Past lives and living in the present

This morning on The Monroe Institute's website I read an article that "renowned British psychologist Roger Woolger, Ph.D" has been researching past lives and the present life phobias attached to same: http://www.monroeinstitute.org/thehub/are-past-lives-real-could-they-be-important-for-our-health-and-well-being-today/. So it got me thinking about two of my phobias: heights and drowning.

I've been swimming since before I can remember. My mother was a beach babe, and I was born and spent the first 6 years of my life in Coronado, California. My earliest memory of swimming was in the Hotel Del pool, diving off the board and hearing someone remark, "Oh my god! That toddler is diving! How old is she? Only two?" I can remember my stepfather telling me after he took me to the deepest part of the pool to hold my breath, he was going to take me to the bottom of the pool, and when he released me, for me to just float to the top. He told me that we always float back up as long as we don't panic. So we went to the bottom of the pool, he released me, I floated to the top, and I learned my first water safety lesson.

We moved to Jackson, MS when I was six, and we had a backyard pool in which we swam constantly. Then when I was seven we moved to Montgomery, AL, and built a backyard pool two years after that. In Montgomery we all took advanced swimming and diving lessons at the YMCA, and all four of us children attended summer camp every year for the next seven years. At the Y, the only dive I never performed was one off the high dive - I was terrified of heights with no reasonable explanation. My siblings weren't afraid, my parents weren't afraid, my friends dived with impunity off the high dive. I couldn't do it.

We went to Lake Jordan and Panama City Beach every summer too, often for a week or so every time. I was water skiing by the time I was in third grade and snorkeling in the Gulf of Mexico at that age. At Auburn when I took the required swimming class for credit, the instructors chose me to be the demonstrator of the various strokes and treading water. I could tread water for hours - it's as natural to me as breathing.

But I'm terrified of the water, specifically being stranded in the ocean or the boat flipping over in the lake. I've been on several deep sea fishing expeditions and all that water skiing required that I ride in the boat, but the unreasonable fear of drowning was constant until my anxiety level amped up to where it is now as an older adult: it gives me the willies to have to even ride on a ferry. When my mother died, we had her cremated and spread her ashes in the Gulf, which meant riding about two miles out into the sea. Luckily it was a beautiful day, beautiful ceremony - we each took a handful of her ashes and threw them into the wind, then threw in red roses afterwards - and my thoughts were firmly centered on the loss of my mama; and yet there was that nagging feeling in the back of mind of somehow drowning because we were so far from shore.

When Jeff and I lived in Seattle, he wanted to take the ferry to Victoria BC, and I refused. I desperately wanted to go to Victoria, but the rough waves, foul weather and certainty of drowning kept me from going. Jeff and I spent several days in Burlington VT a few years ago, and we had to cross Lake Champlain in the ferry so that we could go home by a scenic route. I stayed in the car the entire time while Jeff walked all over the ferry and took pictures. Of course it didn't help that I just knew the sea monster was going to rear his awesome head and crush me if I fell into the Lake!

As an adult I've often wondered why I suffer from these two phobias. I've had several nightmares in which I'm pushed off a cliff and drown in the sea below. I don't know if I'm reliving a past life experience or not, but since my visions always have some basis of reality in them, I would think that's probably the most plausible explanation. For the last ten years I've suffered from crippling vertigo in addition to the fear of heights; it's now so prevalent that I can no longer ride escalators (I feel as if I'm going to tumble backward, and getting on and off of them presents its own problem with dizziness and loss of balance). 

So once again I'm earth-bound. Solidly earthbound. Circle of life, y'all