HOW I CAME TO THIS: PART FOUR
EXPLORING THE SOULS JOURNEY
Dixie Yeterian, circa 2004

The experience with my daughter caused me to go into a number of years of searching. I wanted to have some kind of explanation. I function a lot in my mind and I wanted answers. I started reading everything. I started going to church. I’m not talking a church, I went to ALL the churches looking for one that had an answer. I was looking for one in which there existed the Spiritual force that I had experienced in that dark room when I thought my daughter was dying. I wanted to find that in a place or in a group of people who knew that experience personally. I was searching for that. I wanted to connect with that again.

I started reading about different philosophies and religions. I found the philosophies took me a lot further than religions. I don’t teach religion. I teach Spirituality. I try not to impose my ideals into my classes but it’s impossible not to because as my former husband used to say to me as a criticism (but I take it as a compliment), “Dixie, you say things with such total conviction that people are going to believe you and what if you’re wrong?” And I do. I teach with total conviction because I do really believe what I teach.

The things I teach are of a Spiritual philosophy, such as the concept of reincarnation. I've come to have a belief about reincarnation as a result of a series of experiences similar to the one I just told you. These beliefs came to me over a number of years through a variety of experiences.

When my daughter was about two and a half years old, I was bathing her one day and she asked me if I remembered the bathtub we used to have. I told her that since she had been born we had never had another bathtub. She looked at me and said that it had legs, like animals’ feet. I told her that we’ve always had the same bathtub as I continued to bathe her and then she looked at me and told me the soap stank. I continued to bathe her and told her that I didn’t remember that soap, that we’d always used the same one I was washing her with then. She stopped talking, I could see her thinking intensely, and after a bit, she looked up at me and said, “But you didn’t wash me then, mommy - I washed you.” Now that really made me do some thinking.

It was maybe six months after that when I was sitting in my living room talking to my friend Saundra. We were talking about our childhoods and about silly things that had happened when we were young. Shannon came in and stood and listened for a little while, and then she asked me if I had ever told Saundra about when we were sisters and we came from England to stay with our dad. I told her I hadn’t and that she remembered it better than I did and said “Why don’t you tell her.” Shannon stood there and told us this incredible story about her and I being sisters who lived in England. She talked about how our mother had died and our father had gone to America, intending to send for us once he made his fortune.

Now Shannon’s only three years old and she was describing experiences that she had no way of knowing in this life. She described what it was like to be in a ship below deck in a storm with water up to our ankles. It was amazing. She described the period clothing that we were wearing, how we were nauseated and throwing up from the ship rocking in the stormy seas. She described all kinds of things about the voyage. Then she described what it was like arriving in America and what it was like when we got off the ship. I mean, she had no way to have a conscious memory of those experiences at three years of age in this life. She wasn’t old enough to have been able to read books about this type of experience or to have seen movies about that era, or anything of that kind. It was not something that I could explain by her three-year-old life experience. She ended the story by describing herself as a woman standing at a window looking out and being in deep grief because her husband, whom she knew had gone off to war, was never coming back. Now a three year old doesn’t think that way.

I began reading everything I could find on the subject of reincarnation. I read Jess Stearn’s books “Search for a Soul” and “Search for the Girl with the Blue Eyes” as well as other books on the subject of reincarnation. I also read Taylor Caldwell's book titled “Dear and Glorious Physician". Then I started reading other research. There’s a book titled “Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation” written by a man named Dr. Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia. He researched over 600 cases of reincarnation. It appears that children under the age of six are evidencing a great deal of what appears to be recall of recent life experiences in the same way that children under the age of six in laboratory conditions evidence a very high rate of natural psychic ability. Most of them can see auras and almost all of them are very clairvoyant and very telepathic. As soon as they reach the age of six, though, they lose those abilities rapidly and they lose the memory of what appears to be past-life recall. Dr. Stevenson researched hundreds of cases in which children under the age of six were saying to their parents, ‘I’m not really Johnny. I’m really so and so and I’m married and have six kids and I live in this town and I’m an engineer. I’m not really your son. I’m really this other person.’ It’s an amazing book, and it’s very well documented.

The story in the book that I like the most is the story of Shanti Devi. She was a little girl who was born in a small village in the Delhi, India area. From the time she could speak, she told her parents that she wasn’t really their daughter, that she really was a married woman who lived in a town some forty miles distance from where she was born. She talked a great deal about what she thought was her real life. She named names and places and everything. Her situation came to the interest of scientists at the University of India and they came to meet with her and documented the things that she was saying.

Around the age of nine they decided to take her to the town that she claimed to have lived in in her recent life. They took her by train there. When she got off the train she led the researchers through the town. She took them into businesses and introduced them to the business owners, by name. She introduced them to the local pharmacist and told them that he had repaired her bike. The man confirmed that yes, he had repaired the bike for the woman she claimed to be. She led them to the house that she claimed she had lived in. She recognized that a room had been added to the house. She recognized new furniture that had been purchased. She correctly identified the entire family - aunts, uncles, cousins and the children.

When you read this kind of documentation you have to give consideration that there may be some validity to this. In my first book (Exploring Psychic Reality) I used the phrase, “It’s amazing that closed minds are always attached to open mouths,” one of my favorites that I’ve used through the years. I was one of those people prior to this who was very closed-minded and you know, closed minds are about ignorance. Once I ceased to be ignorant, once I educated myself, I really discovered that a lot of the things I had been saying and believing before were just the result of a lack of education.
I was very interested in reincarnation, but I still was not a person who was going to think that looking at other lives was necessarily a good thing. I had the attitude that, You know, you’d be opening Pandora’s Box. We’re here for a reason. Let’s focus into the here and now. It’s not necessarily a great thing to be looking at the past because you could be opening things that could create more problems.

During those years I was doing traditional counseling. A woman who was a Marriage and Family Therapist came to me as a client - she had been stuttering since the age of seven and she wanted to find out what caused her stuttering. We were assuming that there’d been some kind of traumatic experience at the age of seven that had caused the stuttering to happen. I took her into an altered state through a number of processes designed to open up recall, and then I suggested to her that she should go to the source experience that had created the stuttering.

I expected her to go to seven years of age in this life. Instead, she went to seven years of age as a little girl who lived in Waycross, Georgia, in 1826. She then talked at length about having been the daughter of parents who owned a farm outside of Waycross. She was kidnapped by a neighboring farmer, held hostage for three days, sexually assaulted, and then she was strangled to death. I brought her back up into the present day and took her through traditional resolution processes to bring her fully into this current state of being and clear the experience. When she came out of the regression, she was no longer stuttering and she doesn’t stutter today.

I was thrilled, of course. I mean, I had helped this woman overcome a lifetime of stuttering. At that point, I was not assured that what she had experienced was, in fact, a regression. Even though I was now very open to the concept of reincarnation, I was thinking a number of different things. I was thinking she could have fantasized an experience because maybe it would have been too hard for her to go into the actual event. Maybe she created a story that symbolized the event so that she wouldn’t have to get that close to it.

In regression, sometimes a person will be very hesitant subconsciously to actually look at the real event and will therefore interject a symbolic event in order to be able to deal with it better. It has the same effect on the conscious mind. For instance, if she had interjected a symbolic experience and gone through and done resolution in the symbolic experience, it could have had the same effect of alleviating the stuttering. So I was thinking maybe it was this.

I also considered that she could have actually attuned to someone else’s life experience. That could have happened. Of course it didn’t occur to me at the time that all those were just as far out as the whole idea that maybe she’d had a reincarnational recall, but those were the kinds of things that I was thinking.

Shortly after the session, she got on a plane and flew to Waycross, Georgia. She found the documentation of the purchase of property belonging to the man she claimed had killed her. She found the marriage certification for the people she’d claimed were her parents and she found the grave of the child she’d claimed to be.

After that I started really looking at the possibility of past-life events, especially past-life trauma resulting in present-life neuroses and carry-through emotional trauma. I wanted to understand more about it, so I started doing regression research. Over the following years I did a lot of regressions with my own clients after working closely with and learning from several professionals whom I both trusted and respected.

So probably over a ten-year period, I had led hundreds of people through multiple regressions and documented a lot of them. A number of theories, as far as I was concerned, were given significant evidence during the regressions. For instance, there’s a theory that we come back over and over again in “Soul Families", that the same people come together repeatedly in their many life experiences. I’m very convinced that the same students return to me life after life. I think that’s one of the reasons that often when people meet me and immediately connect with me and think, “OK, you’re my teacher,” it’s because I’ve been their teacher in other lives. We know when we connect with a person with whom we’ve had other life experiences because we have an immediate and palpable response to them.

My experience through the regression work I've done is that younger souls, up through and to the very early Six Soul Evolvement level, evolve very slowly. When we do regressions, we can clearly see that we take one situation and have multiple lifetimes dealing with that same exact scenario until we finally get it right. For example, the situation could be marrying the same partner and having the same dynamics in which we’re either being the victim or being the victimizer and usually trading roles throughout lifetimes. That is to say, you victimize me in this life and the next life I’m going to come back and I’ll victimize you, and I’ll pay you back and then you pay me back. And we just keep doing it over and over and over again until we finally come to a place where we decide “OK, we don’t need to do this anymore,” and let go of it.

As long as we hold resentment or guilt, we will carry karma and we will have repercussions. Those are the two things that cause negative karma. If we feel guilty about something and believe that we deserve to be punished for something, we'll attract someone who will punish us. If we feel resentment for something, then we are going to be put into the same situation over and over again until we come to the realization that whatever it is that we are resenting, we created it for ourselves. Whatever is in our lives, we created for ourselves.

We set up the scenario. There’s nothing going on in our lives that we didn’t choose at one time or another, whether it be our marriage or our job. And when we begin to take personal responsibility and stop blaming others, the resentment goes away. That’s really what it’s about. But all of that we learn through repetitive experiences, through repetitive lifetimes in the same Soul Evolvement level and birth path.

There is a common Metaphysical tenet that says there is no such thing as time outside of this dimension - that all our experiences are happening at the same time and that “time” as we know it only exists in this dimension in a linear, sequential fashion so that we have a definite past, present and future. What keeps us from being totally overwhelmed by having the memory of all incarnations hitting us at the same time is something known as The Veil, and it’s that Veil that keeps us focused into one experience at a time, one incarnation at a time.

Because we are focused individually on a single incarnation, we could live in one incarnation (for example) from 1903 to 1945 and be totally unaware of an incarnation we live from 1892 to 1933 (again, for example). This is known as a ‘simultaneous incarnation’ in which we live some of our years in the same time period in both incarnations; the Veil keeps that knowledge from us. In my regression work with clients, this was evidenced on many occasions when I would ask a client what year they were born, and they would say 1903 (again, for example); and then in their “next” incarnation, say they were born in 1892. If we adhere to the rules of time that we have established in this dimension - that everything occurs in a linear and sequential order - this would appear to be impossible. But if we ascribe to the tenet that there is no time outside of this dimension, it makes perfect sense. The next story is an example of that.

A woman came to me and we did about a year and a half of regressions on a weekly basis. We recorded all of these and kept track of them. She had her Ph.D. in Early Childhood Education. Her one prejudice was real estate guys who drove Cadillacs. For some reason that combo really irritated her.

Shortly after our work together ended, a man came to me who was a real estate agent and who drove a Cadillac. I took him through a series of regressions. He had the same regressions as she had. I’m talking same names, dates, and places. Same regressions, one after the other after the other, and I’m taking these tapes out and listening to hers and listening to his and they were exactly the same memories - simultaneous incarnations. His one prejudice was he couldn’t stand, as he said, “Airy fairy flower children” and she tended to be a free spirit and could have been described as that. The two of them actually became fast friends for a while, but what often happens with simultaneous incarnations is that they started finding fault in each other, and they did find fault in each other and their friendship ended. Why? Because who do you find more fault in than yourself?

Most importantly, though, through all of these regressions it became apparent to me that we progress through our experience in this dimension in a very predictable order. You can view your experiences here in this dimension in the same way that you would view grades in school. We come here to learn, and there’s only one thing we come here to learn, and that’s how to BE Love.

After I was shot and when I came out of the coma, I felt this tremendous sense of excitement because I absolutely Knew what this place was about. I wanted to tell everybody and I thought “Wow, if they just get this, then everybody’s life is going to be good.” People were standing by my bed saying things to me like, “Well, Dixie, you know you can’t go home now. You’re going to have to go into the Witness Protection Program. You’re going to have to walk away from everything.” And it didn’t matter to me that I had, at that point, lost everything I had in the world - my home, all of my belongings, everything - gone. It didn’t matter to me because I absolutely Knew that the only thing that matters here in this place is us and our relationship with each other. All the rest of it is beside the point.

In 1990, when I came out of the Witness Protection Program, all of my possessions fit in the trunk of my car and look at me now - it doesn’t take long to get “stuff”. It’s not about “stuff”.  I could walk away from everything I have right now and though I can’t say it wouldn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter to me really because I know that that’s not what it’s about. I have some things here that I really like, but I had stuff then too that I really liked. It’s really all about us and our ability to be love, to BE Love. It’s not to learn to Love or be loving. It is to BE LOVE.

It’s an immense task, and we go through all kinds of experiences to get to that place. We go through thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of life experiences to get to the place where we are able to be Love.
There are theories that say we go through all forms of life before we progress into the human form. There are theories that we might spend time as a rock or a tree or a bird or a fish or an animal. As a matter of fact, that last theory says that the purpose of animals becoming tame is so that they can learn to acclimate to living in the human environment.

My favorite of the theories, though, is that this dimension, this world, is a Spiritual penal colony. In this theory we’ve all committed Spiritual sins or crimes and we’re held hostage here for the duration (much laughter) and we can’t get out until we’ve served our time. Well, look at me in light of that - I was shot nine times and I still can’t get out! I’m a lifer! And of course I’m kidding.

I think the most profound result of my regression work with others has been the gradual realization that we evolve Spiritually, intellectually and emotionally through predictable patterns of experience, from our first entrance into the Earth plane to the completion of our life lessons in this dimension. It has become apparent to me that in the same way we mature in a single life from infancy to adulthood through a combination of educational and life experiences, the soul gradually matures through a series of life experiences. The process of the education of the soul appears to be very similar to our educational experience from kindergarten through college.