On Death and Transformation
An excerpt from the Podcast and Youtube of Sonia and Bernadeta: What did I do? - talk about past lives and their influence on today -- souls, spirits, ghosts, DNA, ETs, purpose of life, therapy, consciousness, thoughts and other invisible things.
Sonia, what is your story with reincarnation – how did you become a regression therapist?
Oh well, that is a good and profound question… Let me start at early childhood – reincarnation – or let’s say – the concept of a soul that is greater and older than my physical body, wasn’t something that I was taught or told, it was something that made as much sense to me as playing outside in nature, taking care of my rabbits or eating and drinking. It was just normal for me. I had to find out a little later, around the age of 7, when I started school and we had bible classes, that there was a completely different idea to life and death than what felt natural to me. You can imagine that there followed a time of confusion, questioning and finding my path. I never let go of the feeling of a soul and several lives and multidimensional existences, as it was so deep within me, no theory or religious idea could convince me otherwise. Apart from feeling homesick all through my childhood, I also had nightmares, very real, very painful nightmares. It sometimes took me an hour upon waking up to bring myself back into reality. I was often watching my nightmares, sometimes even aware of myself dreaming and trying to change the course of what was happening, but couldn’t. The images were so brutal, so violent, I couldn’t possibly continue to live with them and I started to look for therapy as I thought, there was something wrong with me. Long story short, today I know that I was what some people call “Astral travelling”, meaning, I was leaving my body, visiting those scenes that I was dreaming. I was looking for therapy and found the Regression Academy and decided to become a therapist in that area, not just have therapy for myself. And an anecdote: I had solved my nightmakres before starting the therapy and training as a regression therapist, as my intuition one evening told me, to tell my soul, not to leave. And that was it – I told myself what my name and age was, what year and day and season we have and where I am – and the nightmares stopped. I couldn’t understand why at that moment, only later through my training as a regression therapist, did I unravel more of the mystery of who I am and why I experienced certain things that didn’t have a rational or logical explanation. Today in my practice, I mainly focus on Life Between Lives Spiritual Regression, which answers exactly the questions I have had all through my life – who am I and why am I here?
Life Between Lives Spiritual Regression – tell me a little more about it, what fascinates you about this type of therapy?
Life Between Lives Spiritual Regression is a type of hypnotic regression, where you travel back to the space between lives – specifically, to the time before this actual life incarnation. Of course, you can travel to any time between different lives, but really the one before this incarnation is the one that answers the questions concerned with this life time. My fascination with this space is the vibration and understanding it evokes within myself and for my clients. I guess my whole motivation to do this work is to facilitate the process of understanding who we truly are. It really is for me all about that deeper spiritual understanding – what is life, why are we here and what is death? I am as much fascinated with death as I am with birth. In fact, these are the only two things you can be sure about in life – you were once born, that’s why you are here – and you will once die.
You recently had a few encounters with death yourself, did you not?
Well, not exactly myself but around myself yes. In early January this year the mother of my life partner died unexpectedly and two months later my incarnated soul mate in the form of a dog died at the age of 11 years and 10 months. It was and still is an intense time of my life. But as I said, death has always fascinated me. 11 years ago, a friend of mine gifted me a transpersonal astrology session. Transpersonal astrology takes in account that which goes above the personal, meaning, past lives – and future lives. My one burning question to my counselor was – can you tell with Astrology, when someone is going to die. Of course, he said no. Up to today, I do not believe him. I do believe, there are portals in our life that enable us to leave this planet. I myself know, that I had a portal around the age of 35. I always had this vision, that I was going to die at 35. Of course, I didn’t tell that to people around me. When I reached that age, I wasn’t ready to go. There was a particular day, when I left with the car and driving down the mountain it suddenly hit me – if I want to leave now, I am going to have a car accident today. It was very clear and I was very clear with my answer – I said to whatever was giving me that information, that I am not leaving. “Thank you for the opportunity but I will stay a little longer”. I did not have an accident that day and I don’t know yet when the next portal is going to be, but I know that one back then has closed.
I know this story sounds really crazy but I have another one, almost just as crazy – it is about the death of our cat in 2022. It was a day where I had an online regression client in the morning and the afternoon off. Before I started the session with my client, I suddenly had the vision of my cat dying outside of our house, hit by a car. My immediate thought was that the people working outside would find her and come and knock on my door and that this would disturb the session. So, I went and locked the front door so they couldn’t come in. I never ever lock our front door. But consciously I did not believe our cat would die, so I didn’t close the cat flap or anything. I had a second vision, this time an image, seeing the cat dead on the road – exactly on the spot I later found her. But as I said, I didn’t consciously believe what I was receiving. The cat stayed with me during the whole morning, sleeping next to me while I conducted the session. After the session I went outside for lunch and the cat strolled off playing and following her own business as she usually does. An hour later I had to go to the post office. Driving down the mountain I felt sick as if I had to vomit. I also felt tense and stressed. I did not understand why and wondered if it had to do with my business at the post office, which made zero sense to me.
When I arrived back home 40 minutes later, I found our cat dead, hit by a car.
You can imagine the shock; despite all the information she gave me beforehand. My partner and myself both loved this cat like our child, we really loved and cared for her deeply. It was just before Easter and we cancelled all appointments. We dug her a grave in our garden, invited our neighbors and made her a little goodbye ceremony. It was also just about full moon and like I said, it was around Easter. A few days after her death, my partner and myself both received the same information around 11am which was : “There was a portal open with Jesus Christ energy, so I took it”. Now we both are not religious and I am not someone working with the energy of or ever talking about Jesus Christ, nor was my partner. So we received the same message at the same time, but we only found out in the evening, when we talked about how our days went, that we both got that same message… For me, that whole experience was such a deep, deep introduction to how much of life and death we are in charge of on a soul level. It was in many ways a preparation for what was to follow this year with my mother-in-law and my dog…
Tell me a little more about these experiences.
There is so much to tell… I think, with my partner’s mother, I felt for the first time in my life, what the energy of a “soul contract come to an end” feels like. Three days before her passing, we were invited for dinner. When we arrived there, there was a moment when I looked at my partner’s parents, both of them, and I recognized an energy I had never felt with them before. I remember looking at them, feeling into what I was seeing and trying to understand it. I felt calmness and a very very deep sense of peace. I could not put any words or thoughts to it, I did not understand what this meant. I kept looking and searching a bit, but all the info I got was this sense of deep peace. The day after my partner and I left for holidays to Italy and two days later we got the phone call, that his mother died. Again, we were mainly in shock and it didn’t dawn to me until later, that I had subconsciously known she was about to leave. Now trust me, consciously I had no idea. I was very very far from thinking that she could die soon. She wasn’t ill, she wasn’t old and her passing was not something I had been thinking of ever. But the energy I felt from there had stuck with me and I realised later, that what I had felt was possibly the feeling of two souls, that had a contract on this planet that had successfully been finished. It feels as if both of them, on a soul level knew that one of them was transcending form and they were totally ok with that. As we all are, on a soul level, we are in agreement with everything that happens. There is no fighting or arguing with destiny so to speak, as on a soul level, we have agreed and planned on certain events to happen at a certain time.
Now earlier on I talked about possible portals. It is still a theory that is developing withing me but in short, I believe, that there is stages in our soul evolution and they correlate with the planets and the energies the earth is receiving. One of these stages is a possible passing over to the spiritual realms and leaving the physical incarnation. It could be, that there are several soul missions that a soul may or may not want to experience and it gets chances to leave or to stay. A bit like a subway with different stops and a soul can decide while incarnated, if it wants to take the exit or hang on to the next one.
For my personal experience, I of course also had my personal between lives spiritual regression, which gave me a further understanding to why I am here and gave me the very clear insight, that my mission doesn’t have an end. The reason why I am here, is clearly not attached to an end goal and not even attached to a certain evolution or a learning. It is much wider than that and literally gives me the possibility to leave or stay however long I want…
But you also lost your dog recently and you mentioned it being an incarnated soul mate?
Yes. I am not a fan of those spiritual terms, there is so much confusion around the definition of what something means, but I do use them sometimes so people may understand a little better what I mean. My dog always felt like a part of me. Apart from my whole history during my childhood of me always wanting a dog, a white dog and it finally happening while I was looking for a red or grey short haired dog, Calinka was really my grounding pillar for the past 12 years. I call it a soul mate because it feels like a twin, like someone that came here just for this one purpose – to be with me and to support me with her whole being through 12 years of transformation and soul growth. I am currently writing a book about her story as it goes so so deep and means so much to me, I have to share it with the world. Calinka’s dead was almost as surprising as the passing of my mother-in-law – she gave us two months of preparation though. It was the night after the funeral of my partner’s mother, that my dog Calinka had her first cluster of epileptic seizures. It was such a shock – my partner and myself were both still exhausted from the past days, still in shock, grieving… and then we thought we were losing Calinka to a poisoning. If you have never seen an epileptic seizure before and your dog is in super good health like Calinka was, you literally think she is dying on the spot. Of course, after a couple of minutes, maybe 1-2 minutes, she gained consciousness again and I started to realize that this might be epilepsy. We had two months of trying to help her, heal her and get rid of the epilepsy… It was only about two weeks before her passing where suddenly something within me switched. I don’t know if it was because of exhaustion as I was hardly sleeping during these times, always waiting for her next seizure, watching her 24h, sleeping next to her in the living room, asking a neighbor to watch her while I took a quick shower, eating next to her, doing everything next to her. I never had anxiety in my life before, except actually once, the first time I left Calinka alone with a friend for 5 days as I was going to the Burning Man Festival in the US – I had a full-on panic attack. But yes, that’s a panic attack, not really anxiety. So, anxiety really really hit me hard during the two months of her having seizures. The slightest sound or change in behavior and my whole body was in alarm. It really really was a humbling and exhausting experience. So yes, maybe, I was simply exhausted and I gave up – but in that moment, when something switched and it came to my awareness, that I was not going to heal the epilepsy of my dog, I started to breathe again. I felt a new gained calmness and I focused even more on the times between the seizures – watching my dog running around as if she was a puppy, happy as ever before yet also tired from the seizures and her age. I could feel her again, I could tell that she was totally, totally ok with everything that was happening. And the day before she died, again, my subconscious new. The morning before she died, I found myself on the ground with her, crying, telling her for the 100th time – if this is your time to go, leave. Don’t hold on for me. I will never be ready to let you go, but please – go. Leave. I let you go. I had been repeating this since the very beginning of her seizures, knowing, I had to let her go, but emotionally, not ready to let her go. I am not sure anyone can ever be really ready to let go of a healthy dog or human companion… In my eyes, she was still healthy. Epilepsy is not an illness that leads to death, it is a symptom of an underlying cause which in Calinka’s case, we never found out.
But anyway, the day she died, she was very very tired. In the afternoon I went into the garden as usual and Calinka didn’t really want to come with me. She didn’t want to play, she just wanted to sleep. I could tell that she wasn’t really able to rest as long as I was walking around busy, so I took her into our yurt, made her a little bed and fell asleep next to her. About an hour later I woke up and she was deep asleep. So, I went quietly outside and started weeding our asparagus bed, which had view onto the open yurt door and I could basically see her all the time. Three hours later, she was still asleep, I could see that she was holding her head in a bizarre way. I went to check on her and basically found her in a coma, deep sleeping, slightly trembling. Long story short, she died in my arms 10 hours later. The moment she died, I had my hand on her heart and I was waiting for her next inbreath. Her breathing had calmed down to about 4 breaths in a minute. I can still hear myself saying out loud to her: if you are not going to breath in my Love, your heart is going to stop. And it stopped. It was so so peaceful. That moment of her passing, was just peace. Calmness. Of course, I burst into tears, so many tears, I cried for about two hours before I was able to call my partner who was in Finland at the time and I cried for another two days. But the moment when I felt her heart stopping was just peace. During my tears I had a vision of a pink energy that was taken from me. It was a beautiful picture and it was as if someone was erasing some paint, as if, clouds of pink energy were going from me to the sky. I intuitively knew, that the part of her that was in my energy field was leaving and I was grateful for that. I just watched it happening and kept crying and cuddling her dead body.
And yes, today I am trying to figure out what the next chapter of my life is going to look like – a chapter without her. A good friend of mine, who reads the Akashic records, gave me this beautiful quote when opening our records the day after her passing: “they are saying to me, that you both had a contract for her to support you in your transformation and as your energy shifts, she will go”. So, my energy seems to have shifted in some way and she is gone. And I don’t need her anymore. That’s something I feel is true, but is still very painful to accept fully. I felt that shift of energy a couple of months before already, I was starting to be able to imagine a life without her, but as I said, I was far from being consciously aware or ready to let her go. Sometimes, there is a gap between our spiritual or soul awareness and our 3D existence. I always find it interesting to observe the gap and to continue to live the 3D existence, as long as I am in this physical body, but to also have the soul perspective in everything that is happening. Maybe it doesn’t change my life to have a soul perspective on it, but it makes acceptance of the course of life so much easier and thus heals the emotions so much faster and more profound. There is also much less suffering.
And in what way do these experiences have an influence on your practice?
For me these experiences and understanding of death are the very core of the Between Lives Spiritual Regression – at the end of the day, the Between Lives Sessions are all about dying from the past life, living in the between space, transforming (or dying) from the between space to this lifetime. And eventually, we will transmute this lifetime again to go back to the between lives space. It is so humbling and yet eye opening to understand these cycles of life, that I really am deeply invested in sharing them. Of course, many of my clients come for therapy and therapy is just as important. Sometimes therapy is even what is needed before one can enter the between lives space. I am a very rational and grounded person – the life we live is in the NOW and on Earth. The Spiritual realms are there, if we are aware of them or not. For us to connect with our soul and our higher self’s intelligence is not to become spiritual or more evolved, it is to find the only and true guidance again. And also, we don’t need to stay in that space or awareness all the time – we are living a physical life and it will continue to have its challenges and that’s totally fine, that’s what we are here for. Yet, we can bring soul awareness to everything that we experience and it really reduces suffering for the 3D body and gives us a guidance that no one can take from us. For me, following my souls guidance is really the only thing that truly matters. I can only give from my full power if I allow my soul to shine and live through me. That’s my motivation and that’s what I hope to share with my clients as well.