Past Lives

India Oryx facilitates a monthly Om chanting group and believes in reincarnation.

For instance she has a difficult relationship with her son and believes that in a past life they were not mother and son but rival Roman gladiators, locked in mortal combat with one another.

There is also another man she knows, with whom she has a similarly fraught relationship. She attributes this conflict to a past life in which she had died by drowning in the Nile and how this man, in his own previous incarnation, had stood by and watched instead of trying to save her.

It occurs to me that whilst India’s belief in reincarnation may be helpful to her in making sense of interpersonal conflicts, it may not be all that helpful for the other people involved. It might even be perpetuating things.

In particular I can imagine her son being less than appreciative of his mother’s interpretation of their relationship. Finding a middle ground with someone who is convinced you have been trying to murder them for hundreds of years is never easy. And no one wants to hear their own mother tell them that for centuries she has been wishing you dead.

Similarly with regard to the other man, the one who stood by and watched India drown in the Nile. After hearing her account of how she approached things with her son I can’t help thinking that this man might have had some very good reasons for not intervening in her demise all those years ago.