Prologue

I didn't believe in past life regression. I didn't believe in past life regression like I didn't believe in face tattoos. I knew both existed, I just knew they weren't for me. As far as I could tell, nothing good ever came out of either.

So how did my belief in past lives change? It happened because eventually, all false beliefs must meet their maker. In the case of me, as maker, I had embraced my firmly-held belief in the categorical absence of past lives because somewhere along the way, I believed someone or someones who, in turn, believed in a world smaller than what is, despite the orgy of evidence to the contrary. Truth is always bigger than the consciousness that did not see it.

I also had help. I was taught, like most of us, that to change beliefs once formed, to let go of them, will result in a hard fall down, or down fall, leaving one with scrapped knees, or worse, broken legs, or in the most exaggerated of imagined outcomes, hobbled by Kathy Bates' character in the movie adaptation of Stephen King's classic horror story Misery. In actuality, what I learned is that when I let go of a precious belief, when I marshal the strength to let go, I can't fall hard because nothing is below to break the fall - there is only openness.

This is the emptiness that is the subject of Buddhist contemplation. It is also the Yin (matched with the Yang). It is, said in a different way, the Divine Feminine. And the reason you don't know about it as one half of your reality is that you have designed your experience so that this awareness is awoken now, right now. The emptiness, this Yin, is more complicated than black and white. It can't be understood with black and white thinking. It is paradoxical by nature. And with all paradoxes, to solve it requires a paradigm shift in assumptions. Black and white turns into color, into a rainbow of colors. This is, what the Tibetans call your “Rainbow Body.”

Because the Yin it is both empty and full, full of the potential to be who we are, we initially feel confused about it. Emptiness, this Yin, is both the womb and the baby in the womb (think more like Schrödinger’s Baby). It is also the mother. Why have you not heard of this before? You probably don't need me to tell you that you have been living in a Yang-dominant situation. Do you feel like you can just feel? Do you feel like you have enough spaciousness in your life? If the answer is "no," you have an imbalance, biased to the Yang. That is why you are now learning about this emptiness. It is the Divine Feminine, and she is waking you up to this part of you, this half of who you are.

What I didn't see before learning to let go, to just be in the emptiness, was that by releasing my grasp on any idea, the fall is up, not down. I realized I - can - fly. We can also fall out, like a small bird, kicked out of the nest so it can launch on its own. Our mother knows we can fly, but we don't see it, and therefore, we can't believe it. But she knows. This primordial mother knows.

So, now that I have explained how I let go of believing in the fictional nature of past lives, you may be asking, is she sitting and writing this with the yin-yang tattoo gracing the right side of her face? Rest assured dear reader, I am not. But what I am doing is getting ready to tell you a story, a true story, with the names of the innocent removed and replaced by other names which may or may not be the names of the guilty, or other folks that are also innocent. Either way, I will make sure the name thing is too confusing for anyone to reconstruct what actually happened to whom. Because in this, and all things, the real meaning isn't in the relative details. True meaning can only be found in Love, and names for people are just labels to help you find where to go to meet the one you love. Think about it. And when you are done with that, let it go too.