Past Lives
     Present Realities

by Annie O'Grady

An Adelaide scientist and his ex-teacher wife believe they have visited their own burial sites, from previous lifetimes when they were secret lovers in Ireland in the seventeenth century.

Bob and Sue Meaney, now of Crafers in the Adelaide Hills, were led to find the gravestone by a recurring dream, after a series of spontaneous past lifetime memories they each experienced. Sue says, “We found the grave sites on our first visit to Ireland three years ago, by accident, although we had been hoping to track them down. And last year we felt we had to go back again.”Initially, Bob and Sue had been told by a clairvoyant that they would go to Ireland and find their graves. But the clairvoyant could give no more information. Because they now felt so close as husband and wife - together since 1995 - they assumed that their previous selves were married. Intrigued by both this prophecy and by Ireland itself, they planned a holiday.

They set out not knowing exactly where those lives and deaths had taken place. Before they left, Bob kept dreaming that they would drive to an old churchyard in a little car, climb over a low stone wall, and find the graves of their past selves. “I would know this place if I saw it,” he told Sue. Within a week af first being together, these two professionals had both been shaken by experiencing the first of a series of vivid flashbacks to more than one previous life together. Neither had had such experiences before. “They would just hit us out of the blue,”said Bob. The episodes were of highly ernotional situations, ranging from loss to torture and death around Europe. Sometimes the flashbacks included temporary body pain, corresponding to injury in the past life stories. And they both felt they had been healers in previous lives. The couple's mystical involvement with spantaneous recall has now played a vital role in their futures, because they left mainstream careers ta train in healing modalities. Bob had been working as a biochemist, Sue as an electorate officer. Recently they opened a remedial massage healing centre and body/mind/spirit shop in Crafers village in the Adelaide Hills.

Before Bob and Sue went to Ireland, one evening when they were relaxing on their living room floor listening to Irish music, they spontaneously both felt immensely sad and started to cry. They were having the same vision, of a simple wedding procession between high stone walls past blossom trees to a triangular village “square”. They realised they had been the bride and groom, deeply in love, but that she had died soon afterwards. However, this lifetime together in Ireland was not the life involving the graves. Several other spontaneous flashbacks showed them that whenever they had been together before, death or other tragedy had cut short theìr happiness. This time, they believe, they are grabbing happiness with both hands. The couple's first meeting had such an impact that they both left established families with grown children, to be together. They supported each other through this emotional turmoil. “The evening we first got together,” Bob recalls, “we drove to the top of Mt. Lofty. We just turned to each other and hugged. As soon as I touched Sue, it was as though the knowledge of a thousand years just sort of passed between us. And I felt like I’d come home. I said to Sue, “I’ve been searching for something all mylife, and now I've found it! “I was the same, it was just incredible,” Sue confirms. “I felt like I knew everything about him, I just knew the person that he was, and I felt I was safe at last.”

On their first trip touring Ireland in search af evidence of their past selves, they felt deeply at home in the countryside. They kept looking for a town with a triangular village green. “We didn’t find one,” said Sue. “Then we drove into Raphoe. There it was! And the tall grey stone walls on both sides of the road, the trees in blossom! We thaught, ‘Oh, wow!’ ” They hurried to the local churchyard. But there was no relevant gravestone. Sue explained, “We’d been told that the names would be William and Sarah, husband and wife. We felt the date was around the sixteen hundreds. We found lots of William-and-Sarahs but they were father and daughter, or mother and son. We were a bit puzzled. But lots of the gravestones were so old you couldn’t read them. We felt a bit cheated, but thought, “Oh well, we’re enjoying our journey.” They toured northern Ireland, and drove back down the east coast towards Dublin. In the guidebook they noticed directions to a ruined church where a wall was reputed to have jumped three feet overnight in 1715 during a storm. “Have we got time ?”they wandered. “It’s only two miles away.” At this church site near Ardee they met the caretaker, Paddy, who showed them around, then said, “Oh, you'll be wanting to see the oldest gravestone.”
“OK,” they said politely. Bob said, “He took us over to a recumbent gravestone that was inside the actual boundary of the church, where important people were buried in holy ground. As we couldn’t make out the inscription, he read it to us.” The inscription on the pitted, lichen-encrusted gravestone is: “Here lyeth the bodeys af William Orson and Sarah his wife, departed this lyfe August 20,1682 and August 26,1688.”

Bob said, “When he got to ‘William’ I had a bit of a feeling, then he said ‘Sarah his wife’. This feeling of cold swept right down my body, my heart stopped.” Surprisingly, Sue burst into tears, and ran behind a wall, embarrassed. “What’s the matter with your wife?” asked Paddy. Sue recalls, “We were both just stunned. It blew us away.” The caretaker pointed out a house across the felds where the Orson family had lived for many centuries, until they had sold it three centuries ago. This would be where Bob’s past self had lived for decades. A farm property, it was closed to visitors because of an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease. When they went back to their car, Bob found more confirmation: he saw the wall of his dream. If they had approached from another direction he would have seen it earlier. But this was far from the end of the story. Back in Australia, they found their amazement shadowed by a need to find out more.

Eventually, when no other distant memories stirred, they came to me for intentional past lifetime regression. As they both allowed their memories to open with assistance, separately, the real story unfolded. Sue had not been Sarah, William’s wife, but Sarah’s friend Jenny, who lived in the town. Jenny watched their wedding, pretending she was happy, but secretly yearning to be with William. She was thinking, “I probably won’t marry, because I wanted to marry him.” Occasionally she saw William in the street. He was now an important citizen.

One day she summoned the courage to tell him that she loved him. She said, “We were together a few times making love, but he was feeling sorry for me, he really wanted Sarah. I tried so hard to get him but it was not to be.” The affair ended. Then Jenny found she was pregnant. When this became obvious, she was sacked from her nursemaid job. She did not tell William, believing that he did not want her. Penniless and feeling hopeless, she walked away. A storm came up, and she died at night on the road, in shame. (Unknowingly, Sue had exhibited a similar reaction at the gravestone : she cried and ran away, embarrassed.) Jenny’s body would obviously be buried nearby, but her grave is unmarked. When William found out about the deaths, he was appalled, yet tried to ignore his feelings of guilt. Although materially successful, he was a man who never spoke of his feelings, even to his children (“They’re supposed to know I love them!”). His wife felt estranged, his children left him. He ended his life sobbing in loveless misery: “It’s too late to tell people I love them. There was a girl - but it’s too late, too late!” Painful though these revelations were, they gave us opportunity for therapeutic processing. Because problems experienced as past lifetime pain of any kind always resonate with current-life issues, Bob and Sue were actually also clearing stress from their own biographical past. At the end of an afternoon’s work, healing was well underway for both Bob and Sue. On their later visit to Ireland, Bob lay down on “his” gravestone in the grassy church ruins. “This time I didn’t feel anything much,” he said. “I guess that proves I’ve resolved the pain. “People say to us, ‘Did you trace your roots when you went to Ireland?’ We certainly did! This has been very challenging to me as a scientist, but now I know reincarnation is a fact, absolutely.
“We’ve been given this proof - and this wonderful new life together.”

Annie O'Grady is a past lifetime practitioner, teacher and author of “Past Lifetimes - Keys for Change!” (See advertisement on page 4) Now based near Adelaide, she is also one of Australia's most experienced practitioners of rebirthing breathwork . Tel. (08) 8537 0447.