a good time elsewhere!)
At any rate, accessing this "memory" helped to reduce my unreasonable anxiety every time one of my present life children ran a fever..
And helped me realize that this is the real purpose of remembering past lives.
To heal the present
Submitted by- Ayin Gupta.

As A Child

I had memories as a child, but they presented themselves in my actions rather than a "mental story". I feel I was born pagan and my actions as a child suggest that I have been before as well. I made a habbit of placing pots in a circle on the kitchen floor, taking my place at one, and beating it with a spoon, very similar to a drum circle. At the age of about 5 or 6 I filled a small wooden box with my favorite tiny things and burried it under a tree at the edge of the woods behind our home. I remember thinking that the spirits would enjoy a gift, similar to an offering to the spirits of the land. I experience other things much like this along the way. I was amazed to find later on their significance.

Aside from my own experience, my mom also told me about what my brother did when he was small. She said that he kept telling her that he "grew down", and that he wanted to be big again. She said she asked him what happened to make him grow down, and his response was that he drove a big truck off a mountain. He would motion turning a huge wheel and immitate the sound of the truck, then say "oh no! Aaah! Now I'm little." 

I think it's easier for children to recall their past lives. As adults there are so many things clouding our mind. That's not to say adults dob't remember. Many people do. I suppose it varies from one person to the next.

Submitted by- Merry Johnson