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Lost Soul, Wise Soul: How Challenging Past Lives Shape Our Future
Explore Challenging Past Lives and How They Can Change Your Future Drawing on her most compelling client cases, Karen Joy shows you the natural arc of a soul's journey over many lifetimes, including violent or negative ones. She reveals how our souls begin, how we enter lives on earth, and how facing a diverse range of experiences teaches us to be wiser and happier. Over many lifetimes, most souls have played the dual roles of victim and perpetrator. The trauma of these past lives―especially those that harmed others―can burden your soul, causing your present self to struggle with negative experiences. Learn how challenges can lead you astray, how energy can be carried from one incarnation to the next, and how your soul can move toward balance. Through inspiring case studies, Lost Soul, Wise Soul demonstrates how anyone can overcome a past life history of unethical or shameful behavior and live a life filled with peace, love, and joy.
- GenresSpiritualityNonfiction
239 pages, Paperback
Published February 8, 2022
16 people are currently reading
21 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 4, 2022
I have to be honest—this book was just a little bit too out there for me. While I’m very open to experiences of memories from past lives and have been compelled by accounts of young children recalling strangely specific details from another life, for example, Joy’s accounting of her work with past-regression clients fit such a crisp, linear narrative of how souls “work” that it was very difficult to get past the feeling that some other motivation might be at play. The language of this book is very definitive, claiming to present the truth of how souls incarnate based on Joy’s conversations with clients in hypnotic trance, and while I did my best to turn my science brain off and my spiritual brain on, I couldn’t ignore the strange consistency of client accounts. If your aim is simply to read some fun, interesting accounts of past lives from a hypnotherapist’s perspective, the tales are certainly compelling, and there are some useful practical lessons you can find in these pages. But I think a healthy degree of skepticism is warranted here.
The book is organized linearly, describing a sort of system of souls from “youth” through their first incarnations on earth, challenges of disconnection from source, and re-connection. Joy narrates direct language from clients taken from sessions where they are frequently speaking in the voice of a past life, or sometimes relaying information from a guide or other being. She heavily contextualizes the tales with information about how the whole system works, taken in part from the work of fellow hypnotherapist Michael Newton. This information is presented as something she (and Newton) learned directly from working with clients, but I have to wonder about the role of the therapists themselves and the specifics of the therapist-client relationship.
The challenge with this format is that you don’t really get the client’s perspective. Clients use very similar language (to each other, and to Joy), so the reader must assume that these stories are either paraphrased, compiled, or heavily edited. I wish that we’d had the opportunity to also hear directly from clients about their experiences, or more about the specific methodology. I wonder, for example, how much the therapist’s own perspective affects the questions asked, and how much the client’s expectations for a session play into their responses. My doubt is less that regression is possible, but more a doubt that so many clients would have such a similar, concrete experience of the “life between lives.” Of course such a collection wouldn’t include clients who did not experience a past life or experienced details too hazy to make an interesting narrative, but it’s still strange how the details match up.
Beyond the simple consistency, there are some obvious connections between the way the soul world is described and modern Euroamerican perspectives. Joy does note in the introduction that our current lives and perspectives influence how we understand the soul system, but I’d expect more vagueness in this case. It seems a strange coincidence that souls just happen to reincarnate in a linear order through time, that there is a hierarchy of souls, that Earth is unique as a location for incarnation, that past selves somehow know exact years and ages and locations where they were born in times where that information wouldn’t be available, and that there would be so many movie-like features in the soul realm (from a teacher with a magical orb to a hospital where souls go to heal to a room full of televisions in the afterlife). Any of these things could be true, or reasonable ways the human brain would interpret the truth, but the certainty throws me.
It’s hard not to notice that this book enshrines a certain worldview. Indigenous societies and religions are presented as primitive and early steps on a soul’s evolution. Souls are supposedly supposed to experience masculine and feminine early on, but there’s no actual discussion of say, a nonbinary incarnation or a different take on gender as a soul evolves. Free will is emphasized, but there’s also an element of a “divine plan” and weirdly literal descriptions of guides and soul groups planning out the next incarnation. Guides are strangely judgy, compared to my own understanding of the concept. We’re currently in a time where many souls are “graduating,” apparently, which feels very New Agey.
More concerning, I think, is the way the framework and the specific stories might cause actual harm in the real world for clients or readers who believe what they read. There’s a victim-blamey tone in some places—for example, narratives of cheating suggesting that it’s the person cheated on’s fault / lesson to learn that they’re too naive, or a fairly universal presentation of not having children as a problem. “Lack of trust is the path of blame, anger, and bitterness,” Joy writes. “In other words, victimhood, which means looking outside of ourselves for the cause of our distress. Eventually we learn to look inside.” Sure, there are times when we need to turn inside rather than blaming others, but this absolutism goes much too far.
More generally, the view that a serene acceptance is generally the way to go could be carried out to scary extremes. Horrible experiences seem to be justified by saying that they are soul lessons, and we’re encouraged to sympathize with everyone from Nazis to rapists. Spiritual surrender is one thing, but this feels like a dangerous path.
(ARC provided by NetGalley.)
The book is organized linearly, describing a sort of system of souls from “youth” through their first incarnations on earth, challenges of disconnection from source, and re-connection. Joy narrates direct language from clients taken from sessions where they are frequently speaking in the voice of a past life, or sometimes relaying information from a guide or other being. She heavily contextualizes the tales with information about how the whole system works, taken in part from the work of fellow hypnotherapist Michael Newton. This information is presented as something she (and Newton) learned directly from working with clients, but I have to wonder about the role of the therapists themselves and the specifics of the therapist-client relationship.
The challenge with this format is that you don’t really get the client’s perspective. Clients use very similar language (to each other, and to Joy), so the reader must assume that these stories are either paraphrased, compiled, or heavily edited. I wish that we’d had the opportunity to also hear directly from clients about their experiences, or more about the specific methodology. I wonder, for example, how much the therapist’s own perspective affects the questions asked, and how much the client’s expectations for a session play into their responses. My doubt is less that regression is possible, but more a doubt that so many clients would have such a similar, concrete experience of the “life between lives.” Of course such a collection wouldn’t include clients who did not experience a past life or experienced details too hazy to make an interesting narrative, but it’s still strange how the details match up.
Beyond the simple consistency, there are some obvious connections between the way the soul world is described and modern Euroamerican perspectives. Joy does note in the introduction that our current lives and perspectives influence how we understand the soul system, but I’d expect more vagueness in this case. It seems a strange coincidence that souls just happen to reincarnate in a linear order through time, that there is a hierarchy of souls, that Earth is unique as a location for incarnation, that past selves somehow know exact years and ages and locations where they were born in times where that information wouldn’t be available, and that there would be so many movie-like features in the soul realm (from a teacher with a magical orb to a hospital where souls go to heal to a room full of televisions in the afterlife). Any of these things could be true, or reasonable ways the human brain would interpret the truth, but the certainty throws me.
It’s hard not to notice that this book enshrines a certain worldview. Indigenous societies and religions are presented as primitive and early steps on a soul’s evolution. Souls are supposedly supposed to experience masculine and feminine early on, but there’s no actual discussion of say, a nonbinary incarnation or a different take on gender as a soul evolves. Free will is emphasized, but there’s also an element of a “divine plan” and weirdly literal descriptions of guides and soul groups planning out the next incarnation. Guides are strangely judgy, compared to my own understanding of the concept. We’re currently in a time where many souls are “graduating,” apparently, which feels very New Agey.
More concerning, I think, is the way the framework and the specific stories might cause actual harm in the real world for clients or readers who believe what they read. There’s a victim-blamey tone in some places—for example, narratives of cheating suggesting that it’s the person cheated on’s fault / lesson to learn that they’re too naive, or a fairly universal presentation of not having children as a problem. “Lack of trust is the path of blame, anger, and bitterness,” Joy writes. “In other words, victimhood, which means looking outside of ourselves for the cause of our distress. Eventually we learn to look inside.” Sure, there are times when we need to turn inside rather than blaming others, but this absolutism goes much too far.
More generally, the view that a serene acceptance is generally the way to go could be carried out to scary extremes. Horrible experiences seem to be justified by saying that they are soul lessons, and we’re encouraged to sympathize with everyone from Nazis to rapists. Spiritual surrender is one thing, but this feels like a dangerous path.
(ARC provided by NetGalley.)
June 12, 2022
Loved this book! I was struggling to transform my fears and victimhood feelings into healing, love and forgiveness, and this book helped me so much. It's hard to truly forgive without any understanding of why my abusers, particularly my parents, did what they did. Understanding and forgiveness has been so critical to my healing, as has acknowledging and making peace with my own darker sides, like anger, resentment, control and fear. After reading this book I now know that my teachers - brilliantly disguised as manipulative, narcissistic, abusive, sad, insecure and lost parents, partners and strangers - gave me incredible gifts of strength, compassion, intuition, insight, empathy, awareness, resilience, spirituality and hard-won self love. I'm grateful that authors like Karen Joy are bravely exploring and writing about humanity's darker lives and sides, as I know that understanding and embracing the dark is the only way to the light and true healing.
July 14, 2024
Really breaks down the spiritual significance of the predator and victimhood paradigm to help give a path of awareness and compassion that can aid oneself in moving into forgiveness, not for the sake of the other but for one’s own release of denser thoughts and energy that can weigh us down in a lifetime & over lifetimes. Really helped me on my current healing journey working thru trauma from abusive dynamics starting in childhood. I do want to go back and listen again. There are many interesting insights shared, although there are points and examples threaded for concepts that seem not fully baked or tied together for complete support or coherence. This could simply be because I consumed this via the audible version. Perhaps because of the type of material, a second pass will help these click or piece together the concepts for a more comprehensive understanding of the “nuggets of wisdom” offered in this text.
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November 17, 2023If you liked Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives, this book is worthwhile checking out.
August 30, 2022
Tales of troubled former lives and how they impact the lives of people now.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews