Thanks to all who sent enthusiastic remarks about the New Year’s Day blog entry. The theme creating most private comment was time travel, and some have asked for more about this. I’m happy to oblige, since questions about past lives and reincarnation are central to Nights of the Road, which is almost within touching distance of publication now.
A Corsican Past
In October 1984, I visited Corsica as a tourist. I knew we would live there one day. I did not know how I knew this and also that our home would be in the citadel of Calvi, an unknown town on an island I had never visited in this life. Because attempts to explain such hunches usually met with confusion at best and derision at worst, it seemed pointless trying to tell others it would be so, before it was.
We spent a week exploring the south, east and centre of the island. Driving up the magnificent west coast from Porto, we decided to make a brief stop at a tiny port called Galeria, before arriving in Calvi, where we would spend our second week.
It had been a drive of unparalleled beauty, as was every journey we took in this jewel of an island in the Mediterranean Sea. The sky was blue, the sun was warm and we were in high spirits as we climbed out of our hire car.
Galeria, Corsica
As I stepped onto the tiny beach by the port, everything changed. I fell into and flailed around in a world of horror, trying to pry open relentless hands from a stranglehold grip on my neck. I was still struggling, unable to make a noise and scream for help, when my partner spotted me, apparently having a fit, and rushed to my side.
We were the only people visible anywhere. I could only whisper, “Get me away.” He did so and quickly. It was some time before I could speak and explain that an invisible someone had been strangling me.
That was my first and most terrifying past life experience on Corsica. Other episodes, some scary, others benign, even delightful, would occur over the years, as we visited the home we had found – yes, of course in the citadel of Calvi – and then made the island our permanent home throughout the 1990’s.
The Mystery Unraveled
More than twenty years would pass before, while living in Austin, Texas, at the beginning of 2006, I attended Voices of the Ancestors*, led by Roger Woolger and Patricia Walsh, and the mystery associated with my Galeria experience revealed itself.
I had read of the workshop by ‘chance’ in a bookstore, and booked a place on it immediately, even while telling myself I was mad, since we were in the middle of packing up house to move back to Los Angeles. It was one of my better spur of the moment decisions. Roger has now rejoined his ancestors and I feel grateful to have known and learned much from him before he left.
During the workshop, I accessed and processed a past life from the late seventeenth century.
I was a seventeen-year old girl, living in the late 17th Century and watching over our flock that we had just brought down to winter pasture from our home up in the high Niolu of the Corsican interior. Only the women of the family were present. My father was absent on business for the Council of Twelve, on which he served as a mediator and peacekeeper. My lawyer brother was in Bastia and my other brother still training as a doctor overseas in Genoa.
I was the oldest child and never happier than when out in nature, so I was the one to be out with the flock that day, when Barbary pirates came ashore to capture sheep and slaves.
They caught me on the beach. Because I had screamed to alert my mother and sister and also resisted violently, the pirates strangled and raped me, leaving me for dead on the beach. They captured my mother and sister and carried them away to sea.
I died in that lifetime feeling deep guilt that I had not been able to warn my mother and young sister, or keep the sheep safe.
Meeting a Welsh Ancestor in the Outback
Not all past life experiences are as difficult as this one, although regression therapists speak regularly of a pattern of people reincarnating to complete ‘unfinished lives’ that end traumatically.
I had a particularly sweet past life experience, in another continent and during a camp at which Patricia was again leading a workshop, this time on Karmic Astrology, seven years after I first met her. By then, I had learned to work alone with the dynamics of past life and ancestral contacts, to the point where I could tune into an atmosphere with ease and ‘protect my space’, while deciding whether and how to enter any experience that offered itself.
I had flown into the Red Centre of Australia with a ‘soul family’ member, Ariane. Neither of us felt sure of the exact reason for our visit, but each sensed it would be meaningful.
An unknown camp organizer met us at Alice Springs airport. As we came face-to-face, I received an instant shock of recognition.
Marg and I stood staring at each other as if nobody else was present, before we shook ourselves and re-entered the movie of our present lifetime.
(Marg and Ariane)
Our Star Camp experience organized by the C*I*A at Honeymoon Gap in the West McDonnell Ranges was like a time out of time and it merits a blog entry in its own right. Instead, here I’ll ‘fast forward’ to the last day of Patricia’s workshop, at which I was absent, as I had been hit by a ‘bug’ in the night, and could not stand.
To my surprise, I felt no anxiety about missing the last day. I knew I was exactly where I needed to be. Lying in a bed close to the kitchen area, I watched and listened as Marg came out of the workshop to check that lunch was being prepared. She was energized and, as she began to explain to a friend what had just gone on in her own ‘session,’ I recognized her and exactly who she had been for me in a previous lifetime.
There, in a remote part of the Australian Outback, I had reconnected with my seven times great grandmother, a herbalist and healer from a South Wales fishing village. That recognition was precious and helped healed a rift and a ‘hole’ in the family story.
Honeymoon Gap gave us many experiences, but none more precious than my connection with Marg.
The Battle of Ashdown
Since writing the New Year blog I’ve felt moved to revisit the experience I wrote of last week – that battle scene at the Uffington White Horse in England.
I’m taking it slowly. The energy is intense and I’m not quite ready to enter the event and process it. The hill and its history has strong energy if not approached with caution and care, as I know to my personal cost: I was once thrown down a steep slope of its grass covered earth ramparts, during ‘horseplay’ (?) with two college friends (one of whom I would marry – and leave) and spent six weeks in a plaster cast thereafter…
There’s more to be learned here. What I have established so far is the time frame I’m dealing with. That fight I entered was the Battle of Ashdown and I sense it’s no accident that it comes up in this blog entry. I noticed, just as I sat down to collect materials for this blog, that the battle took place on January 8th 871.
For any followers of mediaeval history who wonder if the battle in which a young and not-yet King Alfred of Wessex repulsed the Danes did actually take place on White Horse Hill, I can say that it did.
I was there.
My thanks for use of their images this week to Jean-Christophe Saliceti for postcards of Galeria and Morris Meredith Williams for his 1913 engraving of Alfred.
* Patricia Walsh still runs workshops working with ancestral spirits, and you can find out more at her website: healthepast.com