What a fascinating interview! Nancy, who has been doing psychic and spiritual work since 1982, has facilitated thousands of sessions into past lives. She uses hypnosis to help her clients release limiting beliefs and psychically reads their souls’ journeys and patterns through lifetimes. She also helps clients to find out what they do between lives, why they chose this current life, what their purpose is and much more. This interview is a real eye and soul opener!
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- Nancy’s own spontaneous past life experience
- Lessons we choose to learn in each lifetime
- How knowing about our past lives transforms our limiting beliefs
- We choose our family members and women often have soul sisters
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS NANCY:
- What is the Dark Night of the Soul?
- Why do some people have an adversarial relationship with time?
- What are the personality characteristics of people called “Fast Trackers?”
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Nancy Canning – Past Lives Expert, Hypnotherapist, Author, Life Purpose Guide
We’re back again for our fourth season here and a new and exciting guest that we have. I’m joined here again by my favorite cohost. I think I always say that, but she truly is. Miss Irene Weinberg, how are you?
Steph, I am doing so great. Life is good. I have a grandchild coming.
I’m glad that they were willing to hold out for this show so we can get it recorded.
He already has a great relationship with his grandmother because he’s cooperating with me and allowing me to do this. I’m very grateful. Talking about having a new life come into the world, many of us look at a new life and say, “This is just a new baby.” What we don’t know is that often, that new baby has had past lives and comes into complete work with the people in his or her life and all. We’re talking to the perfect person here who can talk to that subject. Her name is Nancy Canning. I am excited to have Nancy on our show.
Me too. This is such a fascinating topic.
This is one of the most fascinating episodes we’re ever going to have. Nancy is a hypnotherapist and she takes clients into their past lives and the spirit world. She helps them explore their life purpose and transform their limiting beliefs. She has written two books, with another one on the way. She has a book called Your Life’s Calling.
She has another one called Your Soul’s Calling. It has ragged edges already. I’ve been referring to it so many times. She has facilitated thousands of sessions into past lives and helps clients experience who they are, what they do between lives, and why they chose this life. Can you imagine, Stephanie, you may find out why you chose this lifetime, their purpose and how they feeling.
Also, why I chose this show.
Their purpose, how they’re doing, meeting with their guides, elders, soul, family, and more. She’s in the process of writing a third book called Your Heart’s Calling. This is going to be fantastic. Say hello, Nancy, and then I have some questions that I know our audience will love to hear about.
Thank you, Irene and Stephanie. I’m thrilled to be here. I realized it’s my twenty-year anniversary from when I had my own life between lives and went into the spirit world and my whole life changed. It has been over twenty years of doing this work. Let’s get at it. There’s a lot to talk about.
Let’s start by telling people very briefly how you got into this. What is a past life, which is also called reincarnation? What is it all about so people can understand that and then we can get into some great subject matter with all of this.
It started in about 1982 to ‘83, early ‘80s. I did not believe in reincarnation. There wasn’t much around it and I flipped into a past life. This is Southern California. I was in a hot tub. We did have our clothes on, so it’s okay. I started screaming out loud because I saw this scene in my mind that was so vivid of this Japanese girl with long black hair and a bright blue top in a ditch with her ten-year-old brother. There were samurai soldiers marching by and we were hiding. Even as I talk now, I get chills. I knew that girl was me. There was no doubt, nothing. Thank goodness I was with a friend in the hot tub. I kept saying, “I’m making it up.” He said, “Keep going with it.”
I started reading what there was back in the early ’80s. I went into psychic training and started doing psychic readings of past lives. As time went on, all the doubts I’d ever had were gone because this was the only thing that made sense to me once I was willing to get through my own limiting thoughts and everything I had learned that didn’t agree with past lives.
Past lives and reincarnation simply mean we are each a divine soul. We are divinity and we come into many lifetimes. We come into this one here and we’re living out our lives according to some plans we made before we came into the body. With a new baby coming, that baby is not a blank slate. It already has a soul’s plan for this lifetime.
Your Soul’s Calling: Past lives or reincarnation simply means we are each a divine Soul. We have this divinity and we come into many lifetimes.
Whether it goes according to plan, that’s called free will and that’s a whole other subject. That’s what past lives are. We come in, we live, we leave the body in transition, we go back to the spirit world, we spend time, we learn, and we grow. When it’s time and when it’s our choosing, believe it or not, we choose our families, circumstances, and lessons, and back we come again and again.
Did my little new grandson choose his mother, his father, his two siblings, and me? Did he choose all of us?
It’s an important choice and this can be tough. For those who had difficult childhoods and they could be tuning in to this going, “There’s no way I chose my family,” we choose and it’s with help from very wise beings. We choose the family dynamics that will best suit what we have come to learn as a soul. If we’ve come to learn patience as one of the qualities we want to develop in ourselves, we will come into a family where patience is tried and it’s not something that’s easy to have.
For instance, if we want to do love. We will come in perhaps to a family where it’s difficult to feel love. If you come into a loving family, you’re not learning it. You’re experiencing it. We learn many times through rubbing up against the hard places when it’s difficult to love and we’re able to learn to love or forgive anyway.
What about if someone comes into a family that’s easy and everything seems to be going well?
I have a terrific family. In spite of that, I managed to get some limiting beliefs. There are circumstances that happened outside of the home. You can have circumstances at school where kids make fun of you. You form these limiting beliefs and you still have what you’re here to work on. It just didn’t happen to come from the dynamics of the family, so to speak. Even with a family, you could come into one, my fabulous family was not emotionally expressive.
Now I’ve learned that was perfect for me because I’ve come in to learn to open my heart. We’re loved, but it was not superficial, but it wasn’t real deep. We didn’t know each other well. We were six people living together as a family in love, but it wasn’t deep. I didn’t learn how to engage deeply with other people. Even though it’s a good family, there’s still stuff going on that’s perfect for each person’s learning.
A soul purpose for a person coming in could be that I want to learn how to love better, express myself more, and be loving and kind from my heart space with people.
As one of the lessons, that’s one that pretty much everyone learns. For some people, it’s more. For some people, they have other lessons that are also big for them, like fear. There are people who come in and they’re simply fear-based. Everything about them is fear-based. They come in to learn how to not live from fear. It’s easy in some ways. If you can stand back from your life and be an observer of it and look at the themes, what are the themes that keep showing up in relationships, in work, or whatever it might be? Those are some of the lessons you’ve come in to learn in this lifetime.
I’m fascinated by a couple of things that you talked about in your book. I’m going to let you talk about them. Talk about them as they come up, however you want to weave them together. You talk about the dark night of the soul, which so many people go through. Do they plan that? They go through a very intense period of their lives when everything seems to be going wrong. What’s that about? They always talk about people who have an adversarial relationship to time. There’s divine timing. I must say I am very challenged with time, and then people who seem to have too much going on in their lives. You call them fast trackers.
Let me talk about dark night first because it’s a subject I know well. There are two types of dark night of the soul. Dark night of the soul means that you’re going through a very dark time. Everyone goes through it short-term, like six months a year, with the loss. A dark night always starts with a loss. It could be a death, the loss of a job, the loss of income or employment. Something happens and you go through a grieving period and life gets dull. Meaning you’re dulled down. Everyone goes through that from time to time in their lives.
There is another type of dark night of the soul, which is the mystical one, which is more like 3 to 5 years typically. What sets it apart is that you lose almost everything within a very short amount of time. Within a year, you could have deaths, lost your job, lost the relationship or perhaps your health, lost your money, or moved. What I found was that we tend to keep one element and everything else falls away.
For myself, I kept my health. I never got sick, but I got laid off from my job, got divorced, sold everything I owned, left my cats behind, all of my friends and family, and moved from California to the East Coast. Everything was gone. That is so that you will dig deep inside of yourself and let go of the old way of being. It’s a mystical spiritual process. Did we choose it? I would say we did. My spiritual growth is so important to me, so this is one means of facilitating spiritual growth.
I don’t know that we specifically choose each of the circumstances we go through in life. I want to make that clear. Someone has been through traumas and there has been rape, murder, or terrible things like atrocities. I don’t know that we sign up and say, “Yes, I want that.” Instead, what we sign up for is we want to learn lessons, and the greater beings out there provide circumstances. The order within the universe provides circumstances for us to learn and grow. Albeit, it’s very difficult, it’s still what we are here to do. How do I grow through these challenges? Not, “Why did the challenges happen?” It’s, “Who can I become as a result of this?”
Some people with free will will say, “I choose to stay in the swamp of misery and despair.” Other people with free will will say, “Who can help me? How can I move through this? What’s on the other side of that?” Would you agree with that?
Absolutely. Free will is the thing that messes us up because we can choose to stay in the swamp. We can choose to stay unconscious. There’s no force from spirit. No being comes in and jabs us and says, “You have to wake up.” We’re given little jabs all the time to wake up, be more loving, and look at what’s going on within us. We can choose to ignore that all we want.
I have a quick question. I know we have all these past lives and are continually evolving, but what are we evolving to? What is this final goal that we’re all clearly trying to reach on different levels, coming back all the time? How long does it take to get there? Is there a normal amount of past lives that everybody goes through? What are those stages? What are we trying to reach?
What I know of what we’re trying to reach, this is based on twenty years of taking people into the spirit world and into the afterlife, where you get to see and get to be aware of what these much higher levels of love and consciousness are. We’re evolving to be more like that way of being, which is this absolute beingness of love that we don’t even understand in this realm or in this consciousness.
We have so much going on with these bodies of ours and our emotions that the level of love we’re striving for takes a long time to get there. What happens is we don’t come back anymore. There are beings on the other side in the spirit world who no longer incarnate. They’re done. They’re just helping. Who knows? They could go off into other universes. I don’t know. I do know that what we’re doing while we’re on Earth, we choose Earth as a place to come because it is so dense and difficult. This is not an easy place to be, especially these days. We’re challenged. How do we stay in love? How do we grow? How do we do our own inner work?
We've got so much going on with our bodies and emotions that it takes a long time to get to the level of love we're striving for. Click To Tweet
Is it safe to say when we look at people like Mother Teresa, she’s like an involved soul because she’s so loving to everybody, whereas we’re not and we try to be?
I think some of the evolved souls are people you wouldn’t expect. I’ve had a lot of people who say, “This is my last life,” I’m thinking, “I don’t think so. Sorry.” The one who had lost 28 jobs in his lifetime. He kept losing jobs and he didn’t know why. He knew he was highly evolved. He knew he was going to be gone from this Earth soon. He was moving on as a soul. He knew it.
It turns out the reason he lost all those jobs was he was going around saying goodbye to everyone. In his last life, he had been a street sweeper in New York City. It’s from these people that I go, “Everything we think about how an evolved soul should show up may not be right.” It may not be that they have all the money and all of this. It’s who they are. It’s a way of being and consciousness that creates a higher level.
If people come to you, can you figure out where we are on this journey?
Once we go into the spirit world, I can’t tell personally. Here was my own naivete. I was thinking, “I’ve been doing this work for 30 years. I’m pretty evolved.” This is my thinking. I went right into the spirit world and I met my guide. I immediately took myself back many notches because I went, “That’s evolved.” Meeting the elders is out of my realm of being at this point. It was like there was no judgment. I’m a little more than halfway, whatever that means. I’m not a beginner, but I’m not the most advanced person on Earth by any means.
Nobody ever knows how many lives because we ask that here, but once we get into the spirit world as a soul, we don’t care. I’ve never had anyone ask because we don’t care. We understand that in spirit, it’s not how many lives. It’s who are we as being. That’s what it always comes back to. However long that takes, that’s how long it takes.
It's not how many lives we have had; it's who we are. That's what it always comes back to: who are we being? Click To Tweet
If someone is a fast tracker, is it that they’re loading all these problems in their lives now because they’re going to cheat and bounce ahead of other people or something?
It’s their nature. We all have a personality on a body level, but we also have a personality on a soul level. We have a nature to us. Fast trackers, by nature, want to do a lot. They think they can. I talk about it a lot in the book. Many of these people, I don’t know how they get up in the morning. My heart goes out to them because they have taken on many obstacles, lessons, and setbacks so they can do a lot in one lifetime.
I wrote about it in the book because it’s what struck me the most. Many of them said the same thing. When they were in the spirit world, they were warned against taking on so much and yet they insisted. They thought they could do it because they were arrogant. There was a spiritual arrogance that they admitted to in the spirit world saying, “I thought I could do anything.”
Is that one of their lessons?
I would think so. You get in here and realize that you can’t do everything on Earth. That’s not the way it’s set up or they do their best. It did help them to know that that’s who they are and what they’re doing, so they no longer felt victimized by life.
I would imagine someone going through a great deal, to work with someone like you is a tremendous help because it reframes the suffering they’re going through.
A couple of years back, I had a young woman in her 30s. Her beloved had died a year and a half before. She was so angry at the spirit. She was so angry at the divine for doing this to her. It took her a while of being angry at the elders. They finally got through to her. She calmed down and then they helped her to remember how she chose it. They had warned her. They said, “You’ll only have them for a year and a half.” As the soul, she had said, “I don’t care. That’s good enough for me.” Once she remembered, everything inside of her changed, she goes, “Never mind.”
She was saying, “I was stupid. I shouldn’t have said that.”
It does help to know that there is a greater plan with divine timing. There’s divine timing, but then what gets in the way of people having trouble with time, it’s not so much trouble with divine timing, it’s their own beliefs about time. You could simply have a subconscious belief that says there’s not enough time. If you have that thinking in your subconscious brain that you learned in childhood by looking at family or whatever, that’s what you play out. It isn’t divine timing so much. It’s our own thinking about time. I’ve had people, just by affirmations, have changed their whole relationship over time. It’s very fun to play with time.
Your Soul’s Calling: It really isn’t divine timing so much as our own thinking about time.
It’s so fascinating. For instance, I know people who are uber punctual that they’re an hour early for something or a half an hour early for something. I know people who are usually 10 minutes or 15 minutes late because they’re doing this and they’re doing that. They’re less stressed about time or they’re very stressed about it because the uber-punctual ones are giving them a hard time because they seem to be running late. What are those two styles all about?
That’s simply their subconscious belief systems. That’s the first book I wrote that you talked about your life’s calling. Getting unstuck and fulfilling your life lessons. It is all about how when we’re very young, we’re programmed. We’re figuring out life. We’re sponges. People who need to be an hour early, their thinking is, “This is how I’m safe or this is how I’m prepared.” It comes from something that’s happened in childhood where either their family was like that, so they’re copying or they were late one time for something and got terribly in trouble, got bad circumstances, whatever happened because of being late. They made the decision not to ever be late.
Things happen early on that we make these choices, subconscious programs that happened. That’s what determines our relationship to time. Time is simply time. It’s the same for every single person. It’s our own relationship to it that determines it. Someone who has to be earlier or has to be late can learn to be the other way. It’s just a matter of changing those subconscious. It’s not the conscious mind thinking because they could want to be on time, and then the pattern happens, and they fall into the old way of being ten minutes late. They can change it by changing their thinking.
Time is simply time. It's the same for every single person. It's our own relationship to it that determines it. Click To Tweet
There are actual cultures that seem to run late all the time.
I know people like that.
An hour and a half late for dinner is on time. That’s a cultural thing. A friend of mine for Christmas a couple of years ago had invited brand new neighbors from across the street to come and join us. They showed up an hour and a half late and offered no apologies.
I would be going crazy if that happened.
We didn’t wait. We went on and ate. We’d already put all the food away because we figured they were not coming. For them, it was a cultural thing and it was perfectly normal. It’s all in our thinking. It can be our own family. It can be our own personal thinking, our family thinking, or our cultural thinking. It all can be changed and that may change over time. I used to always have to be early and my husband was late, and being together for twelve years, we changed places. I started seeing his way of doing it and he started seeing my way of doing it. I then started being a little late and he started being a little early.
Stephanie, do you want to ask a question about this?
Irene and I found out that we had a past life run in together and now we’re here again. My question is, like you said, you choose your parents, your mom, and stuff. Do you always have those same people as your mom or your sisters? Do their personalities stay the same? My mom right now, was she my mom in this past life or was it somebody else? Do you always stay close to these people?
We weave back and forth. We don’t always stay with the same family dynamic each time. My family has all done this. Many years ago, when we got together at Christmas, we talked about who had killed who in past lives. My nephew was at Stanford getting his degree in Physics. He’s very left-brained. He sat there and I started laughing at him. I said, “Do you wonder how you got into this family?” We will come back. To answer that, if we have unfinished business with someone, which we often do, we will come back with them. Perhaps not the next life. It could be many lives. With my former husband, it had been like 1,500 years, from what we could tell. We had something to clean up. We cleaned it up and then we were done.
Supposedly, if Stephanie and I had unfinished business from a past life that brought us into this life, we could continue on in other lives together.
It doesn’t have to be bad things. I have soul girls, especially women. We women have soul sisters that we were very close to. They are definitely our sisters with different families. We will do lifetime after lifetime together in different ways. There’s this deep soul love that we come in as a support for one another. It doesn’t have to be adversarial at all. We’ll come in for one another and be there as a reminder that we’re not alone. We’re supported and we’re loved by these friends so that we can go through more difficult times perhaps with family. It may be that the family is the more difficult one and the friends are more of the support.
Your Soul’s Calling: We women have soul sisters. There’s just this deep soul love that we come in as a support for one another. It doesn’t have to be adversarial at all.
I consider a lot of my friends as my family. It seems that we’ve been through a lot together. Maybe not just this lifetime.
Many lifetimes, and you can feel it. It’s like you’re so comfortable with one another. You know that you know them. That’s one way of knowing you’ve been with someone before. There’s a comfort and a knowing. Sometimes people know each other immediately. My parents recognized each other immediately. They were their own true love. They got married on their 10th date during the war and were together for 68 years. It was not their first time together. They knew and it was a good relationship for them. Those are two souls who have done this before.
They may know otherwise that they will not be coming in together. They may have some work to do individually or whatever.
I worked with a man once whose soulmate, his beloved, is in spirit and didn’t come into this lifetime. I didn’t know it at the time, but my client was suicidal because he was missing his soulmate and could feel him. His soulmate is also a male. This guy usually comes in as a female. This lifetime, he’s male in this life. He doesn’t get to have his soulmate with him this lifetime because, in all these lifetimes, he keeps letting his soulmate, who was always a male in the life, do all the work.
He would just skate by. He wasn’t doing his own work as a female. He was being complacent. He had to come into this lifetime to do the work and catch up because their consciousness was getting too far apart. There may be times when the one that we love most is absolutely not coming into our lifetime with us because we have things to learn. We would acquiesce and get into the old pattern of letting them make all the decisions or whatever it might be.
There may be times when the one that we love most is absolutely not coming into our lifetime with us because we have things to learn. Click To Tweet
I see a lot of relationships like that. Once you gave him that information, was he better at handling his loneliness?
Yes. He was told in no uncertain terms, “Do not commit suicide because that won’t get you what you want. Live life to the fullest. Go and learn your lessons.” It was his soulmate beloved who was talking to him saying, “You have to do the work. You have to do it. I want to be with you again. You have to do the work.”
I have one more question and then we have to end, which is so sad. What happens when someone commits suicide? You come in to achieve certain things and to learn certain lessons and now you’ve cut it short on your own. What happens to the soul in that case?
There’s a couple I’ve worked with and I’ll make it quick, but there’s only love on the other side. I’m not advocating suicide, but I also know there’s only love. As was written also in Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, someone committed suicide and got to the other side and the guide is looking at a watch, going, “What are you doing back? It’s not time yet.” You get healed and loved and then you’re back again. You realize as soon as you’re out of the body, it’s like, “I had other choices. I just didn’t see them.” You’re loved, but there are consequences. Meaning you don’t get off scot-free. You have to come back and learn. Whatever was too much for you, you’re going to come back and try it again.
It lends a lot of credence to healing and taking care of yourself while you’re here. Who wants to come back and learn these same lessons?
It would be more difficult, I would think, because if you’ve taken your own life, you are going to come back because of the ramifications of how that affects all of your loved ones. You never think about that. The person who’s doing suicide can’t think of the ramifications. On the other side, you get to see the pain that was caused. It’s very likely that in another lifetime you’ll then be the recipient of that someone leaving you suddenly.
It’s a balance. It’s not punishment. We’re learning what it is and how our actions affect others. We learn both sides of it. I often have that with people who’ve come and they’ve had loved ones commit suicide and they want to know. They do a past life and they go back into a past life in which they committed suicide.
Your Soul’s Calling: Answering the Question “Why Am I Here?” (Your Calling) by Nancy Canning
That puts a whole different angle on that dangle. I don’t want to end, but I think we need to. Let me end this by asking you, Nancy, with all that you’ve learned, all the past life work that you’ve done, all the many stories you’ve had, and going through your own life and lessons, what is your tip for finding joy in this lifetime?
Funny you should ask that, but it’s this next book that I’m being driven to write, Your Heart’s Calling, because it’s my true belief and it’s also my lesson to learn this lifetime. It’s about going into your heart. Learn how you go into your heart and listen to what your heart wants. Within your heart is the essence of joy. Your heart will never lead you wrong. Your head will lead you wrong. It will lead you away from joy, but your heart, when you learn. Many times a day, you go in there and you find that gratitude and that joy, and you find what is it that’s making your heart sing.
Where are your books currently and when is this book coming out?
When this book is coming out is the big question. The other two, Your Life’s Calling and Your Soul’s Calling are on Amazon. You can order them through bookstores. Bookstores can get them. Your Heart’s Calling, it’s so interesting. I made the decision to only do it when I was feeling like loving doing it and I’ve been hitting a rough spot with it. I’m going through some learning myself. All I have to do is get back in that groove but this dry spell I’m in is part of the book.
It’s part of your divine timing.
It’s part of the divine timing. It’s part of what I am learning. Other people go through this too. How can I help them if I’m not going through it and going, “This is how I come out of this. These are some ways of how I find my heart when I’m feeling dry.” I’m living it.
We’ll have to look forward to that, Nancy. We’re excited to see that. You’ll have to let us know so we can talk to you when that new book comes out too. Unfortunately, we have to wrap up our episode again. I’m always curious to talk more about past lives and I know Irene too. Irene, I always like to let you close. What do you like to say?
I always like to say, and it’s especially appropriate with Nancy, to be continued.
Guest’s Links:
- Visit Nancy Canning’s Website
- Nancy Canning’s Books Your Life’s Calling and Your Soul’s Calling
- Journey of Souls referenced in this episode
