Ancestral Patterns, Past Lives, & Karma: Illuminating the Soul’s Timeless Wisdom

What if the challenges you face today are rooted not only in your personal past—but in the deeper, unseen threads of time woven through your soul, your lineage, and your inherited story?

In this transformative conversation at the intersection of depth psychology, neuroscience, and ancestral wisdom, depth psychologist and soul-centered coach, Bonnie Bright, and neurocientist, media psychologist, and consciousness researcher, Dr. Christophe Morin, explore how past lives, ancestral patterns, and karma shape our identities, block our purpose, and offer profound pathways for healing.

Together they explore:

• Past Life Memories – Compelling evidence and personal stories from across traditions and modalities that suggest consciousness carries memory beyond a single lifetime.
• Ancestral Patterns – How unhealed family legacies affect our behaviors, beliefs, and sense of belonging—and how we begin to heal them.
• Neuroscience of Inheritance – What research says about epigenetics, intergenerational trauma, and the power of ancestral healing to rewire inherited 
• neural patterns.
• Karma as Evolutionary Consciousness – A soul-centered perspective on karma—not as punishment, but as a mirror of wholeness and potential, guiding us toward growth.
• Practices for Integration – Tools and ideas you can bring into your coaching, healing, or spiritual work to help yourself and others transform inherited imprints into conscious choice.
• This webinar is for seekers, coaches, healers, and anyone ready to explore how the past shapes the present—and how reclaiming the deeper truth of who we are can free us to live more fully now.

Soul, Cosmos, and Consciousness™ is an illuminating “soul feed” to feed your soul! ENGAGE WITH US in deep reflection and self-discovery at the crossroads of ancient wisdom, cosmic mysteries, evolving consciousness, and the essence of being—via podcast, articles, webinars, online courses, and in-person retreats on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Transcript

Ancestral Healing, Past Lives, and Karma: Illuminating the soul’s timeless wisdom

Dr. Bonnie Bright and Dr. Christophe Morin

BB—So welcome everybody to this webinar on ancestral patterns, past lives and karma. It's a bit of an unusual topic for me, I have to say. I have been interested in a lot of these things for a long, long time, but I haven't necessarily ever taken up teaching them and bringing them to broader groups. Sometimes we cover things like this in the school that I started the program called the Coaching Certificate in Soul Centered Coaching Psychology.

So we are going to cover a lot of ground today as we always try to do, but I am, again, just grateful for those of you who managed to show up here today and for those of you who are watching this after the fact. My name is Bonnie Bright and I'm the founder of the Institute for Soul Centered Psychology and Coaching™ and also the founder of Depth Psychology Alliance™, which I met some of you through that initiative many, many years ago. Most of you actually, I would say, that I see on the call right now. So just really grateful to be able to have this soul-centered perspective.

Of course, for me, that includes Jungian psychology, as well as depth, transpersonal, archetypal, all of those good psychologies that really do take the more spiritual perspective. And for me lately, what has really been on my mind is consciousness. What is consciousness? How do we raise consciousness? What does that do for us when we pursue it? And of course, wow, the world could use a little more of it from all of our parts. So it's another really great reason that I'm so happy everybody is here. So you know a bit about my perspective.

01:31

I'd like to turn the time to Christophe for just a few moments to introduce yours yet again. 

CM—Thank you, Bonnie. I'm somewhat of a recovered materialist scientist who's finally been able to not just accept but embrace many of the topics that we discussed with Bonnie in the podcast or the webinar. So what I like to do is contribute science to the discussion, science that is either emerging or established.

And in the field of past lives and karma and ancestral imprints, there's a lot that we can already at least explain from the perspective of our brain and the neurobiology. So I'll be the brain nerd of the team discussion today. 

BB—Thank you, Christophe. All right, so yeah, I just wanted to start us off with a few ideas about why this topic is important. And I should say these topics, because quite frankly, ancestral patterns and healing and lineage are quite different in many ways from the idea of past lives.

But of course, the reason that we decided to bring these together is because both of them, whether you are a literal believer or not in either or both of these, and of course we do have a lot of scientific evidence for both of these, these days. 

You know, it really makes sense that you could adopt anything that occurs within this realm for you as a story that can really have a significant effect on you. And so we're going to talk a little bit about the power of stories on our brains and our beings, and we'll do that in just a bit.

03:08

But first of all, the reasons that you might be interested in seeking out a relationship with your ancestors and/or your own past lives is because it allows us, number one, to reconnect with our roots and also with the collective identity. So, you know, who is that family lineage that we came from if we are looking at our blood lineage? And of course, there's various different ways to look at ancestors. And we can also say that we are part of a human lineage where there are ancestors we are connected with who are not necessarily a part of our own bloodline.

But sometimes when we take this spiritual path, of course, we probably have all had those experiences where somebody four-legged or the winged ones or the ones that crawl on the earth. Of course, all of these animals can also be our ancestors, as well as the spirits of the land where we live. And it just opens up broader and broader. And of course, we do work a lot with transpersonal psychology. It's one of the biggest lenses that we use.

I've had the opportunity to train with Stan Grof for many years and just have been so grateful to be able to sit in his presence. He's one of the most brilliant minds I've certainly ever met. And he really talks a lot about the transpersonal realm. And of course, transpersonal means beyond the personal. And so this is where all of these concepts, if you want to call them that, are living. Of course, I do believe in each of these as living beings, living memories, things that we do have access to.

04:36

So we'll jump more into that, but also it can give us a sense of a greater belonging, both to the earth as well as to our lineage. If you are somebody who's adopted and doesn't know your blood lineage, that's perfectly okay. Because again, I mean, while it might be nice to know that, and I certainly can understand that, what happens for us when we reach out from the soul's perspective is we do find what we need. We do find those resources and those guides and those support systems that we really need.

Another thing that can happen for us when we start looking into our own ancestral past or our own potentially past lives, helps us to navigate our journey with a lot more understanding because it gives us context in which we can start to place our synchronicities that are happening to us. You know, the things that we have grown up with and maybe have taken totally for granted, a lot of the things that are unconscious in us that as we start to do our own inner work, we begin to make them more conscious.

So it's just a really powerful way to claim our inherited wounds and be able to help our own ancestral line to heal. Because unless we really do our own inner work, whatever is unconscious in our lineage is going to be passed from generation to generation. And Jung talked about that too. He talked about the collective psyche or the ancestral psyche as something that literally gets inherited in each generation.

05:57

And again, if nobody's done the work to look into things like family secrets—you know, anytime in a family if there's been, say, a birth out of wedlock or an accident that was horrible and somebody got really hurt or died and it wasn't meant, but it was something that caused a huge problem in the family. Anytime that there has been secrets that have been kept of any kind, it gets passed—what is not said, what is not shared—the trauma gets passed down in our lineage, but we don't necessarily know where it's coming from.

And in fact, there's been a lot of work in indigenous societies and contemporary work that has talked about disenfranchised grief. And that is when certain generations feel this immense grief, but they can't necessarily connect it back to anything that they're experiencing in the moment. And yet, if you start to look at how their ancestors were treated, colonization, and all of the horrible, horrible things that colonizers have done all over the world.

Any of those indigenous tribes that they have been introduced to, they have just done so, so much damage. And so we can start to see that maybe we are carrying things that aren't really ours. You might have noticed that there's a certain time every year or certain dates when you just really start to feel either down or you always feel happy or something like that. And you may never know. But if you start digging back into your own past, you might find that there were actually things that happened to an ancestor or to the family on certain dates.

07:27

And you might just be picking that up without even realizing that that's what's happening for you. So there's a really great practice that I'm sure most everybody who's here has heard of called family constellation therapy. And this is a really, really powerful process of being able to tap into these fields of grief or these fields of memory that are affecting each one of us, even if we don't realize that that's what's happening for us.

Even if you don't feel like you were raised in a family that carried a lot of trauma, of course, somewhere back in the generations before there was somebody that had a lot of trauma that you don't know anything about, but probably is still very active. And so I just wanted to hit a couple of the indigenous tribes and peoples and just share a little bit about how we know that they are connected with ancestors.

I had the really huge privilege to be able to work with Malidoma Some´ for several years under his guidance and doing a lot of ritual medicine. And the ancestors among the Dagara people, which are his people, is a really, really powerful process. In fact, they bring the ancestors into every decision that's made and every celebration that they've had, and every big village experience that ancestors have to be honored and taken care of.

And in that work that I did with Malidoma Some´, we had the opportunity to go through an ancestralization ceremony where essentially a couple of ancestors were volunteering to come to us to work with us and to be guides. And there was a whole process of choosing or them choosing to come and really making that a more formal relationship. And it's a very powerful, powerful thing when you begin to have that kind of connection with your own ancestors.

09:18

Equally, I had the honor of being able to work on an archeological dig with some Mayan villages that were being uncovered in the jungles of Belize. And so fascinating the power of the ancestors there so much so that they would bury their dead, the people that had just died underneath their living quarters, and then they would build these tubes that would go like from the kitchen or the upstairs down to those grave sites so that they could literally talk to the ancestors and continue to have those conversations.

That's how critical it was for them to maintain that connection with them. And so I'll just end with a final example here, and that is the Hawaiian culture. I live on the Big Island of Hawaii. And it's really amazing to live on such a sacred island where the culture is still intact. And we are aware of very special events and traditions that continue to go on here. And of course, the native Hawaiians believe that ancestors do come back often in the form of animals to watch over and protect us.

And again, just a really powerful experience. The retreat center that we co-operate together is called Manta Soul. It's on the Kona side of the Big Island of Hawaii, right above a bay called Kealakekua Bay. And that's where the dolphins live. It's a very, very special place. And you can really feel the magic of the land here. But one reason that might be the case is because when we first acquired this property, we had a native elder come in to do a blessing, a traditional home blessing.

10:54

And she shared with us that Kealakekua, which is technically the area in which we live, means the path to the god. And literally in the bay right down below, a couple of miles away, is where the Hawaiians would bury their dead, and often the elite—the leaders and the royalty. And so it was a very, very sacred place. And she said very likely those bodies of those people who had passed were carried through this land and literally taken down to those cliffs and bodies were left in some caves in the cliff.

And that was their burial practice. And so I feel like I can feel it in the land. You know, the ancestors, their voices are very strong here. And it's really powerful to know that I feel like they are definitely a partner in my undertakings and my daily life. And that does give you a sense of that connection that really nothing else can make you feel like you're supported in the same way that having that connection with the spirits of the land, especially where you live, and especially if it's an adopted culture. You know, we've lost that largely as Westerners.

We've lost our connection to our ancestors. We might know our grandparents and our great grandparents, but beyond that, a lot of us don't know. So super important. I have some stories for you to share, but I'd like to first turn the time over to Christophe and let him bring some of the science into this and why it's important for us to understand that. 

12:23

CM—Thank you. Well, we often speak about inherited traits, eye color, height, even talent skills.

But what if deeper imprints were created by our ancestors? And this is a very exciting field commonly referred to as epigenetics. Now, I'm not going to bore you with neurobiological consideration, but what's really exciting about this field is that we've had the possibility to show that life experiences of our ancestors do shape who we are today.

And the mechanism through which these imprints are created is indeed related to our genes. So most of you understand that your genes define many of the traits, characteristic, physical aspects. It's basically a recipe, a blueprint for how the divine or nature has decided we should be built.

Well, life experiences, particularly trauma, but also moments of resilience have been known to be transmitted over multiple generations. And that process is referred to as markers that are basically left. Sometimes we call that post-it notes. What's really interesting is epigenetic markers are not really changing the DNA itself.

13:54

It's deciding whether or not specific markers are going to influence the expression of genes. And some genes control our ability to process trauma. Some genes produce us as more anxious. And so the consequence of many of those markers, which could be multiple generations, can be essentially affecting our entire life. Now, that's often looked at as bad news, except that I just mentioned that we also inherit resilience.

And now neuroplasticity, the science behind the self-healing properties of our brain, is showing that we can manifest—i.e. rewire, maladaptive behaviors that we may have inherited from ancestral imprints. So on one hand, I think there's an opportunity, certainly through consciousness, to be at least open. It took me decades to open to the idea of the imprint of ancestors.

But doing the work that, in fact, I described in my newest book, Open, of ritualizing your capacity to be more conscious, to invite the possibility that ancestors have indeed, in a way, co-written who you are. That, I think, is the beginning step to recognizing that, yes, we may carry very, very difficult past experiences, behaviors, events, traumas, but we do have the capacity to rewrite it, to reframe the meaning of that particular imprint.

15:32

And as Bonnie said, we do know whether it's from spiritual traditions, but also from scientific examination, that we seem to operate with this craving, often rewarded by emotions and neurochemicals that make us feel good. We do seek meaning. And therefore, patching those stories is indeed a primal motivation of humans. So considerations that are all evolving. This is really a new field.

And fortunately, with now the emergence of AI, we have the capacity to process a lot more stories and their meaning, which I think will become quite interesting if people are in the spiritual state of sharing and examining the meaning of those stories. I think they can find certainly a psychological perspective to it, a biological perspective, and also a neuroscientific perspective. So that's my science note. Back to you, Bonnie.

BB—Thank you. Well, I just wanted to share then some just a few examples of how some different people have been affected quite powerfully by their own ancestral experience or patterns or things that have been passed down in their own families. And this really does come back to this whole idea of epigenetics because a lot of times what happens is we see things like stress, anxiety, and depression that have been manifest somehow in somebody's life. And often there is not a really clear, obvious reason for some of that.

17:02

Now, of course, we all have stuff that is repressed and suppressed, and we all have the unconscious at work and it's all the time. And so, as Jung said, we are really driven by these unconscious forces. And most of the time, we don't even know it. But sometimes there are things that we can begin to trace back and see that it's not necessarily our stuff that we're carrying, that in fact, we are carrying something on behalf sometimes of the family.

And so therefore, if we are the ones that are willing to not eschew that, but to step up and to really have the courage to hold space for whatever that is, and maybe even to start doing some investigating back into the family line. These kinds of experiences can literally make us completely different people, bring us really into a place of new understanding, new consciousness. And by the way, if you start doing that and you are in your family, again, whether adopted or not, when you start doing some of this work, it affects everybody else.

The ripples just go out and everybody that is involved gets affected. There's a really great book, It Didn't Start With You, by Mark Wolynn, and he tells a lot of different stories in there, gives some great examples, and he shares a couple of stories. One, that there was a woman who developed really intense anxiety around becoming a mother. And, you know, this is probably normal. A lot of people do have those experiences and feelings, but this just seemed really over the top.

18:26

When she had her own baby, it became much, much worse, almost debilitating that she was worried about losing her infant. And definitely in the realm of neuroticism, if not even more pathological. 

And what she did through her own exploration was find out that her grandmother had accidentally caused a house fire that killed her own child. And her sense was that she was really picking up on this experience and that there was something that needed to be processed and ritualized and honored through that, that then she could release that severe anxiety that she was experiencing around her own infant.

Another story of a woman who was just kind of obsessed with these stories about women who were widowed very young. When she got married herself, she was just very obsessed about this and her life was very changed by this experience of anxiety. As she went investigating, she discovered that there was a long line of women in her family who had lost their husbands at a young age. And so again, the idea is that she was picking up on that. 

There's a Jungian analyst by the name of Tirzah Firestone. Some of you may know her.

19:31

She has an excellent book called Wounds into Wisdom. She does a lot of past ancestral work with her own clients. And this is her story, so I really want to give her credit. But she tells the story of a young girl about four years old who just started experiencing this extreme abandonment anxiety. Every time one of her parents would try to leave the house, this little girl would just go into this really devastating state, and they didn't know if they could leave her and they didn't know what to do about it.

And so the story is that Tirzah told this woman, the girl's mother, to go look into her family history. And the woman came back and said, “Wow, I really opened a huge can of worms!”

 What had happened was her own family, a generation or two before, had fled Iran in the '70s or '80s when things were starting to get really dicey with the government there and people were being disappeared. The family decided to get out. But what happened was they had to sneak out in the middle of the night on opium wagons to cross the border and get out.

And there was this grandmother who was quite aged and not quite as cautious, let's say, with her words. And they just knew that if she was with them and talked about it, that she would give them away to somebody, or they might be crossing at a border and she would say something loudly, or whatever it was. And so the story, as it turns out, she was just left behind. The family didn't even tell her they were going because they just did not feel they could risk that. And nobody ever talked about it because how could you possibly talk about something so horrible?

21:00

They had a ritual for this grandmother that was left behind and they honored her own life. And the story is that the girls' abandonment issues started to fade right away. And within a few weeks, she was pretty much over the worst of that. 

Last one I'll just give you, there was a documentary that I saw many years ago and it was talking about this young woman who developed a very severe eating disorder around age 17. Again, this is more and more common these days, but nobody could really point to what that might have come from.

The patterns weren't necessarily there in her own personal biographical history. And then it was discovered that her own mother or grandmother, I forget now, had actually been put in a Nazi concentration camp at that exact same age and was—you know, obviously didn't have enough to eat. These stories happen. And so this really gives us the opportunity to invite ourselves to ask the question, when you are struggling with something and you just can't get a handle on it, and you really see that it's disturbing your life in very difficult and powerful ways, it might be a real opportunity to just start digging in.

22:03

And there are lots of ways to work with ancestors. We're going to talk about that a little bit at the end. I'd like to just maybe say a few words about past lives and the origins of this idea as we move more into that. This is something that, again, a lot of people that I talk with are kind of on the fence about this. They're not sure. But the truth is, is these ideas that we have gone, that the soul is eternal and that we go from life to life, from physical human life to physical human life, is a pretty powerful idea in many of the ancient traditions.

And in fact, these have been around for thousands of years and probably even a lot longer than that. But for example, in the Vedic and the Hindu traditions, reincarnation or samsara is a really fundamental part of that religion. And the idea is that life is a school, and that each time we incarnate into a physical body, it offers the soul a chance to really evolve and to be guided by karma, to be guided by what needs to happen.

And I like to think about that as we maybe chose before we came here as souls, as essence, as consciousness. Maybe we did choose the kinds of challenges that we wanted to have while we were here. Because if our soul is on this ongoing evolutionary journey—what Jung might call individuation, right? —I mean, what a thought to think that our soul might be on its own individuation journey.

23:25

And even if you get more into Jung, even the idea that God might be on God's own individuation journey, and that we are all a part of that, that by the experiences that we are here having, if we can just hold those and not numb out or freak out or panic or jump out of ourselves; if we can just stay with these challenges and to really hold them and to have our feelings about them, but not to just try to numb them or bury them, then the idea is that we can actually learn something.

These are initiatory experiences and that we can really change the direction that our life is going and step into what it is that we are meant to do here in the world. We can really start looking at these past lives. And again, whether you believe it or not, if you can access some events or characters or stories that are going on in presumably what is your own past life experience, these stories become archetypal. And as most of you know, archetypes are patterns.

And we can start to see that there are patterns or themes that are at work in these stories that might have some bearing on our current situation and our current challenges. Rebirth is also something that is a Buddhist thought. They don't necessarily—Buddhism doesn't necessarily look at our one soul that is coming back over and over again, and that that soul necessarily has consciousness. But the idea is that we do come back into a new body over and over and over again so that we can really work on our consciousness and to escape that cycle eventually of having to be reborn here to learn the lessons that we can learn in modern or contemporary life.

25:00

The ancient Greeks also taught about this. Plato and Plotinus talked about the soul's descent and then the eventual return to the One with a capital O—the oneness, the universe. And then of course in most indigenous cultures, we have this whole idea of this rebirth or spiritual continuity that happens, again, between lifetimes. So we can see that there is a lot of support for this. Jung talked about this idea of the two million-year-old self and the idea that we have access to everything that has come before us, as in the collective unconscious.

And so if you consider it from that perspective and we can just pull out some examples from there that seem to be related to us in some way, shape or form, there's just so much wisdom that can come out of explorational process, let's just say. 

I think that these are potentially real life experiences that are just stored in our soul memory or they are metaphors that we can take advantage of and look at and really begin to understand some of the deep-seated patterns that come from those, including our emotional, our relational and our behavioral patterns that might come from unresolved trauma that happens somewhere.

Christophe, back to you with some look at some of the science behind past lives, because there is some. 

CM—There is, and I'm even going to throw another possibility on the way we can look at the interests that we have or the experience that we have of past lives. Well, first, let's go back to what I was talking about earlier, and that is stories do make sense of our life mysteries.

26:36

And that craving is because patterns are much easier to remember than details. And so our entire memory system is optimized to record and retrieve stories. Now, we have direct stories, as I mentioned earlier, that clearly are imprinted in our DNA through the expression of certain genes from ancestors.

It is also possible that we may connect to what we would identify as a past life, but could still be part of our lineage, but we simply do not have the evidence to prove it. So I would argue that it is absolutely possible that some experiences coded as past life may actually be genetically connected. But more importantly, what I've learned about the power of stories on our brain over the last couple of decades is that for our brain, stories are as real as what we call reality.

Never forget that our brain is a perception-making machine to some extent. And more importantly, not only do we make those stories and believe them as true, particularly if let's say we see a movie, we don't question whether the movie is fake, we end up crying or being afraid that somebody is going to be dead when in fact they're going to make $10 million. This makes zero sense. And yet our brain is transported in stories.

So that transportation effect can also participate in imprinting a lot of stories that we may have acquired by watching movies, that we may have acquired by dreaming, that we may have acquired through psychedelic states. So all those stories are coming in into the brain with the obsession, I truly believe that we all have to seek meaning.

28:38

With the obsession to listen to the core of the soul, as Bonnie so often reminds us all, but it's that weaving of how those stories do help us hopefully heal, but also manifest the life we want. That I think is the power of opening to the idea of past lives. Now, having said all that, there are some pretty amazing studies that have completely documented the existence or at least the trace of past life.

Dr. Stevenson, for instance, of the University of Virginia, documented over 2,500 cases of young children worldwide who claim to recall past life memories. And often with very specific details, for instance, a documentation of birthmarks or events that have been recorded somehow in historical records.

So his student, Jim Tucker, continued the work in the early 2000s and did go to that granular aspect of the research seeking to identify if people may have had phobias inherited as the transmission of these large, big events that clearly leave imprints in our DNA can also be a transmission through stories we read or stories we watch or witness.

30:03

Our mirror neurons are well known to activate and help us mirror or duplicate or sample others’ emotions. And so to the extent that we sample others' emotions, we can sample their suffering. And to the extent that we sample their suffering, our brain is filled up with emotional cocktails. And those cocktails are known to directly imprint stories on our brain. It is known that when, again, neurons fire together, they wire together.

So yes, there is evidence that is undisputably relating people who can talk about having past lives experiences. But what I wanted to share today is the more exciting message of seeking the why behind past lives through the power that stories have to heal us but also project us in the future that we want. 

BB—Okay. Yeah. I mean, I know we're going quite fast here, so I just want to take a moment maybe and just let us breathe because I'm just about to say a few things about quantum physics, which you may or may not be into.

I have kind of gone down a rabbit hole of quantum physics and we're hoping maybe to do one of these Friday webinars on the topic of quantum physics and how it interrelates with soul-centered psychologies and neurospirituality. It's a really fascinating idea. And I just wanted to bring out a couple of the main concepts in quantum physics. And that is that even though quantum physics has been around for 100 years at this point, it was very slow to be adopted by most mainstream physicists.

31:38

In fact, there is still a lot of debate and some conflict between the more mainstream mechanical physics and also quantum physics. But the evidence through the math and through our growing understanding is just becoming so compelling that it's easy to start to see how if we live in a quantum world, which we do—quantum is everything that's subatomic, right? This is the sphere or the dimension of being that doesn't follow the same rules that we are used to in regular physics.

So once we get down to that subatomic level, things don't happen the same way that they happen in our reality. It's a completely different reality. And the more that we can understand some of these things that kind of look like magic when we are talking about soul-centered psychologies and things like past lives, we begin to realize that, in fact, what quantum physics has understood for the last 100 years and what most indigenous societies have understood for the last many thousands of years is that we are deeply interconnected.

We're not just these silos or separate beings. We are deeply interconnected not only with one another, but with nature, with all beings on this planet, with all things that happen. And so it's really helpful and important when we can remember that. 

Also, our universe is multidimensional. Time is not linear. We have some evidence through the math, again, that suggests that maybe everything in reality is going on at the same time, that there is not such a thing as past or future, really, that it's like a big circle, and that anywhere on that circle, we could locate a life as in a past life, but it might actually be a future life.

33:16

We don't know what's forward and what's backward. And because quantum physics supports this idea so strongly, it does give us that idea that we can actually heal backward when we are willing, again, to step up and to do this work. 

And so it's really important that we have that understanding that we can have that kind of an effect. I would just say from a soul-centered perspective, this really also gives us the understanding of past lives and why they might be important because these ideas like ancestral entanglement are a natural expression of what we see as an entangled cosmos.

And this is where energy, memory, and intention ripple out and have effects on others, influencing not just who we are, but also what happens with other people around us and also who all of us are becoming. So the past can definitely influence the future, but also from this perspective, the future can influence the past. Again, giving us much more reason to really do this kind of work.

 And the last thing that I'll just talk about maybe is the observer effect. What we recognize from quantum physics is that when we turn our attention to a particle, that particle is first in a wave function, and when we turn our attention to it, we have this possibility that now becomes more of a reality because our attention is on this one particular thing. And so wherever we turn our attention, that is where we have impact on our future. That is where we can shape our future and manifest what it is that is happening in our lives.

34:50

So if we do that unconsciously, we don't have much control over what's happening. But if we do it consciously, again, that gives us the opportunity to bring in the healing, to step into the healing, and to be able to manifest the life that we are looking for. We know that particles can be entangled across the entire universe and that what happens to one particle can actually happen to the other particles simultaneously. 

So there's a lot of evidence coming from quantum physics that we, of course, we could be entangled with a past life or an ancestor that was in our bloodline that came before us or an ancestor that was not in our bloodline that came before us.

Of course, we can have those connections. It doesn't have to rely on time and space for that to happen. Christophe, I think I'll come back to you to talk a little bit about karma. 

CM—Yeah, so I think after talking about ancestral imprints and past lives imprint, the topic of karma is an interesting way to wrap all of it with this idea that our actions do define who we are, what we're going to become over time, and particularly this concept often mentioned in karma of destiny, which is, I believe, our capacity to truly write the life we want.

36:06

So karma is rooted typically in spiritual traditions, but science, I think, is starting to offer some really compelling frameworks to understand the concept of karma, especially when we start paying attention to one of the core principles upon which, as biological organism, we function is homeostasis.

And what homeostasis is, is this mostly autonomous system in our brain and the rest of our body that is seeking to restore or at least create balance. Well, karma, to some extent, could be seen as an opportunity to see how our actions have consequences. And those consequences may, in fact, restore balance in the total impact of your own action.

And so the whole idea is to reflect and reframe our possible impact to the rest of the world. And of course, as Bonnie said, to the extent that we know, embrace views of consciousness that go way beyond our small world in our head or in our body.

And if we in fact believe, as I do now, that any of our actions may have consequences to the rest of the world, then we, I think, have the blueprint ultimately to continue the healing with this idea that there is some sort of scoring between the plus and minuses that are discussed as karmic events.

37:44

All of this yet again is reinforcing the power and the craving that we have for stories, for our ability to summarize archetypally, often, what is defining our struggles? What is defining our wins? What points have we lost by making mistakes but hopefully giving ourselves permission to make mistakes and forgiveness to have made those mistakes.

As we move through a karmic process, I think we have an opportunity to look at its biological imprint, which is truly the whole topic of epigenetics, but our agency for shaping our karmic imprint in the future. And to the extent that quantum physics suggests that there is really no time, that all times are superimposed, so to speak, then we have karmically much more control over our lives than we may have once believed.

So it's a very cryptic topic, at least for a scientist. Initially, when I decided to take a look at it, I was a little intimidated by the lack of science as I saw it. But I do believe now we have frameworks, whether it's quantum mechanics or the neurobiological impact of stories on our brain. We have those frameworks to totally reinforce the value and the benefit of embracing those tools because the karmic model ultimately is a tool to become more conscious and to become ultimately a better agent of our own life.

39:21

BB—Yeah, fantastic. Again, for me, that comes back to this idea that we are consciousness all the time, that we were consciousness before we were born into this physical embodiment that we are experiencing right now. And therefore, once we pass and our bodies are finished with their mission, that that same consciousness just continues on, and perhaps can see at that point the bigger picture because our ego has been taken offline, and our ego is really a filter.

You know It's what brings us into the now and gives us the capacity to actually navigate through our lives, which are pretty complicated as human beings. But once we have access to that higher consciousness—and yet again, another reason to grow it—it gives us choices, it gives us options, it gives us that capacity to see the big picture and the throughline. So if the soul is indeed individuating, as I like to think, then we can see that there is that very powerful process of learning from past events from lifetime to lifetime.

So if we can “remember” some of those—and you know the truth is, is even if you feel like you're making it up when you begin to do this work, it's perfectly okay because it kind of all comes from the same place. 

You know, Jung said that images are the language of the soul. That means anytime we can access images and archetypes and symbols and myth, this gives us the blueprint in which we are living our lives. And it gives us the opportunity to locate ourselves in a metaphor or in a true life, however you want to look at it, but by using the symbols and the archetypes that show up for us.

40:54

So there's a lot of different ways that we can work with these. The most common ones for Jung, again, were using active imagination. So he would perhaps allow us to drop down into an experience and then to engage with whatever character we might meet there, or whatever image might come to us in that powerful experience. And then by engaging, what that means is we can talk with this character or this symbol and see what it has to say because it is representing or holding for us something that is unconscious within ourselves.

And so anytime we can get an image or a symbol or a story, it's giving us that context, that information that we can use as a narrative to place ourselves within that and see what is here for us in our own lifetime.

 I'd like to suggest that we might actually drop into a kind of active imagination. If you guys are willing and up for it, this is probably going to take us, I don't know, five to seven minutes maybe.

And it's the idea of dropping into a past life or seeing if you can access something of a story that may or may not come from your own past life. Again, the idea is that whatever comes to you is coming from your soul because your soul is giving you messages in images, symbol and metaphor. And so anything that you can pull out of this, again, whether you think it's your imagination or not, it doesn't really matter because it's your soul speaking to you and giving you something, presumably, that is for you to know and understand right now.

42:25

So if you would like to participate with me, feel free to just start to make sure that you are comfortable wherever you are sitting or standing. And you can just begin to take a deep breath here, begin to relax. If you'd like to turn your camera on or off, totally up to you to do this process. Often I like to close my eyes when I do this kind of work with my own students and clients. And so it's an easier way for me to access it.

So I'd just like to invite you to notice or feel that you are standing at the top of a beautiful staircase and you can't quite see what's at the bottom, but you feel the call to descend the staircase and knowing that you are safe and that this is something that you are feeling excited about, that there's something here for you. You begin to descend down this staircase. And as you go deeper and deeper down into the earth through this staircase, you come to the bottom and there's a door.

And I invite you to look at this door. Maybe you want to reach out your hand in your mind's eye and touch the door. Notice the details. Notice the material the door is made out of. And as you feel ready, you can sense that there's something waiting for you on the other side of this door. So as you feel ready, perhaps calling on any guides that you might work with or asking your soul self to companion you, you push the door open, and you see a scene that is unfolding around you.

43:51

And as you step off the last step and out into the scene, you look down at your feet and you notice what you are wearing on your feet. And this might give you an idea of a timeframe that you're in. It might be contemporary. It might be ancient. It might be somewhere in the middle. But just allowing yourself now to notice: what clothing are you wearing? And looking at your own hands, what do your hands look like?

Are they the hands of a worker, somebody who does manual labor? Are they big? Are they small? Are they delicate? Are you wearing any jewelry on your hands? What do your fingernails look like? That's often a good teller. 

And then your attention begins to turn outward from your own self, and you begin to notice: What do you see or hear or smell around your environment where you are? Really turning into your senses there…

And what activity is going on around you, if any? And are there other people that are present here? And if there aren't right now, perhaps see if you can find a way to see or engage with at least one other person. But maybe there are a lot here. And so there might be a way that you just choose to walk around, see what people are doing, see if you can talk to anybody.

45:14

And as you find one person or one animal or one symbol that seems to be calling to you that you feel like you want to connect with, presumably a person would be the easiest to get information from in this case. So maybe see if you can engage with someone. Notice also what they're wearing, what they're doing. And what are your own key relationships in this lifetime? Notice how you are with people when you're seeking out people, interacting with them.

And how do you, in this lifetime, support yourself? Do you work for a living? Do you have other means of making a living for yourself? 

And what is the most significant event that you have experienced in this life to date? What has happened to you or for you that has really had an impact on you? And what are you longing for?

46:19

What is the biggest challenge that you are currently facing in this lifetime? And what is your spiritual path like in this lifetime? What are you learning? Are you learning from this lifetime? What can you see that might bring you some wisdom into your experience?

And is there anyone that you would like to ask a question to now before we move on? Just checking in, noticing. If there is something, ask it now. And then when you're ready and it feels right, again, knowing that you are safe and well, but in this lifetime, you have the opportunity now to fast forward almost as if it's a film.

And you fast forward to the deathbed of the you that's in this lifetime that you're experiencing. And as you're on your deathbed, of course, noticing how it is that you die, there could be any number of ways or reasons. And what has been, in this lifetime, the most meaningful experience? What are you the most proud of?

What skills or traits or gifts have you developed in this lifetime? And is there anything that still feels unresolved as you're here moving on from this life?

And what advice would you give about living life to a loved one from this lifetime that you're experiencing now? 

We'll just take about 30 more seconds if there's anything further you want to ask or feel into.

48:44

Just checking in with your heart of this individual in this lifetime, noticing if there's anything that you need to know from this individual. If they have a final message for you, the future you or the past you, depending on if we're taking time into consideration.

And then as you feel ready, knowing that you can always come back to this and explore further, coming back to the door easily that you came in through, opening the door easily, and then ascending back up the stairs the same way that you came in. And as you come to the top of the stairs, coming off the last stair, you notice that you have your regular shoes on and that everything is back to this lifetime the way that you are now.

But you have new information, new experiences to call on. And there might be a way now as you're back, fully back, that you can identify some of the archetypal ideas that were at work in this experience. Was there a victim? Was there a warrior? Was there a teacher? Was there a healer involved? And you can forward that list on your own. 

And so we have just a few minutes. I know these hours always go very quickly, but I believe there are some questions in the chat.

Christophe, would you like to field those? And if anybody else would like to share anything about your experience, you can feel free to just put your hand up or say you'd like to in the chat or just unmute and start talking if you'd like to as soon as we have an opening here. 

CM—There’s a personal story about ancestral traumas and their direct effect on some of her own challenges. And the question was, How do I find more about this story? What, if any, explanation can I draw from basically digging into the past of a story?

50:37

Do you want to talk about regression analysis and some of those methods since we just did a podcast discussing that? 

BB—That's true. If you haven't seen that podcast, it was quite fascinating. We sat down with a hypnotherapist who does a lot of past life regressions. And he just had story after story after story of what people experienced and what it meant for them. 

So what happens for us is it's very personal. So of course, we can know ways to get at the information, but we can't really translate it for anybody else.

If you happen to be somebody who does a lot of dream work and you help other people to do dream work, it's something like that, where when somebody brings a dream or when somebody brings a story of a past life or some kind of an ancestral influence, again, the first thing that I like to do is to look at that archetypally. 

We're looking for patterns. What is the pattern that is at work here? And how can that story, once we have the theme or once we understand something about what was happening in that particular story, how does that then apply to our own lives as a metaphor?

For example, this woman who developed this strong eating disorder, if she had had the opportunity really to sit down with her mother or maybe to watch what happened with her mother or grandmother, whichever one it was that was in the camp, maybe she would have been able to get out of this right away because she could see and understand what that was about. Now that was a very real experience and something that could not be denied that it had actually happened. For you, if you don't have the validation, let's say, or the evidence that something really happened, again, you put yourself in the middle of that story and you say, “What is at work here?”

52:14

And what do I see in my current life that might also be similar to that? So if I was a victim in that life and I was sick the whole time or if I got attacked or somebody killed me or whatever that was, how can we look in our own life at how we felt at that moment, at where we are a victim in our own life, or where we are a healer perhaps, or you know these can be positive or negative. Or, if an experience happened to you, maybe there's a myth that occurs to you that had a similar kind of pattern to it.

And so we're looking for a myth, symbol, and story that we can use as metaphor in our own lives. And archetypes are a really easy way to get there. Of course, this process that we just went through, If you don't feel like it worked well for you, you might want to seek out a hypnotherapist because they have the skill to be able to bring you into this. But it's also, you know, similar to what you would experience. You can do this yourself or with somebody else just by getting into those stories.

And if you have a real story from an ancestor, even more so, there's so many ways in which we can see—both through indigenous peoples as well as now, contemporary people—that are doing this work, that our ancestors have a vested interest in helping us to live our lives, helping us to learn the lessons that we are here to learn. 

And they know how hard it is because they've been here. They've done it themselves. And so they have this desire and this love for us enough that they want to help us with that.

53:36

CM—Just maybe a quick note, since you've talked about Stan Grof, his technology for bringing altered states of consciousness through Holotropic Breathwork is well-documented to help people re-experience maybe birth traumas or past lives. And so there are techniques—technology, we call them—that really facilitate and, in a way, enhance access to those stories, again, to the extent that we can open.

It took me, as I mentioned, a long time to recognize that having a closed-minded scientific view would, in fact, filter or deny access to many of those stories. So you don't have to necessarily have the scientific evidence all the time to at least accept that the experience you're having, let's say, in Holotropic Breathwork, is real because your brain decides it's real, and it is maybe providing more meaning than we have without that openness.

BB—Any trauma that happened before, if it was not resolved or addressed—and we know that a lot of times our ancestors did not have access to the same kinds of tools and offerings that we have now with the internet, it's just so pervasive that we have the opportunity to do this work, but they didn't have it. And so it's kind of our generation are the ones that I believe are here to do some of this work. 

And especially if you feel like you're conscious and you're on this path, this is a really important part of it is to go backward and to help to heal backward because that also heals us and heals forward as well, right?

55:11

So the question that came out of the story: How do I find out more about his story, what his issues were, and if they were similar to mine and how to help heal his wounds and my family heritage. 

So, you know, I wish there was a really clear cut and dried way to do that. There kind of are on some level. Again, everybody's experience is going to be different. One thing you can do is you can go to some of these genealogy banks. There are, you know, like ancestry.com and some of these big— it's become quite a thing.

And with the growing capacity of AI, also there is a chance that you can just go into search through an AI engine like ChatGPT and just ask. I did that with one of my ancestors and there wasn't a lot of new information that I found about her, but it was a validation that what I did know about her is true. 

So if you can't actually do this the scientific way by going into the genealogy and figuring that stuff out, again, you know, I believe—and Jung believed, so I believe like he did—that there is a very fine line between reality and imagination.

And it is just as valid—even though our society does not necessarily suggest that—it is just as valid for us to drop into a relaxed state of awareness and to open ourselves to contact with that ancestor and to have a conversation with that grandfather imaginally. 

And again, when I say that word, we don't want to put that down. In fact, we want to value it because that kind of imaginal experience can actually be more real than even if we just knew some statistics about this particular person.

56:50

Often we are picking up on what's real from them. And even if we're not, we're getting messages and a felt sense that are coming through for us that can actually give us some experiences that can be very powerful for us through the felt sense. If you don't know yet to value that, it's a really good time to start asking yourself, you know: Why don't I value that imagination, and what is there if it was good enough for Jung? You know, Hopefully it's good enough for you as well. So I hope that that's somewhat helpful.

And boy, go do some Holotropic Breathwork, because anything that you can do to get into that non-ordinary or outside-of-our ego states of consciousness, the information just starts coming. And it can really also increase your intuition to do this kind of work as you begin to work with these individuals in your past. Imagine you are tapping into some very real feelings and things that are real. And that's what happens with the Family Constellation Therapy, too.

If you ever have an opportunity to see one of those sessions, really people are just moving into their intuition and acting out or expressing something that is presumably coming from this field, you know these fields that carry information down through the generations or from past lives.

CM—For myself, I want to encourage people to read more about the power that stories have in our brain that affect our capacity to remember, our capacity to feel emotions.

58:12

And I think that craving for meaning can really largely explain why these systems, understanding karma, understanding ancestral imprints or past lives have been discussed and considered by philosophers and scholars and now scientists for thousands, if not millions, of years. So these topics are not exactly new. What's exciting is, as you say, maybe more openness and more information across these disciplines that are giving us different models through which we can heal and through which we may have actually more control over the life that we can manifest.

BB—Yeah. Beautiful. Just this one question on astrology here. Absolutely. I think astrology can be super powerful. And there's something in this study of ancestral patterns, epigenetics, that is actually called the Anniversary Syndrome. And that is that sometimes certain dates in your life actually correlate with certain dates of your ancestors, maybe birthdays or weddings or big events in their lives.

And so sometimes even people are born at a very close date to an ancestor's birthday and they feel like they have a special connection with this ancestor and maybe they are kind of—you know, we often find that people's themes will come through over and over again, so she said that she was a blacksmith in that life and a spiritual alchemist. And I would guess that you also have some contact or connection with that in your current life, where you use spiritual alchemy of some sort, in some way, shape or form to work with your own life or maybe even with other people.

59:43

So we do find that those kinds of themes carry on and that can be super helpful too. Just look at your own life and see what those themes are right now. What archetypes are at work in your life? 

All right. Thank you guys so much. We really appreciate it. 

CM—Thank you…yes…for joining us. 

BB—We are really looking forward to seeing you hopefully again in June. We probably will have to do a different date and time in June as there's a conflict with that, but we will announce that and you should see that coming across your email within the next week or so so that you can plan for the next one if you want to join with us.

Thank you again. Really appreciate it.