There are many ways to find out who you were or what you were in a past life. In this article, we’ll talk about who you were and what you were in a past life, how to find out more clearly, and how this can help you on your spiritual path.

So you want to know who you were in a past life…

Are you sure you want to know? Going into a past life is not always fun and heart-warming. If you’re a ‘macho man’ in this lifetime, you might be disturbed to find out that you were a dainty little lady in your past life. If you’re a dainty little lady in this lifetime, what if you find out you were a disheveled, stinky beggar? Are you ready for that kind of experience?

We’re just kidding… sort of. The truth is, the deep spiritual value of finding out who we were or what we were in a past life can come from discovering the experiences we had back then that have shaped our souls and who we are today. It can also be about gaining insight, learning, and healing experiences that help us with difficult situations in our current life. It can even about connecting to people in our current life by finding out who they were to us in past lives. People often look into their past lives to find their loved ones, people they are having difficult relationships with, and people who have passed. That’s because understanding past life relationships can help us heal current life relationships. Approaching the question of who you were in a past life with this constructive spiritual perspective can allow you to have a deeply spiritual awakening and spiritual healing experience.

Asking the question who or what was I in a past life with intention

Believe it or not, in a past life, you could have been a man or a woman, a sailor or a chef, a peasant or a prince, a shaman or an atheist. Perhaps, you were all of these in one life or another. That can happen because we’ve all had many past lives.  Many sage spiritual beings have said that we’ve actually had thousands of past lives! When trying to see into and experience a past life, we can actually go back into any one of the many past lives we’ve had. With enough practice, time, and patience, we can go back into many different past lives and gradually build a more complete picture of who and what we’ve been.

Because we’ve had many different past lives, when asking “what was I in a past life”, it’s good to set an intention that will guide which past life you discover.  That way, you’re not just randomly landing on one of the thousands of past lives you’ve had. When you set this intention, you can discover information about who you were or what you were that will bring you answers, healing, and insight in this current life and future lives to come.

How can finding out what or who I was in a past life help me?

When you find out who you were, you can better understand why you feel the way you feel and why you’ve had certain experiences in this life. Meaning, if you have certain thoughts, emotions, relationships, motivations, and desires in this life that you want to release, understand, or even cultivate, finding out who you were in a past life can be very helpful.

For example, let’s say you’re an entrepreneur or business person and are having difficulty relaxing and releasing stress in your life. You might find that in a previous life, you were poor and experienced a lot of pain from the poverty.  Don’t worry, finding this out will not diminish your ambition. It can, however, help you understand, better manage, and release your stress. That’s because when you realize what your irrational and unnecessary stress reactions were coming from, you can then feel more safe and comfortable releasing it.

Here’s another example, let’s say you’re child feels that you’re an overprotective parent and you feel very afraid that something bad will happen to your children so you manage them very carefully. It’s possible that it a past life you were a parent and lost a child. As a result, when your child goes out and plays, you experience a lot of fear and anxiety about them getting hurt or something bad happening to them. If you find out about your past life experience having lost a child, you can remove this anxiety producing influence from your life and therefore feel more inner-peace as a parent. With a skilled spiritual counselor, you could even take this another step forward and release any guilt or shame you carried from that lifetime after having lost a child. This would be very meaningful in your life today because the guilt and shame we feel in past lives gets carried over into this life time. Once we identify this guilt and shame, we can clear it and feel better!  This type of healing experience can make a big difference in the relationship between a child and parent. Many such relationships encounter unwanted issues when children feel over-protected.

Another example is if you are having difficulty in relationships in this life – maybe, you’re having difficulty manifesting the optimal relationship for you. It’s possible that in a past life you experienced betrayal or heart break and this continues to affect you in this lifetime. Or, maybe you were in an abusive relationship and your self-esteem and feelings of self-worth in this lifetime are still damaged from that lifetime. Finding out who you were in a past life can really help you bring the different challenges you face in your current life into context. This context can then give you the spiritual insight, fuel, and courage required to make a positive change.

Yet another example is if you’re in a relationship with an emotionally insensitive person, or a narcissist in this lifetime. By finding out who you were in a past life, you might find that this person had done great things for you in a past life and this lifetime was giving you an opportunity to help them. This type of insight can give a husband or wife precious fuel to continue and persevere during challenging relationship issues.

We’ll leave you with a short story of a past life regression we did with someone. This person was having difficulty having financial success and receiving money in their life. They frequently felt like they didn’t deserve money, that they weren’t good enough, and that what they were doing for money was wrong or bad.

This was creating severe limitations on their capacity to be successful, despite working long hours. Often times, their internal resistance was camouflaged in the form of external setbacks. For example, they might have great success with a client only for something unexpected to happen that would interfere. Or, they might start to have good success in one direction and then stop and try something else for some reason.  When finding out what they were in their past life, they discovered that they were a thief in about 500 AD. During this lifetime, they lived in a village where people knew they were a thief and let them steal for almost 10 years until one day, something terrible happened in the village and one of the villagers blamed it on the thief (event though it wasn’t him). That villager violently killed him. This past lifetime left emotional residue of feeling not good enough, and like it was unsafe to take or receive anything from anyone because supposedly it could lead to a violent death. As you can see, what we were in past lives can continue to influence us in our current lives. That said, by learning this information, this person was able to gain perspective about why they had such difficulty with money in this lifetime and they also gained fuel to release the negative emotions they felt about themselves and their work. This inevitably led to them healing those negative karmas, and becoming far more financially successful and being able then to travel and experience the luxurious and abundant life this person was wanting for.

Why go into past lives

Finding out who we were in past lives, what we did in past lives, who was with us, and what happened in our relationships, can allow us to have powerful spiritual awakening experiences in our present lives. It can also help us spiritually relieve symptoms like grief, pain, anxiety, and more. My wife and I are certified in past life regression by Dr. Brian Weiss who is a world renowned psychiatrist and leader in this field. A past life regression is where a spiritual counselor guides you through meditation or hypnosis into experiencing a past life and finding out who you were. People have experienced spiritual healing miracles as a result of these past life experiences.

Although a session is one of the more accurate and healing ways to find out who you were in a past life, this isn’t the only way to find out who you were. There are many ways to find out. We’ll list them below.

How to find out who you were:

1. For a quick and dirty answer to this question, you can try a free past life test. There are many of these tests available online that you can find with a quick google search, however, you don’t need those quizzes to do it. It’s likely that most of these online tests are just for fun, and not optimal for those looking for a true spiritual experience. Of course, no one or test can really tell you who you were better than yourself, unless they’re an advanced and accurate spiritual medium. Even so, a spiritual medium would have to work with you specifically, so there’s still no quiz they could make that would be accurate for everyone. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun to take such a quiz and share with your loved ones!
2. Another way you can do it is by reflecting on your passions, recurring experiences, and out of the ordinary personality traits. You can journal about these and create a picture of who you may have been in past lives. After all, it’s this information that the online tests use to try to uncover who you were in a past life (although sometimes they’ll also use your birthday and astrology).
3. None of these methods, however, compare to having the actual experience of a session with a therapist where you yourself can go back in time and experience vivid past life memories that can include seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting things. Not only can you have these experiences where you can remember nearly everything about who you were, you can also often encounter and recognize people from your present life – a father, mother, daughter, sister, or even a boss – who were also with you in those past lives.
4. A good guided meditation can guide you deep into your subconscious mind or your spiritual self where your past life memories are stored. We may record a meditation for that purpose in the near future. That said, we advise caution and don’t recommend you do this on your own unless the meditation is designed to be safe. If you have difficulties doing it on your own, or can’t seem to access past lives, know that this is common in the beginning. With practice, most people are able to have an experience.
5. Some people who are particularly spiritually developed can see into their own and other’s past lives. To do this accurately, it’s important that the person has their chakras open and clear and that they don’t have any fears, aversions, or attachments that could bias them in their process of interpreting their readings. Again, unless you can do this yourself, having someone else read your past lives is really not the same as having your own experiences – however, it can sometimes be more accurate if you find a very good and accurate psychic (which is uncommon).