This post was inspired by Karen Kubicko, who will soon publish a book on past lives called, Life is Just a Another Class: One Soul’s Journey through Past Life Regression. Visit her blog at: http://karenkubicko.wordpress.com/

When I was in the process of writing my memoir, I discovered a manilla folder stashed away in a pile of memorabilia my mother had kept from my childhood. It was like opening the heart of the five year old girl named Alethea (for Truth) Eamon (for the boy her father wanted her to be). Here, were crayoned drawings of the life I once tried to manifest. A brown shed-like building with black framed windows became a warm home with smoke curling out of the chimney, with over-sized tulips and irises in the yard. In another drawing, a platform of rainbow wood became the play-set my step-father had promised to build me, but never did. 

My will to manifest my perfect world at five failed me, I realized as I flipped through the drawings. Already, at five, I was a child wrapped tightly in the arms of fear and secrets. My reality was the reality my parents were creating. We had just moved three thousand miles away from the extended family I was being asked to forget, and the father I was told never wanted me. I started kindergarten that year, shyly befriending the girl with soft brown eyes and Shirley Temple curls, and coveting the perfect life I know she led inside her department store clothes. For the first several months, my new home in New Hampshire was a teepee, my bathroom a hole in the ground, and then an outhouse made of pine.

I won’t tell you about the plants that looked like tomatoes. I won’t tell you about the man I was learning to call “Dad.” Those stories are part of the larger story of The Girl Named Truth. Instead, I’ll tell you about the five year old child with the deep blue eyes that couldn’t hide her sadness. I’ll tell you about the life she held onto.

There is one picture in the folder saved from my mother that fills me with joy. A picture that became a piece of a puzzle that is helping me to remember one of my favorite, empowered past lives. When we are young children, before we completely absorb ourselves in our new life, we often retain memories of our past lives. In the picture I drew, there appears a happy child with pigtails, wearing a wide red smile over a dress bursting with color. Above my crayoned-self, I wrote the words, “Alethea I was a Gypsy.”

I used to have a bright red fabric hat inlaid with embroidered mirrors threaded in the colors of the rainbow. Some days, when I found myself alone, I would don that magical hat and dance inside another world. A world where I was happy and free.

Thankfully, this life has never left me. Growing up I would cling to memories that were like beautifully painted landscapes vivid in their colors and the peace they remembered. As I grew older, so did that gypsy girl. She became a woman with rippling waves of hair secured loosely with a silk scarf. The dresses she wore lengthened and filled the space around her legs as she danced in her world of beauty and light. Always she would appear, a brief flash of brilliance, filling me with joy, in a moment of need. Reminding me that she was still there, living inside of me.

Only recently I realized I was her. A few months ago I did a past life regression during a psychic class. Before I regressed, I pleaded with sprit to bring me a happy life. I didn’t want another life of repression mirrored back to me, even though I knew those were the ones needing to be healed. When I closed my eyes and breathed into meditation, I found myself inside a temple shaped like a pyramid. I was, I realized with gratitude, a woman (many of my painful past lives have been as a man). And, I was a gypsy. On top of my long hair appeared a white scarf, and my body was draped with a flowing dress.  I was dancing, as a part of a circle of women. Feelings of joy and love filled my heart. I didn’t want to leave.