Someone recently asked “what does spring mean to you”; after a brief pause I answered it is the cycle of rebirth. And then I realized, perhaps because I am currently rereading Dr. Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls, that the seasons mirror our own cycle of rebirth through time eternal.
The nature lovers and gardeners amongst us are acutely aware of the annual cycle of planning, gestation, germination, birth, life, death, rejuvenation and fortification that our gardens experience. In general the process is quite similar to the one that frames our succession of lives. Here’s how. Most of the readers of this blog understand that at the very core each of us is energy – energy that transmutes when the body dies. This energy has consciousness. In fact, some say this energy is consciousness! Upon death our individual energy body is released from the physical form – the part of us that is recognizable to the neighbors who watch us as we tend to our garden chores. The energy body travels to the Interlife – a place known to some as Heaven, and to others as Nirvana, Paradise, Bardo, or Afterlife.
How do you know you ask? Well that brings us back to Dr. Michael Newton, a counseling psychologist who used hypnosis in his clinical practice. More than 35 years ago, he was working with a woman who was socially isolated, extremely lonely and tremendously unhappy with no apparent friends or surviving family. After inducing a deep hypnotic trance he instructed her to recall a time when she was happily with friends. Much to his amazement and bewilderment, she had crossed into the Interlife and began recounting happy times with ‘spiritual family’. Only several years before, Newton a self-declared agnostic who did not believe in reincarnation had quite literally stumbled upon past lives in a hypnotherapy session with another client. Although a logical extension of reincarnation and multiple life times, the discovery that one could get a client to the Interlife through hypnosis was a radical idea at the time.
It would be close to a decade later and after he replicated and analyzed several thousand cases that he would share his findings with the world. Newton found with his 7000 cases a remarkable consistency of detail regarding what souls experience in the Interlife; details reaffirmed by my Newton Institute colleagues through the several thousand cases we work with each year. What these individuals/souls have taught us about our eternal journey through time is at once breadth-taking and awe inspiring!
After reunion and celebration, souls returning to the Interlife enter a period of review and reflection about the life completed while resting and rejuvenating. Unlike the inhabitants of the garden whose winter replenishment is fixed seasonally, the duration of time souls spend in the Interlife between incarnations depends on the difficulty or ease of the prior life, the advice of counselor spirit guides, the soul’s level of engagement in the many educational, recreational and vocational activities of the Interlife and of course the soul’s preference regarding a next incarnation.
Prior to each incarnation, the soul enters a planning phase during which important decisions are contemplated, analyzed from all vantage points and weighted – again much like the process a gardener goes through in the winter when the garden is ‘hibernating’ to decide what new flowers and shrubs will be tried in the garden in the upcoming season. Key decision for the soul include the purpose for the upcoming life and its degree of difficulty, life themes, where to incarnate, the body and life to incarnate into, and in consultation with members of one’s soul family – which of these souls will incarnate to assume key roles.
And then after careful planning, we spring forth in new form to experience life on this incredibly wondrous planet, much like the azaleas, dogwoods, peonies and countless other beauties that burst to life in the spring garden.
We leap into summer finding more time to play and recreate. After all, we understand that a life lived well deserves to be pampered and rewarded and know that time spent on the beach or in the hammock is essential to the rhythm of the season.
We ease into fall to harvest the fruits of our labors, assessing crop yields and ultimately tidying-up before the garden shuts down – drawing another cycle to a close. The satisfied gardener looks back on the planning, decision making and execution with delight and knows as the soul does that the experiences, opportunities and learning were enriching.
A cycle of rebirth — a cycle begun and ended, destined to be repeated again and again and again . . . like the myriad lives each soul will have as it traverses time eternal!
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