Chapter Four
The Ties that Bind
“The Tibetan Buddhists agree that the more aware and conscious a soul is, the better its choices will be for the coming life. They say a spiritually evolved soul can direct its incarnation and choose the place and family of its birth. Otherwise, they say, Karma will dictate the choice, and the soul will be drawn, as a magnet, into whatever womb resonates with all its past experiences.” – Carol Bowman
****How thoughts, feeling and emotions create****
Brian Weiss, in his book Through Time and into Healing (#113), suggests that ‘karma,’ when applied to abuse, is not necessarily a punishment from the past. I believe he is right. Consciousness is a form of energy, a vibration. This energy includes a wide range of human thoughts, feelings and emotions; hate, fear, guilt, and shame, as well as love, joy, compassion and empathy. Why do souls come into a life of abuse repeatedly, over and over; life time after life time? Why are so many children faced with horrific amounts of abuse and/or neglect? I have a hard time with the guiding and planning sessions so many authors write about. They might be true for the more enlightened soul, but it seems to me, that the masses are not so enlightened. There seems to be something missing. For centuries we have been left without direction on HOW TO MAKE SOUL CHANGES.
In his book, The Isaiah Effect, Gregg Braden describes thoughts, feelings and emotions as being the key to creating consciously. He suggests that by aligning your thoughts, feelings and emotions, your soul is empowered with clear intentions, clear inner vision, and purposeful, mindful life creations. He sees our thoughts as the guidance system that directs our emotions;
and suggests that the feeling center is also the heart center. It is interesting to note that the heart is the center for the Buddha, as well as the seat of the soul for Ancient Egypt. The merging of thoughts and emotions through the heart center must be the key. Between thoughts and emotions, a soul can create with clear intentions, clear choices, and clear action.
Schwaller de Lubicz called these the “three intelligences” and spoke deeply about the alignment and possibilities of working with them in the 1950‘s and 60‘s. de Lubicz was French and studied things like chemistry, mathematics, and physics. But it wasn't until 1998 that his writings were translated into English. He was a fascinating man, closely associated with some of the most interesting groups and secret societies in Paris, France, around the turn of the 20th century. Both Braden and de Lubicz stress that the whole point is to be aware; your entire life concerns the condition of not only your mind, body and spirit, but also of your thoughts, feelings and emotions. It isn't a last minute evaluation, it reflects a life time. In other words, if we hold onto feelings of love, peace, joy - or that of guilt, shame or fear during our life, then according to recent theory and the ancient Egyptians, Tibetans and Indian Buddhist texts, we are sure to recreate the condition in the next life. Schwaller de Lubicz also stressed that the principle purpose behind reincarnation must be evolution and the expansion of consciousness.
My past lives displayed a pattern, not of a Karma that states “what you sow, so shall you reap” but a pattern that showed a misalignment of what de Lubicz called the three intelligences. Cerebralintelligence, heart intelligence and emotional intelligence. Due to this misalignment, there was chaos within me. My soul was reacting exactly as the Tibetan Buddhists said!
People have many needs; the need to be forgiven, the need to be loved, the need to experience. These needs also draw us, like a magnet, to that which we know. I was indeed drawn to where my soul resonated with similar energy fields, similar thought vibrations, and like-minded souls. What was becoming more and more real to me is the fact that I am responsible for my past, my present and my future lives.
***********Memories of slavery *********
I laid on my bed, closed my eyes and saw a beautiful purple and blue light. I am again in the old barn. I am in a stall area watching the white children play. They are different than me. They played and laughed. I don't think I know how to do that. I know I don’t know how to do that.
Time moved forward -- I am in a very large white house in the kitchen. An eight year old girl was helping the older women make bread. Her name was Naomi, and she was singing. I smiled, cause boy! Could that girl sing. I appreciated that about her. I didn’t work in the kitchen, I didn’t even know how to cook. I was a house attendant and housekeeper. Cleaning, always cleaning, ironing and bringing things to the Mrs. I had to be careful, careful all the time, to be perfect, to do it just right.
Time shifts, we are being reprimanded in the hall by the Mrs. of the house. She had light hair in a bun, and a long skinny nose. Five of us were being "told what for” and that we are "not doin’ it right.” A man and his teenage boy come in the doorway and watched for awhile. He tells the Mrs. he will handle us. The man looks us all up and down. I am about seventeen; he tells me I must come with him out the back door. Then he tells the boy to come with us to "help" in the barn. Damn that old barn anyway!
I see stairs which are in the back by the kitchen where the blacks go in and out. We do not use the front stairs; it is not allowed. We walk outside by the side garden and I am looking back at the house. I know what is coming. I hate this place.
Most past life experiences are like being given pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. The whole doesn’t come into view until you have most of the pieces, and even then it’s difficult to fully comprehend the past.However, past life experiences have enabled me to comprehend the continuity of my soul. The difficult times of trauma, abuse and misfortune have strengthened me as an individual. At this point, what I am interested in is understanding and taking responsibility for why I have created suffering in my lives. God was not punishing me. I was not a black slave due to Karma. What I created, I created due to not knowing how to create differently, or how to create change within my soul in order to embrace peace, love and harmony. I was beginning to believe that reincarnation is not just a random spur of events. I was beginning to understand that we are responsible for who and what we are.
***********The Ties that Bind**************
With all the terrible things done to me, my life as Clara certainly did not help me overcome my hatred, fear or anger toward the white man. In fact, it only seemed to strengthen it. But it was Clara’s little girl Caroline, {the child I had at age fourteen, whose father was the white man} who would help me to learn to forgive. Because of her I would remember how to love. Love heals the heart, and what better way than through the love of a child.
The light is beautiful.....it draws me in, deeper and deeper within myself. My memories are not outside of myself, they are deeply woven within my ethereal being. My body remembers and is filled with emotions, feelings and thoughts. I am about nineteen years old and standing next to a river. I am questioning if there is a God in this world, and if there is, where was He? My life has been so hard.
Then I notice the birds are singing and the sun is shining and that I am with a young black man whom I love. He wants me to marry him. I sat by the water and faced the sun with my eyes closed. There must be a God, I could feel him. The young man took me in his arms and asked me to marry him. In his eyes I could see my little brother now, Craig, only his name in 1859 was Timmy. He spoke to me about love and taking care of us, my child and me, even though my girl was mulatto. The joy and hope I so desperately wanted, I was feeling for the first time.
Time shifts; I am with my nine year old daughter. "We are free Timmy,” I said to my husband as tears filled my eyes. I know we are leaving for Oklahoma. There is freedom in Oklahoma and it is very important that we go there. I look over my left shoulder at the big white house for the last time. I tell myself I will never forget the pain of this place, or how many times ‘he’ raped me. We have a mule, a small cart, a box of clothes, a bag of flour and sugar, and ourselves. Timmy drives the cart and little Caroline rides in the back. I walk, but sometimes I drive the cart.
Time shifts........I know a few years have passed, because we have a home now. I can see our house. It has a small room in front where we eat and live, and two small rooms in the back. We sleep on a small cot together and the children on a loft up in the rafters. I can see a tree swing out front with a wooden seat where Caroline loves to play. I see my son Edward. I call him "Eddy." He is just a baby playing in a hand made wooden baby seat. I think I am pregnant again!
Time shifts and I know that many years have passed. I am looking at my daughter in front of our house. She is about fifteen years old. She is beautiful. I am only 29, but I feel so old. I am walking up from the dirt road toward our house. I hear myself calling her name, "Caroline." I have a heavy southern accent and put a definite exaggeration on the "line.” She turns to me and smiles. She has much lighter skin than my husband or myself. She was the outcome of the plantation mans ‘rapin’ me. She wore a bandana scarf in her hair which was twisted up underneath; a long cotton dress with an off white dirty apron over the front. She has a garden hoe in her left hand and was leaning up against it resting. I love her; she is so special.
To me she is a “gift.” She is beautiful inside and out. Tears fill my eyes as she begins to walk toward me. As I looked at my daughter Caroline, I see holographically projected over her -- my daughter in this life, Jennifer.
Jennifer was also Alexander’s wife, my wife. She taught me what family was suppose to be back in the 18th century. Here she was again in the 19th century showing her mother, showing me again, something beyond the color of our skin. She showed me the many layers of love, and the inner ties that bind.
Caroline was working on the left side of our fence line in the front along the road leading to the house. She loved working in the rose garden. I stepped up onto the small front porch and bent down to pet our black and white dog named Hoggy. Everyday life experiences are also healing. I do not want to give the impression that all of my past life experiences were traumatic.
Time changes again. I am suddenly in another place - another time - right before the turn of the century. There is a group of us, four women doing laundry by hand -- in a wash tub, with a press. Then we are hanging the clothes on the line to dry. Everyday chores and everyday life. The clothesline is shared by several families. There are no fences between the property lines. We are talking while we do the laundry, about an older woman in the community named Gordie Mae. The work is hard -- the pace of life is slow. It is a simpler time. Then someone brought up the Twister. I said “I ain’t seen nothing like that twister -” and then I remembered it........The sky was green - there was an eerie calm before the storm............ I was letting the animals loose from the barn so they could escape the heavy winds. I have a scarf wrapped around my head. The wind is blowing something fierce. We are headed for a cellar.........underground.
Time shifts -- I am sitting on a porch in a rocker knitting and talking with the other women. My shoulders ache from washing the laundry by hand and hanging heavy wet clothes. Now I am knitting a sweater. Time and place shifts again. I am in church, there is a community congregation but it feels more like a political assembly. An old woman is seated in the front row and strikes her cane on the ground. It is Gordie Mae. She is talking about our rights, as human beings, as Americans, living in the land of the free..........
Time again jumps into the future.... I am fifty years old. I am walking down a dirt road in a dark jacket and skirt. I feel very uncomfortable, even unsafe. There is a white boy about seventeen who jeers comments at me, being sarcastic and mean. He keeps jumping from side to side around me as I walked down the street. He said, "How's it feel to be a nobody?" and ,"How's it feel to be black?" The humiliation I felt was overwhelming, I could do nothing to defend myself. I kept repeating over and over in my mind what my mamma had told me as a child -- “Don’t pay dem never no mind, Don’t pay dem never no mind....”
My thoughts raced; blacks were free, free to be careful. I was thinking how unjust the world was, that today was a day of sorrow, the kind that breaks a heart. A young black man no more than seventeen had been hung. I could see his body swinging from the tree where the hooded men had put him to his death in the early morning hours. I could see a frail girl of about fifteen seated on a front porch. Her long, thin legs draped down the steps. I felt the depth of her sorrow as she sat in the early morning mist, sobbing. I think she was his sister. Older black men in the community hurried about to remove the body. The boy had done nothing wrong; he was accused of something he had not done. It was a terrible and unjust loss.
The Lynching******
My first experience with Clara was in 1992. It wasn’t until the summer of 2004 that I would experience her death. I had been given clues for years but never a clear past life experience. It began with just a feeling, and the sensation that I couldn’t breath. I couldn’t stand anything tight around my neck. There was also a past life dream (covered in chapter seven) of a silver watch that I obtained after a group of black men and women were hung. The watch had the initials LMS engraved on the back. In 2000 I did a painting of myself as Clara with my hands on my neck line; (featured on page #___). Why it took so long to remember I don’t know. Whatever the reason, it is a meditation I will never forget.
The meditation began with a pulsing purple/blue light - coming in waves. Then I realized that I was watching myself mopping the floor of a large Victorian home. As soon as I realized I was observing from a third person perspective, my consciousness merged with Clara’s. I am wearing a long grayish blue skirt with a white apron. My skirt has a side pocket in it. As I was mopping, something in my pocket kept hitting the handle of the mop. I reached into the pocket and took out an old pocket watch. It was silver and so pretty. I ran my fingers over the back -- remembering when I first got it -- and how I first got it. I could feel the engraved initials LMS on the back.
I set the watch on a cupboard, (a mantle for china similar to a clothes dresser but for china instead). I saw very clearly the woman who lived in the house, the one I worked for. She was probably in her late 80’s, maybe early 90's, which was very old for that time. I turned back to continue cleaning the floor; it is heavy and hard work. When I was done I set the handle of the mop up against the wall and reached for the watch. The old woman came around the corner and saw me put it in my pocket. She started to yell at me, "Put that back Nigger...you stole my watch...." I replied, "No ma’m, this is my watch..." She kept yelling - and yelling. I was shaking from the inside out. People outside could hear her yelling. Everything went blank.....and my consciousness went black.
I am in a jail cell, maybe 4 feet by 6 feet, made of small 5’’ river rock stones. It has a high ceiling and a small window with bars about six feet above the ground. I am sitting on a wooden bench that came down from the wall with chains that secured it to the wall. I am shaking and tears are streaming down my face. I am thinking that everyone must know the Mrs. is not right in the head -- that it’s not true. Surely they know it isn’t true... she‘s crazy - everyone knows she’s crazy............
Then I couldn’t see anything - everything went black -- from the inside out I began to cry. My face felt like Clara’s face as I cried for mercy and repeated, “I didn’t do it - no sir, I didn’t do it.’ There was a sheriff standing near by. There was a crowd -- I could hear them shouting and calling out my name, it was so loud! “Hang that Nigger --teach ‘har a lesson. She stole....Hang har -- Hang Miss Clara “B“ -- yelling -- and more yelling........ -
My whole body began to vibrate as I cried and shook. Sparkling white and blue lights danced within my whole being during the meditation. I stood there for what seemed an eternity. I felt like I was half in and half out of my body........then suddenly I heard the door, the floor door banged open -- it was so loud and I felt it drop! My body now, which lay in a meditative state, jolted on the bed as I felt my body drop through the trap door and jerk...the blue and white lights intensified, and then peacefulness, silence and floating. I watched from above -- not sure where I was.
I watched as they cut the rope. I watched as my body fall onto the dirt road. Black men carried my body on a stretcher, which was wrapped in a blanket, to the all-black cemetery; a plot of ground covered with small, white crosses for grave markers. A few were just straight poles. I am following them - floating above. I see my family in mourning; my daughter Caroline and my husband Timmy. I see my name on the marker -“Clara B,” crudely written. I could see the year 1891.... I died in 1891. I sense that this small black community was outside of Oklahoma City.
There was silence for a long time. I moved my hands over my heart -- which opened a flood gate of tears. I cried deep from within my soul. It was Clara who cried, it was me who cried; for all that Clara had been through, for how she had lived and died. My life had been filled with people whose hatred and prejudice filled my every waking moment. I worried for my children and for my family, they were all I had. I was a fifty-one year old black woman accused of a crime I did not commit. The Civil War was not so long ago. My whole life was filled with unimaginable experiences of war, rape, and murder. At the time of my death, my feelings were -- of fear for myself and for others; my emotions were of anger, shame, confusion and distrust; my thoughts were to be far away from this place. I wished I had never brought children into this terrible world. Again I had come to know the suffering, the pain, the wounds inflicted upon the spirit of a people whose color dictated their class, their social standing and their sense of self. My thoughts, my feelings and my emotions drew me like a magnet into my next life. My name was Valeria, I would never marry, never have children and I would experience two of the worst world wars in history.