Jumping Page 20

One of them is a woman I saw once, in Tasmania. I'm surprised to see a woman with whom I have had only one encounter, and we never even spoke. I remember being in Launceston, the second largest city in Tasmania, for a conference where I was invited to speak. I believe everyone else they asked had turned them down—it was so far, so expensive, and no one was exactly sure where Tasmania even was. Africa, they thought? Even I had to look it up, not realizing it was an island off the southeast coast of Australia, one of Australia's five provinces, just adjacent to New Zealand. I loved it, and will always remember the magic of seeing wallabies spar with each other, like miniature boxers, in the twilight on the grounds of the Cataract Gorge Reserve, a wild place just minutes from the heart of the city.

  I look at the woman, who looks strikingly like me, and remember seeing her in the crowd of evening strollers along the pier one night, on the Tamar River. People were checking out the restaurants and each other, wandering into the shops, thinking about taking rides on the water taxi. I felt so strangely drawn to follow this woman, knowing there was some sort of connection, and hoping the woman knew it, too. She was older, and walked with a younger couple, who looked like a daughter and son-in-law. She had put herself under their protection and seemed fragile somehow.

  I tell Philip, “I think she was afraid of me—she noticed me, but only peripherally, and wouldn't look at me head-on. I was a little freaked out—I kept thinking, knowing, she was me somehow, some other version of me. I wanted to see her and have her see me, as validation of something. At the same time, I felt as if something irrevocable would change, and I didn't know if I was ready for that. I think she felt the same way.”

  He says nothing because the woman approaches.

  “Babe, this is Hardin,” Philip says, just as I'm thinking the name in my head.

  “I know.”

  Hardin and I hug. And Hardin, laughing, says, with a distinct Australian accent, “Of course, I did see you. I'm an aspect of you and you of me. It was my first time to ever see such a thing. I wasn't well at the time, and I thought seeing you meant immanent death!” She laughs again, “I know now that's not the case. And I'm sorry to have missed the opportunity, but I was a frightened little thing in that life. Not like you!”

  “Oh, I was scared, too!” I assure her. “It feels so good to meet you now!”

  We hug again, and I turn with Philip, Hardin following, to meet some of the others on the beach.

  Another older woman comes up to me and takes my hands in hers. She is shorter than I am, with long dark hair flowing in the wind. Her face is deeply lined and darkly tanned. She has on what I think of as gypsy jewelry, large hoop earrings, lots of bangles, and long strands of small gold beads around her neck. She's a strong and handsome woman. Her deeply set dark eyes exude confidence and good will. Her white teeth flash in her tanned face as she smiles broadly at me, waiting for me to know her.

  I look down at her, into her eyes, and gasp. “I do know you!”

  In half a second, both of us are crying. I look at the woman, keeping hold of her hands. “What I know is that we killed each other. We've died together, too, when someone else killed us. We've had intense relationships. I know, too, that only people who really love each other would do these things for and with each other. It takes planning and synchronization of everything from our births, to a shared geography, to a million other things, and a deep understanding of what it means for each of us, and for everyone else these acts touch, in terms of advancement.” I'm out of breath.

  Laughing and nodding, the woman pulls me to sit with her on the sand, and I do.

  “We burned at the stake together, our stakes near each other. Part of the Inquisition? We committed heresy?” I look at her for confirmation. The woman nods her head. “We were completely present to each other through the burning,” I continue, “joined in supporting each other. We rose together from that life, with the smoke of the fire.”

  I look at the woman again, who nods and bows her head. I look up at Philip. “She beheaded me in another life. She was the axe man, or headman, as they were called, much hated and feared by everyone, near and far. The King's administration did their best to keep the axe men unknown, but people knew, and the men were ostracized, as if the evil they did was somehow contagious, so even casual association with them would pull you into a dark brotherhood. I had committed some sort of usury—making loans with high interest rates that pretty much no one could have paid. The King had made charging interest on lent money legal, within certain limits, despite the church's opposition. But this was what all the money lenders did, or they couldn't have made a living, what with the King's heavy taxation of all of them. I had been caught, though, in part because I was a Jew and Jews were generally hated, and in part because one family I was over-charging had some connections in high places.

  “When I knelt to the axe man, I knew we had a bond stronger than life! It was just as Duncan Robert said—we'd played all sorts of roles with each other—mother, father, friend, now executioner.” I look at the woman again. “Until we know we're one.”

  “I am Nika. But you've known me by so many other names, we hardly need names anymore. I use Nika because that was one of my favorite lives with you. It was in Russia. Do you remember? We lived in the city of Kiev, in the Ukraine, before it declared its independence. We were sisters, living with our parents, who ran a small tobacco shop, with our lodgings above it.

  “One day our parents went off to a big buyers' market in St. Petersburg, something they'd never done before, about a two-day train trip each way. They never returned. We never learned what happened to them. We were about fourteen and fifteen, you were still in school. We just kept going—we ordered tobacco, forging our father's signature, we managed the books, we closed the shop for holidays and took ourselves on trips out into the countryside. We'd latch onto whatever group of adults seemed handy and were never questioned.

  “Finally we were found out, by an unscrupulous man who wanted to buy the shop out, to curtail the competition. Once he found out, he wanted us to do whatever unsavory thing he said, or he'd report us to the authorities and we'd be put in prison for all that we'd done. We believed him about the prison, and saw it as a prison either way.

  “One night shortly after we were found out, we slipped out of the house and went to the Nicholas Chain Bridge, the only stationary bridge across the Dnieper River that ran through Kiev and the countryside, all the way to the Black Sea. Bridges in Kiev, for hundreds of years, had been floating bridges, primitive affairs removed when the winter's ice began to set in. We considered the bridge one of the wonders of the world. It was known for its beauty all over Europe. ‘It civilized Kiev,’ we used to say, believing it somehow civilized us, too. We loved that river and knew its ancient history. Cossacks lived along it! It had been part of the Amber Road, a main trade route coming in from the Middle East. We thought the river was the most beautiful thing in the city, and the bridge was the second most beautiful. It felt good to become a part of that flow of history.”

  She's beaming as she tells this story, holding onto my arm as we sit in the sand. I look over at Philip, who has joined us on the sand.

  “You mean we jumped from the bridge into the river that night?”

  “Yes. We wrapped our arms around each other and jumped from the railing, which was the highest point we could reach. Do you remember?”

  “I don't think so. Why is it one of your favorite lives? It ended in tragedy, when we were still young.”

  “We accomplished many goals in that life. We didn't see ourselves as helpless. We believed we could take care of ourselves. We had fun doing it. We discovered we had strengths and we relied on them. We didn't turn our lives over to anyone else. We did our best, and we were happy.”

  “But it was suicide. Isn't that wrong?”

  “We had gone as far as we could go in that life on our terms, and we knew it. We weren't leaving in defeat and despair. We were making a stand, refusing to bow to someone else's pl
ans for us. That was our intent,” she says calmly, “and that was our choice.”

  I look at Philip. He looks at me. “How do you feel about it?” he asks.

  I shouldn't be surprised to see I have suicide in a past life. And this death seems much better than beheadings and battles.

  “I feel okay about it. And I'm kind of in awe of the courage those two had.” I look at Nika. “That's why you felt like a sister to me when I first saw you.” Looking at her, I think of my own sisters, trying to imagine them doing half these things.

  “A sister, but closer. I'm so glad I'm here to see you,” I tell her.

  “And I you,” Nika says, smiling. “You know, you still have the courage we had then. You've just jumped again!” And she laughs, causing me to laugh, too.

  “This advances us?” I ask, interested to know, wanting that for me and for her. “To have jumped?”

  “You'll have a better balance of the spiritual and the physical in life now. You've allowed the infusion of spirit into this vehicle,” Nika says, tapping my chest, “for earthly expression, which is what it's all about. You'll find it easier to stay on your purpose.”

  “How does it help you?”

  “A change in your vibration changes mine, by association, because our energies are so connected. It helps everyone in your cohort. Jumping raises your vibration because you've cleared fear in order to do it. Any time we get rid of some of our fear, our vibration is raised because it's no longer as constrained as it was.”

  “Well! Maybe that's why I feel so wonderful here.”

  “Everyone feels better here!” Nika says.

  “We need to go,” Philip says. “There's a man in town for you to meet.”

  Another woman comes through the small crowd around Philip and me, and I begin to wonder if my whole cohort is women. She has grey hair pulled back in a double bun on the back of her head. She's dressed in a mid-calf length skirt, with blouse belted over it. She wears soft moccasin boots.

  She's Navajo, I think, because I've seen women like this when I've visited my sister Kelly in New Mexico. I feel an immense love for this woman, just as I do for Nika.

  “I was your husband in our last life together,” the woman says, taking my hands in hers. “I'm someone else's granny in this life that we share. But I'm there for you, too.”

  My mind is reeling. This woman is in my life now!

  “We live within each other—that's what a cohort is. You can see that now?” the woman asks. “We had a deep kind of experience together—a life and death one. In that existence we successfully piloted a group project to a kind of cosmic completion. That's rare. Things like that get planned often but seldom completed. So many things have to come together—people have to hold firm in their resolve to maintain authenticity of self and purpose. When we succeed, it's like every holiday and celebration rolled into one, like finding your lost parents, or reaching the top of a mountain you never expected to be able to climb. The success is felt by your whole cohort, and beyond. It's an extreme exercise in service, so it produces an extreme euphoria. You and I worked hard to do that. Do you remember?”

  I stop to think, and the memory starts to surface. We didn't intervene in something—someone died. I remember. It's a small story, really, so I would never have realized the size of its effect. We were children, not more than eight or nine. We let our friend drown. We could have saved him, but we didn't. Somehow, we knew we weren't supposed to. He had to die in order for his family to learn compassion. He was supposed to be here for only a short while, and he knew this. If we intervened, all of the plans everyone had for this life would be put to waste, and some of those plans were important for the country and the world. So we let him drown and then we took his body home to his parents, after getting it onto our sled. Back then, I only knew I was confused and paralyzed by fear the whole time.

  “It's the not intervening,” the woman says. “It's almost impossible for us when we're on Earth, especially in life-and-death situations. We tend to follow rote behaviors for any given situation, but especially those. In truth, all situations are different and require our intuition. But usually we can't see that when we're on Earth. When it's life or death, we think we're supposed to intervene on the side of life. But that time, seeing death approaching for the first time in our young lives, we still listened to our own intuitive knowing and watched him die. We cried, but we held on to each other and stood firm, supported by every ounce of energy our cohort could send our way. And then we still had to witness his parents' grief, knowing that on some level they did blame us, even though they said they didn't. It was quite traumatic for everyone concerned, and it followed us for the rest of those lives. But there was a way we did have peace on it, and we helped each other maintain that.”

  “What are we to each other in this present life?” I have to ask.

  “That's still to unfold,” the woman says, “though not intervening is still a theme for me, as are lost children.” She looks down for a moment. “I just wanted to plant this awareness for you, for you to know I'm there for you, whether or not we ever meet.”

  We hug, and I feel this woman's power and again feel the sensation of being one. “Go and finish your journeying,” the woman says, smiling. “We're proud of you. You're clearing the path for so many others.”

  I blow her a kiss as I move up the beach again with Philip. I think about how different my journey is from Duncan Robert's. He met one group of people and stayed in one place, listening to stories that told him of his larger identity. He was transformed by hearing what he had done in other lives and learning what he could do in this life. Maybe I'm learning the same things in a different way. Philip is quiet while I ruminate.

  Two people are walking next to me, on my left, and suddenly I'm aware they are my mother and father from my current life. I am face-to-face with my abuser, a man I have always feared. As we walk, I feel my father's courage, and it's an incredible realization to me. I resist, but the information comes to me (as it does in the Void) with its heightened energy, and I can't avoid the knowledge of what made the abuse possible. Because I'm in the Void, this knowledge neither outrages nor sickens me. My name is on the things that led to the abuse, too.

  First thing I know?

  Only someone as close to you as your cohort would engage in this kind of advancement with you. I've had a buried idea that I was experiencing abuse in retribution—because I had engaged in it in another life. Engaged in it maybe with the entity who is now my father. We took on something incredibly difficult, together. We were partners in it. Now I realize that just wasn't the case. The three of us—my mother, too—agreed to take this on out of love, to help each other through a complicated skein of generational relationships that had gone from bad to worse.

  This is the second thing I know: we can carry wounds of the spirit from lifetime to lifetime. Times when we were made to feel less than or others were, times we tried to right a wrong and failed. Times we failed in some way—failed ourselves or others. We want to keep trying until we've righted it, so we carry it along.

  In our cohort, we had occupied various roles over various lives—first helping to create grudges and resentments that had become deeply embedded, and then trying to work to alleviate them. We created this situation as a group and we had to resolve it as a group. These grudges and resentments had constrained all of us, dooming us to life after life in which we strove to ease them, heal them. It was slow, laborious work. Progress was incremental, and it kept us from other pursuits.

  So, my father proposed the most courageous resolution—it called for something beyond everything we had been trying. He wanted to settle it once and for all. It required something transcendent, that we wouldn't be able to deny had changed us profoundly. Incest.

  He proposed this scenario to give everyone a chance for a purge of the negative energy that constrained us all. It was a drastic proposal, extremely difficult for everyone involved and could only be carried off by those with impeccab
le motivation and dedication. His courage and love had inspired me to offer my partnership in the scenario.

  The third thing I know is that lives are for trying things, taking risks, for the right reasons, under the right conditions, so progress can be made. Because I did, my mother did. My mother and I had had many other lives together. We all trusted each other to stay true to purpose, in order to achieve the larger healing.

  We stand face-to-face now. No one takes anyone's hands.

  I realize how long I've been carrying buried hatred, fear, and confusion about my father. I see the harm that does to my current life—this is the stuff of illness, how it starts, where it starts, how it gains hold. It takes up residence in a corner of an essential organ in your body and eats away at it—the unresolved anxiety of it always with you, like a piece of leather rubbing at your skin until it reaches bone. It can do this because you have weakened your own spirit enough by this negativity to create a permanent home for it. I know I have worked hard on Earth to be able to manage my understanding of the abuse and make a kind of peace with it. I realize now only my father can heal me or help me heal myself at the level of spirit. But it's for me to do, to allow, not him.

  I have to love him, and my mother, the way I love Philip.

  This would have seemed impossible, unthinkable before. I can do it now because I know this is how the healing of the whole cohort happens—they find their way to love, out of the place of grudges and resentment and pain. If I permit the healing, they can all heal and move forward. We all play a very real part.

  Healing is an action, a choice, a stepping out of the old and into a new way of seeing the situation. What has made me hold onto the old? To prefer it over healing? Well, you have to be ready or letting go to heal can feel like further victimization, creating more resentment. It's such a worn-out platitude to say “you have to be ready” to let go. But it had been so hard to get hold of an awareness and even limited understanding of the abuse, that letting go of it seemed wrong at first. My understanding of it had seemed so hard won that I thought letting go of it meant I would lose that part of myself again, would lose all that understanding, and go back to being that unprotected child.