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Elizaveta Garifullina (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

Can our past lives influence our current ones? Is karma a punishment? What is a karmic relationship? In this article, I will try to answer these questions by taking some information from the book Journey of Souls by Michael Newton.

Karma does not mean justice at the human level, because it is not limited to one life. For example, a person who was a thief in a previous life, in this one may want to be a victim of a thief and lose a large and important amount of money in order to understand the consequences of such actions. Or the person who mocked “weaker” people will be born as a “weaker” person in the next life. But is it a punishment? No, because the Soul chooses it. No one punishes it, and no one forces it to choose to live through such an experience. However, all our lives are connected. We cannot live the same scenarios in every life, because our goal is development. The same scenarios lead to the same lessons, which would not be helpful. To understand the completeness of experience, we must travel between two polarities.

What “haunts” us from life to life is experience. Young souls can be under the strong effect of their past lives. Their impulsive decisions, fears and inner feelings can be significantly influenced. Also, these souls may carry the trauma of those lives where their lives were abruptly cut short, or where they suffered greatly. Of course, the experience of past lives affects not only young souls. Older souls may be influenced by their most “meaningful” lives.

If the same events repeat with you or you attract similar people, it’s worth slowing down and paying attention to what might be going on inside. What do you keep doing wrong? Where are you deceiving yourself? Where are you betraying yourself? Why do such situations repeat in your life? What decision are you afraid to make? What can people teach you? Be honest with yourself. Of course, you can go to a hypnotherapist, open a layer of past lives, dig into it and find the reason. But nothing will be more effective than deep work with yourself. You already know everything. You already know everything yourself. Trust yourself and try to take an honest look at your life.

Our relationships with people are very complex and broad issues if we consider them from the point of view of the connections between lives. Absolutely all of our loved ones are in our lives for a reason. People appear in your life exactly when they should appear and somehow change you. With our parents, we most often work out some karma, gain new experiences or learn essential lessons that will be useful in the future. Parent-child relationships are rarely easy, precisely because we “work” in these relationships. Our relationships with friends are easier and most often teach us something important, helping us look at ourselves from the other side. And our romantic relationships have many types: karmic relationships with people with whom we have not closed some experience (where there are many unresolved things between us) or relationships through which we learn new sides of ourselves. 

Most often, we enter into relationships (which we later characterize as relationships that changed us) with people with whom we have already passed many lives and accumulated many stories, some of which were painful and some happy. In fact, from the point of view of life lessons, the duration of a relationship is not as important as its value, because a relationship that lasted a couple of months can change you more than a relationship that lasted for years, due to the fact that you were karmically tied to a person in that short relationship. 

So, are we burdened by our past lives? Everyone will answer for themselves. Some people may view our karma as an opportunity for growth, personal development and learning. And other people may feel burdened by their past lives, believing that past traumas still affect their current lives. For the second type of people, there are many spiritual practices that will help them free themselves from the unresolved feelings of past lives, but we must work with our past lives with great caution.

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