How past life can hold us back from releasing a relationship

She comes to me for a Karmic constellation session. The topic is her and her ex-husband. She has been divorced for 9 years. It was an ugly divorce, and she has already done an immense amount of emotional and spiritual work to let him go—and yet, something there remains stuck. She is unable to move forward and find her "Chapter B," even though she truly wants to.

We place the floor anchors (fabrics): "Me," "The Ex."

At a certain point, the representative representing her says: "From my head, I’ve let go, but there is something holding between us; I am still connected to him." I bring in a representation for what connects them and realize that this is a karmic story, so I bring in a representation for "Shared Karma."

Their shared karma reveals three lifetimes they spent together. We bring in a representation for each lifetime and allow the stories to emerge from them.

Three stories come to light:

• A lifetime of an almost symbiotic friendship.

• A lifetime of a father and son that ended in the father's death, involving violence.

• A lifetime of a cult leader and his relationship with one of the community members.

We move through the lifetimes, one by one, to see and understand what lies there.

In the friendship lifetime, we realize that despite the experience of near symbiosis, the patient's "Self" was actually the father. He is violent toward the child, and the child himself is both angry and violent. As the story unfolds, we realize that something happened, leading to the father's death, and the son—despite being able to save him—chose not to. The father died, and the son had a part in it. The son is the previous incarnation of the ex-husband.

We clear the energy between that past life and the current life, creating a separation so that the energies of past lifetimes are no longer part of the present.

I return to check the experience: what is happening to the energy of the thing connecting the patient to her ex. It shifts aside. It feels less significant, but still part of the field. We return to the lifetime of the cult leader and the cult member.

We discover that the cult leader is the ex-husband, and the cult member, who is in love with him and wants him, is the previous incarnation of the patient.

In cults, members often swear oaths or make vows to the cult leader and the cult when they join. It is part of the initiation ritual.

I bring in a representation for the vow, and immediately, the patient's soul begins to breathe a sigh of relief. The vow feels accurate to her. By the same token, she feels bound to it, unable to move from the space she is in. She stands next to the cult leader, while her "Self" stands on the other side of the room.

I ask the patient's representative to acknowledge the vow and release herself from holding onto it.

The moment she does this, the soul feels free to move.

We return to check what is happening in the present, and specifically, what is happening between whatever is holding the patient to her ex-husband.

The representation of "what connects the patient to the ex" feels no longer relevant and can leave the field. It exits the field, and the patient feels she can finally breathe.

Many times, we get "stuck" in relationships with various people. Not because of what they did to us in this lifetime, but because there are other lifetimes we experienced with them, and something in us wants to use this lifetime to fix all the other lifetimes. Usually, what happens is that we only perpetuate the pain and the systemic imbalance.

The more we clear past lifetimes, the more our "here and now" can become clean and liberated—and therefore, much easier to change.