Spurned and Burned

Many Lives, Many Masters, written by Brian Weiss, medical doctor and American psychiatrist was one of the first books I’d read about reincarnation. I’d wondered, specifically after the loss of someone very close to me, whether a person or a pet, what happens to them after they die? What does their soul do? And if they return to earth what transpires in-between lifetimes? Perhaps just as importantly, does the “residue” or trauma from past lifetimes affect us in the current one? Do we bring our baggage back in, locked within our souls?

Weiss wrote about his personal and professional experiences as a psychotherapist regressing patients through hypnosis. It was through this work he discovered that there is another journey the soul goes on in-between lifetimes. His book is filled with these accounts. Another intriguing author/pioneer is Dolores Cannon, who crossed over in 2014 having had a career as a hypnotherapist who specialized in past life regressions. She started out as a typical Navy wife raising her family and using hypnotherapy for clients wanting to lose weight or stop smoking until several major events catapulted her life into the past life regression realm. Lastly, I’ll refer you to Francisco Candido Xavier, the Brazilian Spiritist Medium who wrote Nosso Lar, in which a deceased physician recounts the tale of his life after dying.

Let me state outright, if you haven’t guessed by now, I don’t think there is only one life. I think we keep coming back to “earth school” to have a physical life until our soul evolves enough that we can go onto other realms. Now that I’ve come out with it, I want to talk about a time period that my soul remembered, the time of the Cathars during the 13th Century in France and how I came to be interested in them.

I was introduced to the Cathars when I had my very first Aura-Soma reading, before becoming a trained consultant myself. Aura-Soma is an esoteric “self-selective soul system” according to founder/creator Vicky Wall. Readings are based upon the colored, numbered and named bottles you choose. The equilibrium bottles in this ever evolving system correlate to the chakras, numerology, astrology, the tarot, the language of color, the tree of life, and past lives. I chose a bottle that correlated to a past life involving the Cathars. Who were the Cathars and what did they have to do with me in my present life?

I discovered the Cathars were a gnostic sect who believed that they could have a direct relationship with the divine devoid of any intermediaries. They lived in a culture that was rooted in the evolution and enhancement of the feminine. That belief however was blasphemy in 1244, as it threatened the powerful Roman Catholic Church. History has it that at a mountaintop chateau in Southern France called Montsegur there was a nine month siege during which Inquisitional forces were called out to reform or obliterate the Cathars. The French troops built a palisade of wood and other flammables and herded over two hundred men and women who refused to renounce their belief to a blazing wooden pyre. It’s been written that the smell of human flesh burning filled the valley for miles. The burning at the stake was a message to others never to attempt to have a personal relationship to the Divine without a religious intermediary such as a priest, bishop, cardinal or pope. This story is more fleshed out in Arthur Guirdham’s book, The Cathars and Reincarnation.

Shortly after my Aura-Soma reading  with Carol Jean McKnight, psychotherapist, author, Aura-Soma practitioner/trainer who later became my Aura-Soma teacher, I serendipitously discovered Christa Lancaster and Marc Bregman, authors of Flesh off the Bone: Dream Descent Through Past Life Trauma in which Christa wrote about her regression sessions leading to her discovery that she was amongst the Cathars burned at the stake in the Languedoc region of France in the thirteenth century. That past life trauma caused present day challenges until her regression sessions allowed her to uncover and work through it. Reading the book, I had a powerful visceral response to her account of the burning. I felt like I was reliving the event as I read.

Was I burned at the stake? Undoubtedly, just as many other women healers, midwives, herbalists, men, children and even animals for that matter were because we wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t conform to the societal rules set by the ruling elite. The burning times occurred throughout Europe and in America in Salem, MA in 1692/1693.

My soul remembers them. I’m grateful to be alive and living in a time where my wicked good witchy soul can thrive.

blessed be bitches!

I mean Witches! Witches! Witches!