In 2001, without prompts or encouragement from anyone (quite the contrary, I’m sure people found it strange and even off-putting) I began to regard myself as a "Priestess of Yoga".
I found the title ‘yoga teacher’ or 'yoga instructor’, underwhelming, slightly insulting - and decided I would allow myself more. I was delivering a spiritual message from a place of knowledge and compassion. I felt this qualified me as a priestess. I figured that due to the sad shortage of priestesses in the world at this time, maybe the world needed some around, so I embraced myself as one - even though no one ordained it but myself.
So despite my awareness that this could be perceived as a haughty thing, I settled into my idea of what I felt being a Yoga Priestess would be. And lived it quietly in my town of residence for many years, teaching several classes a week here, there and everywhere. I could deliver a yoga class practically anywhere.
As a priestess, I felt a duty to do my best to conjure the spiritual investigatory juices of students who encountered my class. To motivate others looking for more to life to lead a more spiritually centered lifestyle.
On a morning in 2005 I awoke from a lucid dream in which I had received very specific information regarding one of my past lives.
I was to research these two words together; "yoga" and "patriarchal".
I looked them up and toward the top of all the google results in the world was "Ida Craddock", priestess of Yoga. I was stunned, like my heart skipped a beat and a feeling of excitment went through me. I devoured everything I could find on her and was excited to read a book written about her by Harvard professor Leigh Eric Schmidt called, "Heaven's Bride".
I knew in that moment I had lived her life. All the pieces fit. So much about myself and my own destiny as the person I am today made more sense. A question I had sought an answer too through my practice of lucid dreaming had been responded to.
Everything I read about her sizzled with relevance within the person I am now. Those memories being revisited in print came alive in my psyche- the same psyche that might have experienced those events directly.
It was in that moment that two lifetimes became connected and I experienced my consciousness momentarily as an undivided continuum - despite nature’s tendency for us to forget that lived in other bodies before. Indeed, it is within the forces of nature herself, programmed into the matrix, that we should forget ourselves with each new birth, ignorant to the memories of our own past experiences!
Hence the inventions of spiritual disciplines, like Yoga, that require isolation and meditation on the spiritual self existing within the reincarnating psyche, within the program of nature, to be observed, developed, taken seriously, and preparations made for its future incarnations.
As Ida, I was a young, idiosyncratic, loner yoga teacher specializing in sexology at a time when it was unacceptable - even dangerous - to do such a thing. It was the early 1900’s and there were laws against such work and its circulation. But I did it anyway.
Despite my focus on teaching married couples how to enjoy meaningful sex in a repressive society, I was breaking the law by using the mail to distribute my materials. I was put in prison multiple times and institutionalized.
Just before being incarcerated again, I ended the life of that body. Inhaling gas and neatly cutting the wrists. An efficient exit. My understanding and acceptance of the temporariness of physical bodies allowed me the courage to kill my physical body rather than return to the terrors of a hard labor camp.
That was 1902.
Interestingly, Ida lived during some of the same years as did the body of the occult master Aleister Crowley. Although we approach spirituality from different angles, I was honored he reviewed one of my most important writings - calling it one of the most important human documents ever produced.
I am again associated with Aleister Crowley in this current life. I know who he is and what he's up to. I grew up with him. We both took bodies in the same area of the world and on nearly the same day of Pisces. I have been associated with him throughout my life in his current form. He's doing much of the same, to no surprise, having fully resumed his work as an occult teacher and has again, in this life as he did in our past, given my work a public review. Talk about a little synchronicity!
As Ida, I was unmarried my whole life and never had physical sex. I departed that body a physical virgin….yet I was a sexologist.
In this life I’ve had physical sex, but haven’t focused on teaching about it.
Times have changed.
Women are different now.
Sex expression has, we’ll say, developed in its own way, with or without the inclusion of my work.
A lot of work has been done in the west by the western woman to gain these strides forward in sexual and societal freedoms. And even though nature perverts everything it’s still good to see that women have made some gains.
The services I offered in my last life were relevant then and remain so, but society seems perpetually dis-inclined toward spiritual love making - therefore there is little use for it. But it remains available and will be even more available as it is re-released by me in the near future.
We live in a bi-polar society undulating helplessly between hyper activity and depression, exposure and suppression.
Rarely do we experience the third state of being – equilibrium – a calm stability - the state in which the self becomes equipped with clear vision and a desire to act spiritually rather than carnally.
Sex union between couples, explosions of true love, was once my dream for humanity. But nature is her own entity and has her own story to tell and we are hired hands, just characters on set for the super drama that is the unfolding of this creation.
When I discovered the life of Ida, I, Erinn, had already vigorously resumed the study of yoga with a remarkably similar aloof attitude that had been there before.
In this life, when I only heard the word yoga my head shot up.
I instantaneously knew, for no conscious reason, that I needed to know everything there was to know about that word.
Why would that be?
Nothing had triggered me before with such force.
The reason is that the memories are contained right there in the psyche - in your mind container. They are with us all along. We are just blocked from accessing them.
From that moment on, upon hearing the word, I studied Yoga, practiced it, scrutinized it, researched its scriptures, origins, teachers and related religions.
--------------------------------
The things we experience in our dreams can be really important to our understanding of ourselves. Why we are the way we are, whey we are interested in what we are interested in.
Why we have recurring issues in our lives.
Our dream life can be an opportunity for collecting information about ourselves that otherwise we cannot access.
The dream state is a special condition of consciousness worthy of attention and documentation.
The early morning hours seem to be especially revealing.
By putting value on the information I retained from my dream state then bringing that information into the physical world, by comparing the material left behind by my past incarnation with what I am producing currently, I am consciously bridging a memory gap between two lifetimes.
And I plan to do it again too, however......
…now my aim is not to find myself in another Earthly body.
No condition here is good enough.
I practice the 8 limbs of Yoga because it increases one's vibration psychically and spiritually - and the higher we go in vibration, the closer we get to living in a compatible environment.
It takes an amazing amount of pulling your shit together.
Admitting what you don’t know.
And expanding on what you do know.
It’s a fascinating thing to recall who you once were and re-arrive to live in a time and place when I can have a dream, remember my past life and read about it in a book, even on Wikipedia no less.
How spiritually extra is that!
Comments powered by CComment