Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - The Power of Our Past Lives with Ainslie MacLeod

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Have you ever had that inkling that your past life may be affecting your present moment?   During this week’s Language of Love Session, past life psychic, spiritual teacher, and author Ainslie MacLeod and I are unpacking reincarnation and the basics of past lives. We break down the relationship between the body and soul, how learning about our past lives can set us free, and how our past lives impact our ability to love. Ainslie also reveals his journey to this profession, his recent book, The Old Soul’s Guidebook, how he refined his psychic ability, and how he came to know the spiritual guides that instruct him.  In this conversation, Ainslie Macleod and I discuss:  The Basics: What is a past life? What does it mean? The healing power and purpose that can come with learning about your unique past life How Ainslie developed his psychic connection in the early days of his profession The concept of twin flames and how misconception can fortify toxic relationships  The experience of losing my son and how that devastation helped me foster stricter boundaries  The thread between death, grief, teaching, and healing Visit Ainslie MacLeod’s website to learn more about his psychic journey, services, and recent book, The Old Soul’s Guidebook: Who You Are, Why You’re Here, and How to Navigate Life on Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the past 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Here on the Language of Love Conversations, I'm talking to some of the world's most influential and revolutionary experts, thought leaders, spiritual teachers, and celebrities about love, sex, and relationships from a mind, body, and spirit perspective. and that way my goal is to awaken your mind body and soul it's time to become fluent in the language of love i'm really excited for this week's episode of language of love conversation with ainsley

mcleod he's a past life psychic spiritual teacher author his newest book is the old souls guidebook who you are, why you're here, and how to navigate life on earth. We get into it all. What the heck are past lives? What is a soul? Why do we have past lives? Are they real? And how learning about your past lives actually sets you free in ways that therapy might take years to do. We also, of course, get into the loss of my sweet boy, Sammy, and the sole purpose of that, as well as the real deal on soulmates and twin flames. What are they really? How many soulmates do we really have? We get into it all on this week's episode. I can't wait for you to listen. Ainsley McLeod, I'm so grateful that you're joining us.

Well, I'm grateful to be here. Thank you so much for having me. So I have had such a good time diving into all your content and teachings, and my peeps know that in addition to focusing on how to love and be loved better, which we definitely will be addressing in this episode in all sorts of interesting ways, that I take a very spiritual approach to life. And I talk a lot about, and people are very interested in talking about soulmates and soul paths and soul journeys and past lives. And so we're going to be diving into all of that. Well, that's, that's my world. So yeah, I'm so excited. Yeah.

I'm so excited to talk to you about this. I know your newest book, the old souls guidebook, who you are, why you're here and how to navigate life on earth probably addresses all of this. And we'll have the links to everything in the show notes when the podcast is up and you guys will be able to access all of those links to learn more about Ainsley McLeod and his work. But let's start with the basics because a lot of folks, you know, to me, I feel like I've understood that the soul is eternal and that I've had many past lives and probably

am a pretty old soul. Yes, you are. But most people, you know, since I was a little girl, I kind of was attuned to that. But a lot of people I talk to, this is new content for them. So can you just start, can we start with the basics of like, what is a past life and how does that play out and what it all means? Yeah. I mean, it's something that I never even thought about until I started, you know, fell into

this work, you know, and then I found that reincarnation really explains everything. And of course, if you have reincarnation, then you have past lives. Yeah. To me, it's all, it seems like, you know, it's like looking at a, you know, pictures of an iceberg, you know, where you just see the top and they show all the stuff underneath and that's the hidden part, you know, that's the, I always say, I don't think you can truly understand who you are and why you're here if you don't take into account where you've been and all the experience that your souls had.

And so what, how would you define reincarnation then? Well, it's a process that souls use to really get growth. if you came into this world just once you'd never get anything done you know maybe you die age three or you never really get on your life plan or you're stuck in the poverty trap and can't accomplish the things you so would like to it's by coming back time and time again in different circumstances you're flipping all the time from one gender to another or in between or whatever different sexual orientation different parts of the world you've been rich you've been poor you've been black white brown everything in between and it's this experience that gives the

soul an understanding of what it really is to be human which is you know ultimately one of the major goals for for the soul so i like in coming back all the time it's it's like the soul wants kind of master's level education and what it is to be human and to learn about love and empathy and compassion and so on, rather than just coming in for an evening class. Makes a big master's level. Some of us feel like we're getting multiple PhDs, but it's interesting just talking about the soul. I think the premise that we're working from that you and I agree on, and obviously everybody can have their own opinion about this, but that the soul is our true selves, our essential self, our core, right? And the soul is what enervates us.

and from which we are created. And the idea is that our soul is eternal. And by the way, this applies and is found in every religion and every discipline and every perspective. So this isn't about religion or debunking religion or spirituality or that argument about religion and spirituality. This is just about the fact that we all are souls inhabiting a human body, right? I think that's the fundamental, that is the core, yeah.

Yeah. And that we are in this body for however long we're in it until that body dies. And then the soul goes back to source, goes back to oneness, God, universe, whatever you want to call it. So to translate back to what you were just saying, if I understand you correctly, is that as a soul, we're constantly expanding and learning and evolving. And one of the ways we do that is by having this human experience. And what you're saying is that we come back.

So the bottom line is that we keep coming back to have this human experience, to have all of these different experiences and color, shape, sizes, everything, because that's what allows our soul to learn and expand. So then when we talk about past lives, and I do want to find out how you even got into all of this, as I understand it from you, your teaching is really about by understanding our past lives, we can put in context this life. and what our soul's purpose is in this lifetime. Am I paraphrasing that? Yeah, I think that's beautifully said. The thing about finding past lives,

and I've been doing it for now for about 25 years, is that you find the sort of themes sometimes. You can tell from what maybe didn't get completed in past life that that's something you might want to then work on in this one. You can find trauma in past lives that shows up as fears phobias limiting beliefs even physical blocks and ailments as well can be tied to to past lives as well it really offers a lot of healing as well as just understanding it's sort of it can really do some healing to the soul you know people often say well what about you're talking about past life trauma but what about stuff that happens in this life well sure i mean You know, we have awful things, traumatic events will happen in this life.

But how we respond to them is totally related to whatever has happened in our past lives. So it's why you could get two people with the same traumatic experience as children, you know, two siblings, one sees all in terms of betrayal, the other sees all in terms of rejection, or maybe it creates low self-esteem or something. But, you know, we get two different responses and it depends on what has happened in past life. Because what happens in this life is not the cause of the fear. It's the trigger. It's a trigger. It's the catalyst. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I remember when I first sort of started understanding and learning about past lives and understanding our past lives and even

having access to that, it was originally through reading Brian Weiss's book, right? Many Lives, many masters. And I did work with some past life regressionists. And what I thought was really powerful about it, and I'm wondering about your take, is that as a therapist, both wearing my therapist hat and my human hat, what I thought was so profound about it is when, and I'll give you the example of one of the things that I discovered, that when you see the picture of your past life as it pertains to a challenge or a trauma or a drama or a struggle in your current life, it's like all of a sudden your attachment and stuckness in the situation shifts just with that understanding. And that's one of the things that was so astounding to me as a therapist where

you usually have to do a lot more to get someone stuck. Right. It can be just like that. I mean, I've literally worked with people where they've blown through a major past life issue or major issue in this life. Just at the moment they hear about it, literally as I'm telling somebody about the past life. There's an example I put in my latest book. When you've been beheaded in a past life, which sounds horrible, but it is actually a little bit more common than you might think. So it does show up from time to time. It translates to neck and shoulder pain in this life. Funnily enough, if you've been hanged in a past life, it'll be throat issues or neck issues, but it's the neck and shoulder. That's the sign of having been beheaded. I mean, of course, it's not the

reason everybody has neck and shoulder pain. Yeah, but it's often correlated. Absolutely. So when it shows up in the past life, I can kind of make that prediction. So I was working with this person and all my sessions are over the phone. So I was telling her that you were beheaded in the past life. Do you have any neck and shoulder pain? she said she'd had 20 years of chronic neck and shoulder pain and it literally disappeared as we're talking about it the moment the soul hears about the past life and can make that connection oh you know that was then this is this is now we can let we can let that one go oops i was holding on to something i didn't need to hold on to right and i always say it's like

with a you know with a whimper not with a bang it's not like oh my gosh it's like a soul going okay yeah yeah that's what if that makes a lot of sense is that what you talk about what you mean when you talk about the achilles body parts yes like our achilles heels that there are body parts yeah these are areas of weakness in the body and that are related to whatever's happened in the past life that person with the neck and shoulder pain she actually turned up at a couple of my events and i was actually telling her story i didn't know what she looked like she's in the audience and i thought she was just i thought she just had a question she's like that was me that was me you're talking about well i'll tell you yeah go ahead

i was just gonna say that the pain had gone she's actually a ballroom dance teacher so she has to kind of move her neck and shoulders a lot and yeah it's just gone after 20 years wow so my example that i like to share is that i did i was struck this was many years ago and i was really struggling with my oldest son who now more than 10 years later is thriving and wonderful at the time he was really struggling. And I was really like, I knew that I was too codependent with him in his pain. And there were ways we didn't have a conflicted relationship. I was more of his life preserver than anything else, but it had evolved to the point where I, I was drowning with him and neither one, I wasn't helping him and it wasn't working and I didn't know how to

stop it. And I really just went into this past life regression. And I, and my understanding is you work a little differently than past life regression that we're going to get into in a minute. But in this case, I was taken through this deep kind of hypnosis meditation into guided into the past life as it pertained. Really, what I presented was the struggles my son was having. It wasn't really even about me. But what was fascinating is what came out was this very clear. I mean, I even drew it and painted it. I have it somewhere with this very clear image. I could see myself as I was like early teens. I could see what I was wearing, what I looked like.

And my son was my little brother who was like seven or eight. And we were somewhere in Eastern Europe and there was a pogrom or something where people were coming in and attacking and burning the fields. I'm grabbing onto, making him through. We get separated. Don't know what happened to our parents or anything else. And then we're walking like running, hiding, and we're walking down this railroad track in the middle of these deep, deep woods. There's nothing around. We're really hiding because if people, I think we were Jewish or something. And if people found out we were in danger and then we're walking, walking, walking for days and he can't keep up and we're starting to starve and we can't take care of ourselves and I can't keep dragging him along. And finally, I say to him, OK, you stay here. I'm going to go try to find some food or find some help or something and come back and get you. And so I go and it's actually not far, ironically, until I find this road and someone picks me up and takes me to this old woman in the community that took in strays and whatever.

and she was a very wealthy woman. And I mean, I saw this, this is all like, I could write this like a novel, but I saw the whole story. And then she takes me in and I don't tell anyone who I am. I like create a new identity and I keep meaning to think, okay, I got to run back and get my brother, but I was too scared. And I ended up never going back for him. Personated someone and had this very comfortable life, but I was always in this silent agony of guilt and shame because I had left him behind. And in the regression, we kind of went through what happened to him and that he had died and made peace at. And then it was like that dynamic between us, it's hard to describe, like immediately shifted inside me. And I went home

and I actually told him about it. And he, in these days, would roll his eyes at me. He thought I was crazy. He was a young teenager. But to this day, 10 years later, if I'm fussing at him about something, he's like, I'm not the one who abandoned me in a pogrom. He's always commenting on that. It's hard to describe. At that moment, when I went through that, understood that, it wasn't like when I went back home, I had to intellectually process it and remember it. It just like immediately changed the dynamics between us. Right. Absolutely.

You change immediately. The moment you're aware of that past life and you change, well, it changes the dynamic, changes other people around you. There are so many things that now if I found a past life like that, what I would tell you, I would run through some very obvious things that I would expect. One is that when you've left someone, you know, forced to, it's not, you know, there's no karma there, or you didn't willfully abandon him, your soul might feel, gosh, I should have done more, or something like that. But what it does is it creates what's called a fear of death. it's not actually a fear of your own mortality but when your soul feels that you were responsible

for someone's death or even your own death in a past life through maybe something like carelessness or neglect you know or selfishness which is kind of that way yeah but what's going to happen is in this life you're going to feel overly responsible not just for that soul but for other people's happiness and well-being yeah that's about right overly responsible that's my Or answer to myself, just because I can fix it doesn't mean that I should or that it's my job to do so. Exactly. It's not always your job, but that's how you're programmed. You know, you feel like, oh, my gosh, I've got to make sure everyone's okay. It's an overcorrection, if you like, from the past life.

There's another way it sometimes shows up, the same fear will show up, and that's wrong decision making. And that's if your soul feels that you made a poor decision. You know, it might feel like, oh, I should have stayed with him or something. Then it shows up as a bit of a challenge making decisions. funnily enough it's often over little things like i always use the example of choosing between two things on a restaurant menu you know no one's going to die if you if you choose the fish instead of the steak or whatever i joke about i put this in the book and this is why surf and turf was invented it's for people who can't make up for people like me yeah these are just amazing

yeah and i guess at this point you're sort of one of an outlier as malcolm gladwell would say You know, you've done so many of these that you've been able to kind of see the patterns and the correlations. And so I've done my 10,000 hours. Yeah, you've done your 10,000 hours. So how did this start for you? Because my understanding is that it was a lot about your guides, right? That were you get the information a different way than regression or that kind of thing. The way I got into it was that I kept hearing from psychics that I was psychic and I should be doing something about it.

but nobody ever said well this is how you get started or you know so I was kind of going who me you know it's like I didn't exactly feel psychic in fact my life had felt like such a series of blunders I thought I felt like the least psychic person in the world but I kept hearing from psychics also that a particular uncle who had died that he was a spirit guide and wanted to work with me and then this is a story I talk about a lot this was so powerful and life-changing for me it was totally transforming is that I was on a trip to Hawaii I was walking around a bookshop one morning and I was in a very altered state and I really knew it I mean I was feeling wow what the heck's happening here and I just turned a little corner in the

middle of Borders bookstore and and there was my uncle been dead 10 years at that point and he was about a foot away from me just there and gone he was there for about a second but real I mean it was like not a shimmery it was like he was in 3d yeah totally totally and also interestingly not exactly how i remembered him if you like but more like he actually was which is you know quite fascinating and it was just like a yes a three-dimensional kind of projections or something but with a clear message about wanting to work with me so a couple of weeks later i was back in the mainland and just thought well let me just try it and i found that i could i could connect how did you connect just sat down and went okay john are you if i'm supposed to work with you are

you there you know and it was like oh found that i could get some response it was very rudimentary i mean i would never have made a career out of it in the first few weeks it was like really slow going and you know it's very uncertain about what i was doing but over time i built i built confidence what a lot of people go through i think when they start doing this kind of work is that concern about is it just my imagination yeah am i making this shit up that's what i asked i get these down what was helpful was that i could check out things that he told me first time we ever spoke i said he had been in the ref in britain during world war ii and i i said okay give me a list of planes that you flew and then there was there was one that seemed very unlikely and i

thought is this me you know it's my imagination but i called my dad and the next day and i went he just tried a curiosity you know could you confirm something here and he went oh yeah sure you know and it was like oh wow and also i would keep a dictionary beside me when i start you know the early days because every so often a word would come up and i i wouldn't know the the meaning but i'd look it up and i go wow no well done spirit so you were hearing words you didn't even know the definite you'd never heard before it didn't know that or didn't know the definition and they would always be the most appropriate word for in the context so that helped me very quickly to build confidence that it really was coming from another source and then of course when i started working

with people and you get that kind of oh my god even my own mother doesn't know that you know that sort of response that's of course that's validating but the other thing that happened very quickly when i well i actually spent three years practicing way more than i should have according to the spirit guides, you know, like they were trying to get me, you know, I was, I was so afraid of making like a blunder or making a mistake, you know, like, oh my gosh, you know, what if I tell somebody something that's wrong and they, they base their entire life on this. But yeah, after about three years, I started, I started reading people and what I found

very quickly was that past lives showed up all the time because initially I wasn't really clear. It wasn't even clear with the spirit world exactly what my focus would be, but I started to get more and more interested and intrigued by this whole past life and reincarnation thing, which to be honest, I haven't really believed in before, you know, and now it's just absolutely makes such sense. And I mean, I, I really do believe there's nothing about we humans that isn't in some way past life related.

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Well, I mean, it makes sense. Talking of regression, I did one or maybe two regressions. But in the very early days, thinking, hmm, this is what you do, I was so bored, you know, like half an hour relaxing somebody, half an hour listening to them go, oh, I think I see a house. I'm going, oh, for God's sake. Yeah, because you can just see it yourself. So it just became quicker for me to say, okay, look, you know, there's this, that, and then that happened. And then I found it and people come back to me and they go, oh, my God, you know, my pain's gone or my fear of this is gone or whatever it is. And, of course, that's super validating as well.

Yeah. And so at this point, obviously your uncle is one of your guides, but I'm assuming you have a whole team that instructs. And do you know who they are? I mean, because we all have tons of spirit guides. We just don't tap into them like you do. Some of us do. And maybe if we have time, I'll ask you for some tips and tools for all of us to kind of tune into our guides more. But I want to ask you about soul families or soul groups, and in particular about soul mates, because I have my own opinions about soul mates. And since this show is about a love and be loved better, it comes up a lot. And I do find that, so in a minute, I'm going to have you tell me in your idea of what a soul mate is. But also, I think a lot of people use this concept of like twin flames and this person is my soulmate to justify staying in really toxic situations. And like, oh, no, my soul won't grow.

I signed up for this and my soul won't grow unless I stay in this really dysfunctional relationship. So I'm wondering whether you can speak about that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we come into the world. If you're an old soul, and you are, you're a very old soul, you've been kicking around on this plane for back in between here and the astral plane for maybe 5,000 or 6,000 years. It's roughly that long. You are old. And you think of in that time of all the experiences that you've had, it's all contributed to make you who you are.

Now, when you're a young soul, when you come in in your very first life, there's a bunch of souls that come in all around the same time. This is like an extended soul family, very, very large group of souls, many thousands, maybe tens of thousands. And you all come in roughly at the same time. And it's like a horse race. You know, off you go. Some of us fall at the first fence. We fall behind and so on. We reach the end at different rates.

But the older the soul gets, the more it wants to interact with members of its soul family. because one of the major goals it's a major goal by the way for you in this life is you're seeking intimacy i mean it's a big thing for souls anyway but it becomes a major focus for certain lives and it certainly is a major one it's really up for you in this life i can talk more about that if you like but to get to a more intimate place with those you want to interact with it's much easier with somebody who's from your soul family and maybe somebody you've known before an old friend is what my guides would call them and so as an old soul you're looking for a soul mate or soul mates you know that thing you were talking about oh my god i get people you know

i put this in my first book where somebody came to see me i was working out of a shop and and the first thing i mean almost before she sat down i said oh my god are you are you being physically abused at home or something and she goes yeah oh my my husband's got angry shoes and yeah too violent and I'm going oh my god what are you doing with her that guy and she goes well I feel I'm meant to be with him and it was like oh no that you know there's a lesson and I was saying no the lesson is to protect yourself you don't value yourself enough to get the hell out that's your lesson girl yeah it is I don't know what happened to her she's an older lady and I never saw her again but gosh I hope she she didn't stick around none

of us are here to be used as punching bags for other people. Yeah. I feel like when that happens, it's part of our journey. It's the catalyst. It's to set us up. And sometimes things have to get bad enough before we're willing to stand for ourselves or value ourselves or learn to set boundaries or accept how worthy of love we are or whatever that soul lesson is that we came here to learn. But I do have that experience and I have for most of my life, but certainly in my adult life and certainly over the past five to 10 years where I meet people and it's like a joke with many of my closest friends who I met this way because we laugh about how I'm like, oh, hello, I don't know you, but we're going to be really good. I recognize them. I don't know why. And I'm like,

oh, we're going to be really good friends. I don't even know who you are, but just so you know, I'm adopting you. That is that soul-to-soul connection. Absolutely. It's a feeling of comfort, of familiarity. And love, like deep love. And that it is a soul-to-heart connection that we make. There is this myth about there being one soulmate and my spirit guides don't even acknowledge that twin flame thing. There's something they talk, it's too esoteric, not necessary to go into right now. It can sort of give the sense of that. But we have this idea that we meet a soulmate and we're like swans. We're bonded for life and we sail into the sunset together and everything is just sweetness and light. And it doesn't always work like that.

You can have an agreement with a soul. You're supposed to be together. And the agreement between souls is never, there's nothing mandatory. And that's really important to recognize because I think I've done it myself. You think, oh, this is a soulmate and I really need to stick with it. And you're being abused and taking all sorts of shit and going, oh yeah, I better stick this out because it's a soulmate. But we have multiple agreements to make sure of this. And they're not fallback positions. The next one could be even better or completely different or whatever, but soul does make multiple agreements. Very few people are meant to be alone. Loose agreements like, OK, I'm going to show up in your life and I'm going to like be an asshole.

I'm paraphrasing this. I'm sure this isn't how our souls say it, but like I'm going to be a complete asshole to you and restrict you and put pressure on you so that you can have the experience. Like I'll be the one that does that for you so that you can have the experience of breaking free of that dynamic. It's kind of along those lines. We make these agreements and they're not firm. A romantic agreement, like a soulmate agreement, would be to say, let's try. Let's try to hit it off. Let's see if we can make it work. Nice. And people often feel, oh, then there's that obligation. But if one of the partners, you know, if you get involved with somebody and then they cheat on you, it doesn't matter how many lives you've had together or how great a soulmate this is. They've violated the terms of the agreement. Yeah, yeah. So you're under, the agreement becomes null and void. So you're no longer under any kind of obligation.

And I wish more people recognized this, that, you know, we're, you know, I see so many people, like I say, I've done it myself many times, sticking things out because, you know, for, well, for different reasons, you know, low self-esteem, loads of past life stuff play, you know, play into why people stay in abusive relationships as well. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with the Coffee Plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like Coffee Plus B12 to help support immune function and Coffee Plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose Ginseng Delight, our new double espresso with ginseng extract.

Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Nespresso.com. hey don't forget to go to drlauraberman.com you can find so much great information there and sign up for my newsletter so you get weekly updates on how to love and be loved better and also on my website you can get my brand new ebook you're not crazy you're just ascending it's a practical guide to spiritual awakening that many of us are going through right now and it's enough to make you feel crazy so check it out i'm here for you always helping you learn to love and be

love better. Yeah. And also the ways that, and I think it's important also for people to understand this, who have left relationships, even if, I mean, it doesn't mean you have to have been abused or cheated on to have left a relationship, but if you have left a relationship, that that's part of your soul's path too. Like, let me check this out with you because this is how I imagine it, our soul's path. That like, we come here like a GPS machine. We come here with the destination plugged in. Like, okay, this is the general trajectory I'm on and what I'm trying to learn, right? But then in our human experience, it's not like every step we take and every move we make is predestined and determined. We keep taking detours and wrong turns or decide to just make a different

turn or take a different route. And in the end, we're still kind of moving toward our destination and the destination, our soul's purpose, our soul's intention is still there. We just are making all these detours along the way. I think that's beautifully said. Oh my God. One of the things that drives me nuts is that sort of belief that when people say everything's just meant to be, you know, like we have no free will. I mean, you're absolutely right. It's like setting destination and then anything can happen on the way. That's part of the fun. Right. Well, is how you may not feel like while we're here but from our soul's perspective it's kind of like a video game you're having an experience if everything was just meant to be there'd be no

point in coming there'd be no growth so no life throws stuff at you like you know shit happens it's a messy world that we're in the growth comes from really how you deal with it there's something that i think uh these are probably some of the wisest words that i've ever heard from my spirit guides is that the experience is not the lesson the lesson is what you draw from the experience and there's always a positive lesson if you look for it no matter how challenging the experience itself is and the lesson very often is about looking for ways to transcend the situation and heal yourself from these things i mean you know like i'm saying none of us are here to be we don't sign up to be abused that stuff happens you know for example you're a super empath you're

a very, very strong person. It's kind of interesting that I did a little reading. I hope you don't mind. No, I'm curious. You have that sort of interesting combination of being very, very strong, but also very, very gentle at the same time. Sometimes that sort of little bit more masculine energy can block the empathy, but in your case, it hasn't. You're what I call a super empath, very, very, very deep feeling. A lot of that comes from your soul age. I mean, we develop empathy just over lifetimes the more often we come back the more we recognize that what's happening to other people's you know could be happening to us yeah and actually is happening to us because we're all one yeah exactly that's the big big lesson the problem with being highly

empathic and a lot of people who would be drawn to you and your work will be highly empathic too the risk is that the bullies will find them this is a so it's been a major theme of my life suffered a lot from narcissistic abuse. Me too. I know. And it's like, it's this strange draw that bullies and narcissists don't pick on each other. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. They need a nice juicy codependent. Oh, they do. Absolutely. And then it becomes utterly fascinating. I actually, I taught a few classes in this and I'm actually next year, I'm going to be putting together a a whole program and a book on healing from narcissistic abuse because it's such a it's an epidemic you know it's the other pandemic and so many of my clients have had to deal with this

and often you know just confused you know they don't know what's going on you know all the gas lighting all the things you know that that narcissists will do but the one of the things that i found most fascinating about it is that it's all spiritual this whole dynamic between narcissists and empaths it's a spiritual issue you're never going to be able to heal a narcissist through therapy or something right because it's a spiritual issue and they don't think there's anything wrong with them you know right so they're not open to therapy they're extremely ego-driven but they're extremely fear-driven yes so they have all the fears as my spirit guides would identify they have a minimum of 12 fears so basically whatever fear you have as an old soul empath

they have the same one the difference is because they're coming from a place of ego they externalize their fears and you internalize so let's say you have a fear of inferiority this comes from being treated as as if you have no value treated as lesser in a past life you're going to have all those signs in this life would be codependency, tendency to settle, low self-esteem, and you will internalize all that sort of thing. You'll beat yourself up and feel lousy about, oh, I did this. Become your own worst enemy. The narcissist doesn't create the wound. They find the wound and they stick the knife in there. They pour that salt in there. Absolutely. Because they're externalizing their fear. Like if you have a fear of judgment,

This comes from maybe being judged and executed in a past life. So then in this life, it most often shows up as a fear of public speaking. It was a huge one for me. I mean, at 30 years, I didn't speak in public. I've never done something like come on your show. It was like, oh, my God, I'd have run a mile. All going back to a past life, which then worked through. And now it's that joke, you can't shut me up.

but so if you've got judgment you're you're criticizing your your inner critic is going to be full on all the time you know you're beating yourself up and that narcissist well they have the same fears so they will but the external attract and criticize criticize put downs all that sort of thing so you touched on it before boundaries setting boundaries it's almost like the deterrent if you can heal the fears yeah and you know i'll be showing this on the book if you can heal your own fears they're like a shark those narcissists you know they're swimming along they smell blood in the water off they go and i don't even think they're conscious of it it's totally unconscious it's not like i'm having their hand it's just intuitive they're almost

empathic in a different way yes they're very intuitive and they intuitively know yeah i want to ask you about this because my evolution you know i consider myself a recovering codependent I've lived a life surrounded, I mean, every close relationship I've had, especially with men, has been with a narcissist, including my dad, who was a very significant narcissist. I mean, a wonderful human being in many ways, but a very wounded one and did a lot of damage and boundaries, absolutely, and fears preventing the boundaries, absolutely. But here's, and I wanted to ask you about this because Lord knows we talk about Sammy, my son having died a year and a half ago, or maybe a little more at this point, which to me

was the worst possible thing. There's nothing worse. There's literally nothing worse that could happen to me. And when the worst possible thing that could ever happen happened, it's hard to explain. Along with earth shattering devastation and being curled up in a ball and unable to function and in the darkest night of my soul, which I'm still climbing out of, there was this strange liberation because it was like the worst thing had happened and there's nothing to be afraid of anymore. And like all of a sudden I had zero tolerance for anything that my body didn't say yes to, including how someone speaks to me, including who I spend my time with, how I spend my time, what I say yes to, like total opposite of what I would have been before. I would have

had to really talk myself into and feel really guilty about saying no to something new. I was going to really disappoint someone by saying no to, or saying affirm like, ew, don't talk to me that way to the narcissist, whoever that is in my life that I'm trying to continue. Like it would take so much. I would do it, but I had to really gin up the courage and it was really uncomfortable and now it's like no don't fuck with me like i don't know i have no time like i don't give it it is total liberation and the experience is not the the lesson the lesson is what you draw from it what i think is really inspiring is what you've taken away from that you know because when you go through something as devastating and as traumatic as that you do need some time to

lick your wounds yeah you have to curl up in a fetal position for a while you have to go through the the sadness and the grief and so on but when you come out of it it's like going into a wave and a deep trough of a wave and then back out of it you realize these things are survivable now it's actually that experience has triggered in you uh past my fear of loss and the loss teaches your soul. Loss in past lives teaches your soul that bad things can and do happen. It sometimes robs you of the ability to be sort of complacent about life or just assume that everything is going to just work out, you know, tomorrow will just be like today. But that is actually, there is something healing about that. I think, particularly when you were saying, can't get any worse.

You know, bad things can and do happen, but they are survivable. And I think also when you've had something really traumatic like that you do lose your tolerance for the bullshit you see what's important and what's not and so when somebody you know they act out or you know start being a pain in the ass it's like you know you're much more likely to go oh yeah go on with your bad self yeah right absolutely let me ask you yeah go ahead one more thing i was just going to say that major loss like that will also remind the soul that you don't have forever yourself you know it's a reminder of mortality and you don't want to spend your time with people who are unsupportive or aren't you know don't have your back or that are annoying or whatever it is you

know life is too short yeah that was immediate that was almost immediate and i've been really connecting with that this far out now as looking back that there was a very specific moment it was probably like a week after he died. And I don't know why, like all of a sudden I was aware that I needed to make a choice to stay alive. Like it was literally a choice point. Am I going to live or am I going to let myself die? Not that I would have killed myself. Cause that's not my personality type, but I probably would have generated some life killing illness in myself. Right. You know, but like, I was aware that I was in choice in that moment. And at the same moment, it almost felt like a download. I was being shown and integrated into me that I was like, I mean, I was always aware of this. We're all aware of what a gift it is to be alive, but it's hard to explain. It was like in 5D on steroids, like I could fully understand what a miracle it is that

I get to be in this body and have this experience and what an amazing God-given gift it is that I get to be alive and that it's a gift that can change. And like none of us know what's going to happen in a minute or an hour or like my son, one minute I was talking to him, the next minute he was gone, right? None of us know what's going to happen a minute from now, much less an hour or a year. So to really value the miracle that life is and to choose to embrace it and to live it was a very conscious decision that I made. And it felt like I was being taken.

It wasn't like I sat down and said, hmm, am I going to live? It was like I was taken into that decision, if that makes sense, as I was in that really dark night. That's, you know, sometimes it takes something like this to really connect us so deeply with our soul, whole spiritual world. And when you go through loss, like I say, you have to go through that initial period where you, if you just can't function, everything's just meant to be, you know, it's like, God must have a plan for my son or whatever.

That is like spiritual bypassing. Yes, I agree. I did that when my mom died and then I had breast cancer within a year. Oh boy. But let me ask you this about, because you're bringing, you're reminding me of the other part of my question, because a lot of my audience, like me, has had a child lost, which is obviously the worst thing, and all of us have lost. If we live long enough, we're going to have heartbreak. We're going to have tragedy, and maybe not with us in person, but to people we love or to people

around us. And so I feel like this is relevant to everyone, even though I'm selfishly asking, Cause I'm curious what your take on this is with Sammy is your sense from your guides, from your perspective, from the way you look at life is your sense that on a certain level, this was part of his soul's path and, or whatever he took in that moment that he didn't know had was fentanyl and not whatever Xanax protein, whatever he thought he was taking once he took, because I've thought about this. Once he took that fentanyl that he didn't know he was taking, had he survived, the whole trajectory of his life would have been fucked. Excuse my language, but it would have been. And he would, you know, because it's three times as addictive as heroin.

So he would have been fighting. He would have been a heroin addict times three. And that is not easy to survive, much less heal from. And whatever trajectory he was on was forever changed. And I've often wondered if at that moment, his soul was like, okay, we got to pull you because there's no way you can fulfill your soul's purpose now. Or was it that when his soul came into this life, his soul knew that there was going to be a point and all the ripples that that death created was going to help all of his soul family and all of his soul growth catalyze their directions and that this was part of his agreement to sign up to do. or is it something totally different and just fate or circumstance or accident or whatever well something that happens so far into a person's life like that would not be it would not be part of the life plan it's more likely to fall into that category of just you know shit happens on the physical plane i know we try to look for meaning yeah and of course i mean i you know i have a lot of clients who you know do that and i have the deepest sympathy but you know

Because we're all like that. We hold souls. We want to find meaning. And sometimes, like I say, it's not meant to be. There is one thing that can happen is that if the soul feels like, yeah, we could end up with even in a worse situation, it may lose the will to live, as it were. because sometimes when i'm looking at a past life my spirit guides will describe a person's death with a physical ailment plus a mental condition so they'll say something like they died of cholera and grief what that means is that they probably had lost family members ahead of themselves they get sick and there's no will to survive you know there was a somebody i worked with years ago had lost her son and she was asking if it was because he'd been sort of there'd been some suicidal ideation there but what had happened is he dived into a river never came up and what i found was that he he started like losing control or starting to drown basically

and didn't bother to really try and save himself you're just like okay well yeah that's probably how I go, partly because of this soul carrying a fear of failure, disappointment, and doing a sort of, you know, which affected his will to live, which then when faced in that moment of choice that we're often not even conscious of, that's really the predictor of whether you survive illness, I think, in a large part. It's not the only variable, but like the drive to live plays such a huge role in whether or not you survive illnesses or challenges or near-death experiences yeah so specifically with sammy i mean we need to work together so i can you know if you're up for that we could have a look into all of that and see because i'd have to really

work with my spur guys to see what all the you know the nuances and and things were so i couldn't give you a definitive answer but yeah we'll have to book a session and get to the bottom of that Because I do feel that his death, whether, and I would have never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever wanted it. If I could go back in time and change it, I would do anything to do that. And at the same time, I can look around me and see all the beautiful healing ripples that his death has created. In some cases, changing the trajectory of people's lives. I mean, it certainly has changed the trajectory of mine, but all the people that I've heard from whose child came to them after they heard Sammy's story and said, here's the Percocet I just ordered from someone on Snapchat. I'm not going to take it. Or like so many, he saved so many lives by his story and he's changed so many relationships and the pain of his loss. The other thing that really astounded me is that many people really close to me who had very close relationships with him by proxy because they're close to me, but as, and some of them had sort of a friendly, close relationship to them, him as one of their good friends, kids, right? But his death was a wake-up call for so many people I know, where then they changed their entire lives. Because they were like, fuck this. If Sammy can die like this, life is fragile. And they went through their own dark night of the soul. Not even necessarily because Sammy wasn't on the planet anymore, if that makes sense, but because he died.

Oh, absolutely. Well, this is what your soul would always want to take from an experience like this. How do we transcend this? How do we grow? How can we help other people as well? The ripple effect can be absolutely enormous. There's something that my spirit guides say, you can never be an effective grief counselor if you've never lost anyone.

And what they always mean is that your experience is something you bring to the table. So if you're going to be a life coach or a healer or whatever, look at your experience and how that will affect other people as well. And if you've had that fear of loss triggered, one of the most effective ways to heal that is to help others. We live in a world where people live in such isolation as well. And when they lose somebody, they often go into that hermit mode. In fact, what would be the most healing thing to do is to get back out into the world.

you know you see this when when grandma loses grandpa yeah you know until the funeral and yeah and then afterwards you know grandma's kind of on her own you know and we are meant to if you go back to our earliest tribal lives you know when you you lost someone the community would come together and adopt you yeah and not just for the first week but like that's right you would be incorporated and there would be kids running around your hut and you would still be grounded by people. I think that's really true. And what you're doing, by the way, to talk about this, to share your experience is so incredibly healing. Another conversation I had with my spirit guides, it sounds a little tangential, but they were talking about how prior to the internet,

and this is broadly speaking when people were looking for expert help somehow they were looking for the the phd you know the person with letters after their name now what they observe is that what we're looking for is someone who has walked the same path as us we've had the same kind of experience so if you've gone through an experience like this and come out the other side that is so healing. That's inspiring. And that's life-saving. It's life-transforming. It's a wonderful thing. That has surprised me. That has surprised me. I mean, my MO has always been to heal, learn, teach. Just since I was a little girl, it's always just, that's what I do. And I wasn't really thinking about it when Sammy died. And once again, all of these things, I couldn't tell

you why I did them. It wasn't a decision point. It wasn't like I sat down and said, oh, I think I'll sit here bawling on social media on camera. I would have never signed up to do that. But for some reason, something told me to turn the camera on. And then I had this moment of like, oh, should I really post this? Oh, fuck it. I'm just going to post it because I'm being told to post it. So I'm going to post it. And then there's just this onslaught of people saying, oh my gosh, you're helping me understand how to do this. You're helping me understand that it's okay. You're helping me not feel so alone. If you can do this, I can do it too. And so then it just kept going from there. But I think you're absolutely right. There's something so powerful in being open with

your vulnerability and sharing your story, whatever your story is, whatever your pain is. I mean, not necessarily like you can when you're in the deepest dark night of the soul, but as you're learning and healing to share that wisdom with the world to me that's one of the greatest gifts of of the internet and social media is that capacity to be in community even though we don't all live in the same village yeah i was going to say that it's a spiritual act spiritual act is when you heal yourself by helping those who suffer as you've done whether it's this life or a past life and it kind of in a way it doesn't get better than that you know it's like you know you're healing you're helping other people to heal it's phenomenally powerful and in ways that you won't

even know until you process this life on the astral plane you can't always you well you can't tell all the lives that you've touched and there are so many the whole tapestry yeah another interesting thing is that you are working through a past life fear of rejection too when you've got rejection and loss rejection comes from abandonment and past life yeah i definitely have that you know Again, we can talk more about this when we have a one-on-one, but it's a big one for this life. Now, this very interesting thing that I found is that I started doing a lot of podcast interviews when my last book came out. And like I've done for you, a little reading just so I kind of got a sense of what's going on with the person who's interviewing me. And I found that everybody who

interviewed me had a past life fear of rejection when they were working through every single person. And what's fascinating about that is that by being a podcaster, bringing people together, what you're doing is you're creating community. Because there are three ways I identify to heal a fear of rejection. One is to do the past life work. I would say that's the most important thing. Second thing is to belong. But the third thing is to be the uniter. If you can be the the pipe viper or the the person who draws people in that is super healing it's it's spiritual it's it's going to be massively consistent with your soul's life plan and it will give you fulfillment and it will grow and grow yeah i would say that for sure that this

community is i feel deeply connected to them as well as myself in a way that i didn't two or three years ago, it was more of like part of my job and interacting with people just like I would anywhere. But I would say over the past two or three years, I feel extremely connected and close emotionally, even though I don't know most of them personally. I feel very emotionally and energetically close to this listening community and to my social media community where I feel like I'm talking with friends. And that makes sense to me. Yeah. On a very deep level, you will feel, you're going to feel the love. Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. I could talk to you forever. I'm definitely going to set up a session with you to dive into Sammy and I'll share with you guys

at some point, the highlights of my personal session. We'll see what he has to say about Sammy, and I'll share that with you because I know that many parents are here who have lost children or people who have lost loved ones. And obviously every dynamic is different, but I know that we're all in this together. So as I heal and learn, I'll teach you guys too, or share with you guys. Where can people find you Ainsley? I know you have a website, Ainsley McLeod, which is by the way, spelled A-I-N-S-L-I-E. And McLeod is spelled M-A-C-L-E-O-D, AinsleyMcLeod.com. This is in the show notes, so you'll be able to find the links there. And you can read his newest book, right? What's the title of your newest book?

It's called The Old Soul's Guidebook. Old Soul's Guidebook. Yeah. Yeah. And also soulworld.com if you want to learn about my membership program. Oh, well, that's really easy. Soulworld.com. Okay, good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all that you are and the work that you do in the world and for joining us on the language of love. Oh, gosh. Well, thank you so much for having me on the show. And thank you for all that you do I love you, too. I love you, too.