I remember coming to earth and incarnating here, and this is something I believe you can do too, because when we come to earth we often accept an intentional memory wipe so that we can start fresh here. After all, if you started with all these past life memories and all this other stuff, it would be like loading a computer up with already full capacity on the hard drive. You couldn't put anything new on it.
However, when you start out, you can also get a lot of junk programming and malware and viruses in your mind. At one point, after hearing a lot of other stories of people who remembered incarnating here and remembered past lives, and realizing I didn't remember, I decided that I wanted to remember and that I would do whatever it took soberly. I did this without any kind of drugs or alcohol. I'm sober almost 10 years now, and I don't believe in taking things like hallucinogens or something to try and get an experience like this. I remembered this completely naturally.
Why I set the intention to remember
The first intention I set was that I'm going to remember how I got here, because remembering that you had a life before you came to earth and had this body makes this life so much easier to navigate. It allows me to have peace and to remember that I chose the journey here. I wasn't a victim of my parents celebrating my dad winning a race. I was conceived by choice. My parents getting together opened a gateway that I chose to use to enter into this reality, and that's what I remembered.
The first thing I remembered of coming to earth was just having this feeling. I was walking my dog out at night listening to some Deadmau5 electronic dance music, and I just had this vision. Not so much seen with the eyes, but seen in the mind. I had this vision of being this big fiery bird, like a Phoenix, and coming from the sun, which you can think of as like heaven. It's powered by all the souls and spirits and angels hanging around in there putting out all this light. Then I remember leaving the sun, coming to earth for an adventure. I remember that general feeling of flying in space, being really excited to come to earth and pick a body.
What I found in hypnotherapy
Then I got some more clear memories when I did hypnotherapy. I saw a hypnotherapist because my mind was filled with a bunch of self-harm thoughts that had been programmed into me by my parents and their behaviors, and then I had reinforced them through the music I listened to, the movies I watched, my own behavior, and so on. At about two years sober, I asked my wife whether she has self-harm thoughts after we have an argument. She said no, never. I'm like, well, I do, and I don't want to anymore. I want to be like you. At this point I knew I could reprogram my mind, because I had reprogrammed my mind to stay sober and to not want to drink no matter what was going on. So I knew I could reprogram my mind into self-love all the time too.
I asked my wife for suggestions, and she said, why don't you go see a counselor? I had a client who was a hypnotherapist, and I initially started working with him, but he was online. I thought it would be awesome to work with a hypnotherapist in person and go to their office, so I searched for a hypnotherapist in my area in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I found Michelle Butler with Butler Hypnotherapy. I came to her and said, look, this is what I want to do. I want to reprogram my mind to love myself, and I want to really enjoy being here.
If you've never done hypnotic regression, it's basically someone talking to you and helping you relax yourself, and you remain conscious at all times. It's not like they're programming you to do stuff. It just helps you get the normal noise that goes on in your own mind out of the way so you can get in there and observe the operating system. All hypnotherapy does is, with your consent, help you do the equivalent of shutting down a bunch of the programs that are running on a computer, then go look around in the command prompt, look around the operating system, see how it's programmed, and dig around and change stuff in there according to what you want to change. It also helps some of these more transcendent experiences come up, because when your mind is very active and thinking in the beta brainwaves, doing tasks and working and interacting with the world around you, a lot of the experiences that condition our thoughts are deep, deep down.
The moment the soul and the body joined
When I went into hypnotherapy over many different sessions, I had a couple of different memories. One was the moment my soul, or the energy that does not require this body to operate, came together with the body. There are many ways to look at it; you could call it the astral body. But I remember the moment that this physical body and my soul came together. The way I've come to see it, on another level I'm a soul who identifies with many different lifetimes, and on the ultimate level who I really am is God, the creator, the ultimate source, the alpha and omega. I've taken these different levels of reality to create my own experience in the meantime, and one level is being a soul that identifies with many different lifetimes.
I remember the soul, the energy body, coming together with the physical human baby, the fetus. And I remember the love, the joy, like getting on a roller coaster where you don't know exactly how long it's going to last or when you're going to get off, and you don't know exactly what the ride is going to be like. You can look around and see the rest of the world and get an idea of what the ride might be like, but I remember this huge feeling of love and excitement as the body and the soul joined. This was not something the therapist cued specifically. The therapist cued, remember something that will help you love yourself at all times, and I remembered the moment the soul and the body joined.
Why doesn't everybody remember this?
You might ask, well, Jerry, why doesn't everybody have that memory all the time? Some people do have that memory all the time, but it's not something people often bring up. More than likely, there's somebody in your friend or family group who remembers either that kind of experience or even a past life. For example, I have an aunt, and after I told her about these experiences, she said that when she was a little girl she remembered telling her family that she had chosen them from heaven, and that her older brother said, go back, we don't want you. But she remembered choosing her family from heaven.
In another regression, I remembered choosing my family as well. This was before I talked to my aunt about it. I remembered selecting my two parents. I had more vague recollections of this before I did hypnotherapy. For example, when my daughter was a baby, before I ever tried hypnotherapy, I was reading these Wayne Dyer and inspirational books, and some of the ideas mentioned were that children choose their parents. Even though I didn't identify with that personally, I remember just playing around with the idea. I remember looking at this couple that was fighting and looked like maybe they were into drugs or drama or some kind of insanity, and I remember seeing them pushing this baby stroller around and thinking, that's a really brave baby right there to choose those two parents. Then I had this thought right after: you were a brave baby to choose your two parents too, because my two parents looked much the same from the outside as those two parents did to me.
That was one of my first thoughts that I kind of remembered, like, wait a minute, I chose my parents. They didn't ask for me in the way it seems; I'm the one who came here with no physical body, so to speak, an energy body. I found them, and they were open to me, but I chose them, and they agreed, especially my mother. People were telling her she shouldn't keep the baby, because she was still not divorced yet from her ex-husband and she got pregnant by my dad, who was an alcoholic, drug addict, gambling addict, sex addict, and some other things. Looking at those two, I had this little knowing: I picked my parents too, and I was quite a brave soul. You look at me in that stroller and see, wow, that's a brave kid right there picking these two parents. Could be a rough ride.
Choosing the rough ride on purpose
I had that sense before I went to hypnotherapy, but then in hypnotherapy I got a much clearer picture of being this floating ball of energy and looking at my two parents and thinking, these two will be perfect. I can help them. Their lives were pretty challenging and filled with drama and excitement, addiction in my father's case, and in my mother's case trying to change my father. I thought, this is just where I want to go. My mother will really need me, and my mother and I together might be able to bring my father around. These two are going to give me the kind of childhood I want to have, and these two are going to get me into adulthood ready to do what I'm here to do on earth, which is to teach, to help people, and to help people who are in need of someone like I am now. This is why I came here, and I was very aware of that before I incarnated. I picked two parents that I thought would help me get to the point I'm at today, and I remember that very clearly.
I also remember having a conversation, you could call it with God or with an angel or whatever you feel comfortable with. I was looking at these two parents and saying, yes, these two are perfect. And it was like another being looked back at me and said, really, these two? You sure? This could be a rough ride for you. I thought, this is going to be a great time. Yeah, it could be a rough ride, but I like a rough ride, so let's go, baby. This is going to be a great time with these two parents. And yeah, there was a chance it wasn't going to work out, and I wasn't afraid of that. If it doesn't work out, I'll just pick another body and go back in through that one.
How you can tap into the memory too
I've shared this with the hope that, even if you're skeptical, you can tap into the memory, or just tap into the desire for the memory to come up. If you've never had suppressed memories come up before, they're quite a wild ride. When I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, I remembered some childhood trauma that I had not consciously remembered for 20 years. I had been told never to speak of this again, and yet all the time since, I've been talking about it. All of a sudden at a meeting, somebody made a joke and, boom, the memory came up into my head after not being remembered for 20 years. Then more memories followed once I got that one out.
At the time, that was kind of scary and traumatic, but it was very healing, and it also helped me wonder, what else don't I remember? If I could not remember some big, painful childhood trauma, and clearly if you observed my behavior it was there, clearly I was acting like a traumatized child before I remembered it, then I realized there are memories inside that are waiting for you to be ready for them. I stated my readiness to get into my traumas before the memory came, and then I stated my readiness for, hey, what else can I remember? I've remembered past lives, other incarnations on earth, I've remembered things like building stars. I've got a lot of amazing memories. My kids the other day were talking about another lifetime they had on other planets.
What if it's all imagination?
The last thing I'll address: some of you are thinking, maybe this is all total fantasy and imagination. The way I see it, all of reality, or what we call reality, is created from imagination. You are God, and that's who you really are. The son of God is this body that you've created. That's what Christ was trying to tell us, that I and my father are one. Who I really am is God, and every incarnation, all of the universe, is imagination that's been manifested by the one, the father, into reality.
So this is where I'm at today, and I'm glad to share this memory of coming to earth with you, because this was a powerful, life-changing experience: to remember choosing to be here. This eliminates being a victim. After all, if you want to argue the original sin in my life, if you want to look at it that way, it was that I chose to incarnate here. I started everything. I didn't have to come to earth. I didn't have to experience anything I've experienced. I chose to. And that's the biggest difference in the world: remembering the choices you have.
If this resonates, I keep going on these out-there experiences in my Life playlist, where I share more of these life stories. I tell the rest of this same memory in the evening I chose to incarnate again, and I go into picking my parents and the day itself in remembering the day I was born. If you want to talk through your own memories, or just the desire to remember, I'd love to go deeper with you inside the Jerry Banfield Family.