The truth is never complicated or hidden, the Universe is constantly revealing it to us through many means, not least astrology.
The only problem is in terms of our own capacity to receive this truth. We don’t see it because our minds are so distracted by other things.
I try to set up my own understanding each day by taking a long walk on a deserted Australian beach including a half hour stop for sitting meditation facing the sunrise.
I say deserted because it usually is. When I arrive in the tiny beach car park at around 6 am I am invariably the only one there.
Over the last week, there have been up to dozen others and when I return at about 7.30 the car park is full.
They are there because the conditions for surfing have been excellent.
Everything in life can teach us something and I have written about these guys before because there is a powerful analogy to be had seeing surfing as life.
I see them as souls emerging from the ether and looking out at the conditions to see if it is time for them to incarnate once more and surf the waves of a human life.
After standing at the front of the car park, assessing the waves and discussing them with their soulmates they pick up their boards and run down to the shore to vigorously paddle out towards them.
Over the last week the waves have been great but particularly so at the far end of the beach just below the rock that I sit on for my meditation.
Because of these rocks, this area is the most dangerous for surfers but these souls are not at all deterred. They literally run about a kilometre to get there as quickly as possible.
These guys have been waiting weeks for these conditions and when they see them they enthusiastically take the plunge.
While observing this scene I realised another level of application to my life surf model.
Many people think of reincarnation in terms of our deeds for good or bad meaning that we have to come back and experience what we deserve.
This is a kind of balance sheet view of karma which states that if you are cruel to someone you will have to return to a life situation where they will get their revenge on you.
This view is one that is based on the same type of religious conditioning that would send us either to heaven or hell when we die.
For a while I have been asking the question to what extent do our past life experiences condition our next life choices or are these all made willingly by our souls.
My conclusion so far is that both elements are present.
Our past life experiences may leave certain things with other beings unresolved and this would generate a need to return with those same beings under circumstances that might give us another chance to resolve them.
But far from being compelled to do that, our souls would opt willingly to do so, excited by the opportunity to learn more from new experience.
While watching these surfers charging towards the strongest and most dangerous waves, I realised that it is the challenging aspects in our charts that compel us to reincarnate in our attempts to resolve them.
The easier aspects of our charts are aspects of our lives that our souls would naturally choose and would wish our coming life to be focused on that experience.
For example if someone had Mars in Aries in the 1st house they would wish for and choose a life where they could be strong, courageous and independent.
If that Mars is opposite Saturn in the 7th, they would experience their relationships as being a barrier and a frustration, imposing limits on their own independent ambitions.
They would therefore attract partners who have unfinished business with them from previous life experiences. This would be the compulsive aspect of their new life.
They would have to take on these experiences but also are likely to project the frustration onto their partner and to blame them for it.
The consequence of such projection would be that they would be tied into future lives with the same soul because there would be more unresolved issues that would come out of the current life experience.
And so on and so on.
The natural extension of this viewpoint is that people who have charts with lots of challenging aspects have less freedom for manoeuvre. They have to experience these energetic challenges because there is a carry over from the past that demands their attention.
Even so their souls willingly and enthusiastically choose these aspects because they have the opportunity to experience them.
Those with easier aspects maybe have fewer themes carrying over from previous lives that demands their attention so they have more freedom to explore their personal placements unhindered.
Watching the surfers some guys are there every morning whatever the conditions, but many of them only turn up when there is dramatic ones.
The same would apply to souls reincarnating. Although there is no time on the other side, a soul can reappear quite shortly after their last incarnation or they can wait even several centuries.
It could be the case that if they have to come back to have a particular kind of experience with a specific member of their soul group, they might have to wait a long time for the right combination of planets.
A couple of weeks ago I was asked by a mother to look into a past life with her daughter. She said that although their relationship tenuous for most of their shared life, it had deteriorated considerably in the year since the daughter got married.
Their past life review is fascinating and can give considerable insight into their current life relationship.
I will quote from the relevant parts.
“Let’s start with your birthchart and particularly the aspect patterns in it.
You have a Bundle type chart with all of your planets concentrated inside a trine between Mercury at 13 Cancer in the 12th house and Saturn at 14 Scorpio in the 4th.
Consequently there aren’t many large aspect patterns. You have a stellium in Cancer and Leo in the 12thand 1st houses containing 6 planets and the Ascendant.
You have no oppositions and only a few relatively wide square aspects.
This in itself tells us something about your current life.
What it indicates is you have picked a life with plenty of opportunities and the freedom to explore the patterns of your choice.
It suggests that you are not carrying with you major challenging themes that have an origin in previous lifetimes.
There are only two smaller ones, both involving the 4th house of family.
The first is the square between the Sun, Uranus, Ascendant and Neptune.
The other is the wide square between Mars and Jupiter with Saturn.
Any past life review should naturally focus on these patterns to see where the energy that is there might have come from.
You have asked in particular to focus on a past life experience with your daughter so we should look at her main aspect patterns as well.
Your daughter has a quite different kind of chart, with some fairly challenging aspects.
This suggests someone who has had less choice over the themes that she has to explore in this life.
These challenging aspects indicate patterns that have carried over from a previous life which have compelled her to seek out this particular life in order to make an attempt to resolve them.
Her main pattern is a T Square involving her Aquarius Ascendant and its opposition to the Moon in the 7th house and its focus onto an apex Pluto.
Her Moon is exactly conjunct your Mars, so her Ascendant is opposite that Mars and her Pluto is exactly square to it.
There are other challenging points between you as well, not least her Venus being exactly conjunct your Saturn and her Mars being opposite your Sun, but it is her T square challenge to your Mars/Jupiter that is the focus of the problems you have between you.
We can therefore surmise that your daughter has chosen this particular relationship with you this time round in order to try and resolve these patterns that have carried over from her past.
These challenges between the two of you would also be exacerbated at the moment because transit Pluto has gone over her Ascendant and is transiting through her T square.
Whenever Pluto is part of a pattern like hers, it will only make one major aspect by transit to it in her life, but it will very powerfully trigger the challenges in her T Square and also her difficult synastry with you.
Pluto’s transit will continue to oppose her Moon and your Mars over the next couple of years.
So it’s likely that it will bring up some major issues between you.
When looking into a past life connection between you and her, we should therefore focus on this synastry.
As her apex Pluto is so important we should regress you both back to a time when it was being powerfully triggered.
By regression the Sun moves backwards through our chart at approximately one degree per year.
So the obvious thing would be to find a point in your past when your regressed Sun was going through these degrees of Scorpio. This means heading back to the 1690s.
In March 1691, your regressed Sun was at 7.03 Scorpio, exactly square to your Mars.
The regressed Mars was also in this range, opposite its current life position.
In 1692, your regressed Sun was square to your current Jupiter.
If we do the same thing to your daughter’s chart we can see that this was a very important period in her past life history too.
Her regressed Moon is exactly conjunct her current life Pluto.
When we consider that her current life chart has an exact square between the Moon and Pluto, this regression is telling us that the experiences that have built up over the years to form her current T Square, began on 21st Nov 1692.
How can we use astrology to find out what was happening in your past lives in the late 17th century?
By using horary.
A Past Life Horary is the most important chart as it will give us the major themes of that life, particularly in terms of their relevance to our current situation.
When you request a review, this is the astrological equivalent of going for past life regression hypnotism.
We are accessing the deeply subconscious part of your brain that knows what your past life experiences were.
A horary for that moment will reproduce these in astrological code. The chart will describe your past life experience.
This is that chart.
In any horary, the chart ruler signifies the person asking the question so in a past life review it will describe you in that life.
Taurus is rising, so Venus signifies you.
Venus is in Taurus so you would have been female in that life.
Venus is in the 1st house so the main themes here would have been about your independence.
Venus is dignified in Taurus so you would have been a strong woman.
How do we find your daughter in this chart?
Because you have specifically asked about a past life experience with her, she must be signified by a planet that is aspecting Venus in the horary.
This would have to be Pluto, because it is Venus’ only major aspect.
It makes sense because at 5 Aquarius, Pluto is quite close to her Ascendant.
It is also the apex planet of her T Square and a very important player in your shared synastry as well as you current shared transits.
As Venus is square to Pluto in this chart there would be some conflict between you and her in that previous life.
As Pluto is in Aquarius, she would have been a man in that life.
As Pluto is the ruler of the 7th house, that man would have been your husband.
I have a method of identifying someone’s birthdate in a past life which involves the regressed Sun forming an aspect with their 4th house ruler.
If we apply this to you, the regressed Sun would have been square to your Venus (4th ruler) in August 1671, making you aged 21 at the time of this event.
If we do the same to your daughter’s chart, your past life husband would have been born in October 1661, making him 10 years older than you.
Using dowsing, I have discovered that you were born in Portugal in the city of Porto.
For more specific information about what was happening in your past life at this time we should look at your regressed solar return for the year 1692.
This is a truly astonishing solar return.
There is an exact Sun/Pluto conjunction in the 8th house. The orb between the Sun and Pluto is a mere one minute.
This conjunction is also tightly square to a Scorpio Moon.
In 50 years of looking at solar returns I have never seen anything as tight as this and it clearly points to your past life death.
There is also a very tough T square involving Saturn conjunct the Ascendant opposite Jupiter and Uranus in the 7th house and an apex Venus/Mars conjunction in the 9th house.
This suggests that your husband might have been involved with your death and that it probably occurred while you were travelling abroad.
Let’s take another look at your chart.
We know that you died in November 1692.
At this point your regressed Sun was just half a degree past the square to your Jupiter.
This tells us that you set forth on that journey about 6 months previously.
If we regress your chart back a year further the Sun would have been square to your Mars.
So by looking at a regressed solar return for that year we can see what was happening then.
Here we have an exact opposition between a Sun/Mercury conjunction and the Moon.
The Moon is the chart ruler and in the 7th house, so I believe this is telling us that this was the year when you married your husband.
The fact that Pluto is close to the Ascendant and moving in on the Sun is telling us that this marriage would end in tragedy.
So it seems that you married an older man at the age of 19 and died at the age of 21.
Can we learn more about this event by looking at a regressed solar return for 1692 for your daughter?
There are two T Squares in this chart.
One is very similar to the one in your solar return.
It involves Saturn in the 1st, Uranus in the 7th and an apex Venus in the 9th house.
The other has the Moon in Taurus in the 5th house opposite Mars in Libra in the 11th focusing onto an apex Pluto in the 8th.
The square between the Moon and Pluto is exact to half a degree.
In your solar return the Sun is exactly conjunct Pluto in the 8th house.
In your daughter’s solar return the Sun is sextile Pluto.
The Sun is also in trine to Uranus in the 7th and sextile Saturn.
From all of the above, we can say that your husband murdered you.
The Moon in the 5th opposite Mars is telling us that his reason for killing you was that he wanted to be free to have an affair with another woman who he had met on his travels.
If we have another look at your daughter’s regressed chart for November 1692, this can tell us more.
The exact Moon/Pluto conjunction at 6 Scorpio in sextile to an 8th house Neptune shows her killing you.
The regressed Sun is in the 7th house conjunct Uranus in Sagittarius and sextile to Jupiter at the Midheaven.
Uranus is the new wife.
Jupiter is the 7th house ruler.
From this it seems clear that this other lady came from a wealthy family and getting married to her meant that your husband’s career would benefit considerably.
The Sun has just over a degree to go to reach the conjunction with Uranus, so after killing you, your husband stayed away from Portugal and married the other lady in the early months of 1694.
I believe that he would have stayed married to this lady and his crime was never discovered.
It seems that he continued to live on into his late 60s.
Discovering that your daughter was your husband in a previous life and that he murdered you in order to marry another woman would understandably be a profound shock for you.
But perhaps it does help to understand why your relationship with her in this life has been such a painful one.
My experience in looking into the astrology of past lives is that if someone takes someone else’s life they are compelled to keep coming back with that person in order to seek some kind of resolution.
However coming from such an extreme act, the type of synastry that the two people would share in future lives must by its very nature be challenging and difficult.
As I said earlier on in this report, your current chart indicates that you have a certain freedom to follow your own chosen life.
Your daughter does not have that freedom. She has to keep coming back with you whether she wishes to or not.
As a soul, she would have to wait to be reborn for the right astrological conditions that could occur in order to have another life with you, but the oppositional challenges of the kind of synastry that would be appropriate would also make it very difficult for her to get the resolution she needs.
Looking into this past life experience and the karmic carry over that you have with her, I would say that her debt to you would mean that she has to keep returning with you until resolution has been achieved.
And this resolution cannot be achieved by her.
The only way for you to free yourself from this ongoing situation is through truly forgiving her, not only for any actions that she might have taken in your current life, but even more importantly for killing you back in 1692.
This is understandably a very big ask of you as a mother and a past life wife and victim.
But complete forgiveness is essential in order for both of you to be able to move on.
What is more the opportunities for you to forgive her come few and far between.
Pluto’s coming transit to oppose your Mars/Jupiter and her Moon give you this chance over the next couple of years.
If you miss this one, you may well not get another chance to do that in this lifetime and will therefore have to come back with her with another set antagonistic chart patterns between you in your next life.”
The clients response to this report
“I want to tell you that your presentation was flawless, including precise explanations of every chart. I am more than grateful for your expertise.
You said I could ask questions, and how to approach the forgiveness factor is the critical one.
I have all along forgiven my daughter for the pain she has caused me in this life. I’m not rejecting her, she has rejected me since she got married.
I have forgiven everything because of the love I had/have for her.
She is the one who treats me badly. Why isn’t it she who should be asking forgiveness? She doesn’t see herself at fault. Why isn’t she working toward forgiveness if that is the reason she incarnated with me?”
My answer was
“In response to your questions, I feel we have to extend the concept of forgiveness.
For me forgiveness on your part would require a total acceptance of your daughter’s choices both in this life and previous ones.
From your message you suggest that she has rejected you, particularly since her marriage in 2025.
This is certainly related to her Pluto transit over her Ascendant and approaching the opposition to her Moon.
For a Cancerian mother, this is the hardest thing to do and you have chosen this chart in order to give yourself this test in this life.
So the issue here is not simply forgiving her for anything she has done, it is about allowing her reject you, to go her own way, leaving you behind.
If you truly want to avoid coming back again with more themes to work out with your daughter, this is what you have to do.
And the challenge for you to do this completely comes over the next two years.
I sincerely hope you will be able to find resolution with your daughter going forward.”
Forgiveness is a tricky business. Like many of my generation, I learnt the Lord’s Prayer by heart and had to recite it on my knees before I went to bed each night.
I always felt there was something weird about “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us”
I can remember wondering why so many were sneaking round other people’s houses.
The trouble with this kind of conditioning is that it is mindless, there is no real understanding of what the words mean, they are simply parroted.
We are told that forgiveness is a noble thing and that “virtue has its own reward” so therefore we should do it, but are we really convinced enough to actually do it?
We need to see that those who “trespass against us” do so because they are repeating a pattern that came from a previous life and unless we completely forgive them and let go of any conception that we are being unfairly treated, they will have no option but to come back and trespass against us again.
I was married to someone who killed me in a past life. If looked on our relationship from the perspective of this life experience only I would have found it difficult to forgive and let go of any feelings of resentment that I might still be carrying.
But this knowledge and the appreciation that without completely letting go, I would be forced to come back and work with her in a future life, has made it far easier to move on.
Forgiveness is a form of enlightened self interest and especially important if you are dealing with someone who murdered you in a past life.
As such any self respecting Capricorn would have to be on board.
Posted on 16 April 2026
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HAVE YOU BEEN HERE BEFORE – ASTROLOGICAL REGRESSION AND PAST LIVES
YOUR PAST AND PRESENT FAMILY PACKAGE – UNDERSTANDING THE PATTERNS
YOUR SOULMATE SYNASTRY – PAST AND PRESENT
TREAT YOURSELF – REMEDIES INDIVIDUALLY TAILORED TO YOUR BIRTHCHART AND TRANSITS
PROGRESSED LIFE SUPPORT – WHEN WILL YOUR SOULMATE BE COMING ?
WHAT’S HAPPENING MAN ? USING HORARY TO ANSWER ALL YOUR QUESTIONS
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR FATE – USING ELECTIONS TO ENSURE THE BEST POSSIBLE OUTCOME FOR EVERY VENTURE