Learning to Ask: What a Past Life Taught Me About Receiving
Self-hypnosis is not an easy thing to learn. People tend to imagine it comes naturally — that you close your eyes, sink down, and arrive somewhere deeper without much effort. The truth is more stubborn than that. The biggest obstacle, at least for me, is not falling asleep.
That surprises people. But the state you're reaching for sits right up against the edge of sleep, and if your body is tired, it will happily take the invitation to slip all the way under. I've been learning this the slow way, through practice, as I've worked on much of my own healing while new health issues have come up for me. What I've found is that the work gets easier the more I tend to the basics. Sitting in the quiet. Prioritizing my sleep. The more rested I am, the better everything else goes. Rest isn't separate from the practice — it is part of the practice.
One thing I keep having to remind myself of is that we can go into hypnosis with our eyes open, too. Somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that closed eyes were a requirement, and they simply aren't. Lately, doing self-hypnosis with my eyes open has helped me more than anything. I'm not looking at the room in front of me — I'm seeing through my mind's eye. To make that easier, I shut off the lights and create a darker, quieter space for myself. Less to pull my attention outward, more room to travel inward. If you've been struggling to drop in, that small shift might be worth trying.
A life I had almost forgotten
Recently, in that quiet, I rediscovered a past life that has become important to me.
In it, I was homeless alongside my father in Vietnam. My mother had died from sickness, and it was just the two of us. We were barely making it — I was only a child — and I was too prideful to ask for help. So was my father. We were cut from the same cloth in that way, both of us carrying our hardship in silence because asking felt like something we couldn't afford to do. So we suffered. We went without. We held on to our dignity even when it cost us nearly everything else.
I carried that until I was finally old enough and strong enough to change it. I had to triumph — to find work I could hold, to earn enough that I could care for my father and for myself. That was the turning point of the whole life: the moment the child who wouldn't ask for help became the person others could lean on.
Sitting with it now, I understand what that life was trying to teach me. It was about learning how to receive — help, and love. Two things I had refused, again and again, because taking them in felt like weakness instead of what it actually was: connection.
Both ends of the coin
What moves me most is how that lesson threads into this life.
Receiving help isn't the focus of who I am now — but its mirror is. In this life, I'm learning to give love without expectations. To offer it freely, without keeping quiet score, without needing it returned in a particular shape. And I've come to believe you can't fully hold one of these without the other. Giving without expectation and receiving without shame are both ends of the same coin. You need both to be whole. Honestly, I think it's what the world needs, too — more of us willing to give freely and to let ourselves be helped.
To move through that past life on my own, through self-hypnosis, was profound. No one guided me into it. I found my own way there and let it show me what it needed to. That's exactly why I hope to teach others how to do the same — because there's something powerful about arriving at your own healing under your own steam.
What I was really asking
I didn't go looking for that memory by accident. I wanted to know what has been blocking me from success in this life.
What I found wasn't what I expected. The block isn't about misusing good fortune, or failing to share what I have — those aren't my wounds. The block is how difficult it still is for me to ask for help where I actually need it. That old pride didn't stay in Vietnam. I carried it here, too. I can still be the person who suffers quietly rather than saying the words I need help.
But now I can see it clearly, and seeing it is the beginning of changing it. That's the work in front of me in this life. Not to become someone new, exactly — just to finally let myself do the thing that child couldn't. To ask. To receive. To learn that being helped is not the opposite of being strong.
I will learn to ask.
If you've been curious about self-hypnosis, or you've felt a pull toward exploring a past life of your own, I'd love to hear about it — and in time, to teach you how to make that quiet space and go inward for yourself.
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