I was just having a Reiki healing session with my healer and she told me that she had a really clear vision come up of me in a past life. 

I was an indigenous person of some kind, (an inuit or an native american indian) in Alaska and I was dying in the middle of a big wide open plain of snow. My horse was there and I was injured in the thigh area of the leg and couldnt go anywhere. She thought maybe the horse had fallen on top of me. 

This is really interesting as I have a big blockage in my leg (thigh) which I have been working to allow to release for about 4 years since it first became aparent on my first 10 day vipassana retreat. 

Has anyone else had similar experiences to this? Or any visions in energy work or even mediation?

Hey B-Man,

Years ago on a Goenka vipassana retreat, on about the 6 or 7th day, the visual field was very flickery and vibratory with eyes closed and I began to experience images of various beings.  The most prominent and memorable image was of a wolf with a peircing gaze stairing right at me.  Many of them were animals.  I saw a group of rodent looking animals huddled together and images of a hawk or eagle (although I had also heard a hawk cry earlier in the day, potentially priming the image of the hawk).  I like to read about spirit animals/animal totems and enjoy entertaining these metaphors/conceptual proliferation from time to time. Although, my overall goal is liberation and this conceptual proliferation doesn't seem to work towards that goal in my experience so I hold it lightly and don't take it too seriously. Still fun stuff though Thanks for sharing your experience.

Metta,

Drew

hey Drew, 

Interesting! Maybe you were a shaman in a previous life. have you ever done a shamanic ceremony?

best, 
Bman

Hi b man,

I've had all kinds of visions of past lives during high concentration states. In my practice memoir, I talk a little about that. For many years, I took them seriously, until I realized that my mind was just constructing another story about who I was. It was/is the same process whereby I construct an identity around my job, my family, and all the rest. After I saw through them, they stopped. I don't get them anymore.

          jak

I would take past life visions maybe not seriously but at least as a sign I'm heading in the right direction since the Buddha talks about them a lot in the suttas. He seems to have used them for developing insight during anapana just before his enlightenment. See for example the Mahasaccaka sutta.

What method of meditation did you use to get to that kind of concentration?

It wasnt actually me, but the reiki healer that relayed the vision she had of me in my past life whilst treating me, in my case. What were you doing svmonk?

I used to go to a reiki group and one particular person prompted an image of me jumping or falling off an enormous volcanic rock cliff of an island and turning into a fish when I hit the water.
Happened a couple of times - same person - baffling. Always wondered if that was meant to be something I should take as a past or future life event, or just nonsense ?
I didn't take any of it medically seriously (beyond placebo, relaxation or trance) when I was experimenting with hands on and reiki, but nevertheless it was pretty trippy what the mind would do, and how people seem to interact in that subconscious level.

Hi b man,

I wrote about the first time it happened in my practice memoir, Silicon Valley Monk. It was during my first retreat, a 7 day Zen sesshin. On the Thursday, I was doing concentration (breath object, abdominal focus) and heard someone coughing, but in a way that sounded like they were sick. Up came a question of why this person had to suffer, and after that a series of images of the person's past life, that they had been a child in a concentration camp and were killed in the gas chamber (including some pretty horrible realtime of the gas chamber).

After that, I started getting dreams and other stuff including a retreat experience again associated with concentration meditation that I interpreted as being about my past life and those of others. I didn't talk about it at all, since I thought people would think I was crazy. This went on for many years. Finally, four years ago I did a concentration retreat where I had a full vision of "my" past lives, that I had been a monk in the Buddha's sangha, had been expelled which is why I was having such difficulty achieving jhana on that retreat, and after that had various other lifetimes, all associated with meditation, etc. etc.

Anyway, I ended up in a psychiatric institute (you can also read about that in the memoir) for a week, not from these visions specifically, which is unfortunately how I exited the retreat, and since then have spent some time reflecting on what happened. I realized that my mind had been making up these stories to reinforce my feelings of having some kind of permanent self, and of being somehow special. If you had asked me, I would have said that I didn't believe in rebirth but I would still have said that it might be possible. Now, I don't think it really matters. It's just another story we tell ourselves to reinforce the sense of being.

Now, I suppose at this point someone is going to  chime in and say: well, didn't the Buddha teach rebirth? From my reading of the suttas it isn't a central point of his teaching, and at one point when asked straight out he explicitly refused to answer whether someone who is enlightened exists after death (it's one of the unanswered questions). I would assume that if, as the Therevada orthodoxy has it, an arhat is freed from being born again (and the other paths have various limits on the numbers of births) that the Buddha would have said: "Yes, an arhat is not born again, an anagami is born into the Tusita heaven, a sakadagami is born once more, and a sotapanna is born seven times more".

My opinion (and it is just that) based on my experience is that he had visions of previous lives during concentration meditation. At that time, the human understanding of causality in the physical world was not as advanced as it is now, and so he took those visions at face value. So a villager would come to him weeping and say: "Bhagvan, my mother has died. Can you tell me her fate?" He would go off and do concentration meditation, see something, then come back and report and the villager would go off feeling better. In other words, it helped relieve the villager's suffering.

My opinion is past lives are really just another way you reinforce your sense of "you" being a thing rather than a process that started and someday will stop.

wow that must have been pretty full on to experience that, whilst feeling pretty raw and delicate like you can on retreat, I'm not surprised you left. 


Yeah, I can see the sense in that, and I can see that for oneself. It explains things less well, when experiencing it about someone else though. Maybe it is just the mind playing tricks then? or maybe there is a deeper meaning or message to be learnt from those lifetimes that will help us resolve something to reach enlightemnent? I dunno. Its good to talk about it though, thanks for sharing the stories, they are very interesting. 

your post reminded me actually of something that I was thinking about the other day in relation to this. Which is, once you enter the stream you are guarenteed enlightenment within 7 lifetimes right? Even if you do nothing but watch TV all day every day for 7 lifetimes (Assuming you can be reborn, obviously). So on the 7th life time, it seems that you would just become enlightened one day? Is this the sort of thing that maybe explains what happened to people like Ekhart Tolle and such?

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http://newgrassroots.tripod.com/

lol. Buy cheap, buy twice ;-)