I remember being born. I also remember being conceived, and I'm going to tell you exactly how that happened and how you can have the same experience, if you would like. So the first step is to open your mind. If you think you already know, if you've got your idea of reality down to this little tiny "this is absolutely how things are, nothing besides this is true," and you think it's not possible that you could remember being born, that you've lost those memories and they're gone forever — if you think like that, then you're going to prove yourself right.
But if you start to open your mind, which is what I did, things change. The first step for me was hearing other people tell stories about remembering they were born, hearing other people tell stories of remembering before they were born, and remembering past lives. That's how I started to open my mind.
How I started to open my mind
At first I just thought, well, that's interesting. I read the book Many Lives, Many Masters. I heard Wayne Dyer talking about past life regression. I came across the idea of past life regression and remembering past lives a bunch of times. At first, when I heard it, I thought, this is just a cool idea, it's probably not true, but it's interesting. And the more I started listening to it, the more I thought, all right, this actually does sound pretty reasonable. Especially Brian, who wrote Many Lives, Many Masters — he encountered a patient in psychotherapy and he didn't believe in this stuff at all. He got frustrated, so he just told her to go back to whenever the problem started, and she went back to a past life, and it healed her present life.
So the more I started to read books like that, the more I also started to look around at other babies. When my wife had our daughter, I got this feeling that our daughter had chosen us, that she was aware of us before she was even with us, and that she chose us. The whole experience of having a baby — not through my body, but watching my wife be pregnant and having the baby — left me with this feeling that my daughter chose us. And with my son, the moment we first talked about him and the month he would be born, and we were specific, it was like my wife got pregnant immediately after that, even though I'd been trying for over a year before that. It was like we could feel him in the room with us, and he chose at that moment to be with us.
So the more I had experiences like that, the more I opened my mind to the possibility of remembering my own similar experiences. Now, this happened in a way that I didn't directly plan for. I just kept opening my mind. I kept reading books. I kept staying out of the garbage and the news and the drama. I stayed out of all these distractions enough to focus my mind on going within, on learning and expanding my idea of what's possible.
The hypnotherapy session that changed everything
From that place, I had a very clear problem I was facing. In 2019, I was still plagued with self-harm thoughts, which was five years after I got sober, and I was desperate for a solution that was all natural, that involved going within, that did not involve just taking medication and drugging yourself into oblivion — but to really fix the programming at a core level. So I went to see a hypnotherapist.
What a hypnotherapist does is help you get into a really relaxed state. In my experience, life is trying to hypnotize us all the time. Going into a video game is a state of being hypnotized. Sitting there in front of the TV and watching something is a state of being hypnotized. But what's so special about hypnotherapy is that, instead of hypnotizing you and sticking all these beliefs discreetly in your brain through video games and TV, it can help you go within and work on yourself intentionally — to see what's going on in your subconscious and your unconscious programming, and to get past the normal distractions that your mind is filled with.
So I went to a hypnotherapist in 2018, 2019 with a specific problem. I said, look, I want to reprogram these self-harm thoughts my mind is having, because I know my wife does not have these thoughts, and therefore it's possible for me to work the same way. I want to go into my brain and reprogram it so I don't think that way. When my wife gets upset, she doesn't go to self-harm thoughts — that's not in her programming. She goes to asking for help, getting some space, feeling her feelings, which was all foreign to me at the time. And I wanted to fix this.
We would do a talk session where she would talk like a regular therapist would. What are your goals? My goal: I want to eliminate self-harm thoughts. Where do you think these originate? I saw my parents live this way. My mom would run out the door saying "you'll never see me again" and slamming the door. My dad had made a bunch of attempts on his life earlier. That's what I grew up with. So it's like, okay, well, I want to reprogram that. And I had no idea I was about to remember what I'm about to tell you.
The moment my soul bonded with the body
After having some of these talk sessions, in one of the sessions — and this is really simple — she'd have me lay down in a chair. "Now, as I count back from 10 to 1, you're going to get relaxed deeper and deeper. 10, 9, deeper and deeper. 8, you're twice as relaxed. 7, you're twice as relaxed." And by the time she got to 1, it's like you're within. You're very aware that you could just snap out of it at any time. You could get up from the chair, but you don't want to, because you want to go inside and see what's happening in there.
And then my hypnotherapist cued me, and what ended up happening was I had a memory of the moment my soul, so to speak, bonded with the body in my mother's womb. I remembered having this energy body, and I remember the joy — the joy of this baby body. The best analogy I can make is: picture you don't have a car, and you go to the car dealership, and you're looking at all these different cars, and you find one that you love. Now you can drive. You can go anywhere. The world is open to you. You were in this totally different world where you didn't have a car, so you were stuck. But now you can get in the car and drive, and you're free, and you can go all over. That's how getting into one of these bodies is.
When you're not in one of these bodies, and you're just energy, you can still interact with the world a little bit. You can make a rainbow for somebody. You can send signs for somebody. You can mess with devices, send blank texts. There are little things you can do, but you don't have a real voice. And when you get into one of these bodies and you incarnate, now you have a real voice. Now you have hands and arms, and you can do stuff, and you can fully participate in the reality.
And I've never been able to sustain self-harm thoughts again since I remembered the moment that my soul and the body came together. The body, you could look at almost like a pet — like a horse. You're getting on the back of the horse and riding. The body has a life of its own, but I am not the body. I'm actually getting on the body and riding it. And when the body dies, I will continue on. And the body, through my being here with it, gets this immortality, because it's not just a body anymore — it's part of something bigger.
So I remembered all that, and I felt this massive love and joy. Like, wow, look at this body, it's all mine, I'm so excited for this adventure we're going to have, I'm ready to learn. That feeling of love and joy at being in my body reprogrammed and cleared out all that junk garbage programming that I learned from my parents especially, but from the bigger culture too. It cleared that junk programming out and got me back to being like a baby. A lot of babies, you can just see they're so excited — let's see what this thing can do, let's move it around, let's get it stronger. And I got that back. That is how the self-harm thoughts have been permanently eliminated since then. It's been amazing.
Choosing my parents
From there, I had several more memories. Before I had this clear of a memory, I had this kind of sense that our daughter had chosen us. I remember walking around one day with my wife and seeing these two parents who looked like a mess, pushing a baby around in a stroller. I looked at the baby and I thought, that's a brave soul for picking those two parents. And then this thought came to me, maybe from my father, who's passed on: you were a pretty brave soul yourself to pick the two parents you picked.
And then this memory came to me of being with a team of spiritual guardians, advisors — some of you would use the word God — looking at my mother and father. There was going to be a vortex, a window, an embryo that was going to open up and could turn into a baby. And this could be your way into this reality. Do you want this one? Or would you like a different one? I remember looking at it the way you might look at a roller coaster. The cart's coming in, it's sitting there, there are open seats, and you've got a spot. But you could get out of line anytime you wanted to. You could go ride another roller coaster.
And it's like: I want this one. This looks awesome. This is going to be a great ride. I'm going to be able to help these two parents so much. Me coming into this world is going to do a lot of good for them. They'll put me in a position to come here and help all the other people on this planet. And I remember that.
This is the same story I tell from the soul's side in the evening I chose to incarnate again and on the morning of remembering the day I was born — the claustrophobia of being born and the shock and joy of that first breath.
You are the cause, not the effect
Once you remember that you chose to come into this body, this whole reality, the trick — the devil — is in trying to get you to forget that you are the cause. You are the cause. There's not a God that's a cause outside of you. It's not the system. You are the cause. You're here because you chose to be here. You're not a victim of your parents bringing you into this reality. You chose to come in with the specific parents you had. You chose them. And I've remembered that, so you can't take that away from me. I know, I remember where I came in.
Now you might wonder, well, why doesn't everybody remember this? Because a lot of us forget this in childhood. We're not brought up to remember it, and we go through an amnesia process that makes the game more difficult. Picture it this way: if every single person came in remembering they're an immortal soul, remembering they had chosen this body, we'd live in a completely different world. It would shatter the entire nature of the reality of this world we live in. So I hope that happens more and more.
My kids have said all kinds of stuff. They talk about lives on other planets that they lived. Lots of times kids up until they start going to school do have all these memories. And then once they get into this programming culture, it overwrites these memories with junk, but they're still under there. The purpose of overwriting these memories, in my belief, is that when you don't remember you're the cause, you think you're the effect. You think you're a bot. You think you have to just do what you're told to do and make other people happy. You are then ready to be dominated, ready to just be a subject and to pour your energy out and be sucked dry like a battery in the matrix. I get into a lot of these conversations with the people closest to me in the Jerry Banfield Family.
But once you remember, this information is the key to being unplugged: I'm here because I chose to be here. And because I'm here because I chose to be here, I also am free to exit anytime I want to. I can leave anytime I want to. If I got tired of being in this body, I could leave it. Now, it might look like the body evaporates, like Obi-Wan in Star Wars, or it might look like the body has a heart attack or something. But the first thing that would happen would be: I've had enough of this reality. Often you see people who get sick before they die — they had enough of this reality first. The vital life energy that you come in with as a baby was gone first, then they got sick and died. To me, that's a choice to exit this reality, however you are taking it.
So when you remember all the stuff you've done from being a baby to get to where you're at now, it changes things. I tell my kids: be careful crossing the street, because you don't want to go back to being a baby, do you? And they're like, no, I do not want to be a baby again. You've done so much work just to be able to learn to walk, learn to talk, to have a voice in life. This life becomes special and precious because you realize how much work you've put in just to get to where you're at today. But it wasn't work — it was play. You're playing around. I played around. I had so much fun growing my body, making it bigger, laughing and having joy.
I've had all these memories completely sober
I had another memory when I was in a breathwork class. Now, I've had all of these memories absolutely sober. I have never taken plant medicine. I've never taken acid, never taken LSD. I smoked weed a few times, and I think the last time, in college around 2003 to 2005, it might've had something in it, because I couldn't remember who I was for a while afterwards until I woke up the next day and got really sick. But that didn't give me any good experiences. It was just purely dark — blackness and forgetting who I was and being this empty voice of thoughts before I fell asleep.
So I've had all these experiences completely sober. In fact, drugs and alcohol and plant medicines, to me, are a handicap, crutches. You can have all these experiences sober. You can remember being born.
When I started to have these memories, I started talking about them. And my aunt told me, "Yeah, when I was four years old, I remember telling everybody at the dinner table that I was up in heaven and I picked them for my family." And then her older brother, one of my uncles, said at the time, "Well, we don't need you, you can go back." My aunt remembers, when she was a kid, being in heaven and picking her family out. And she still has that memory today, even though she was born like 60 years ago. So there are a lot of people walking around who have these memories but who often don't share them, because they're afraid of being judged and thought crazy by people who are, as I see it, not really alive anymore — not plugged into the same thing they are.
The breathwork memory of being born
I had another memory of being born when I was doing a breathwork session — the kind where you take a whole lot of short, deep, fast breaths, in, out, in, out. Now I normally breathe extremely slowly. I'll breathe in for twice that long and out for twice that long, because the animals that tend to have the longest lifespan on this planet tend to breathe the slowest, and the ones that tend to have the shortest lifespans tend to breathe the fastest. Your breathing rate is kind of like setting a cycling rate on your whole body. In my experience, if you want to live longer, one of the easiest things to do is slow down your breathing, which will slow down your thinking, which will give you all the peace you're looking for and perspective on life.
So I was doing this breathwork session where we're breathing really fast — like 15 minutes of just so much fast breathing. It got my brain into this altered state. You get so much oxygen into the brain (although it's carbon dioxide that really triggers you to feel the need to breathe). Taking a whole bunch of breaths in and out for 15 minutes straight, with a little break, and then doing that three or four times in a row — during one of the sessions you get to a point where you don't even need to breathe. After 15 minutes of fast breaths, you can lay there for several minutes without even needing to breathe. You just settle into this stillness and this altered reality.
And on one of those sessions, I had this very vivid memory of my huge mother, me being this baby, and being born. It was a massive emotional experience — God, the emotions of both coming out into the world and feeling really excited and full of love. I'm finally out on my own. You think being 18 years old is a big deal? Being born is like 10 times that. You've literally been inside someone. You have zero autonomy. You get dragged along everywhere. The best you can do is try to influence them with your thoughts. You can dip out of the body pretty easily if you need to. But then you go from being born, which is both amazing and shocking and traumatic sometimes, at the same time. I remember that massive emotion: yes, I'm out, I'm free, we got this far, things are going great, I love my mother so much.
But at the same time, I also really missed my mother, because at the time of this breathwork session, my mom lived in Mississippi. I didn't even see her that much. I hadn't seen her in years. And I felt how close I was to my mother as a baby. I remembered being in the womb for nine months, feeling inseparable from my mother, feeling all of my mother's love. And then I also remembered and felt how far from that I was now. So I'm crying in this breathwork session: mom, I love you so much, mama. I remember this feeling of being this little baby on this big, huge person, having a presence that was not so locked in. The way we are now as adults, you're kind of locked in. My presence was not so locked in. I had this much bigger feeling of myself. It was an amazing memory.
Why this is one of the most important stories in my life
I've shared all this with you because this is one of the most important stories in my life. These are hugely transformative experiences, and they make it hard to be afraid of dying. Now, I love this body, and I take care of this body, and it's in the best health it's ever been in — it's like aging backwards, it's amazing. At the same time, I'm very aware that the difference between here and the other side is as thin as a sheet of paper. You can go back and forth. Just like you can die, you can come back and be born again too. I have, in my belief, infinite lives and potential. At the most fundamental level, I believe I'm God — and so are you.
A lot of people get tricked into doing things because of all these fears. When you get into these kinds of memories, it just smashes the whole matrix of all those fears. So what if I run out of money? I can sleep outside. So what if I die? I'll just get another body. All of a sudden you can't just be herded like a sheep around everywhere because of being afraid. It's like: I chose to be here. I'm here because I want to be here. And I'm going to be here as long as I want to be here, and as soon as I want to leave, it will be easy to leave. Therefore, let's have all the fun we can here. Let's really enjoy the experience. This is close to what I came to believe reading Jane Roberts, which I talk through in my discussion of Seth Speaks.
I think of myself a lot of times as baby Jerry. Is baby Jerry hungry? Does baby Jerry need to eat? Is baby Jerry thirsty? Does baby Jerry need to sleep? I put baby Jerry to bed like he's a baby. It's 10 o'clock, you need to get your full night of sleep so you're ready to grow tomorrow. Like I tell my kids: you need more sleep because you have so much growing to do. A lot of adults don't let themselves grow anymore. I have a lot of mental growing to do each day, and I need my sleep to process all that.
So this is how I remembered being born, and this is how you can do it too. If you enjoyed this, you'll love a lot of the other stories I share — how I got sober, how I met my wife, my whole life story — over in my Life playlist.