Have you ever picked up something new – a language, a piano, a kind of art – and it felt oddly familiar? As if your hands already remembered?
We often call these moments “talent” or “intuition.” But sometimes, what’s happening is simpler: you’re meeting an old pattern again, one you’ve practised in other times, other forms.
Our creative essence doesn’t start from zero each time – it continues. We inherit emotional rhythms, sensibilities, even aesthetic preferences, not just from our ancestors, but from the long memory of our own experience.
When you start to read beneath the surface – pattern beneath pattern – you begin to see how what you love, notice, and repeat today carries the thread of everything you’ve ever been.
There’s a story of a four-year-old boy in Hong Kong who learned to play the piano in just three months – and played like a master.
Sure, he has a great teacher.
And yes – the Asian tiger moms! Possibly a tiger dad too in this case…
But still, there was something in him that couldn’t be taught – the phrasing, the sensitivity, the flow.
You could feel that this wasn’t his first encounter with the piano.
He was picking up where he left off before.
You too can pick up where you left off before.
And if that’s true, then what you’re naturally drawn to today – your creative leanings, fascinations, even your obsessions – might be breadcrumbs leading you back to your own essence.
Let’s trace them together.
1. Read your own face
Browse through your old photos – the ones you rarely look at anymore.
Different ages, different moods, different places.
Look closely, not at how you looked, but at what’s looking back through your eyes.
- Which version of you feels the most alive? Which one carries a wisdom, a mischief, or a knowing you’ve forgotten?
- Which memory, image, or rhythm feels older than your physical age?
- What longing keeps returning, even when you can’t explain why?
- What movement, art, or element feels like home to your body?
A friend of mine teaches dance. He always felt deeply connected to the rituals and rhythms of the earth – the elements, bare feet, wind.
He feels particularly drawn to Native American drum circles – the grounded power of tribal dance.
He intuitively understands how energy flows within human body, and his choreography somehow has great healing effect.
One day, looking into the mirror, he suddenly realised: this feeling of belonging wasn’t some random entertainment but from essence.
Such connection, some may describe as “past life”. When I first wrote this post on 26 March 2013, I too used the phrase “past life” to describe an energetic familiarity – something that felt ancient yet alive in me – simply because I didn’t yet have the language to capture how memory moves through essence.
But the fuller truth is that you don’t need to hold a “past life” belief in order to feel the continuity of soul through what you love, create, or remember.
2. Follow your obsessions.
We all have certain things that stay with us – a piece of music, a place, a philosophy we can’t explain our love for.
When I first heard the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching as a child – “道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名…” – I started to cry with joy.
I was too young to dissect all the meaning then. But I felt that I didn’t have to grasp its great meaning. Because deep down I felt…understood.
I grew up near Wu Dang Mountain, a Taoist (Daoist) heritage site at the heart of mainland China. Each time I climbed the mountain, I felt soothed, as if I’d returned home.
Over time I realised: the mountain, the text, the desire to understand the “why” behind all things – they were all the same pulse repeating in different forms.
Any places you are obsessed with? Anything you are never tired of doing, if money, time and age is not a concern?
Notice what you always return to, even when life moves on.
Those are the threads that never stop weaving through you.
3. Repetition Mapping
We tend to pay attention on the big shifts, but the smaller patterns often reveal more – the themes that keep showing up, the timing that returns like a tide.
When we stop treating them as coincidences, we begin to see an invisible order beneath the surface.
Mapping these repetitions is not about fixing patterns, but about recognising the rhythm of your soul at work.
- Notice what repeats – a phrase, a colour, a kind of encounter, a question that never seems to fade.
- Don’t analyse it (yet).
- Simply place each echo on a map of your awareness.
- When seen together, these repetitions begin to draw the outline of your becoming.
Sometimes your essence or deepest self speaks through dreams, carrying messages that linear logic can’t decode. Sometimes your essence or deepest self speaks through repetition.
What you keep circling back to – in thought, in art, in relationship – is not random. It’s communication.
In the Intuition Course, we cultivate your perception. To sense the subtle energy movement beneath events. To read pattern beneath the patterns. To hear the rhythm within timing, with confidence and clarity.
When you start mapping with awareness, you can connect the dots. Your intuition then goes being a mysterious talent and becomes deep insights you can trust.
4. Let recognition find you
There are moments when you remember what remembers you.
Don’t chase it. Don’t rush to explain it. Don’t scare it away.
Recognition is shy – it appears only when you’re still enough to receive it.
Sometimes, this recognition carries information: a creative impulse, a sense of belonging, or an inner knowing that feels older than you.
Let it unfold in its own timing.
Practise this kind of listening – allow what wants to be known to surface naturally.
Perhaps this is how your soul begins to draw nearer – not through visions or answers,
but through a quiet intimacy that feels both ancient and tender.
It doesn’t demand belief; it invites relationship.
The more you lean into it, the more life itself starts to speak to you.
Look at what feels familiar.
What draws you closer without reason?
What do you do so naturally that it feels like breathing?
Those are your returning rhythms – your essence practising itself again.
Let your curiosity follow them.
They’ll show you not who you were, but who you’ve always been.
Further exploration:
Become Your Own Creative Alchemist course:
a deeper unfolding of your soul’s creative calling.
An embodied journey into how your essence creates form.
A return to the place where clarity, momentum, and timing arise naturally – and in harmony.
A reawakening of the creativity that has always been within you –
asleep but stirring in your bones,
woven through your breath and dreams,
flowing between your soul and your body.
First time here and loving it so much 💞🙏🙏✨🙏✨🙏🌺❣️🌺❣️🌺❣️
Thanks for connecting Bertha & so glad that you are enjoying it! 🙂 <3 <3 <3
Dear Yiye,
thank you so much for this touching and ecouraging post. My heart right away breathed more deeply 🙂
I’ve been seeking for my true self for more then two years. My life went in patterns or circles. My inner voice told me to do things different but I never listened until my body and my heart were burnt out.
Last year, in late summer, I went to an meditation and kind of schamanic retreat for more than one week. When I got there I sat down and send some prayers out to tell me who I am, who I was and what my purpose might be. I was desperate, I was longing for an answer, I was quite frightened as well. On the last day I sat down in an meditation and all my questions got answered -also about the future. The divine power within me showed me images and told me their stories to it.
I am very grateful and glad to have found you on the Web. I have signed for your posts just some weeks ago. Whatever you write about is like a truthbomb to me! 🙂 My soul and heart are always smiling and dancing when I browse your advices.
You are really inspiring and its beautiful to actually feel your loving energy and soul!
Have a good easter sunday, many thanks and much love
Anja
Happy Easter Anja!
What you shared above is insightful! I’m sooo happy for you that you are walking your truth! Keep shining + letting the miracle unfold!! 🙂
All my love
Yiye
Dear Yiye,
I am in my late twenties and for the past two years, I have felt sense of “what can I do for this world” and “I am here to do something else than my vocation”. The feeling is so strong that it makes me cry…I feel like I need a mentor, a guide, someone who understands this feeling, because most of family and friends don’t. I feel very strongly thats its trying to tell me something and although i feel much more spiritually awakened than 2 years back, i still feel a BIG heaviness in my soul. I love your writing and like you said, spiritual scriptures, words, including your letters feel like home. Unfortuantely i did not get a reply when i asked my higher self about my past life but I am convinced that I was a healer in my past life.
Thanks again for your writing, it gives me a lot of peace…
Best,
P
Dear Pri, thanks so much for writing and sharing!
Although you might still feel the heaviness in your soul, you are closer to your core essence than you think.
I had this feeling you described above for about 2 years too – in my late twenties. In fact, it’s this strong feeling drove me to start this website.
thanks again for your sincere comment!
Yiye
Hi Yiye,
wonderful, touching and deep the way you write.
I had about 8 years ago a past life session which I still remember very clearly and which gives me new insights even of today. On of the lifes I saw was a wise man – literally with white hair and long beard -, a consultant of a kingdom, but for political reasons I was undesired, which left me feeling very sad and lonesome.
Then I love Asia, and Asian food and Asian people (that includes you 🙂 ), so I am sure I have spent some lives there, as buddhist monk.
Thank you! I got an inspiration from you to meditate on!
Love & Light
Petra
Hi Petra, thanks for sharing your story and your love of Asia 🙂
Enjoy the meditation, I’m glad to have assisted!
Yiye
Hi Yiye,
This post was amazing for me as I had just finished visiting my book in the Akashics Library for the first time – no more than 30 minutes ago. I was amazed at what you wrote about what felt like home to you – reading the Tao De Ching, because I had that experience just this past week. Hearing the Medicine Buddha Mantra performed by H.H. Penor Rinpoche (on youtube) – it made me ball my eyes out because it “felt like home” – those are the exact words I had used to describe it to friends!
During meditation, I see myself on a mountaintop at the very north tip of India. I having been feeling very compelled to travel to the Himalayas and in fact am doing so soon. I see myself as a Buddhist monk and in the male form during most of my meditations, and have a very strong interest in Asia. I am a caucasian female from the midwest US, and have also always felt a very strong connection to American Indians – so much so that I KNOW in a past life I was one. When I was young, I would draw and paint Native people without ever really understanding why. I was naturally drawn to it. I was always very sympathetic to their plight growing up and have been feeling a strong call to help in their healing process.
I am in the process of changing the direction of my life. My awareness has been opened and I am experiencing spirituality in a way I never knew existed. It is so beautiful and wonderful. I want to heal myself so I can help others to awaken to this beauty and heal from the numbness of our society.
Thank you for your tips to discovering our past lives. They are very insightful:-)
Jenni
Dear Jenni, thanks for sharing your beautiful stories – I’m honoured to connect at this place with you.
You are already on your spiritual path, but I’m sure there will be more belonging and wonders on the way!!
with love
Yiye
Ohh, you are rocking it Yiye, I love this juicy post. If I had read it, oh, about 2 months back I would have thought something along the lines of “I don’t know. I’m sure we’ve had past lives but what would be the point to go down the rabbit hole” but now I know what the point is…and it is a lot of fun too.
Lots of love to you xx
Hey Alison – I love your “rabbit hole” description – know what you mean! thanks again for sharing your thoughts!
Yiye
Oh dear Yiye, what a beautiful and moving post full of wisdom! I loved the stories of your past life connections. I’m definitely going to try some of the techniques you describe. Thank you.
For me, I am very open-minded and not altogether decided on a belief about after- or past life. I do believe nothing ever is lost in this universe, and at this time in my life one very plausible explanation is that when we die, the boundaries of the body fall away and all souls are together in the spirit place. Therefore, I believe we can access any past life and it isn’t necessarily “our” past life but one we relate to, that has some significance for this current lifetime. And that’s how we “choose” which one to connect with. If that makes any sense 🙂
Personally, I have this connection with Ireland, so I or souls I relate to, have probably spent many lifetimes here. When I moved to Ireland as a student 21 years old, after 1 1/2 years I had picked up mannerisms, the language and the accent so completely, people who met me didn’t recognise me as a foreigner anymore. One of my professors at Galway university told me he’d never seen the like of it; he’d known Germans who after 20 years in Ireland still sound like Germans. He used to say half-jokingly that I must have an Irish gene in my family from centuries ago, that surfaced in me. I think it was a past life. I also think he was an old soul, too 🙂
When I visited Delphi in Greece, I felt such an overwhelming sense of coming home, it was staggering. It’s such a resonant, powerful place. It also has a “rock of Sibylle” (yes, really), it made me laugh when I saw the sign on it – I wasn’t surprised at all. My parents must have received guidance from another place when they named me in this lifetime.
In Delphi, I felt no vertigo although I am usually *very* afraid of heights. I sat on the low stone wall by the street and looked down the steep drop into the deep valley, but all I thought was how beautiful it was – I wasn’t feeling queasy at all.
Those were two stories, I’ll stop now before I keep going on and on!!
Much love and blessings,
Sibylle
wow Sibylle! I love reading your stories too! pick up the mannerisms, the language and the accent 100%, and when you were born your parents feel the vibraton of”Sibylle”! So cool – so honoured to hear these and thanks again for sharing!!
all my love
Yiye