Perhaps, on some level, I've intuitively comprehended and embraced the necessity of coming to know my own Shadow...maybe this is due to many lifetimes of darkness wherein I exerted only feeble half-measures to find my way free, or maybe because I remember as a breech-birth trying to claw my way back ("...please don't send me out there again, there will be too much pain...") or maybe because, as a child born with an inner Light that the ill adults in my world wanted to steal or stamp out, I instinctively went inward to a world where faeries and spirits could comfort me, and yet every year it became harder to breathe, every year it was more apparent to me that I didn't want to be here...and this would always be the point at which my soul sought to forcibly leave...and repeat ad infinitum, the futile pattern...

I only remember one previous life with any detail, maybe a second one farther back, but the one I believe to be my most recent incarnation is the one that has spoken to me, haunted me, ever since I remembered it...him, rather, at age 19...I don't have a lot of details. All I know is that he was a young, handsome, fair-haired Englishman who was quite smart, but very socially phobic. He also had terrible scars on his face and body which I originally mistook to be acne and other assorted scars from I knew not what. It wasn't until I met with a female shaman about 7 years ago that I was given more of a glimpse of his truth. She confirmed my memory but said that the man had survived Smallpox, not acne, and that the scars his illness had left him with were so shameful to him, and that in addition to his general anxieties over being among people, and his self-reproach regarding possible homosexual leanings, he one day decided enough was enough and so he blew his brains out...