Healing Past-Life Fears

Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge.

Today I speak with Ainslie MacLeod. Ainslie is a psychic who, for more than a decade, has collaborated with spirit guides to gain insight into significant past-life experiences. He’s the author of two Sounds True books, The Instruction. and, most recently, The Transformation: Healing Your Past Lives to Realize Your Soul’s Potential. The Transformation. is an exploration into how our past lives directly impact our soul’s evolution. In addition to his books, Ainslie can be heard in a three-part online course on Healing Your Past-Life Fears, which begins on May 3, at 8pm Eastern Time at Soundstrue.com.

I spoke to Ainslie about how we can recognize, work with, and resolve past-life fears, as well as how we can connect with our own spirit guides.

Tami Simon: Past-life fears…I’m curious, Ainslie, if someone has a big, irrational fear – maybe it’s a fear of getting into an elevator or a plan or a fear of public speaking. How would they know if it’s a past-life fear, a fear from something that happened early in their biography, or just a plain, old fear?

Ainslie MacLeod: The kind of fears that you’re talking about there depends on the manifestation of it. If you get a kind of panic, that really kind of strong, phobic reaction, it’s pretty much guaranteed to come from a past life. The most common one that I come across as a phobic fear is what they call a “phobia of judgment” and that is the one that results in a fear of public speaking, which is apparently the biggest fear in America. And because it is a past-life fear, you get that huge overreaction. What’s happening is that the soul is being taken back to a time when you were judged and that judgment lead to your death. Say that you stand up in front an audience and all of a sudden you’re hit almost instantaneously with this huge panic. You can have triggers in this life. For a lot of people it can be getting up or standing up in class, which can be very uncomfortable, to getting to teenage years or into the twenties, where they start to develop into a really big deal.

The soul is going back to a time when it was judged and basically reacting with that “fight or flight” reaction; it is wanting to get out of it because it was saying that the last time we were judged, we were executed or something really terrible happened. In fact, those really phobic reactions are usually related to death in one way or another. Most of the fears that we talk about are more to do with being taken off your soul’s life plan, having had your purpose derailed in a previous lifetime, and then there is a fear that comes up as a result of that.

TS: Ainslie, I know that you’re a psychic and you work with information that you get from your spirit guides in that there is this whole model about past- life fears resulting from an interrupted soul’s life plan, the way you’ve just been describing. But someone is listening and they are thinking, “I have a fear of this and I have a fear of that, and maybe it’s even a totally irrational fear–but I’m not sure it’s from a past life.” What gives you this confidence that these irrational, huge, fears are related to past-life interruptions of our soul’s plan?

AM: It’s largely through working with the spirit guides that I have learned all this stuff and it happens sort of gradually to begin with. I was noticing that I was doing a session with somebody and this whole topic of a past-life issue would come up and then what I would find was that I would explore a past-life on somebody’s behalf and then be able to predict, from what happened in the past, that they would have issues with this life.

People don’t generally come to me and say, “Well you know, I’ve got this huge fear of such and such. Where does it come from?” I’ll be looking at a past life and telling them that this or that happened and then I’ll look for what they call “resonances” in this life; these are reminders of soul-level memories, of what happened in a previous lifetime. And there are so many different ways that that works.

I was just looking over some notes this morning and I found a couple of really interesting ones where I told the client, for example, that she had frozen to death in a previous lifetime. She was male in that lifetime and a twenty-four-year-old trapper in the French speaking area of Canada. And she told me in the next session that we had, there was an incident that she had when she was a child when she was very tiny and her mother heard noises coming out of her room and went in and there was her little girl and her lips had turned blue. She was freezing cold even though the room was a normal temperature, and she was speaking French. Those sorts of things that I come across a lot where there’s an obvious kind of relationship between the past experience and the present over and over again. Like I said, I’m able to kind of predict things. For example, if I see what somebody has been handed in a previous lifetime, I can predict, for example, that they are going to have issues around the throat area; they will not usually feel comfortable wearing a turtleneck or a necklace and they probably have issues with the throat, especially if there’s a stress going on.

TS: So someone comes to you for a reading, how is it that you see a past life? Meaning, at some point, a visual story unfolds in front of you and you go, “Oh, that’s the past life?” Or your spirit guides tell you in certain words that this is the important past life of the person that they need to be aware of?

AM: In the old days when I first started, it would just kind of be out of the blue, “Here’s a past life that the spirit guides want to talk about.” Now what I do is I devote the whole of a second session with someone to looking at past-life issues, because that’s really where you find the big blocks. We’ll actually sit down with a view to exploring a past life. Generally what I do is I go into past life and pick up information. Some of it is visual, but most of it is actually more like reading thoughts when I work with my spirit guides. It’s very subtle. If you work with me, you see that I have to break off a lot and just pay attention and listen to what I’m getting and then pass on the information. It’s a little stop-start, and basically I’ll just pass it on just as I’m given it; I’ll just pass the full sentences that I’m given onto the client. But in amongst that, I will get visuals to help me understand, or sometimes even emotions, just to get a sense of what’s happening.

When it comes to emotions, in fact, one of the things that happens a lot when I’m working with someone is that even before I go into talking about the past life, my clients will start to feel emotions related to that life, maybe sadness or anxiety before I even talk. Time is fluid on the other side, as you know, and your soul can be experiencing emotions. As you start sort of stirring up this past life, you soul starts to feel a sense of what has happened; like it’s all being stirred up. That filters through into the person’s consciousness. It can happen five or ten minutes before I even start talking. And then if I’m working through something, it’s quite amazing, just to be talking about a past life and to be able to say, “Well, I bet you have a problem with such and such, or I bet you don’t do this…” Or you see physical things come up.

I was talking to somebody a few months ago who had some traumatic past life; I can’t remember the details now, but as part of that, there was a loss of an eye. And as I told her that she had lost an eye, she let out a little “yelp!” As we finished, I went back and said, “Okay, what triggered that reaction?” And she said that about ten seconds before I told her about losing an eye, she felt a stabbing pain behind her eye, and I was able to say that I thought it was the right eye and sure enough, it was. This was a way that her soul was remembering what happened in that previous lifetime. And I think these experiences help to validate that what you’re getting is real. It really did happen.

TS: Ainslie, your new book is called The Transformation, and you make a link between the importance of healing past-life issues and fears and this time that we’re in right now as a collective time of transformation. Can you help our listeners understand that link?

AM: We’re undergoing this transformation, which is a shift, as my spirit guides would put it, from a stage-three consciousness, which is a kind of awareness that we’ve had for the last fifty-five thousand years or so. And we’re actually going through this very big shift again like we did all those thousands of years before. This shift will take generations. It is picking up speed and it’s relatively fast. But there is a way that you as an individual can speed up the process of really altering your consciousness going into this stage-four consciousness. And the way to do it is to battle or overcome your past-life fears, which act as the blocks.

This was the process that I was made aware of. If you can understand the past life and what happened, and in most cases you can understand which past-life issue you have that are fears. And you can actually figure that out from the “resonances.” Then once you figure that out, you look for what is called “comic motivations,” which are emotions or feelings to actually push you to make the changes that you need to take you to this third step, which is really to embrace your soul’s core values or higher goals. So it’s really is a three-step process.

TS: Let’s fill in some of the gaps here that there may be. You said that we’re moving from a stage-three consciousness to a stage four. Can you just briefly describe stage one, two, and then three, and then the transformation that we’re going through into stage four?

AM: Stage one would be consciousness that you might find in a snake or a mouse or some creature that’s working mostly by instinct. Stage two would be larger mammals – cats, dogs, horses, and so on. Stage three, as I say we went from stage two to stage three about fifty-five thousand years ago, and it was really at that point that our species was able to embark on the path that we’ve taken. We’re able to think more rationally and develop our creativity or so on. We’ve been like this for all these years, but we’re going through this change now and it’s really at a point now where the planet needs to be changed. We as humans can’t really continue the way we are. Of the last ten-fifteen thousand years, we became caught up in what they call the “illusion” and that is really the barrier between the physical plane and the more spiritual plane. Up until that point, we were much more connected through the tribe. Everyone had a purpose and there was more meaning to life. Then once we started to go from the hunter-gather lifestyle to building cities and so on, artificial hierarchies came up and we have ended up in the world we’re in right now, which is very unequal and it’s violent. It’s not working for the majority of people. In some ways, in an element of a rescue mission, like souls are getting together and saying, “We need to do something about it. And this is time to really move forward.” It’s time for another great leap, if you like.

It’s already happening. I was thinking earlier about how a company like yours wouldn’t thrive in many parts of the world and probably wouldn’t have existed fifty or one-hundred years ago. But as our consciousness rises through the collective consciousness, then people are opening up to a more spiritual way of living. This is actually going to increase. What it means is that you’re going to see a lot more Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings in the world over the next few generations as this transformation takes place and people connect with their souls more strongly.

TS: What’s interesting to me, Ainslie, is here at Sounds True we published a book called The Mystery of 2012, and there are many authors and teachers who are associated with Sounds True who in different ways–they aren’t using the language of moving into “stage-four Consciousness”–but they are talking about a kind of shift that we’re going through right now as a collective. But I’ve never heard anyone else identify the healing of past-life fears as a critical part of this shift. That seems to be a unique contribution that you’re making. And so once again, I’m curious what you think the relationship is between healing these past-life fears that we have and this shift in consciousness?

AM: Essentially it is by healing these past-life fears you have no more blocks to achieving certain goals, so the system that I’ve got here, the system of the transformation, if you like, allows us to identify ten past-life fears. In fact, every fear falls into one of ten categories.

TS: Can you tell us what some of those categories are, at least the big ones?

AM: Sure, absolutely. One like “inferiority”–that’s one I come across a lot. Past-life fears of inferiority comes from having had a life where you had no say over your destiny and where someone else ran your life for you. You were really taken clear off your life plan very, very early on. And that can deal with controlling parents or different circumstances like slavery, perhaps, if you were born into a slave family. It’s about your entire life being not your own, arranged marriages, that sort of thing.

So you have that in your past and then in the present there’s an inability to fully exercise your self-determination or your ability to create your own life. One of the very common resonances that I’ve come across with that, and have been through in my own life, is that in times of stress or in relationships, there is this tendency to be taken into the past, into a life you lived when you had no power or self-determination. What you find is often very strong people who will become dominated by a partner, for example, or they lose their fight and find themselves on the floor looking up wondering, “How did I get here?” And that can be over a long period of time, sometimes. People get ground down in a relationship when they have this fear. And when you’re actually able to overcome that fear, which is through the comic motivation of self-determination, then this is where you see people just turning things around. I’ve seen clients of mine do amazing things because they’ve suddenly found that ability to finally run their own lives and turn around and get rid of the abusive partner or they’ll change the job they’ve been stuck in for years. It’s like gaining all this new power, and after they do it, they get taken to this place of respect, which is one of the soul’s ten goals that all match up to the fears. Once you gain that sense of self-respect, there’s no going back. In that area, you’ve taken that sort of leap.

That’s the sort of shift that I’m talking about. And each fear has a motivation that will help you to overcome it. By doing that, you no longer have that fear and you are open and connected to your soul and its transformational goal.

TS: It sounds like part of what you’re saying is that in this shift to what you’re calling fourth-stage Consciousness that when we heal our past-life fears, then we can live our life fearlessly? Is that what you’re saying?

AM: That’s essentially it. It is our fears that act as blocks to fulfillment. It is fear that holds us back in different ways. Let me give you an example of somebody with a fear of failure, which is a very common one. A fear of failure comes from having had usually multiple lifetimes, some were relatively recently, a few lifetimes before this one, where you haven’t completed your life plan; you’ve died young or somehow you didn’t experience what in a major way you set out to do here. And so what happens is that your soul has this fear that in this lifetime you may not live long enough to get everything done. It’s totally irrational and you would expect your soul to know the difference but it doesn’t. These are soul-level fears. And your soul is actually looking backward, not into the future so people with this fear are not going to die young, it’s just that the soul has the anxiety that that might happen. You could live to be 120 years old, but your soul is worried that you’re going to die at age five or twenty or whatever that you did in the past. It gives a sense of anxiety about getting things done but often manifests as the “headless chicken syndrome,” running around knowing that there is something that you want to be doing but never quite getting there. Or inertia where you just get stuck or you’re in a holding pattern.

If you have failure, a lot of people become “perfectionists.” There can be an association with making mistakes in a previous lifetime so people become very reluctant to take chances or make mistakes in this life and find it very difficult to make decisions. And again, once you overcome that fear, it just opens everything up. You find that people who overcome the fear of failure, they have a feeling of the world as their oyster and that they can achieve anything they want and that there will be plenty of time to do it. They don’t have that same anxiety. What’s interesting about the fear of failure is that the way of overcoming it is through curiosity; what your soul throws up as a motivation to help there is the desire to keep learning because, in fact, what happens when you have a short lifetime is that you miss out on a lot of education. Not the academic kind of education but just life experience. Curiosity pushes you to keep learning, and people with a fear of failure (and I come across this over and over again) prefer NPR, if they listen to the radio, or The Discovery Channel, if they watch TV, and they prefer non-fiction books to fiction. There’s a thirst for fact-based information. That’s taking the soul to a place of knowledge, which is the soul’s goal associated with that fear.

TS: Ainslie, you said that there were ten main fears and that all of our fears fit into one of these ten categories. Is each person primarily, do you think, trying to heal one of these or could I be trying to heal all ten of these different categories?

AM: When you get to be an older soul, and the people who are motivated to do this type of work are older souls, then you’ve probably got most of these fears operating in some way or another. But it’s a question of what’s been triggered in this life and how strong the fear was originally. As we go through our lives, we deal with fears and we’re working on things. We may not know it’s happening, but these fears are in a constant state of flux. What I will find is that I’ll be working with somebody who has got maybe five fears that are a one out of ten and then several that are a seven or a nine out of ten. I try to get a numeric value as often as possible to get a sense of which ones are strongest. But usually, once I go into the past life, it will become very clear what the issue is. If it’s a fear of death, it will come up immediately. It’s usually to do with violent death. If somebody was killed in battle, we can look at how that affects them.

TS: Let’s say that someone is listening, Ainslie, and they think, “I’d like to become more fearless in my life and I recognize that I have these irrational strong fears, but I just don’t know if this model of past lives . . . I don’t know if I buy it.” What would you say?

AM: That’s a good question. The people that come to me seem to have no problem accepting the existence of past lives. Again it’s an old-soul thing, but I really can’t remember having a client who looked at me and went, “Are you sure I’ve had past lives?” It seems to be just a given. Like I said, it’s likely an old-soul consciousness. It’s not something I’ve come across. I know that there are a lot of people who wouldn’t accept the whole concept but to me it makes perfect sense. I mean, I’ve been working with this for years and it really helps to explain so much. Coming across people with so many issues that can be predicted just from what happened in a lifetime. You can just see time and time again how past life would impact you.

There was just a couple of lines that I put in the book, which I loved: It was about a little girl, the mother is a client of mine and her little girl has been a handful. When she was about five years old, she was continually running away from home and causing a lot of grief for her mother and there was one time when they were having a stand-up argument and the little girl looked straight in mom’s eyes and said, “You can’t tell me what to do. I used to be your mom.” And you hear this from children a lot. This is something I come across when I’m talking to parents. They will say, “My child remembers being in Yugoslavia in a time of war or they remember certain experiences that they’ve had” but they are really very unlikely to make up this time of war, or something like that. It’s not a glamourous experience. Kids remember something that was a very unhappy experience or have panics at night that come from having been murdered in a previous lifetime. I just come across so much stuff like that.

TS: In this model of your work, you’ve mentioned this idea of the “Life Plan.” Can you say a little bit more about that? Is it the idea that every life has a plan and that yet it’s interrupted? Is the interruption not part of the life plan?

AM: No, the interruption is absolutely not a part of the life plan and that is really the key to all of this. Of all of the ten fears, nine are about having the life plan interrupted in some way, where you don’t get to experience what it was that you set out to do. The tenth one is the fear of death, which, of course, is the ultimate derailment of your life plan. If you’re killed, it’s kind of “game over.” What your soul does with each lifetime is that it creates this life plan from the astral plane before it comes onto the physical plane. The life plan includes things like a personality, missions that your soul wants to experience, and people whom your soul wants to hang out with, and karma that it wants to deal with from previous life times, and then what happens with each of these fears–they are fears such as a fear of loss. This happens when life is going along okay; you may be on your plan (most people are kind of on and off a little bit) but loss can come along and just devastate somebody.

Let’s say that your life is all about raising your family and your family all gets killed in an air-raid in World War II. You’re going get a huge fear of loss as a result of that and it will have really taken you off your life plan. Everything changes from that point on.

Each fear is related to an experience that your soul has where it doesn’t get to complete what it was set up to do. Powerlessness, for example…people with a fear of powerlessness usually have a need to control the environment that can be quite controlling. In fact, at the extreme end of the scale, they can become control freaks. But they are reacting to a life in which something has happened that’s taken them suddenly off their life plan. Powerlessness has to do with everything going okay one day and then the next minute, you’re thrown into a jail cell. From that moment on, you have no say over your destiny and so you find it in this life where powerlessness would be affecting somebody. They don’t want someone else telling them what to do. It’s a sort of overreaction to what happened in that previous lifetime.

TS: Is the healing simply becoming aware of the past life and the interruption that occurred? Does that awareness just generate the healing?

AM: I’ve had a lot of people who have been told about a past life and that’s been enough for a healing to take place. I mean sometimes it’s very, very radical stuff. I talk in the book about someone who got over a three-decade long very disruptive phobia just really through knowing what had happened in the previous lifetime.

TS: What was the phobia?

AM: It was a story about a woman, I was looking at her past life and she was a young, male immigrant from London several hundred years ago, in the early pioneer days in Virginia. The guy married and had a kid and a bit of land. I almost didn’t put the story into the book because I thought it sounded like an episode of Gunsmoke or just sounded a little hokey. But I’m glad I did because I got a chance to talk to my client about how this had affected her life. To cut a long story short, someone who wanted to get his hands on the property poisoned the family’s well, killing his wife and child. And when the young man tried to do something about it, he was actually accused of killing his own family. It was very unfair. He ended up locked up, but they left the cell open and a lynch mob dealt with the problem. And that was it.

I asked this client afterward, “Do you have any fear or issues surrounding being poisoned?” And she was completely silent; there was no noise on the other end of the line at all. And I tried again, because I could hear her breathing, “Does that mean anything to you?” I am looking for these connections all the time with past lives. Finally she whispers, “I’m paranoid about being poisoned.” And I responded, jokingly, “Who isn’t?!” But she said, “No, you don’t understand.” It turned out that her entire life had been ruled by her fear of being poisoned. She had spent decades throwing out food. If food came into the house and it was opened and she wasn’t the one who checked the seal then it had to go out. It got worse and worse, especially when the kids came along in the early 1980s with the little cans of baby food. If the cap for the baby food didn’t pop with just the right sound when it was being opened, then out they went. She was wasting so much food and causing a lot of tension in the relationship. Her husband was going crazy. She was only drinking bottled water and water from a well, which she was having tested every couple of weeks. She wouldn’t even shower if it was too long between the tests.

Then there was the Tylenol scare I think in 1981 when poisoned Tylenol was put on the shelves. This left her feeling validated and she was able to say, “See, it really does happen.” She had to take tranquilizers and she was an absolute mess. A lot of my clients talk about knowing what happened in the past as a burden or huge weight being lifted. This happened almost immediately for this woman. A lot of people talk about that happening within minutes or even as we’re talking, they feel as though something has happened. And then in her case what happened was a month later, she went to the fridge, took out a carton of milk, poured herself a glass and drank it, and then realized that she hadn’t checked the seal. She said, for her, that was the biggest day of her life. It was absolutely huge and she’s gone from strength to strength. She is off the medication and everything is back to normal, but this is after decades.

TS: Now Ainslie, it is one thing to have a session with a gifted intuitive or psychic who can read your past lives and report them. But it’s another thing to be able to figure that out for oneself and then to have the healing that comes from that and the potential fearlessness. Can people really figure this out for themselves?

AM: Yes, and that is really the beauty of the system. It allows you to look at any of those past-life fears and identify them by the resonances that I’ve been talking about. And once you’ve done that, then you can work with your spirit guides to overcome the fear. You can do it yourself. In fact, although it’s dramatic and fast when you actually work on the past life and knowing what happened, you can still make major shifts and overcome huge blocks just by working on the resonances. You don’t need to know the actual facts of the life.

TS: By “resonances” you mean what I’m experiencing in this life that seems related?

AM: Those reminders that can be the emotional or physical. There are different ways in which that will come through. People will have unexplained ailments; very commonly I come across this. I talk a lot about that in the book as well, people with unexplained itching or gastric problems, which all shifts as soon as they work through the past lives. But you can look at those resonances and figure out the kind of fear or fears (plural) because so far in my career, I’ve not met anyone who has just one fear. Most people have a good lot of them. Then you can work on the different exercises that you can use and you can work with your spirit guides to overcome the effects.

TS: We’re going to have to talk a little bit more about that. I’m going to work with my spirit guides? Okay, you’re going to have to help me understand that.

AM: Okay. Well, spirit guides are support on the other side. We all have them and these are souls on other planes, who help us in our life. A lot people are not aware that they have spirit guides, and it’s actually a guarantee in our work that we all have them. It’s just a question of calling them in and working with them. We have a kind of hands-free approach so you have to really get them involved. But once you do that, you can undergo amazing healing. You can tell them that you have identified this fear and what must have happened in a previous lifetime because of the symptoms that you have and then you can tell them that you want to work on this–the cosmic motivation that is related to that fear–and that will take you to where you need to go. And they work really in suits; it’s like the cavalry coming to rescue you.

TS: Now if I don’t know whom my spirit guides are or if I’ve never made contact with them, you make it sound pretty lickity-split, 1,2,3 – kind of thing. Is it like that? That I’m going to contact my spirit guides and the cavalry is going to come rushing in?

AM: It takes a little bit of practice but I just want to say that if I can do it, anybody can. I learned to communicate with spirit guides starting about twelve years ago. It was really just a question of sitting down and talking. I’ve helped a few people. Actually, I’ve had a couple of clients just in the last week who have just been blown away by just that very thing of sitting down and giving it a chance and feeling the presence of somebody there and feeling a dialogue beginning. It’s something you can build. A lot of people never give it a try or don’t know that you can even do that sort of thing. Once you do it, it’s like having this amazing support system on the other side.

TS: Ainslie, can you give me an example from your own life of the healing of a past-life fear? How you became aware of it, what the fear was and then what change has been for you?

AM: Yeah. My biggest one was a phobia of judgment. And when I was younger, I had the two classic symptoms. One was a concern about what people were saying or thinking about me. The other was a fear of public speaking. I didn’t talk in public for three decades. I wouldn’t have even done an interview like this. I was totally phobic about this. I went into a past life in which I was executed for my political views. The other part of it that I did was that I worked with my spirit guides to use a technique that I put in the book (in the appendix in the back), which is called “Identify and Annihilate” and, of course, once you’ve identified the fear, that’s half the battle. And then basically you take the fear and show it no mercy. This technique will just talk you through what you need to do. It’s based on the principle that when we have a fear, the tendency is to suppress it and cover it up. And here, what you’re doing, you’re actually pulling out the fear and continually giving it no place to hide and then eventually it’s forced to dissipate or disappear. And this is something that I keep hearing from clients, about how effective this has been. I show them how to do it once and after that, they’ve been able to identify other issues and just use it for a few weeks. Huge changes happen that way.

It really helped me hugely because it was certainly going to impact my career as an author if I wasn’t going to be able to go into bookstores and talk about my work. It had been hugely debilitating. I couldn’t give speeches or talks. I’d even have terrible anxiety whenever somebody else was giving a talk. That has all changed since these days; you can’t shut me up. It’s been really, absolutely transformative.

TS: Just to understand this technique. I get that you identified this in a previous life for speaking out politically; you were punished. You were killed?

AM: Yeah.

TS: But then what did you do once you realized that?

AM: Once I knew what had happened, there were two things: one was that my spirit guides had me write about the life and make as many connections between past and present as I possibly could, and had the kind of “A-ha, that’s why I have this issue or that issue.” I was able to go in and find different elements of this and then my spirit guides had me do a regression with them. It was a slightly different version, basically going back into that life with a different perspective on it, just to see it as a detached observer instead of the person right in the middle of the drama. In fact, that was one of the things that came to writing about this, and this is what my guides had advised my clients, is that when you’re writing about a traumatic or difficult past life, you want to push the fears into the past as much as possible. When you come to writing about it, you do it in the third person, not as it happened to me but as it happened to this person. It helps to push it away from you.

TS: That’s helpful. And it does bring up my final question for you, which is: you mentioned early in our conversation about how time is fluid. Yet here we are talking about our past lives as if they’ve happened in a sequential way. And yet, I’ve heard people say, “Well, actually, all our lives are happening in a parallel wrinkles of time” and of course, all of this sort of bends my mind into liquid form. But I’m curious, Ainslie, what you think about that? Are our past lives happening in the past or are they happening in concurrent wrinkles of time? What’s your view?

AM: I’ve talked to my spirit guides about this and my understanding is that it’s all happening in this linear fashion. Past lives are in the past. This idea of it all happening all at once, I don’t know. That’s not something that I’m getting but maybe it’s a different way of expressing the concept that I don’t understand. We talk about the movement of the Universe being in a forward direction. It’s only going in one direction, which is good news when you talk about the transformation because that shift in consciousness has to go in this forward motion, continually rising. It may ebb and flow but it ultimately is getting to this place of higher consciousness, in part because of the forward movement of the Universe.

TS: I just have now a more final question, which is: do you think that if somebody looks inside and notices that they are being run by a fear of some kind, that that means that there is always some past-life resolution work that they could do and benefit from?

AM: So far, I’ve not come across anyone with a fear that I can’t trace back to a past life. What we have in the present are triggers and so we have an experience where sometimes something happens in childhood. It explains, for example, why some people are phobic about dogs. They’ve had some experience, perhaps in this life. But you can take two people and one has been bitten by a dog and nothing happens. They don’t go through their life being terrified by dogs. Whereas somebody else has the same experience and they won’t go near the creatures. What’s happening is that one has the past-life issue and the other doesn’t. It’s a surprise with all the fears that people are going to react in very different ways, depending on how big the fears are in the first place. You can take two siblings and they will react very differently to the same kind of experiences growing up, depending on what’s in their past.

I haven’t found any fear that you can’t trace back in some way to the past life and then deal with. You can help to dissipate that fear in this life, whatever it is.

TS: Very good. I’ve been speaking with Ainslie MacLeod. He’s the author of a new Sounds True book entitled The Transformation: Healing your Past Lives to Realize Your Soul’s Potential. And beginning on May 3, 2010, at 8pm EST, Ainslie will be leading us through a three-part online course on healing your past-life fears. And as part of the online course, am I correct Ainslie, you will actually be helping people learn how to identify which past-life fears are operating in their life?

AM: Absolutely.

TS: Wonderful. Once again, beginning on May 3rd at 8pm EST, “Healing Your Past Life Fears,” a three-part online course with Ainslie MacLeod, the author of the new book The Transformation. Thank you, Ainslie, for being with us.

AM: Thank you, Tami.

TS: For SoundsTrue.com, my name is Tami Simon. SoundsTrue.com: Many Voices. One Journey.