Ancestors, Past Lives and Ghost Stories – Part Two

I’m Sara Walka, founder of The Sisters Enchanted, and reading past lives is honestly one of my favorite things I get to do. People love to dive into their past lives, and I’m pretty curious about mine too. It’s something I love to talk about, love to teach, and love to experience. We’ve been teaching intuition and inner work here at The Sisters Enchanted for going on ten years, and past lives come up a lot, because they’re one of the most useful ways to understand why you keep bumping into the same stuff in this life.

This is Part Two in our “Ancestors, Past Lives, and Ghost Stories” series. In Part One, we talked about ancestors, and that matters here, because all of these energies that came before this moment are impacting you right now. They’re not separate experiences. So today we’re getting into what past lives actually are, how I started reading them, what they look like for me, and a few simple ways you can start exploring your own.

Why would you want to explore your past lives?

You explore your past lives to understand the recurring resistances you keep experiencing in this present life. If you find yourself playing Whac-A-Mole in some area of life, coming up against the same resistance again and again and again, that’s a great place to look. There’s a real chance you brought that same rhythm or experience into this lifetime as something to learn from.

Here’s the bigger why. Your soul isn’t here to coast.

So much of feeling meh, or like life isn’t really alive and awake, or like you lack purpose, comes from staying in the nice, comfy area we already know. We don’t push out of our comfort zones because we’re afraid of failure, of embarrassment, of putting ourselves out there. But when we aren’t growing and expanding, we get constricted and restricted, and that’s where resistance forms. It’s like an energy buildup that wants to push out, and if we don’t let it grow, it starts to energetically disrupt our lives and create problems. Past lives give us a way to see that buildup for what it is.

How does your end-of-life energy shape this life?

Your end-of-life experience from a previous life is the most recent energy you carry into this one, so it tends to set the tone for how you arrived here. When I read past lives, that’s one of the first places I look.

Think about it like this. Say you leave the house for work, but before you even get out the door you’re stuck in traffic in your own driveway, you can’t find your other shoe, you can’t find your keys. You step into a brand new environment still carrying all that frustration. Leaving one life and choosing the next works the same way, in my experience. If an ending was sudden or cut off quickly, almost like hitting stop and pulling the tape out of the VCR before the movie’s over, there’s an abrupt, unresolved energy to it, a sense of lacking completion. If an ending was surrounded by love and care, that’s different energy entirely. And if someone was alone at the end, or had lived in a way where other souls didn’t want to be there, that tells you something too. Understanding the energy you were in when you chose to come here gives you real clues about the patterns you walked in with.

Why do the same patterns keep showing up, even when they look different?

The same wound repeats across your life because it’s here to be learned through, and it will keep coming back wearing new disguises until you see it. The tricky part is that it rarely looks the same twice.

Here’s an example. Say you struggle with time. Maybe at work you were always the one showing up late, or always the one working overtime when nobody else did, and there was this whole time theme to your work life. Maybe you heal that and get past it, all on the straight and narrow. Then fifteen years later the resistance shows up again, but now it’s with a kid, or a partner, or an aging parent, and there’s that time story again, the overdoing, the nothing’s ever on time. You might not recognize it as the same story, because it looks so different from the original one. But the thread is identical. It’s just showing up in a new way. This is exactly where past lives help us uncover the repeating stories we can’t see in our own lives, the ones coming back again and again so we can finally learn through them and grow.

What do past lives have to do with the witch wound?

If you keep circling the same fear of being seen, being too much, or being too powerful, that’s often the witch wound, and past lives are one way to trace it back to its root.

At The Sisters Enchanted, we talk about the witch wound as an ancestral fear of being too powerful, too visible, too much, and it shows up as patterns that quietly keep you small. That’s the same Whac-A-Mole we’ve been talking about, just a specific flavor of it. The resistance you brought in from a previous life, the ending that left you hiding, the instinct to shrink so you stay safe, those threads often braid together into the wound. The good news is that the same move heals both: once you can state the pattern, you can interrupt it. If this is landing for you, our full breakdown of the seven self-sabotage patterns lives in What Is the Witch Wound?, and it pairs beautifully with the past-life work below.

How do you explore your own past lives?

You can explore your past lives using three accessible tools: your astrology (especially your South Node and Chiron), a Tarot spread, or a direct conversation with Spirit or your higher self. You don’t need to be a professional reader to start.

Before we get into the how, one rule: let go of perfectionism. A past life reading, whether you’re doing it for yourself or hearing it from someone else, is a perception. Intuition and psychic skill work by using what you already know, what your logic brain can communicate, to deliver the message. So if you lived somewhere a reader has never heard of, in a time period they don’t know, they probably won’t hand you an exact country and date. The theme and the energy can still be spot on, even if two readers describe the actual life differently. In our Holistic Witchery program, the very first intuition lesson is about understanding your connection to symbols, because you receive information through imagery, words, and feelings that your logic brain then interprets. When we clamp down on “but what exactly was I,” we close off the message. Receiving this takes self-trust, full stop.

Your South Node

Your South Node shows what your soul is moving away from, which makes it one of the best places in your birth chart to look for past life themes.

Here’s my own chart as an example. My South Node is in Scorpio in my 5th house, and I’ve got Pluto and Mars there too, plus some asteroids, so there’s a lot happening. That’s a lot of combustion and chaos energy sitting in a very creative, outside-the-box house. So I came into this life with that combustion running: make chaos, don’t settle, constant upheaval. For most of my life, even well into adulthood, that was the loop. How can I disrupt this? How can I make a problem out of it? How can I change it real quick? All of it fueled by passion and emotion. It’s taken a lot of inner work to move toward my North Node in Taurus, which is steadier, calmer, and not at all what I’m naturally inclined to. So look at your own South Node. Where is it? Are there planets sitting with it? What can it tell you about how you came into this life, and what themes you might have carried in?

Chiron, the wounded healer

Chiron is the asteroid known as the wounded healer, and it points to what you can heal in others but struggle to heal in yourself, which makes it a direct line to your deepest repeating pattern.

Find where your Chiron is and look at everything around it. We teach how to identify Chiron, your nodes, and all these birth-chart elements in our Astrology Fundamentals class inside Holistic Witchery, so put that on your future to-do list. The reason Chiron matters so much for past lives is this: when we don’t heal these wounds in this lifetime, we carry them over into the next one.

A Tarot spread (or just good questions)

You can explore past lives with Tarot by pulling cards against a few focused questions. You don’t even need a formal spread.

There are tons of past life Tarot spreads online, and we’ll link one with this post over at our links hub. But honestly, you can skip the spread entirely. Just make a list of questions and pull cards to answer them. Try: What was my end-of-life experience like in my previous life? What lessons did I carry over into this lifetime? What strengths did I carry over? And then, how can I grow in this lifetime so I don’t carry that same lesson into the next one? Working with past lives this way is a lot like any Tarot reading. You get the information, then you journal on it, meditate on it, let it sit, and receive the message that comes with it.

Asking Spirit or your higher self

If you connect with Spirit, Source, your higher self, angels, or your ancestors, you can simply ask them directly what you need to know about your past lives.

If you pray, dream, imagine, or talk to an energy like that, you can open the door with a question as simple as, “What do I need to know about my past lives? What messages do I need to receive?” and let the information come through however it comes.

How do I actually read past lives for other people?

When I read past lives for someone, I connect with their energy first, then ask to see their lives like I’m flipping through the pages of a book. Here’s the whole process.

I start by asking to connect with the person’s energy, and I invite it to join me. I actually hold my hands out to receive it, and I’ll feel or visualize what that energy looks like and what it’s like to be in it. From there, I ask to see the past lives. For me it’s literally like a book opening flat, and I flip the pages in my mind, flip flip flip, until I pull to a stop. Then I ask to see what I need to see, and I receive it as a visual, a message, or sometimes a feeling right in my body. I can ask questions. I’ll usually ask to see the end of life, and sometimes I’ll look at the life between lives, the energy the person was in while choosing their next life. If I want to see more, I just keep flipping.

This wasn’t something I set out to build. I started as a Tarot reader, that grew into my psychic skills, and that grew into seeing past lives and the occasional mediumship moment. It was a progression of developing those senses over time. But if you want to know what actually heightened all of it:

And one more thing on how I hold all of this. You might be wondering about soul retrieval, the idea that you lost a piece of your soul somewhere and need to call it back. That’s not quite how I work with it. I see your soul and energy more like little cloud puffs. You’re constantly leaving bits of yourself in the places you’ve touched, and constantly picking up bits of the energy you interact with. We’re all in this big energetic exchange all the time. So I don’t see it as pieces lost and retrieved. I think we unknowingly block off places of our own energy, and we can unlock them and let them back out through inner work and self-exploration.

Why is fall the right time to do this work?

Fall is an ideal time to explore past lives because it’s a liminal season, when the veil is thinner and it’s easier to receive, feel, and tap into this kind of information.

There’s an emotional, dreamy energy to this time of year, and it sets the stage for the new year ahead. We’re creating space through gratitude, through receiving, through giving back, through harvesting, through dreaming and ideating, just really appreciating the magic of the season. It’s the perfect window to ask the bigger questions. What am I not seeing? What can I be more aware of as I step into the new year and set new intentions?

And this loops us right back to ancestors, where we started in Part One. You’re carrying all of this energy with you all the time. Your ancestors, their experiences, how that rippled through society, all of those influences, that’s in your energy and it’s shaping your choices and your thoughts every single day. Your past-present self, you as a child, a teenager, an earlier adult, all those decisions and their impact, that’s with you too. And your past lives, that energy, those lessons, that’s with you as well.

Think of it like a tote bag, or one of those rolling carts, and you’re bringing it along with you everywhere you go. The more aware you can be of everything inside it, the easier it becomes to retell your stories, to heal, and to grow in the direction you actually want.

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