How many of the following do you relate to?

• You buy spiritual or intuitive development programs but you have a ton of resistance to completing them…only to end up buying another and starting the cycle again
• The idea of developing your gifts makes you incredibly nervous
• You feel like maybe it’s wrong to use your gifts, but you’re not sure why you feel that way
• You’re deathly afraid of making mistakes when it comes to using your intuition, even if you’re new at using your gifts and in a stage where it’s fine to make lots of mistakes
• You really dislike the Church in this lifetime, although you have no basis for that dislike. You dislike going into churches and you dislike what they stand for
• You put the brakes on in your psychic development. You make a bit of progress, then you get scared and shut it down
• You don’t like doing anything that isn’t ‘approved’ by society.

If you related to many of the above statements, it’s likely that you have some past life traumas which are holding you back in the area of psychic development.

What are past life traumas?

Most of us incarnated here today have had many past lives and some of those lives would have featured significant tragedy and trauma. Usually when we die and a lifetime is over, we cross over to the other side with no problems. But when we die after a lifetime that involved a traumatic death, we may not cross over to the other side completely. Instead, we will often stay ‘stuck’ and become earthbound, leaving a piece of our mental or emotional body on the earth plane. We may even be seen or perceived by sensitive people as an earthbound spirit as we wander the earth, lost and stuck. That lifetime remains unresolved and incomplete. But we move forwards on our soul’s journey anyway, with that particular fragment of ourselves missing. And when we reincarnate, we may carry the wounds from that past life in our physical and etheric bodies, Some people are actually born with PTSD due to past life events.

Other people are not born with PTSD but have it awakened if they find themselves in a traumatic situation in this life that is reminiscent of a previous lifetime. In a situation like that, we can awaken the remnants of the old trauma and be affected by it. We may even experience physical issues in our physical body that corresponds to the area of the etheric body where the old trauma is stored.

Sometimes we can be triggered by our past life tragedies and traumas without us even going through something traumatic. For example, if you perished in the Holocaust in your most recent lifetime, you might respond in a stressful way when interacting with authority figures like the police or military. You might find that you have a stress response when this is not appropriate for the situation you are in this time around. Your heart might beat fast and your blood pressure might increase when you see a police car, even though you are a law-abiding person. This is what I mean when I say that all kinds of things can trigger past life stuff — it doesn’t even have to be something inherently traumatic that triggers us.

Now I’m going to look at the 2 most common past life fears that can arise when a person is on a path of psychic development, and how you can deal with them.

1. A fear of being ‘outed’

I’ve noticed that it is common for psychic development students to have some serious fears around visibility (and this is a fear I had, too.) What I mean by visibility is that people who train to give readings or healings for others are often afraid of how people they know or how their community will react when they go public with their new business or work.

I believe that this fear is quite normal, and the reason for it is that historically, many people lived in societies with an established way of connecting with the Divine, and that established way of doing things involved rules that were often enforced. The punishments for breaking rules could be severe and brutal.

So, in many societies throughout history, if you stepped forward offering your spiritual gifts to the community in your own unique way, it may not have ended well for you.

We only need to look at the Inquisition to see what happens when people go their own way with their spirituality and make the mistake of not hiding it.

So, it’s clear that throughout history it was often safer to hide your spirituality and your spiritual gifts.

Some of us realise this, and think, “well it’s safer these days to be a visible spiritualist or psychic. So therefore I need to put myself out there and be visible! It’s what I need to do to succeed.”

I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t matter what happened in the past — there is no ‘should’ about whether you are an ‘out and proud’ psychic or whether you quietly want to set up a website for the right people to find, that the rest of the people around you don’t know about.

Basically I’m saying, don’t feel pressured to be highly visible and ‘out’ if you don’t want to be. You get to choose how you want to approach this. You can still be highly visible and taking clients in the spiritual space, but be invisible to the people around you.

How do you know if you’re affected by this past life fear of being ‘outed’ in a spiritual sense?

Past life fears often have a sense of panic attached to them, and they can create unconscious resistance.

So, if you have completed a training to give readings or healings for others but you can’t seem to launch a business because it terrifies you too much (and you feel a sense of panic around it), that’s a sign something bad has happened to you in a past life as a result of using your psychic or spiritual gifts.

Many old souls are drawn to giving readings and healings to others, but they also have more past life fears that can get in the way, simply because they’ve had more lifetimes.

Towards the end of this article, I’m going to talk about some ways to deal with these past life fears and get past them.

Now let’s have a look at the second common past life fear that gets in the way of psychic development:

2. A fear of ‘getting it wrong’

I did a past life regression several years ago where I discovered I had a lifetime as a temple oracle in Ancient Greece. My job was to give future predictions and channelled advice to the authorities and to the people who came to the temple.

I did not have much interest in predicting the future and instead I spent a lot of time in communion with the deities. A foreign army invaded our city and I had failed to predict it. A man came to stab and kill some of the women who worked in the temple as oracles, and he succeeded in killing some of them. I escaped but tried to kill myself by hanging myself. I failed but died not long after from exposure, after fleeing my home.

Soon after the regression ended, a rash came up around my neck. You can read the full story and see the pic here.

I am telling this story because it is a past life situation that revolved around making a mistake (i.e. not bothering to focus on the job I was being paid to do, which was predicting the future). This clearly ended badly for me in that lifetime, and it was something that tripped me up as a psychic until I healed it.

We can in fact be traumatised by any mistake we may make in a past life that ended in our death, especially if it was a traumatic death such as execution or a murder.

We can also carry this fear of making mistakes into our psychic development work. It may literally feel like, ‘If I make a mistake, I’ll die.’

But the problem with this is that when we are new intuitives, we can’t be too scared to make mistakes. By making mistakes, we learn how our intuition operates. We also learn to distinguish between the voice of true intuition, and the voice of our human mind.

We learn through mistakes. So if you never make a mistake, you’re not learning and progressing.

Here is an article I wrote on this topic: Feel Free to Screw It Up!

If you have this deathly fear of ‘getting it wrong’, I highly recommend you read that article.

How to deal with past life fears

The #1 best way to deal with past life fears is through a past life regression — and one that has a focus on healing. Some past life regressionists will take you back to a previous life but won’t do anything to heal it. You want to avoid that.

I wrote an article on finding a past life healing regressionist here.

Something else you can do to soothe your past life fears is get a past life reading with someone and ask the person who does the reading if there is any past life energy still hanging around that is holding you back in the area of psychic or spiritual development.

Sometimes having the awareness of the past life situation, and understanding how it affects you, can help to dislodge the fear. However, this isn’t going to work for the most traumatic lifetimes (and in those cases, it may cause the unresolved trauma to leak through into this life even further.)

You can also learn to get past life information in my Akashic Record Reading Program.