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

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, and years later the event may be over while part of you is still responding as though it is happening now.

Sometimes the trail takes us further back, into pregnancy, birth or an experience that happened before we had enough 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 such as: 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 actually happening right now?

These are questions I spend a lot of time with.

Every once in a while, though, the trail goes somewhere stranger. There is no obvious event in the person’s own history and no known family story that seems to explain what we are seeing, yet the body is responding as though something very real has happened.

Now imagine that the person having that response is two years old, and 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 has not. But “not proven” and “there is no evidence” are not the same statement.

There is evidence. The much more interesting question is what we make of it.

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, and its research archive contains more than 2,500 cases.

These children typically begin speaking about another life between about two and five years of age. Some give names, places, relationships or descriptions of events, while others 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 already been saying.

What interests me is not simply that children tell unusual stories, but the way the stronger cases have been investigated. Researchers ask what the child actually said, when the statements were made, whether they were documented before a possible previous person was identified, whether the child could have learned the information through ordinary means, and whether there were unusual fears, behaviours, skills or patterns of play that appeared to correspond with what the child reported.

Some cases are much stronger than others, and that distinction 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, 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. One of the things that makes the case particularly interesting is 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.

James also repeatedly played out airplane crashes, and that detail caught my attention because children do not always explain what is happening to them in words. They show us through repetition, reenactment, play, behaviour and the things they return to again and again. Their bodies and behaviour can express something long before they have enough language to explain why it feels so enormous.

That was the point 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.

As I listened, I had one immediate thought:

I’ve seen this.

Not in a research study and not as a verified reincarnation case. I had seen similar patterns in my BodyTalk practice.

Those things are not the same, and I do not need to pretend that they are. But the similarities were strong enough that I could not ignore the parallel.

The Baby Who Could Sit in the Car Seat but Could 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, that was simply the story his 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 and he could be buckled into it without a problem. The distress began when the car seat was placed into the car.

That distinction caught my attention. If restraint itself were the issue, I would have expected the distress to begin when he was buckled. It did not. 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, the car did not simply mean transportation.

It meant: My parents disappear.

We worked with the emotional charge and active memory through BodyTalk, and afterward the family reported that he could travel in the car again.

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 an unusual awareness around driving.

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

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 that case to embellish it, and I am not going to fill in pieces I no longer have. What I do remember clearly 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 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.

What interests me is what happens 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 appear to correspond with the deaths they say they remember.

I do not need to claim certainty in order to take the pattern seriously, and after more than a decade in practice, these are not isolated experiences for me.

I Work With This Material

This is not simply an intellectual question for me.

I have been a BodyTalk practitioner for more than a decade, and I have encountered this kind of material again and again. I have watched babies move from intense, seemingly inexplicable fear into being able to tolerate the very thing that had terrified them. I have seen adults experience meaningful shifts in long-standing physical, emotional and behavioural patterns after we worked with material their system presented as belonging to another lifetime.

Sometimes the changes are subtle, while other times they happen so clearly and immediately that they are very difficult for me to dismiss.

I do not need a research paper to tell me that these imprints can be meaningful because I see what happens when we address them.

The research matters to me because it gives me another lens for understanding what I have already spent years witnessing in practice. It gives me another body of information to place beside what I observe, and sometimes it gives language to something I have already encountered with a client.

But I did not come to believe in the relevance of this work because somebody wrote a study. I came to believe in it because I have sat with people, followed what their systems presented, worked with those imprints and watched what changed.

I do not believe this only because I have read about it. I believe it because I have seen the impact of addressing these imprints, over and over again, for more than a decade.

It Is Not Only Babies

One of my yoga students was also receiving BodyTalk sessions from me.

She had always been extraordinarily limited in forward bending. She could barely reach her knees, let alone touch her toes.

During one session, material emerged that we interpreted as a lifetime involving enslavement and cotton picking. Within the logic of that story, bending forward was not simply a physical movement. It was associated with forced labour.

We worked with that material, and immediately afterward she could touch her toes.

That was around ten years ago, and she can still touch her toes.

That experience has stayed with me because the change was not subtle. There was a very clear physical limitation before the session. Specific material emerged, we worked with it, her range of movement changed immediately and that change remained years later.

The same woman gave me another experience that has stayed with me for a different reason.

During another BodyTalk session, material emerged that we interpreted as a lifetime in which she had been stoned to death during the Victorian era.

What made that experience particularly striking was the order in which it happened. She had not come into the session talking about an aversion to the Victorian era or suggesting that something might have happened to her then. The material emerged first.

Only afterward did she tell me how intensely triggered she had always been by that period of history. She hated it. She would not watch movies or television programs set in that era and wanted nothing to do with it.

That sequence matters to me because I was not building a past-life explanation around information she had already given me. The story emerged first, and then she recognized an existing reaction in her present life that seemed to correspond with it.

I have seen the same kind of specificity with other clients.

One woman came to me with persistent migraines concentrated around the base of her skull. During BodyTalk, material emerged that we interpreted as a past-life death by hanging.

As we explored what had come forward, I asked her whether she wore scarves. She did not. I asked about necklaces, and she told me she could not tolerate those either. Anything around her throat felt unbearable.

That does not establish that a particular historical lifetime occurred, nor does it establish that a hanging caused her migraines. Migraines can have many causes and deserve appropriate medical assessment.

What it does illustrate is the kind of pattern I have encountered time after time in practice: material comes forward that seems strange or unrelated, and then some present-day fear, physical restriction, aversion or behaviour suddenly makes sense in the context of it.

Sometimes the material emerges before the client has given me the association. Sometimes a pattern shifts after we work with it. And sometimes, as with my yoga student’s ability to bend forward, the change is immediate and remains years later.

That is very different from simply being interested in the idea of past lives.

I work with this material, and I have repeatedly watched something change when we do.

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 that BodyTalk proves past lives are real. I do not think that would be 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, document statements, compare them with records and 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, and sometimes it appears connected with pregnancy, birth or the family system. At other times, the material presents in language that we interpret as ancestral, karmic or past-life material.

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

Research can tell me that there are young children reporting memories that appear to precede their current lives and that some of those children show corresponding behaviours or phobias.

My clinical experience can tell me that I have worked with babies and adults 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 different forms of information, and I am comfortable allowing them to sit beside one another without pretending they are the same thing.

Then There Is the Regression Work

The children’s cases are not the only body of work that shaped my thinking.

Dolores Cannon’s The Convoluted Universe was one of the books that fundamentally changed the range of possibilities I was willing to consider. Over decades of hypnotic regression work, Cannon documented people reporting past lives, between-life experiences and states of consciousness extending beyond the boundaries of one physical lifetime.

I do not place hypnotic regression in exactly the same evidential category as spontaneous statements from very young children. Suggestion matters, the way questions are asked matters, and memory itself is complicated.

But Cannon’s work was not happening in isolation.

Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe discusses a broader body of past-life and consciousness research, including the work of psychiatrist Joel Whitton. Whitton hypnotized a core group of subjects and spent thousands of hours recording what they reported about apparent previous existences. Talbot describes subjects giving unusual historical details and also reports cases in which people experienced psychological or physical changes after traumatic past-life material was explored.

Talbot himself does not claim that this proves reincarnation. In fact, he explicitly says that the evidence does not prove it and even asks what “perfect proof” of reincarnation would look like. His argument is that there is enough serious material to deserve open-minded consideration rather than automatic dismissal.

That distinction matters to me because my own experience has led me to a very similar place.

Unproven Is Not the Same as Unevidenced

Another part of The Holographic Universe changed the way I thought about evidence itself.

Talbot points to a double standard we sometimes apply depending on whether an idea already fits the worldview we have accepted. His specific comparison is between the Big Bang and near-death research.

The Big Bang is widely accepted because there are compelling reasons to believe it describes the beginning of the universe, even though nobody has “proved” it in an absolute sense. Talbot then points out that someone suggesting that the realm encountered during near-death experiences may represent another level of reality is often dismissed precisely because that claim cannot be definitively proven, even though he argues there are compelling reasons to take those reports seriously too.

I am not using that argument to say that every extraordinary claim must therefore be true. That would make no sense.

What it did for me was sharpen an important distinction:

Unproven is not the same as unevidenced, and unfamiliar is not the same as impossible.

Talbot also spends considerable time questioning why consciousness research is so often dismissed or ignored even when there is material worthy of investigation.

Eventually my question stopped being, “Can somebody prove this beyond all doubt before I am allowed to consider it?”

It became, “What is actually here if I am willing to look?”

Why I No Longer Begin With Disbelief

I did not always think this way.

Dolores Cannon expanded the range of possibilities I was willing to consider, while Michael Talbot gave me another framework for thinking about consciousness, interconnectedness and whether our ordinary experience of being completely separate, local beings tells the whole story.

Research into young children reporting previous-life memories gave me cases that could be investigated in a very different way. Birth psychology made me look seriously at how early human experience begins, while prenatal consciousness pushed that question even further back.

BodyTalk gave me somewhere to encounter all of those questions through direct practice.

Then my clients kept giving me stories, and the stories were not merely interesting. Things changed.

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.”

After more than a decade of working this way, I would actually take that one step further. I do not need science to tell me whether the material I am encountering is meaningful because I have seen the impact of addressing these imprints too many times.

Science may eventually help us understand them better. Research may give us better language, challenge some of our interpretations or reveal mechanisms we do not yet understand.

But I am not waiting for science to give me permission to notice what I have already watched happen in front of me.

Why This Matters Before Conception

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with fertility or pregnancy.

For me, quite a lot.

If you are preparing to conceive, 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 your childhood, your relationship with your mother, a miscarriage, a frightening medical experience, fear of pregnancy, fear that your body will fail you or 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 sense that there is another layer underneath it.

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, and I do not want past lives to become another explanation we automatically impose on everything.

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

For me, the purpose is not to convince someone that a particular story is literally or historically true. It is to pay attention to what happens when the body encounters an explanation that seems to make sense of what it has been carrying.

Sometimes that story begins in childhood. Sometimes it begins in the womb. Sometimes it appears to be connected with a family pattern several generations old. 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.

You already have enough pressure to do everything perfectly. You do not need another checklist telling you to eat perfectly, supplement perfectly, track perfectly, time everything perfectly and heal everything before the baby arrives.

That is not what I mean by conscious conception.

For me, it is an invitation to become curious about what your body is asking you to understand, what you may be ready to put down and what kind of beginning you want to create.

Fertility is not only a problem to solve. It is also a relationship with your body, your history, your partner, 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.

Prenatal consciousness asks us to widen the frame because there is a baby in this experience too: a baby developing within an emotional, relational and physiological environment, responding to sound, movement, physiology and connection, and whose experience does not suddenly begin the moment somebody cuts the cord.

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

It is not because mothers need another reason to feel responsible for everything. They absolutely do not.

Awareness is not blame. Awareness simply 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, and sometimes we begin hearing that story long before they can tell it to us in words.

But There Is Still One Problem

The strongest research cases generally involve children who can talk.

They can tell their parents that they had another mommy, that their plane crashed, that they drowned, that they lived somewhere else or that they had another name. Researchers can then investigate what they say.

But I work with babies too, and 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 or label them difficult, clingy or a Velcro baby? Do we assume the goal is simply to teach them to stop signalling, or do we become better listeners?

Regardless of where you land on reincarnation, one thing does not require belief:

Babies communicate before they speak.

They communicate through their bodies, behaviour, movement, connection, distress and through what changes when they begin to feel safe.

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

That is where I want to go in Part Three.