Ask a Psychic: Past Lives
Have you ever felt a mysterious pull toward a place you have never been, or an inexplicable connection with someone you just met? These experiences may be echoes of past lives. Dr. Deganit Nuur, clairvoyant and founder of Nuurvana, offers some illuminating answers.
In my past lives, have I always been the same gender?
Most of us have been a little bit of everything in past lives, every gender and every socioeconomic background. We have lived around the world. We have been warriors, sages, murderers, philosophers, and most of us have done it all at some point across the vast span of our many incarnations.
There are usually themes or patterns that prevail from one lifetime to the next. You may have spent a significant stretch of time on Earth as an artist, for example, returning to that expression again and again. But outside of those recurring threads, you have likely been a little bit of everything else, too. The soul is not fixed to a single identity. It is far more expansive than the labels we tend to assign in any one lifetime.
This perspective can be quietly liberating. The rigid categories we use to define ourselves in the present, whether of gender, nationality, class, or profession, may be just one chapter in a much richer and more varied story.
I am always drawn to one area in my city. I get a strong spiritual tug there. Does this have to do with a past life?
It could absolutely be a past life connection. Some people will feel homesick for a place they have never physically visited in this lifetime, a deep, inexplicable longing that no map or memory can account for. That ache is meaningful.
Often, when you feel this way about a particular place, it is because you once lived there and it was likely a very fulfilling period for you. The soul retains impressions of places where it flourished, loved deeply, or found profound meaning. Those impressions do not always dissolve when a lifetime ends.
Something to try
The next time you visit that place, slow down. Sit quietly in the space. Notice what feelings or images arise without trying to analyze them. You may be surprised by what surfaces when you simply allow yourself to be present there.
This phenomenon is not limited to neighborhoods or city blocks. Some people feel it toward entire countries, specific landscapes, or ancient sites. If a particular culture's art, language, or history has always moved you in ways you cannot explain, that too may be worth exploring as a possible past life resonance.
Do dreams allow you to revisit past lives?
They absolutely can. Dreams are one of the most accessible portals we have to other dimensions of our existence, and past lives are no exception.
Sometimes an entire lifetime will play out in a single dream with a beginning, a middle, and an end that feels utterly foreign to your current life yet undeniably real. Other times, the clues are subtler. You might notice a figure who appears again and again across different dreams, someone you cannot place in your waking life but who carries a familiar weight. That recurring presence could be someone, or even a version of you, from a past life.
Repeating locations in dreams are also worth paying attention to. If you find yourself returning to the same house, city, landscape, or era in your dream life, those settings are likely not random. They may be locations your soul once called home.
"Our existence is not linear. Our identity is not on a timeline that starts at birth and ends at death."
Medium and Reiki teacher Caitlin Marino offers a perspective that reframes the concept of past lives altogether. She describes them as alternative lives, suggesting that we perceive multiple dimensions of reality where all versions of ourselves are happening simultaneously. From this view, there is no strict past or future. There are simply different expressions of the self unfolding across different planes of experience. Dreams, then, become less of a time machine and more of a tuning device, allowing us to access frequencies of ourselves that are always present, just not always audible in waking consciousness.
Does my intense relationship have something to do with a past life?
Almost certainly. When a connection feels larger than this life, when it arrives with a force or familiarity that cannot be explained by the months or years you have actually known someone, it is very often because you have known each other before.
The intensity of a past life connection often reflects how recent that shared history is. Although "recent" is a relative term when we are speaking across lifetimes. The 1600s, for example, is considered relatively recent in the broader context of past lives, which can stretch back thousands of years. When a past life connection is more recent, the energy between two people can feel electric, almost urgent, like unfinished business pressing up against the present moment.
When the connection is more ancient, the feeling tends to be different. There is less fire and more warmth. A quiet recognition. An ease that bypasses the usual awkwardness of getting to know someone. It is like meeting someone and already knowing, without being able to say why, that they are family.
The spectrum of past life connections
More recent past lives tend to feel like instant sparks, charged and intense. More ancient connections feel like instant family, steady and deeply familiar. Both are significant. Neither is more valuable than the other.
It is also worth noting that difficult relationships can carry past life energy just as powerfully as loving ones. If someone pushes every button you have and the pattern seems to repeat no matter how much you work on it, there may be karmic threads from a previous lifetime that are asking to be resolved in this one.
Generally speaking, we have shared past lives with almost everyone who populates our current world in a meaningful way. The people who shape us most are rarely strangers to our soul.
How do you release past life pain and find joy now?
Understanding the spiritual significance of a trauma and completing the karma of a past life are both essential to healing and setting yourself free. This is not about intellectually cataloging what happened in a previous incarnation. It is about finding the deeper purpose that the experience was meant to serve.
For example, you may have had an extremely difficult past life designed specifically to cultivate humility in your soul. The hardship was not punishment. It was curriculum. Once you can see the lesson clearly, you stop fighting the experience and start integrating it. You find the medicine in the situation, benefit from it, and release it with love, understanding, forgiveness, and a sense of completion.
Forgiveness is particularly important here, and that includes forgiving yourself. Across many lifetimes, we have all played roles we would not be proud of in this one. We have hurt others. We have made choices driven by fear, greed, or ignorance. Carrying guilt across lifetimes serves no one. Understanding, and then releasing, is the path forward.
Some people find that working with a skilled clairvoyant, past life regression therapist, or energy healer helps them access and process these layers more efficiently. Others find that meditation, journaling, or somatic practices create enough space for the understanding to arise naturally. There is no single right way. The intention to heal and release is itself powerful.
A gentle reminder
While it is deeply fascinating and genuinely healing to explore our past lives, try not to become so absorbed in looking backwards that you lose sight of the life you are actually living right now.
You incarnated in this body, in this part of the world, at this precise point in time, for a reason. This life, with all of its particular joys and struggles, is the one your soul chose. You do not need to fully understand your past lives in order to thrive in this one. The healing you do here and now ripples outward across all your lifetimes anyway.
Continue to work on yourself. Build the life that feels most aligned with who you are becoming. Use your past, in all its dimensions, as wisdom rather than weight. And keep moving forward.
