Why I No Longer Say “Past Life”

On reclaiming the language of the soul — and what we open when we do

Language shapes reality. Or the old adage, “words carry power”. 

The words we choose to describe our life stories don’t just communicate — they constrain or expand what we’re able to perceive. And when it comes to the soul’s accumulated experience across many realities, I believe the phrase “past life” may be quietly limiting us. 

For years, practitioners in the realms of regression therapy, intuitive healing, and spiritual exploration have used “past life” as the accepted phrase for a profound phenomenon: the soul’s access to experiences that don’t belong to this current lifetime. 

A sudden knowledge of a foreign language. A fear with no traceable origin. A grief that feels deeper than the body carrying it.

The term makes sense within a linear model of time — the idea that souls move forward through a neat sequence of lives, accumulating experience the way a traveler collects passport stamps. And a linear model is easiest for us to grasp on the daily.

But what if that model is incomplete? What if the soul doesn’t travel through time at all, but exists, in some sense, across it? (Perhaps your mind just did a backflip)

“What we call a past life may not be past at all. It may be happening now — simply in a dimension of experience we access differently.”

The problem with “past”

The word “past” implies irreversibility and sequence. It places an experience in a closed chapter — something ended, concluded, behind us. We've all wanted to put uncomfortable memories behind us. This framing subtly positions the soul as a linear being moving in one direction, accumulating history much like a collection of past romantic relationships we don’t intend to revisit. 

Interestingly, one of the most rigorous explorers of this territory seems to have arrived at the same unease with this terminology. Dolores Cannon is the hypnotherapist and researcher who spent nearly five decades conducting regression sessions. Her work gave rise to QHHT, which I specifically practice. Dolores was deliberately moving away from the phrase “past lives” in favor of “other lives.” The reason was precise: in her view, time is not linear. These lives aren’t behind us in a sequence. They are, in some meaningful sense, happening simultaneously — and the soul holds them all at once. 

Dolores Cannon arrived at this not through philosophical speculation but through the accumulated testimony of thousands of clients in deep hypnotic states, each of whom seemed to access experiences outside of ordinary time. What she found, again and again, was that the relationship between these lives wasn’t linear. They informed each other across what we perceive as centuries. They carried unresolved energy forward — or perhaps more accurately, across. In a future post we will dive further into this and the tapestry effect.

Old framework: “Past Life”

A previous sequential incarnation. Closed, completed, causally behind this one. Implies the soul moves forward through time like a traveler on a road.

Expanded framework: “Soul Memory”

An experiential imprint accessible to the soul regardless of linear order. Honors the possibility that these lives may coexist, overlap, or exist outside time entirely.

What quantum thinking opens

I want to be honest: I am not a physicist, and I hold the quantum framework here lightly as a permission structure, not a proof. But physics has been quietly unsettling our assumptions about linear time for over a century. From Einstein’s relativity onward, the idea that time moves in one direction at one speed for everyone has been complicated, revised, and in some theoretical frameworks, dissolved altogether. Block universe theory, for instance, holds that past, present, and future all exist simultaneously — that what we call “now” is a perspective, not an absolute. I honestly can’t speak beyond that on physics though it is fascinating and worth paying attention to. 

What I find useful in this isn’t the technical argument but the felt permission it offers. When modern physics itself struggles to locate a firm boundary between past and present, it becomes harder to insist that the soul’s experiences must line up in orderly fashion. The soul may be doing something closer to what quantum particles do — existing in superposition, nonlocally, in ways that our linear minds then translate into the only language we have: before and after, then and now.

Dolores Cannon put it more plainly: time is simultaneous. We created the concept of linear time because it helps our minds make sense of embodied life. But the soul, she suggested, doesn’t live inside that construct the way the conscious mind does.

“We created the idea of time so our world makes sense. But time is simultaneous.”

— Dolores Cannon

What “Soul Memory” offers instead

The phrase Soul Memory does something important: it keeps the soul as the subject. It honors that these experiences belong to the soul — they are part of its accumulated knowledge — without claiming to know exactly when they occurred or in what order. Memory is not inherently sequential. Memory is interpretational. We know this from our own lives: a smell can return you to an experience from twenty years ago with more vividness than something that happened yesterday. 

Soul Memory also creates room for something that “past life” quietly forecloses: the idea that the soul may be holding multiple experiences at once — that what we call a “life” is less a discrete chapter than a facet of something larger and less bounded. This resonates not only with Cannon’s work but with strands of Vedantic philosophy, certain Kabbalistic teachings, and shamanic traditions that speak of soul aspects and parallel selves. Sometimes our dreams could indeed be the veil thinning. 

When a client comes to a QHHT session describing what they’ve always called a “past life vision,” shifting to Soul Memory language often opens something in them. It removes the sense of something finished and done. It invites a different quality of curiosity: What is this part of my soul still carrying? What is being communicated across the fabric of time? 

Practical implications for healing work

Language in healing contexts is not merely semantic. When we frame an experience as a “past life,” there’s an implicit suggestion that its resolution lies in the past — in going back there, processing what happened, and closing the loop. This framing has value. But it also has limits.

When we work with Soul Memory instead, we can ask different questions. 

Not just what happened to you then? but what does this aspect of your soul know that your present self is being asked to integrate? 

Not just how do we heal this wound from another time? but how does the wisdom held in this memory want to move through you now?

The shift is from retrieval to reception. Soul Memory is not something you go back to dig up. It arises when the soul is ready to offer it — when the present moment has the capacity to hold it, learn from it, and let it transform.

An evolving vocabulary for an evolving understanding

We are living in a remarkable period of convergence. Ancient wisdom traditions that have always spoken of the soul’s eternal, nonlinear nature are meeting a physics that is cautiously arriving at similar conclusions. Practitioners like Dolores Cannon spent lifetimes building an empirical (if unconventional) body of evidence for what the mystics have always known: that the soul is not contained by linear time.

“Past life” will remain a useful shorthand, and I’m not suggesting we abandon it entirely. But Soul Memory invites us into a deeper, stranger, and ultimately more honest relationship with what we are — beings whose awareness is not confined to this single moment of time, who carry within us the imprints of experiences we have not fully mapped. Who are perhaps far more simultaneous than we have dared to believe.

The soul does not live in the past. It lives in the whole.

Invitational Exercise

If this resonates with you, I’d invite you to notice the next time you reach for the phrase “past life” and ask whether “Soul Memory” opens something wider in you. Let the language be a portal.