Have We Lived Before? A Soft Exploration of Reincarnation and Past Lives

August 17th — Some evenings carry a strange familiarity, as if I'm remembering something I cannot name.

A quiet thought lingers: what if my soul has walked these roads before?

Not only in relationships that feel fated, but also in places, careers, and passions that carry a strange familiarity. As if some part of us whispers: I've been here before.

Psychiatrists Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker spent decades studying children who recall past lives. Thousands of cases have been documented where a child describes a former life with astonishing detail, sometimes including places, professions, or skills they had never been exposed to in this lifetime. In certain cases, these memories could even be verified. Their work suggests that the soul may carry fragments across lifetimes: echoes that resurface as inexplicable affinities.

One child, for example, spoke of a village miles away and described the layout of a house he had never seen. When researchers visited, every detail matched. Another child carried an intense fear of water and later explained that he had "drowned before." These are just two among many stories that science cannot easily explain, but that point toward the possibility of memory reaching beyond one lifetime.

If reincarnation is real, maybe that's why you feel a deep sense of homecoming when you step into a city for the very first time. Or why you've always known, without question, what your soul came here to do, even if your surroundings never taught you so.

Perhaps that is the beauty of the idea of reincarnation, it offers an explanation for the unexplainable. Why we fall in love with a culture we've never lived in. Why certain art forms stir something ancient within us. Why a simple landscape can move us to tears, as if we are remembering rather than discovering.

Skeptics argue that these stories may be coincidences, imagination, or the power of suggestion. And yet, how do we explain the child who speaks a foreign language fluently, or the one who recalls a name and place that history later confirms?

Whether reincarnation is truth or metaphor, it speaks to our longing for continuity, for meaning beyond the boundaries of one life. It offers a lens through which we can see our passions and connections not as random, but as threads in a much larger tapestry.

I have to admit, I'm still not sure whether I truly believe in this theory or not. Some days I lean toward doubt, other days I feel the pull of possibility. Either way, it remains a fascinating thought, and it has given me comfort to imagine that life might not end the moment we die. That perhaps there is more to our story than this single lifetime. 

When I first began exploring this topic, I noticed something shift in me. My fear of death softened. Because I love life so deeply, it comforts me to imagine that I could return here again and again. That endings may not be as final as they seem, but part of a larger rhythm the soul already knows. And perhaps even the people whose paths have parted from ours might meet us again in another lifetime, waiting to continue the story. 

Maybe that's why—if they exist—karmic bonds feel so powerful. Why our callings feel like destiny. Why some places feel like home the moment we arrive.

Because perhaps, in some way, we've already been there.

Maybe the reason you feel so drawn to a place, a song, or a calling is because your soul remembers. And maybe that memory is simply guiding you home.

Have you ever felt at home in a place you had never been before? Or heard a quiet pull from the soul, something too deep for logic to explain? And tell me honestly, does this sound completely delulu, or could there be a spark of truth hidden in it?

Softly,
Selflavie

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