What If the Memory Is Older Than the Family?

What children’s reported past-life memories have made me question about fear, pregnancy and the stories our bodies may carry

by Joanne Yanke, BodyTalk Birthkeeper October 3, 2026

In Part One, I explored a question that sits underneath so much of my BodyTalk work:

Where did this begin?

Sometimes there is an obvious answer.

Something happened to you. Your body adapted. Years later, the event may be over, but part of you is still responding as though it is happening now.

Sometimes the trail takes us back further, into pregnancy, birth or an experience that happened before you had the language or conscious memory to make sense of it.

Sometimes it takes us into the family system, where fears, beliefs and patterns seem to have been carried for generations.

If you are preparing to conceive, you may already be asking questions like these.

What am I carrying that I do not want to unconsciously hand to my baby?

What do I want to heal before pregnancy?

What kind of emotional environment do I want this child to arrive into?

If you are already pregnant, the questions may sound slightly different.

Why is this fear so intense?

Why is pregnancy bringing up something I thought I had already dealt with?

Why does my body seem to be responding to something much bigger than what is happening right now?

These are questions I spend a lot of time with.

But every once in a while, the trail goes somewhere stranger.

There is no obvious event in the person’s own history.

There is no known family story that seems to explain what we are seeing.

And yet the body is responding as though something very real has happened.

Now imagine the person having that response is two years old.

And imagine that child begins telling you where they believe the fear came from.

That is where research into children who report memories of previous lives becomes very difficult to dismiss without at least looking at it.

I am not asking you to decide that reincarnation has been proven. It hasn’t.

But I also no longer think it is accurate to say there is nothing here.

There is evidence.

The much more interesting question is what we make of it. Pasted markdown

More than 2,500 cases

The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies has spent decades studying young children who report memories of previous lives.

Their research archive contains more than 2,500 cases.

These children typically begin speaking about another life somewhere between the ages of two and five. Some give names, places, relationships or descriptions of events. Some show unusual interests, behaviours or fears that do not seem to fit anything their current family knows they have experienced.

In a number of cases, researchers have identified a deceased person whose life appears to correspond with what the child had been saying.

UVA also reports that approximately 30 percent of the cases include a birthmark or birth defect that has been examined in relation to injuries or marks on the person the child says they remember. Pasted markdown

What interests me most is the way these cases are studied.

The researchers are not simply collecting stories about children saying unusual things.

They ask:

What exactly did the child say?

When did they say it?

Was it documented before anyone identified a possible previous person?

Could the child have learned the information through ordinary means?

What behaviours accompanied the statements?

Were there unusual skills or repeated patterns of play?

Did the child have fears that seemed connected with the way the person reportedly died?

Some cases are much stronger than others.

That matters.

I do not need every case to be compelling in order to become interested in the ones that are extraordinarily difficult to explain.

The little boy who kept crashing his plane

One of the better-known American cases is James Leininger.

At around two years old, James began experiencing intense nightmares involving an airplane crash.

He later made statements suggesting that he had been an American pilot who died when his aircraft was shot down during the Second World War.

He gave information that included the name of an aircraft carrier, the name of another person associated with the ship and details about the crash.

His parents eventually found a striking correspondence between what James had been saying and a pilot named James Huston Jr., who had been killed during the war.

Researcher Jim Tucker later published a detailed case report.

An important feature of the case was that a number of James’s statements had been recorded before Huston was identified. That does not eliminate every possible alternative explanation, but it makes the case considerably more interesting than a story reconstructed after the family already knew who they were looking for. Pasted markdown

James also repeatedly played out airplane crashes.

That detail caught my attention.

Because children do not always tell us what is happening through explanation.

They show us.

They repeat.

They reenact.

They play.

Their bodies and behaviour can express something long before they have enough language to explain why it feels so enormous.

And that is where this research stopped feeling purely academic to me.

I had already seen something like this

During the 2026 Prenatal Consciousness Summit, I listened to researcher Masayuki Ohkado speak about reported past-life and between-life memories.

He discussed children whose reported memories involved traumatic deaths and whose present-day fears seemed to correspond with them.

One child reported drowning and had an intense fear of water.

Another reported dying in a car accident and feared highways and fast-moving vehicles.

Another described a life involving forced separation from her mother and panicked when she could not see her present mother. Pasted markdown

As I listened, I had one immediate thought:

I’ve seen this.

Not in a research study.

Not as a verified reincarnation case.

In my BodyTalk practice.

Those things are not the same.

But they were similar enough that I could not ignore the parallel.

The baby who could sit in the car seat, but not ride in the car

Years before hearing Ohkado speak, I had worked with a family during pregnancy.

During our prenatal BodyTalk work, material came forward that we interpreted as a past-life experience in which the baby had been orphaned.

At the time, it was simply the story the system presented.

I had no idea whether it would ever matter after birth.

Then the baby arrived.

Eventually his family noticed something very specific.

He could sit in his car seat.

He could be buckled into it.

That was not the problem.

But when the car seat went into the car, he would completely fall apart.

That distinction caught my attention.

If restraint were the problem, I would expect the distress to begin when he was buckled.

It didn’t.

The environment changed, and his response changed with it.

So we went back into the BodyTalk work.

The earlier story about being orphaned resurfaced, but this time another piece came forward.

Within the story his system presented, his parents had died in a car accident.

Suddenly that original word — orphaned — had context.

Within the logic of that memory, a car did not simply mean transportation.

A car meant:

My parents disappear.

We worked with the emotional charge and active memory through BodyTalk.

Afterward, the family reported that he could travel in the car again. Pasted markdown

I could stop the story there and make it sound very tidy.

But the part that stayed with me came later.

As he grew into a toddler and preschooler, his mother told me that he would remind her to drive safely.

The overwhelming panic was no longer controlling the experience.

But there was still this unusual awareness around driving.

I think about that child whenever someone tells me there is nothing worth investigating in past-life material.

And then there was the baby who was terrified of water

I also worked with a baby who had a striking fear of water.

I do not remember enough details about the case to embellish it, and I am not going to fill in pieces I no longer have.

What I do remember is the material that emerged in the BodyTalk session.

The story was of another lifetime in which the water itself had been toxic or dangerous.

The feeling carried in the baby’s response was essentially:

Dangerous. Don’t touch me with that.

I want to be very clear about what I am saying here.

That session does not establish that an objectively verifiable past life occurred.

BodyTalk is not a historical investigation.

What emerged was a consciousness-based interpretation within a therapeutic session. Pasted markdown

That distinction matters to me.

But when I place that experience beside the car-seat baby, and then place both beside researchers independently documenting children with fears of water, cars, separation and other things that correspond with the deaths they say they remember, I become curious.

Not certain.

Curious.

I think that is a much more useful place to stand.

BodyTalk does not prove reincarnation

This is where conversations about consciousness can become sloppy very quickly.

It would be easy to take stories like these and say:

“BodyTalk proves past lives are real.”

I do not believe that is responsible.

A BodyTalk session is doing something very different from the work of researchers like Ian Stevenson, Jim Tucker or Masayuki Ohkado.

Researchers investigate claims.

They document statements.

They compare those statements with records.

They look for ordinary explanations.

My work is therapeutic and interpretive.

Through neuromuscular feedback and the BodyTalk protocol, I follow what the system appears to prioritize.

Sometimes that information is physical.

Sometimes emotional.

Sometimes relational.

Sometimes it appears connected with pregnancy, birth or the family system.

And sometimes it presents in language that we interpret as ancestral, karmic or past-life material.

I do not need those approaches to be identical in order to notice when they seem to touch the same question.

Research can tell me:

There are young children reporting memories that appear to precede their current lives, and some show corresponding behaviours or phobias.

My clinical experience can tell me:

I have worked with babies and children whose intense reactions did not make obvious sense in the present, where past-life material emerged during BodyTalk and the presenting pattern subsequently changed.

Those are two very different forms of information.

I am willing to let them sit beside one another without pretending they are the same thing. Pasted markdown

Why this matters before conception

This is where the conversation becomes important even if you are not raising a child who tells you she used to have another mommy.

If you are preparing for conception, you may already be asking questions that go far beyond whether you are ovulating or taking the right prenatal vitamin.

You may be thinking about what you are bringing with you.

Your childhood.

Your relationship with your mother.

A miscarriage.

A frightening medical experience.

Fear of pregnancy.

Fear that your body will fail you.

A family pattern you desperately do not want to repeat.

Maybe you have already done years of personal development and healing and still have the feeling that there is another layer underneath it.

Women preparing consciously for conception often carry exactly this tension: they want to trust their bodies and create a different beginning for their child, but they are also afraid of infertility, loss, family patterns and the possibility that something unresolved is still in the way. Fertility Avatar

I do not think that means there must be a past life involved.

There are many possible reasons a fear, belief or body response can exist.

But I do think we are allowed to be curious about the full range of possibilities.

The purpose is not to convince you that a particular story is literally true.

It is to notice what happens when the body finally encounters an explanation that makes sense of what it has been carrying.

Sometimes that story begins in childhood.

Sometimes in the womb.

Sometimes several generations ago.

And occasionally, in my work, the story seems to reach further back than that.

If you are preparing to welcome a baby, I think that is worth exploring with care rather than fear.

Because you already have enough pressure to do everything perfectly.

Eat perfectly.

Supplement perfectly.

Track perfectly.

Time everything perfectly.

Heal everything before the baby arrives.

This is not another item to add to that list.

It is an invitation to become curious.

What is my body asking me to understand?

What am I ready to put down?

What kind of beginning do I want to create?

The women I work with around fertility are often looking for exactly that: not simply a pregnancy, but a conscious beginning rooted in body trust, emotional readiness and a desire not to repeat what came before. Are You Ready for Conception Ov…

Fertility is not only a problem to solve.

It is also a relationship.

A relationship with your body.

With your history.

With your partner.

With uncertainty.

And, for some women, with the baby they already sense themselves preparing to welcome.

Once you are pregnant, the question changes

When pregnancy begins, attention tends to move toward birth.

How am I going to cope with labour?

Can I trust my body?

What if I panic?

Will I be listened to?

What if the birth I am hoping for changes?

Those are important questions.

But prenatal consciousness asks us to widen the frame.

There is a baby in this experience too.

A baby developing within an emotional and relational environment.

A baby responding to sound, movement, physiology and connection.

A baby whose experience does not suddenly begin the moment somebody cuts the cord.

This is why I care so much about what we carry into pregnancy and birth.

Not because mothers need another reason to feel responsible for everything.

They absolutely do not.

Awareness is not blame.

Awareness gives us somewhere to work.

If an old fear is being activated, we can meet it.

If a family pattern is surfacing, we can become conscious of it instead of automatically repeating it.

If something in the body is asking for attention, we can listen.

And if a baby seems to be communicating something through behaviour, distress or connection, I want to be willing to listen before deciding that baby is simply difficult.

That is the thread connecting fertility, pregnancy, birth psychology and BodyTalk for me.

Every baby has a story.

Sometimes we begin hearing that story long before they can tell it to us in words.

That fits directly with the centre of my work: your body communicates, your baby is part of that relationship, and our job is not always to override the message but to become better at listening. Brand Voice

Why I no longer begin with disbelief

I did not always think this way.

Dolores Cannon’s The Convoluted Universe was one of the books that expanded the range of questions I was willing to ask about consciousness.

Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe gave me another framework for considering interconnectedness and whether our ordinary experience of being completely separate, local beings may be incomplete.

Those books belong in a very different evidential category from prospective research involving young children.

I do not need to blur that distinction.

Then BodyTalk gave me a way to encounter some of these questions through practice.

Birth psychology made me look seriously at how early human experience begins.

The Prenatal Consciousness Summit introduced me to researchers looking at experiences before birth and, in some cases, before conception.

And then my clients kept giving me stories.

At some point, the most honest position for me stopped being:

“Past lives cannot be real.”

It became:

I have seen enough that I am willing to investigate the possibility.

That is not dogma.

It is not certainty.

It is curiosity.

And I think curiosity leaves us far more room to listen. Pasted markdown

But there is still one problem

The strongest research cases generally involve children who can talk.

They can tell their parents:

I had another mommy.

My plane crashed.

I drowned.

I lived there.

My name was this.

Researchers can then investigate what they say.

But I work with babies too.

Babies do not have those words.

So what do we do when an infant is having an enormous response and we cannot simply ask them to explain what is happening?

Do we dismiss it?

Do we label them difficult?

Do we call them clingy?

A Velcro baby?

Do we assume the goal is to teach them to stop signalling?

Or do we become better listeners?

Because regardless of what you believe about past lives, one thing does not require belief:

Babies communicate before they speak.

They communicate through their bodies.

Through behaviour.

Through movement.

Through connection.

Through distress.

Through what changes when they feel safe.

And once we truly begin from there, the way we understand babies changes.

That is where I want to go in Part Three.