Children's Past Life Memories - Responding

Carol Bowman in her book Children's Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child, describes how to be helpful to your child when he or she talks about a past life memory.  These are her words:

Stay calm:  Breathe.  Clear your mind so you can devote your full attention to your child.

Acknowledge:  With assuring words and a loving tone of voice, acknowledge your child and the truth of the memory.  This keeps the memory flowing and ensures a positive outcome.

Discern:  Listen closely to discern the facts and emotions of the emerging story.  Also, look for the underlying themes of the memory, and how they relate to your child's present life.

Allow emotion:  Always allow your child to follow the memory wherever it leads, and to express all emotions, no matter how disturbing or intense.

Clarify past and present:  With loving assurance, clarify for your child the difference between images from past lives and present reality.

After the intital shock of actually listening to a past life memory, the last point may actually be the most surprising to parents - that young children sometimes believe that their memories happened in THIS life.  If this happens, you may have to simply explain that what they remember is from another life and that they are now safe in their new body with their current family.

Children's Past Life Memories - Recognition

According to author Carol Bowman  you can tell fantasy stories that children make up from real past life memories by these signs:

Matter-of-fact tone. When children make up stories, their voices tend to change tones in a singsong way, while past-life-memories tend to be told in a more mature, even tone.

Consistency over time. Fantasy stories change over time and are easily forgotten by children, while past life memories are unusually consistent over time.

Knowledge beyond experience.  While fantasy stories can incorporate words heard on TV or in a story book, sometimes children's past life memories show knowledge and vocabulary the parents are sure they have never been exposed to.  For example, a toddler talks about different kinds of sails on a ship that was in use a century ago.

Corresponding behavior and traits.  Special skills or phobias can be connected to memories from past lives.  Also, some children are born with birthmarks or birth defects that correspond with their memories of death in their past lives.

The next blog post will be about how to respond if your child shares a past life memory with you.

Little Quirks

A mom in recently asked Aakash if her son's quirky way of saying no could be past-life related.
When her son says no he says 'nay'.  She has no idea where he might have heard that or understand its concept.  When she asks him he says nay means no!

This quirk could be something he saw in a TV show but, maybe it stuck with him because of his past life experience.  Does your child have a strange quirk that leaves you wondering where they could have possibly come up with that? 

Short Answers

Young children talk in little spurts.  One moment they are talking about a bug or a tree, the next about being hungry or something else totally unrelated.  They don’t stay on one topic for long.  And they are not interested in listening to one topic for long either. 

So when they ask a complicated question, with a long adult complicated answer forming in your mind, you often lose their attention by the time you get a few sentences into any well thought out answer.  So what to do?

Keep it simple!  And also keep in mind that when they ask a question, they have already been thinking about the subject, so you might want to ask them what they think before even attempting to answer.  Then, if you provide an answer, try to keep it short – the younger the child, the shorter the explanations.

Spirituality and Happiness

Here is a link to an article by The Washington Times reporting on two studies done on children and spirituality.  The studies found that children with a sense of spirituality, not necessarily religion, were significantly happier than other children:

"The study itself did not emphasize the importance of institutional religious practices but focused more on the child’s sense of “personal meaning” - and their sense of such basic values as kindness toward others, altruism, meaningful relationships and volunteering."

What do you think?

Being Thankful

We all get caught up in the stressors of the day.  It can be very easy to forget the good things that are around us. An easy way to let go of the demands of the day is to remind your self of the things you were grateful for that day.  Even if it is just that you have a roof over your head.  Being grateful puts things into perspective and teaching your children this valuable lesson can help them with their stressful world too.

Sunday Morning Report on Past Lives

Some children spontaneously remember details of other lives.  Most adults need some help to activate those kinds of memories.  Take a look at this interesting report:   Sunday Morning Video about Past Lives