Echoes from a Past Life
A friend of mine has always had a peculiar behavioral quirk at mealtimes - he refuses to eat a bite of his own food until every other person at the table has sat down and begun eating.
True, some people may simply call this polite vs. peculiar. Humans have all sorts of elaborate rituals and protocols when it comes to communal meals. And if you ask my friend, he will insist up and down that the root of this behavior is indeed politeness. This tracks to a point - he was raised in a very conservative home with strict decorum and a high value placed on manners and hospitality. He's extremely polite, and even hyper-vigilant at times when it comes to monitoring everyone's comfort levels and making sure no one is perturbed or offended.
Which is exactly why I find the meal-time behavior so odd - because if making other people feel comfortable is the goal, then this behavior backfires almost every time. Inevitably, one or two people will counter-insist "Oh please, start without me! Don't wait for me!" but he will sit there anyway, stone-faced and resolute, until he's witnessed everyone around the table settled and chewing. Even when this clearly makes the other dinner guests all uncomfortable. Even when we've explained to him, on several occasions, that his inflexible adherence to this dinner "rule" is, in fact, making it awkward for everyone and thus achieving the very opposite of his stated intentions.
I found myself really dwelling on this behavior recently, it felt like a knot that wanted to be untied. And yes, I'll acknowledge that the whole issue is really for him and his therapist to work out together. But I just had this sense that there was something else going on there, something energetic.
Sometimes asking the right question is like finding the right key, suddenly the door "clicks" and swings open.
Once I set my own judgement of the situation aside and approached it with a more compassionate and neutral curiosity, the right question came to me - "If this behavior doesn't make sense within its current context, what past context DID it make sense in?"
Again, probably a great question for my friend to dig into in therapy! But for me, once I phrased it that way in my mind, suddenly I got a rush of information in response - a clear psychic vision of my friend in a past life.
He was dressed in furs as if he was a trapper in the 1800's, sitting at a long wooden table at some kind of community gathering. The humble table was laid out with candles and simple foods, bread and stew, but there was enough for everyone and the mood was celebratory. He was laughing, talking to the other people gathered there and enjoying himself, and took a big bite of stew from the bowl in front of him.... and just a few moments later, he doubled over coughing and retching up blood. He had been poisoned.
It all made sense in a flash, why my friend is hardwired to wait until he's seen everyone else dig into a communal meal. That past-life experience, the shock and violence of that death, still echoes in his bones. It urges him, beyond all reason, to eat last. Always eat last. It's not just a matter of politeness, it's a lesson of survival.
It reminded me of what a long road it is, to heal all our parts. Few of us make it out of childhood without significant baggage that we spend our whole adult lives reckoning with. It feels overwhelming, to think that we also have lineages of past life trauma that need to be healed too. (Not to mention generations of epigenetics, which is an urgent conversation among black and brown people who are disproportionately affected by ancestral trauma and still struggling to survive and thrive today).
The only way to face it all is to lead with compassion and curiosity.
