Since 2024, I’ve been doing Evolutionary Manifesting readings, where I explore the past life blocks that are stopping clients from manifesting their goals. (I call these past life blocks ‘karmic complexes’ and if you’re new to this term, you can read about it here.)

Karmic complexes are traumas that impact the soul. They can be caused by defeats, losses and tragedies that we go through during any given incarnation and which we do not recover from in the lifetime in which they occurred. The trauma is such that the past life self who goes through the experience dies with serious unfinished business.

Because the nature of trauma is to repeat itself until it finds resolution, with a karmic complex, we will find ourselves repeating the same sort of experience over and over in our lives, and one lifetime after another, in an attempt to ‘downgrade’ the original trauma and find resolution. (But there is a solution to these unwanted repeating patterns, and that is what Evolutionary Manifesting is all about.)

When I do an Evolutionary Manifesting reading, I research for clients whether they have a karmic complex, and if so, what are the past life experiences that originated their karmic complex? And how these past life experiences are echoing through their life today, and preventing them from having the life they want. 

In this article, I’m going to talk about the most common reason for a severe karmic complex being kicked off in the first place. 

It is suicide.

I’ll give you an example in a reading I recently did for a client. 

This client is someone who has a successful, spiritually themed YouTube channel. However, she wants to expand her business or her vocation by writing a book, and found herself feeling blocked. So she got a reading with me. Here is what it said:

You have one karmic complex affecting the manifestation of your desired intention.

I’m going to tell you the story of how this karmic complex was initiated. 

You had a male lifetime in Argentina during the 1700s.

In that life, you were married with lots of daughters. You lived in a place in Argentina where it was quite cold but the terrain was beautiful. You were involved in the smuggling trade. In that life, you struggled with ongoing feelings of depression, a fear of failure and despondency. 

The smuggling that you were involved in, I was told, was technically criminal but not unethical. (You didn’t harm anyone with what you were doing.) I was told that you were living high on the hog and spending a lot of money. Your family had a very beautiful lifestyle but you were spending all of the money that came in. And you had no other skills or sources of income except your smuggling business. 

The people in charge knew what you were up to and wanted to put a stop to it. They played a game of ‘cat and mouse’ with you for a while and devised a plan to cut off your money flow but without warning you or confronting you. This may have involved undercover informants. They worked out how your business worked and then strangled the business.

You lost your money source overnight through this process and you had no savings to fall back on. You were plunged into poverty compared to how you were living before. I am wondering if the family wealth was seized by the authorities for this descent into poverty to be so fast. 

You started drinking a lot in order to deal with the trauma and one day you you decided to go out into an isolated place in nature and commit suicide(I’m sorry this story is not a very nice one – I realise this is emotionally weighty.)

Your family did not know where you had disappeared to and it took 4-5 months before your body was found. However, the body was never identified as yours and your family never knew what happened to you. 

(By the way, your parents in this lifetime were 2 of your daughters in that previous life.)   

I looked into this historical scenario and it was called the Mercantilist Monopoly: Spain had set up a system whereby goods could only come to Argentina from Spain via Peru and they were heavily taxed. No goods were allowed into the country from anywhere else. But this meant that everyday items such as tools or textiles were inaccessible to the majority of the population and so there was a big trade in smuggling and it was seen as necessary for survival – this fits the ‘criminal but not unethical’ characteristic I was given.

I think you were smuggling alcohol from other places in Europe, perhaps France. Apparently the method the authorities used to put you out of business was very common – if the authorities confronted people directly there could be rioting or resistance so they did it by stealth and so you wouldn’t have known at all that you were being investigated nor would you have seen it coming. I also found there was a big crackdown in 1776 because of a change of policy and smugglers who had been trading comfortably for years went out of business and went bankrupt overnight in this way.

This past-life aspect died with significant unresolved trauma, creating a pocket of unfinished business that has yet to be completely integrated into your soul. Healing this past life self and bringing this part of your soul’s history into resolution is necessary for your evolution, and I will explain how you can do that in a moment. 

Right now, this unintegrated aspect is operating beneath your conscious awareness. Out of a desire to protect you from a repetition of their past losses, they are sending defensive impulses into your psyche, to protect you from repeating the original trauma.

This is a past life self who feels he failed, and feels a lack of hope. He also felt victimised by the authorities. He also felt very much out of the loop because he didn’t see this ambush coming. 

So, the energies that characterise this karmic complex are: failure, hopelessness, victimisation, being ‘out of the loop’ and self-denial (denying oneself what one wants). 

I also saw that this karmic complex has affected your trust in your own intuition to some degree and this may be around practical things, because this past life self did not see it coming. He feels a sense of self-devaluation around how perceptive he was. This karmic complex affects you at the third eye chakra in the area of intuition. 

I saw that this complex has an impact on your heart chakra – this past life self has not forgiven himself for letting his wife and daughters down financially and this complex also impacts on the area of romantic relationships (although I know you didn’t ask about that or have an intention related to that). This past life self is afraid of letting loved ones down and taking on responsibilities (such as children) in case he fails again.

He also doesn’t want you to finish projects you start and his lingering trauma affects how confident you feel at work. I know you have a successful YouTube channel so it looks like you’ve done a good job of succeeding in spite of this karmic complex. But it is slowing things down somewhat because it is a significant complex. 

This past life self is sending the following messages into your subconscious mind:

“Don’t even try or go there. You will let everyone down. Best to stay where you are”

“It’s best not to have responsibilities”

“Don’t assume you can, or be overly confident” 

“Don’t dream or have ambitions”.

He is protecting you from failure, loss and disappointment. He does not want you to go through the devastating losses he experienced, so he would prefer that you stay where you are professionally.

(As an aside, the client let me know that she felt she had trouble committing to things in her life and this karmic complex resonated.)

The link between a severe karmic complex and suicide

This gives an example of how dying by suicide can really exacerbate the trauma that causes a karmic complex and make it worse.

Note that there are two levels to a karmic complex — what I refer to as a ‘level one’ karmic complex (which is a severe complex) and a ‘level two’ karmic complex which is less severe. 

Level one karmic complexes are initiated by serious defeats that often involve loss of life or a loss of a dearly loved one. Level two karmic complexes tend to be ones that involve a loss of one’s home, status, fortune, income or career. 

Suicide will take a level two karmic complex and turn it into a level one complex, exacerbating the severity. This means that instead of simply dying with unfinished business and unresolved trauma as per a level two complex, the past life self dies with unresolved trauma and also becomes earthbound, meaning a piece of the past life self’s emotional and mental bodies are left behind on the earth plane, representing soul loss. The events of the past life are therefore very unintegrated and a serious wound on the soul that needs to be resolved. This wound will echo into future lifetimes until it gets resolved. And it will likely echo again and again, both within one lifetime and lifetime after lifetime. 

An example of this is, a person who can easily manifest a romantic relationship but the partner is not a good one. And bad partners are all they can manifest into their life. And this is something they manifest lifetime after lifetime. That echo is the manifestation of a karmic complex.

(This also happens with a level two karmic complex, but the echo will be less severe and impactful.)

If the past life self (in that previous life in Argentina) had faced his problems head on and stayed alive, there would have been a downgrading of the trauma that occurred or at least not a worsening. But that was possibly too much to ask of the past life self and he wasn’t able to manage it, and I can understand that.

In conclusion…

Suicide makes things worse on the soul level. It is not a solution, earthside or on the other side. 

So, this is just an article for those who are interested in karmic complexes and how they get formed and exacerbated. And also perhaps for those who may consider suicide, which makes problems worse for the soul and is to be avoided for that reason.

The solution instead is to turn towards resolution of a karmic complex.