I believe I chose my parents before I was born, and I remember doing it. That is my answer, and I have been working it out in public for about two years. I arrived at 11:55 p.m. on June 15, 1984, to a mother who was a veterinarian and a father who was an alcoholic, a drug addict, a compulsive gambler and a Vietnam veteran who worked at a racetrack. Before I had a body, I looked at the two of them and decided they would do.
Here is where I land now. We come here by choice, and that choice changes how I hear everything else, including the hard parts of my childhood. It is why I don't see myself as a victim of my parents. I can't prove any of it. What I can do is tell you how the memories came to me, what they changed in my life, and how my view shifted as I kept writing about them. The six posts are shown in full below.
The earliest of them is I Remember Choosing to Incarnate Here, and You Can Too, from April 2024. I was nearly ten years sober by then, and I had decided I wanted to remember how I got here, without drugs or alcohol. The first picture was of myself as a fiery bird leaving the sun. Later, in hypnotherapy, I remembered the moment my soul came together with my body. I had gone to that hypnotherapist to get rid of self-harm thoughts, and I have not been able to sustain them since that memory.
The next, Remembering Being Born and Choosing My Parents, from August 2024, is the longest and goes deepest. It covers a breathwork session where I remembered being born, and the picture of choosing my parents like picking a roller coaster car with open seats. The idea I kept coming back to there is that you are the cause, not the effect. If I chose this, I cannot also believe I was simply done to.
In October 2024 I wrote two posts that retell the same beginning as a picture. Flying Back to Earth imagines the evening of June 15, 1983, when I decided to leave the sun and come back, and I say outright that I picture it that way. Remembering the Day I Was Born follows the day itself, from the long labor to the doctor who wanted to go home for dinner and the shock of the first breath. Read them as the vivid parts of the story rather than as proof.
The newest pieces, from June 2026, are where my view has settled. No One Is Innocent uses Call of Duty Warzone to explain it. If you drop into a player-versus-player game, you knew what you were signing up for, and that is how I see coming here. I am not saying anyone deserves what happened to them as a kid. I am saying that remembering you chose to be here is what lets you reclaim your power, and I have watched people in Alcoholics Anonymous resolve some of the worst childhoods that way.
The most candid of the six is I Picked My Parents Before I Was Born, an excerpt from my memoir published in June 2026. It describes my father's drinking, drug use, gambling and repeated trips out of his parents' house, and a presence that asked whether I had really looked at the probabilities. I said yes, I knew it could go wrong, and I still wanted to go. It also names the abuse. An adult crossed a boundary with me when I was little, and my father spanked me with a belt and grounded me for long stretches. Now I see that I was loved all the time, and I also refuse to pretend the hard parts didn't happen.
Taken together, the belief has moved from the cosmic toward the grounded. In 2024 I wrote about being a phoenix and, at the deepest level, about being God, and I said that my parents were the ones I had chosen. In 2026 the emphasis is on the living details. The core idea has not changed. If you chose to be here, you are not a victim, and that is the part I keep returning to.
For the soul and the reality behind all of this, read Soul, Consciousness and Reality. For how I have worked through my father, see forgiving and setting boundaries with my parents.
If you want to think through your own beginnings with me, you can order a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- I Picked My Parents Before I Was Born (June 21, 2026)
- No One Is Innocent: Why I Believe We Chose to Be Here (June 17, 2026)
- Flying Back to Earth: The Evening I Chose to Incarnate Again (October 24, 2024)
- Did We Choose Our Parents Before Birth? My Honest Answer (October 24, 2024)
- Remembering Being Born and Choosing My Parents (August 8, 2024)
- I Remember Choosing to Incarnate Here, and You Can Too (April 16, 2024)
I Picked My Parents Before I Was Born
Originally published June 21, 2026.
This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
I actually remember picking my parents. I know how that sounds, and I can already hear you saying, hold on, what the fuck are you talking about? I’m serious. I remember it. This wasn’t something I carried consciously my whole life—it came back to me later—but I’m starting the book here because it puts everything else in context. Before having this human body, I remember existing as some kind of energy body, looking down and watching my parents in a cheap hotel room. I remember thinking, yeah, these two are going to do just fine. They were opening a gateway into this reality, and it felt like the right moment for me to enter. There were plenty of other options—different parents all over the world, different life scenarios I could have chosen—but this one stood out.
These were two parents in Michigan, with my father being an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sex addict, and a compulsive gambler. He was a Vietnam veteran who worked at a racetrack, a man with an ex-wife and two children he couldn’t show up for. He kept getting kicked out of his parents’ house, spent some days homeless, and was banned from a VA psych ward. I remember looking at him and thinking, I can help this guy. I was trying to save motherfuckers before I was even born. I remember thinking, this is a fixer-upper right here. I really believed I could help him get his life on track. The woman who would become my mother felt like the perfect partner in that mission. I thought she and I would make a great team, because she was also trying to fix him.
At the time, she was still technically married, coming out of a bad first marriage, though they had been separated for a while. She was a veterinarian, seven years younger than my father, and full of passion. From my perspective, it felt obvious: these two had intensity, chaos, and potential, and all they needed was me. Once I got in there, I was sure we were going to have a great life together. I imagined us turning this whole thing around and making something beautiful out of it.
The beginning was rough, though. While my mother was pregnant with me, she went to live with my father’s parents. Not long after, he got kicked out of the house again. So there she was, pregnant, living with his parents and his brothers and sisters, while he couldn’t even be there because he was such a drunk and drug addict. That was the environment I entered into.
Right before choosing them, I remember another presence—call it an angel, God, a friend, or whatever makes sense to you. We were talking shit, honestly. I was like, look at these two. Look at these crazy motherfuckers. I think they’ll work as my parents. And this presence was like, are you sure? That could be a rough ride. Have you really examined the probabilities here? There was a high chance I could become an alcoholic myself. Plenty of ways this life could go completely sideways with these two as parents.
I remember acknowledging all of that and saying, yeah, I know. I knew there were high-risk scenarios baked into this choice. I knew it could go very wrong. But I also saw the upside. It could go really well. I could help turn their lives around. We could have an incredible time together and transform this mess into something meaningful. And honestly, I was tired of shopping around. It felt like picking a character at the beginning of a video game—after a while, you just want to stop tweaking sliders and get started. I remember thinking, fuck it, these two will work. Let’s spawn already.
I arrived on June 15, 1984 at 11:55 p.m., and from the moment I got here, I was loved. My mother loved the hell out of me. She wanted a child deeply, and I was her first. That love was unmistakable. My father’s mother—my grandmother—radiated care and devotion in her home. She held a beautiful, steady space. Now, she could also be harsh sometimes, talking shit about what a whiny baby I was, which in hindsight probably had a lot to do with the food they were feeding me and what my mom was eating and all that. Still, underneath the commentary, there was a lot of love. My grandfather provided the house, made sure everyone had a place to live, and took care of the practical side of things. It was a loving home.
That doesn’t mean it was peaceful all the time. There was drama, screaming, and yelling here and there, and it was a hard environment for my mother to stay in long-term. She knew she needed a way out. She was thinking, I have to get out of here, and the best option she could see was the military. It guaranteed a paycheck and a way to provide for me. Being an army brat comes with its own baggage, no question, but it also came with stability. My mom stayed in the military the entire time until I left home. She joined when I was just about to turn one, and it was a massive leap of faith.
After my father had been kicked out of his parents’ house and moved all the way to Texas to live with his aunt and uncle, my mom got assigned to Texas to begin her military career. While she was there, she picked my dad back up. He was still drinking, using drugs, and gambling, but she laid down a hard boundary around his sexual acting out. She told him she’d cut his balls off if he didn’t stop. As far as any of us know, he kept it in his pants from that point forward. That was one of the first addictions he actually did something about. So I grew up in a household with an alcoholic, drug-addicted father and a mother who was clearly attracted to that kind of man—both in her first husband and her second. At the same time, the military provided a stable and relatively safe container for our lives.
My mom worked a lot, and my dad stepped up and stayed home with me. He filled what most people would think of as the traditional mom role. He was what we called a house man. My mom told me that when she first went to work and left me alone with him, I cried nonstop for forty-five minutes. Then something clicked. My dad took care of me, and life settled down. From that point on, he was always there. Once my mom got home from work, he’d sometimes head out drinking, but during the day, he was a constant presence. There was no one more consistent in my childhood than my father. He was always there.
A big reason for that consistency was that he did make changes. After his last night doing cocaine, he prayed to God that he would never do it again, and he stopped. When I was six years old, after many failed attempts, he finally got sober. By then, we had moved to White Sands, New Mexico, and later to Yokota, Japan. Those were my earliest childhood years, all the way up through kindergarten. Most of the time, I remember thinking that life was good. I had a parent taking care of me at all times. My basic needs and material possessions were provided for. From my perspective as a kid, things felt solid. For all the chaos underneath it, I had a nice childhood.
Now, I had little things happen. An adult crossed a sexual boundary with me when I was little. I told my parents immediately, and they dealt with it. That experience marked me in ways I wouldn't understand until much later. At the same time, though, my dad was worse in terms of abuse. My dad would spank my ass until it was bruised and red sometimes. He'd get the belt out and spank my bare ass when I wasn't doing what he was telling me to do. I'd get smacked upside the head sometimes, put in my room, grounded, and live in fear of it more often. He was always telling me and threatening me with something. But then again, I was being a little pain in the ass too and constantly rebelling.
He’d tell me to stop doing something, and I’d deliberately do more of it. I’d run around causing chaos, daring him to chase me down and catch me. I was a kid who hated being told what to do, and I challenged my father constantly. Over time, I learned to read his emotions with precision. There were moments when you could fuck with him and moments when you absolutely could not. When he was right on the edge of blowing up, I tried harder to behave. When he was in a better mood, I let myself push things a little further.
Even with those quiet foundations of struggle and a measure of abuse, it wasn’t as bad as I once believed it was. I’ve talked to countless people since then and read story after story of childhoods that were far worse. For a long time, I treated my own childhood like something I should resent, something I should punish myself for. Looking back now, I can see that I actually had it pretty good. I was taken care of. I was loved, consistently. I never went a single day without someone loving me. Learning to look back on your own beginnings with that kind of honesty is a lot of what I help people do, and if that's where you are, you can book a private call with me and sort through your own story with me.
The worst of it, honestly, was being sent to my room sometimes. When I was eight years old and my dad had just gotten sober, he was constantly on edge. You could spill a glass of milk and he’d snap—God damn it. What the fuck, Gerald? Jesus Christ—just fucking losing it over small things. He refused to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that tension showed. At the same time, he was a Vietnam veteran doing the best he could, and he was home every single day.
He was also a woodworker, and he took care of everything. He built furniture in the shop, handled the house, and kept our lives running. He made dinner, took care of the cars, did the laundry, mowed the lawn, and handled everything for my brother and me. Literally all my mom had to do was go to work and come home, and everything else was taken care of. If my dad wanted time in the workshop, my mom actually enjoyed having that extra time with us kids.
Then there was another incident around me exploring my body as a kid, and it went very badly. My dad got really pissed off and grounded me and put me in my room for hiding and lying to him. I’m not even sure how long I was grounded—at least a week, maybe a month. That stretch was one of the worst, loneliest periods of my entire life. I remember going to school and feeling like it was the only positive thing I had. School felt safe. It felt like relief. Thankfully, it was a good school, and I actually enjoyed being there. I made a lot of friends, which mattered more than I realized at the time.
I also remember that my father struggled with his weight for as long as I can remember. He’d go on these extreme, crazy-ass diets. Sometimes he’d eat something like five hundred calories of rice a day and ride the shit out of an exercise bike. He’d starve himself, lose the weight, hit whatever target number he had in his head, and then immediately go out for a steak dinner. Half the weight would come back almost instantly, and he’d fall into hopelessness again. Throughout my early childhood, my dad struggled consistently with both his drinking and his weight. I had things happen to me that never should have happened. I got smacked and hit. I lived with fear. And yet, somehow, when I look at the whole picture, it was still a pretty good deal. If your own childhood is harder to make peace with than that, and you want to talk it through with someone who gets it, you can set up a call with me — no advice, just space to sort through your story.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
No One Is Innocent: Why I Believe We Chose to Be Here
From my video published June 17, 2026.
No one is innocent. I've found this to be a really helpful idea when life seems to be brutally unfair, especially when bad things happen to kids or to people who don't seem to be doing anything wrong. The reason I carry the idea in my head that no one is innocent is that I remember being born. I remember choosing my parents. So as far as I'm concerned, I knew what I was getting into.
One of the hardest things for me to figure out in my life has been why bad things happen, kids especially. I've had my share of bad stuff happen, but I think a lot of people have had it worse. The only idea that makes it make sense to me is that I chose to incarnate here, that I knew the reality I was getting into.
Warzone as a way to see it
I'm going to have Call of Duty Warzone playing in the background, because that's exactly how I look at it. In Warzone, nobody's innocent. You know what you're getting into. You're dropping into a player-versus-player, kill-or-be-killed game. No one playing Warzone is innocent, because you knew what game you were playing when you got into it. Sure, you could argue that certain people might deserve it more than someone else playing, but when I look at it from the point of view that I chose to play this game, then anything that happens to me is just part of the game I chose to play. I'm not innocent.
Innocence, the way people usually mean it, takes the position that somebody just got here by being a victim, that you got thrust into this reality by your parents and therefore you don't deserve anything happening to you. Now, I'm all about innocence in another sense. I've got two kids. I love my kids and I take great care of them. My kids have their innocence and that's very important to me. But at the same time, I believe my kids knew what they were getting into. They picked me as their parents. They looked at this reality. They had time to research it and think about it. So I also look at it like my kids are just as much the opposite of innocent. In this human life and this human experience there's a lot of stuff they're not aware of, but on the deepest level, they chose to get in and play this game.
You could think of it like beginner Warzone players. A beginner may just get dumped on when people use certain strategies against them over and over again. From that point of view you could argue, oh, he's just an innocent newbie, he doesn't know how to play, he's brand new. But if you play Warzone, you are not innocent. If you get shot, whatever context it happens in, you're not innocent, because you chose to be here.
Protecting innocence in the right way
I think it's ideal to build a reality where we all love each other, take care of each other, and protect our creative innocence, the part of us that really loves life and that is not scarred by what's happened. I'm big into protecting my kids' innocence. At the same time, I explain things like death and alcoholism to them. I have very grown-up conversations with my kids, because at the deepest level they're more like a new player and they need to learn how the game works. You need to learn how the game works if you're here. So all my kids need from me is help learning how the game works.
From there, I understand that anything could happen to my kids. I've known so many parents who have lost a child. To me, if you're incarnating, if you're having children, you don't get to have an innocence where you pretend nothing could ever happen to your kids or to you. I accept that my kids, to some degree, have just spawned into this reality. This reality can be really nice and feel just like heaven a lot of the time, but it can also be just like hell and miserable. Having kids means, to some degree, that I've spawned my kids into a game of Warzone, and one way or another, however it goes down, that's the game we're playing.
I do everything I can to protect my kids. Maybe I'm too protective sometimes. I feel like my parents were not as protective as me. They let me just experience stuff. I try to balance that by letting my kids level up playing the game, because to get better at the game of life you really need to play it. It's tricky as a parent, because I want to let my child play the game of life so they can get better at it. Imagine a Warzone game where my kid spawns in and I take the controller and play it for them. If I'm ever not there, they don't know how to play life anymore. So I want to let my kids learn how to do life as much as possible. At the same time, I don't want to let them get killed before they get a chance to reach the final circle.
But it's going a certain direction anyway. Every Warzone game only lasts so long. Whether you get to the beginning of it or the end of it, to some degree, doesn't matter, because we're infinite beings. You can always play again and again.
What innocence really is
What's special about innocence is the power you have behind it. We think innocence can be taken away, but I don't see it that way anymore, because you can reclaim your innocence anytime you want to when you remember that you are an infinite being and that you got here by choice. One of the big losses of innocence, in my experience, happens when you think you're a victim, when you forget how you got here, when you forget that you chose to be here and that you aren't in this reality by accident.
As a kid, that sense of power was very familiar to me. I felt very powerful as a kid. To me, really losing your innocence is when you start to feel powerless in life. From that point of view, a lot of adults have lost their innocence today and feel powerless. But just because you're powerless at one point doesn't mean you're powerless in the entire perspective. Just because somebody exerts power over me and kills me in a Warzone game doesn't mean I'm completely powerless in the rest of my life. It just means that at one point in the game, somebody beat me. And that's okay. I don't have to feel bad about that, because I'm the one who decided to play this game, and my kids are the ones who decided to incarnate into this reality with me.
From there, I don't have to go around constantly worrying and being afraid. I accept that true innocence is knowing your power, not feeling like the world is holding you back, and remembering that I got here because I wanted to be here.
Where parents protect the wrong things
I see people struggling a lot in life with the idea that you have to protect kids' innocence. To me, a lot of parents turn that into the belief that you need to hide some of the basic facts of life, that you shouldn't tell your kids about sex, that you don't want your kids cursing. I'm okay if my kids curse. I think it's funny when my kids curse. They're out here swearing, "Dad, fuck this, that's bullshit," yelling at my dog, "Hey, bitch, come over here." That's not losing your innocence to me. They're just having fun playing around with life. Parents are often protecting innocence in the wrong areas. Innocence is about your power, about remembering that you are an infinite being, that you go through many deaths, but really deaths are just changes. You change from one being to another being.
Somebody mentioned their daughter calls them a bitch. I get it, my kids are toxic as hell to me sometimes too. It's funny, because I don't look at it like, oh my God, they've lost their innocence.
Sobriety, abuse, and choosing to be here
I go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm sober eleven years, and I see a lot of people there who had horrible, abusive childhoods. What I've seen is that the ones who are able to resolve that, the most powerful resolution I've ever witnessed, comes from people remembering that they got here by choice. A lot of people say, well, I didn't deserve what happened to me as a kid. I'm not saying you deserve it. What I'm saying is that if you spawn into this reality and choose to drop into a position with parents who are abusive, or who have the potential to be abusive, and if you knew how this reality works before you chose to enter it, which I believe all of us did, then when you come in and something bad happens, it's like, hey, that's just how the game's played.
Now, I'd prefer for us all to come together, and instead of spraying each other like in Warzone, to pray for each other and love each other. There's a girl in an AA meeting recently whose boyfriend died all of a sudden after they'd been dating less than a year. I'm praying for her. I'm praying that she remembers she chose that boyfriend. You don't get to choose what the people in your life do. Just like with having kids, you don't get to choose when your kids enter and leave this reality.
True innocence is remembering your power, and that means my kids have a journey. I'm a part of their journey, but they're the architect of their journey. My wife has a journey, and we're on this journey together now, but she's not taken hostage. She can leave anytime she wants to, even though it might not feel like that with co-parenting and everything. Sometimes this life journey is amazing, and yet I'm here because I want to be here, and I have the right to leave anytime I want to as well. I believe in taking care of yourself. I don't believe in harming yourself. I believe in loving your body and taking care of your body.
The fear of dying
At the same time, a lot of people have lost their innocence in the sense that they think this is all there is. I have a friend in Alcoholics Anonymous who's in his eighties and lives in a nursing home. Everybody around him says, why won't he just die? His life seems to suck now, he has basically nothing to live for, so why does he keep living? From my view, he's just scared of dying.
I remember when I was a kid, I was not scared of dying. I didn't even have a concept of dying. I didn't have a concept that I couldn't exist. I remember the exact moment in third grade where you could say I lost my innocence and found out about death. My grandfather was sick, and that's how I found out about death. I thought, oh my God, you can die? And that was, in a way, a loss of innocence.
The Moment I Broke My Fear of Death
As soon as I broke my fear of death, everything shifted. I remember the exact moment it happened. I was doing a Buddhist death meditation in 2014, or maybe the very beginning of 2015 in January. I had been sober about nine months by then. In that moment, I realized something simple and overwhelming at the same time: hey, I'm alive right now. And nothing else really matters. If I'm alive now, and I've always been alive, then I don't have anything to worry about. This whole death thing may be overrated.
Getting sober was, to me, a kind of death of its own. It was a change I genuinely think of as dying. It killed off a lot of my old personality. It destroyed my old ways of thinking and my old ways of being. From that view, it felt like I regained my innocence. I came to see that I'm not just a body trying to get through life and live as long as possible.
What Innocence Really Means to Me
For me, playing a game like Warzone is a perfect picture of maintaining your innocence. It's going around having fun playing the game, not worried about when somebody is going to kill you, just having a good time. I treasure that today. Most people think of innocence as being naive, as being dumb about how the world works. That's not it to me at all. In my experience, innocence is about reclaiming your power. If you don't have power, if you don't remember being here, then there is no innocence from that point of view.
When I look at kids, I've come to believe there's really nothing to lose, because you can always get it back. You can always regain your innocence, so to speak. You can always be a kid again.
Take Care of This Body
I tell my kids this all the time. Hey, you take care of this body, or you might have to be a baby again. You won't have to, but you might choose to be a baby again. So take care of this body, because if you don't, you might wind up being a baby again. They look at me and say, I don't want to be a baby again. And I tell them, I feel you. I don't want to be a baby again either. I've worked hard to get here. I worked hard for this. But at the same time, you can always go back to being a baby again.
I hope sharing this is helpful. If you want to go deeper into how I think about sobriety, fear, and the lessons I've picked up along the way, you can explore more in my Life playlist.
Flying Back to Earth: The Evening I Chose to Incarnate Again
From my video published October 24, 2024.
It's June 15th, 1983, and the way I picture my own beginning, I've been resting in the sun. This is the evening I decide to leave the sun and go incarnate on Earth. In my imagination of it, I'm flying like a phoenix. My body is a giant red phoenix, as big as the Earth depending on how I size it, but not visible to humans right now. It's a big journey.
Deciding my time has come
I've talked it over with the other beings here, the other souls, and I've decided my time has come to go back to Earth. It's been a nice rest after that last lifetime, and it's time to get into the action again. So I'm flying to Earth. The journey is nearly instantaneous if I want it to be, but I choose to take my time to think about whether this really fits what I want to do.
With my creation, do I want to experience another life on this planet after I've had so many? Will I actually be able to live past my 30s this time on this planet? And what kind of a life do I want?
Where on Earth do I want to land?
I arrive on the evening of June 15th, 1983, and I'm looking around the planet to get an idea for where I want to incarnate. I think I'd like to be on this planet ready, coming out as a baby about a year from now. And the first question is: where?
Do I want to incarnate in some of the most populated areas, like China, like India, Africa, South America, where there are so many people and so much happening? Or do I want what will probably be an easier ride, a more luxurious material life but with some different challenges, somewhere like the United States or Canada? I don't know yet.
It comes down to my desired incarnation time and the vast fields of probability for the basic kind of life I can have if I pick this parent or that one. This is really a lot to think about right now, so I've got my work cut out for me. I think I'm going to take a few months to just explore and really take in the state of this planet right now, because I've had some other adventures, went off into some other realities, and it's taken a little while to jog my memory on the current state of the planet.
Why I'm drawn back to North America
Currently, I'm leaning more toward a North American incarnation again, where my previous one was, if you're doing linear time. I think I want to go back there again because that life ended rather early, in my teens. It was a rough ride. The way I remember it, I was a violent person in a violent environment, and it cost me my life, and I was disappointed that incarnation ended so quickly.
So I'd like to find somewhere we could have a bit longer incarnation on this planet, somewhere I could come teach and bring these teachings to the planet.
The parents I'm looking for
And I'd like to pick some parents that will have a nice combination of interesting qualities. I don't want some boring, perfect parents. I want some parents that I can help, and I also want some parents, though, that won't be too rough of a ride — parents that will really love me and really take care of me and really prepare me to teach here.
This is how I like to imagine the journey that brought me into this life. If you enjoy these reflections, you can watch my newest videos in my Life playlist, and you can hear how the rest of it actually played out in my life story in 10 minutes.
Did We Choose Our Parents Before Birth? My Honest Answer
Originally published October 24, 2024.
I believe I chose my parents before I was born, and I remember doing it. That is my answer, and I have been working it out in public for about two years. I arrived at 11:55 p.m. on June 15, 1984, to a mother who was a veterinarian and a father who was an alcoholic, a drug addict, a compulsive gambler and a Vietnam veteran who worked at a racetrack. Before I had a body, I looked at the two of them and decided they would do.
Here is where I land now. We come here by choice, and that choice changes how I hear everything else, including the hard parts of my childhood. It is why I don't see myself as a victim of my parents. I can't prove any of it. What I can do is tell you how the memories came to me, what they changed in my life, and how my view shifted as I kept writing about them. The six posts are shown in full below.
The earliest of them is I Remember Choosing to Incarnate Here, and You Can Too, from April 2024. I was nearly ten years sober by then, and I had decided I wanted to remember how I got here, without drugs or alcohol. The first picture was of myself as a fiery bird leaving the sun. Later, in hypnotherapy, I remembered the moment my soul came together with my body. I had gone to that hypnotherapist to get rid of self-harm thoughts, and I have not been able to sustain them since that memory.
The next, Remembering Being Born and Choosing My Parents, from August 2024, is the longest and goes deepest. It covers a breathwork session where I remembered being born, and the picture of choosing my parents like picking a roller coaster car with open seats. The idea I kept coming back to there is that you are the cause, not the effect. If I chose this, I cannot also believe I was simply done to.
In October 2024 I wrote two posts that retell the same beginning as a picture. Flying Back to Earth imagines the evening of June 15, 1983, when I decided to leave the sun and come back, and I say outright that I picture it that way. Remembering the Day I Was Born follows the day itself, from the long labor to the doctor who wanted to go home for dinner and the shock of the first breath. Read them as the vivid parts of the story rather than as proof.
The newest pieces, from June 2026, are where my view has settled. No One Is Innocent uses Call of Duty Warzone to explain it. If you drop into a player-versus-player game, you knew what you were signing up for, and that is how I see coming here. I am not saying anyone deserves what happened to them as a kid. I am saying that remembering you chose to be here is what lets you reclaim your power, and I have watched people in Alcoholics Anonymous resolve some of the worst childhoods that way.
The most candid of the six is I Picked My Parents Before I Was Born, an excerpt from my memoir published in June 2026. It describes my father's drinking, drug use, gambling and repeated trips out of his parents' house, and a presence that asked whether I had really looked at the probabilities. I said yes, I knew it could go wrong, and I still wanted to go. It also names the abuse. An adult crossed a boundary with me when I was little, and my father spanked me with a belt and grounded me for long stretches. Now I see that I was loved all the time, and I also refuse to pretend the hard parts didn't happen.
Taken together, the belief has moved from the cosmic toward the grounded. In 2024 I wrote about being a phoenix and, at the deepest level, about being God, and I said that my parents were the ones I had chosen. In 2026 the emphasis is on the living details. The core idea has not changed. If you chose to be here, you are not a victim, and that is the part I keep returning to.
For the soul and the reality behind all of this, read Soul, Consciousness and Reality. For how I have worked through my father, see forgiving and setting boundaries with my parents.
If you want to think through your own beginnings with me, you can order a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- I Picked My Parents Before I Was Born (June 21, 2026)
- No One Is Innocent: Why I Believe We Chose to Be Here (June 17, 2026)
- Flying Back to Earth: The Evening I Chose to Incarnate Again (October 24, 2024)
I Picked My Parents Before I Was Born
Originally published June 21, 2026.
This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
I actually remember picking my parents. I know how that sounds, and I can already hear you saying, hold on, what the fuck are you talking about? I’m serious. I remember it. This wasn’t something I carried consciously my whole life—it came back to me later—but I’m starting the book here because it puts everything else in context. Before having this human body, I remember existing as some kind of energy body, looking down and watching my parents in a cheap hotel room. I remember thinking, yeah, these two are going to do just fine. They were opening a gateway into this reality, and it felt like the right moment for me to enter. There were plenty of other options—different parents all over the world, different life scenarios I could have chosen—but this one stood out.
These were two parents in Michigan, with my father being an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sex addict, and a compulsive gambler. He was a Vietnam veteran who worked at a racetrack, a man with an ex-wife and two children he couldn’t show up for. He kept getting kicked out of his parents’ house, spent some days homeless, and was banned from a VA psych ward. I remember looking at him and thinking, I can help this guy. I was trying to save motherfuckers before I was even born. I remember thinking, this is a fixer-upper right here. I really believed I could help him get his life on track. The woman who would become my mother felt like the perfect partner in that mission. I thought she and I would make a great team, because she was also trying to fix him.
At the time, she was still technically married, coming out of a bad first marriage, though they had been separated for a while. She was a veterinarian, seven years younger than my father, and full of passion. From my perspective, it felt obvious: these two had intensity, chaos, and potential, and all they needed was me. Once I got in there, I was sure we were going to have a great life together. I imagined us turning this whole thing around and making something beautiful out of it.
The beginning was rough, though. While my mother was pregnant with me, she went to live with my father’s parents. Not long after, he got kicked out of the house again. So there she was, pregnant, living with his parents and his brothers and sisters, while he couldn’t even be there because he was such a drunk and drug addict. That was the environment I entered into.
Right before choosing them, I remember another presence—call it an angel, God, a friend, or whatever makes sense to you. We were talking shit, honestly. I was like, look at these two. Look at these crazy motherfuckers. I think they’ll work as my parents. And this presence was like, are you sure? That could be a rough ride. Have you really examined the probabilities here? There was a high chance I could become an alcoholic myself. Plenty of ways this life could go completely sideways with these two as parents.
I remember acknowledging all of that and saying, yeah, I know. I knew there were high-risk scenarios baked into this choice. I knew it could go very wrong. But I also saw the upside. It could go really well. I could help turn their lives around. We could have an incredible time together and transform this mess into something meaningful. And honestly, I was tired of shopping around. It felt like picking a character at the beginning of a video game—after a while, you just want to stop tweaking sliders and get started. I remember thinking, fuck it, these two will work. Let’s spawn already.
I arrived on June 15, 1984 at 11:55 p.m., and from the moment I got here, I was loved. My mother loved the hell out of me. She wanted a child deeply, and I was her first. That love was unmistakable. My father’s mother—my grandmother—radiated care and devotion in her home. She held a beautiful, steady space. Now, she could also be harsh sometimes, talking shit about what a whiny baby I was, which in hindsight probably had a lot to do with the food they were feeding me and what my mom was eating and all that. Still, underneath the commentary, there was a lot of love. My grandfather provided the house, made sure everyone had a place to live, and took care of the practical side of things. It was a loving home.
That doesn’t mean it was peaceful all the time. There was drama, screaming, and yelling here and there, and it was a hard environment for my mother to stay in long-term. She knew she needed a way out. She was thinking, I have to get out of here, and the best option she could see was the military. It guaranteed a paycheck and a way to provide for me. Being an army brat comes with its own baggage, no question, but it also came with stability. My mom stayed in the military the entire time until I left home. She joined when I was just about to turn one, and it was a massive leap of faith.
After my father had been kicked out of his parents’ house and moved all the way to Texas to live with his aunt and uncle, my mom got assigned to Texas to begin her military career. While she was there, she picked my dad back up. He was still drinking, using drugs, and gambling, but she laid down a hard boundary around his sexual acting out. She told him she’d cut his balls off if he didn’t stop. As far as any of us know, he kept it in his pants from that point forward. That was one of the first addictions he actually did something about. So I grew up in a household with an alcoholic, drug-addicted father and a mother who was clearly attracted to that kind of man—both in her first husband and her second. At the same time, the military provided a stable and relatively safe container for our lives.
My mom worked a lot, and my dad stepped up and stayed home with me. He filled what most people would think of as the traditional mom role. He was what we called a house man. My mom told me that when she first went to work and left me alone with him, I cried nonstop for forty-five minutes. Then something clicked. My dad took care of me, and life settled down. From that point on, he was always there. Once my mom got home from work, he’d sometimes head out drinking, but during the day, he was a constant presence. There was no one more consistent in my childhood than my father. He was always there.
A big reason for that consistency was that he did make changes. After his last night doing cocaine, he prayed to God that he would never do it again, and he stopped. When I was six years old, after many failed attempts, he finally got sober. By then, we had moved to White Sands, New Mexico, and later to Yokota, Japan. Those were my earliest childhood years, all the way up through kindergarten. Most of the time, I remember thinking that life was good. I had a parent taking care of me at all times. My basic needs and material possessions were provided for. From my perspective as a kid, things felt solid. For all the chaos underneath it, I had a nice childhood.
Now, I had little things happen. An adult crossed a sexual boundary with me when I was little. I told my parents immediately, and they dealt with it. That experience marked me in ways I wouldn't understand until much later. At the same time, though, my dad was worse in terms of abuse. My dad would spank my ass until it was bruised and red sometimes. He'd get the belt out and spank my bare ass when I wasn't doing what he was telling me to do. I'd get smacked upside the head sometimes, put in my room, grounded, and live in fear of it more often. He was always telling me and threatening me with something. But then again, I was being a little pain in the ass too and constantly rebelling.
He’d tell me to stop doing something, and I’d deliberately do more of it. I’d run around causing chaos, daring him to chase me down and catch me. I was a kid who hated being told what to do, and I challenged my father constantly. Over time, I learned to read his emotions with precision. There were moments when you could fuck with him and moments when you absolutely could not. When he was right on the edge of blowing up, I tried harder to behave. When he was in a better mood, I let myself push things a little further.
Even with those quiet foundations of struggle and a measure of abuse, it wasn’t as bad as I once believed it was. I’ve talked to countless people since then and read story after story of childhoods that were far worse. For a long time, I treated my own childhood like something I should resent, something I should punish myself for. Looking back now, I can see that I actually had it pretty good. I was taken care of. I was loved, consistently. I never went a single day without someone loving me. Learning to look back on your own beginnings with that kind of honesty is a lot of what I help people do, and if that's where you are, you can book a private call with me and sort through your own story with me.
The worst of it, honestly, was being sent to my room sometimes. When I was eight years old and my dad had just gotten sober, he was constantly on edge. You could spill a glass of milk and he’d snap—God damn it. What the fuck, Gerald? Jesus Christ—just fucking losing it over small things. He refused to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that tension showed. At the same time, he was a Vietnam veteran doing the best he could, and he was home every single day.
He was also a woodworker, and he took care of everything. He built furniture in the shop, handled the house, and kept our lives running. He made dinner, took care of the cars, did the laundry, mowed the lawn, and handled everything for my brother and me. Literally all my mom had to do was go to work and come home, and everything else was taken care of. If my dad wanted time in the workshop, my mom actually enjoyed having that extra time with us kids.
Then there was another incident around me exploring my body as a kid, and it went very badly. My dad got really pissed off and grounded me and put me in my room for hiding and lying to him. I’m not even sure how long I was grounded—at least a week, maybe a month. That stretch was one of the worst, loneliest periods of my entire life. I remember going to school and feeling like it was the only positive thing I had. School felt safe. It felt like relief. Thankfully, it was a good school, and I actually enjoyed being there. I made a lot of friends, which mattered more than I realized at the time.
I also remember that my father struggled with his weight for as long as I can remember. He’d go on these extreme, crazy-ass diets. Sometimes he’d eat something like five hundred calories of rice a day and ride the shit out of an exercise bike. He’d starve himself, lose the weight, hit whatever target number he had in his head, and then immediately go out for a steak dinner. Half the weight would come back almost instantly, and he’d fall into hopelessness again. Throughout my early childhood, my dad struggled consistently with both his drinking and his weight. I had things happen to me that never should have happened. I got smacked and hit. I lived with fear. And yet, somehow, when I look at the whole picture, it was still a pretty good deal. If your own childhood is harder to make peace with than that, and you want to talk it through with someone who gets it, you can set up a call with me — no advice, just space to sort through your story.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
No One Is Innocent: Why I Believe We Chose to Be Here
From my video published June 17, 2026.
No one is innocent. I've found this to be a really helpful idea when life seems to be brutally unfair, especially when bad things happen to kids or to people who don't seem to be doing anything wrong. The reason I carry the idea in my head that no one is innocent is that I remember being born. I remember choosing my parents. So as far as I'm concerned, I knew what I was getting into.
One of the hardest things for me to figure out in my life has been why bad things happen, kids especially. I've had my share of bad stuff happen, but I think a lot of people have had it worse. The only idea that makes it make sense to me is that I chose to incarnate here, that I knew the reality I was getting into.
Warzone as a way to see it
I'm going to have Call of Duty Warzone playing in the background, because that's exactly how I look at it. In Warzone, nobody's innocent. You know what you're getting into. You're dropping into a player-versus-player, kill-or-be-killed game. No one playing Warzone is innocent, because you knew what game you were playing when you got into it. Sure, you could argue that certain people might deserve it more than someone else playing, but when I look at it from the point of view that I chose to play this game, then anything that happens to me is just part of the game I chose to play. I'm not innocent.
Innocence, the way people usually mean it, takes the position that somebody just got here by being a victim, that you got thrust into this reality by your parents and therefore you don't deserve anything happening to you. Now, I'm all about innocence in another sense. I've got two kids. I love my kids and I take great care of them. My kids have their innocence and that's very important to me. But at the same time, I believe my kids knew what they were getting into. They picked me as their parents. They looked at this reality. They had time to research it and think about it. So I also look at it like my kids are just as much the opposite of innocent. In this human life and this human experience there's a lot of stuff they're not aware of, but on the deepest level, they chose to get in and play this game.
You could think of it like beginner Warzone players. A beginner may just get dumped on when people use certain strategies against them over and over again. From that point of view you could argue, oh, he's just an innocent newbie, he doesn't know how to play, he's brand new. But if you play Warzone, you are not innocent. If you get shot, whatever context it happens in, you're not innocent, because you chose to be here.
Protecting innocence in the right way
I think it's ideal to build a reality where we all love each other, take care of each other, and protect our creative innocence, the part of us that really loves life and that is not scarred by what's happened. I'm big into protecting my kids' innocence. At the same time, I explain things like death and alcoholism to them. I have very grown-up conversations with my kids, because at the deepest level they're more like a new player and they need to learn how the game works. You need to learn how the game works if you're here. So all my kids need from me is help learning how the game works.
From there, I understand that anything could happen to my kids. I've known so many parents who have lost a child. To me, if you're incarnating, if you're having children, you don't get to have an innocence where you pretend nothing could ever happen to your kids or to you. I accept that my kids, to some degree, have just spawned into this reality. This reality can be really nice and feel just like heaven a lot of the time, but it can also be just like hell and miserable. Having kids means, to some degree, that I've spawned my kids into a game of Warzone, and one way or another, however it goes down, that's the game we're playing.
I do everything I can to protect my kids. Maybe I'm too protective sometimes. I feel like my parents were not as protective as me. They let me just experience stuff. I try to balance that by letting my kids level up playing the game, because to get better at the game of life you really need to play it. It's tricky as a parent, because I want to let my child play the game of life so they can get better at it. Imagine a Warzone game where my kid spawns in and I take the controller and play it for them. If I'm ever not there, they don't know how to play life anymore. So I want to let my kids learn how to do life as much as possible. At the same time, I don't want to let them get killed before they get a chance to reach the final circle.
But it's going a certain direction anyway. Every Warzone game only lasts so long. Whether you get to the beginning of it or the end of it, to some degree, doesn't matter, because we're infinite beings. You can always play again and again.
What innocence really is
What's special about innocence is the power you have behind it. We think innocence can be taken away, but I don't see it that way anymore, because you can reclaim your innocence anytime you want to when you remember that you are an infinite being and that you got here by choice. One of the big losses of innocence, in my experience, happens when you think you're a victim, when you forget how you got here, when you forget that you chose to be here and that you aren't in this reality by accident.
As a kid, that sense of power was very familiar to me. I felt very powerful as a kid. To me, really losing your innocence is when you start to feel powerless in life. From that point of view, a lot of adults have lost their innocence today and feel powerless. But just because you're powerless at one point doesn't mean you're powerless in the entire perspective. Just because somebody exerts power over me and kills me in a Warzone game doesn't mean I'm completely powerless in the rest of my life. It just means that at one point in the game, somebody beat me. And that's okay. I don't have to feel bad about that, because I'm the one who decided to play this game, and my kids are the ones who decided to incarnate into this reality with me.
From there, I don't have to go around constantly worrying and being afraid. I accept that true innocence is knowing your power, not feeling like the world is holding you back, and remembering that I got here because I wanted to be here.
Where parents protect the wrong things
I see people struggling a lot in life with the idea that you have to protect kids' innocence. To me, a lot of parents turn that into the belief that you need to hide some of the basic facts of life, that you shouldn't tell your kids about sex, that you don't want your kids cursing. I'm okay if my kids curse. I think it's funny when my kids curse. They're out here swearing, "Dad, fuck this, that's bullshit," yelling at my dog, "Hey, bitch, come over here." That's not losing your innocence to me. They're just having fun playing around with life. Parents are often protecting innocence in the wrong areas. Innocence is about your power, about remembering that you are an infinite being, that you go through many deaths, but really deaths are just changes. You change from one being to another being.
Somebody mentioned their daughter calls them a bitch. I get it, my kids are toxic as hell to me sometimes too. It's funny, because I don't look at it like, oh my God, they've lost their innocence.
Sobriety, abuse, and choosing to be here
I go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm sober eleven years, and I see a lot of people there who had horrible, abusive childhoods. What I've seen is that the ones who are able to resolve that, the most powerful resolution I've ever witnessed, comes from people remembering that they got here by choice. A lot of people say, well, I didn't deserve what happened to me as a kid. I'm not saying you deserve it. What I'm saying is that if you spawn into this reality and choose to drop into a position with parents who are abusive, or who have the potential to be abusive, and if you knew how this reality works before you chose to enter it, which I believe all of us did, then when you come in and something bad happens, it's like, hey, that's just how the game's played.
Now, I'd prefer for us all to come together, and instead of spraying each other like in Warzone, to pray for each other and love each other. There's a girl in an AA meeting recently whose boyfriend died all of a sudden after they'd been dating less than a year. I'm praying for her. I'm praying that she remembers she chose that boyfriend. You don't get to choose what the people in your life do. Just like with having kids, you don't get to choose when your kids enter and leave this reality.
True innocence is remembering your power, and that means my kids have a journey. I'm a part of their journey, but they're the architect of their journey. My wife has a journey, and we're on this journey together now, but she's not taken hostage. She can leave anytime she wants to, even though it might not feel like that with co-parenting and everything. Sometimes this life journey is amazing, and yet I'm here because I want to be here, and I have the right to leave anytime I want to as well. I believe in taking care of yourself. I don't believe in harming yourself. I believe in loving your body and taking care of your body.
The fear of dying
At the same time, a lot of people have lost their innocence in the sense that they think this is all there is. I have a friend in Alcoholics Anonymous who's in his eighties and lives in a nursing home. Everybody around him says, why won't he just die? His life seems to suck now, he has basically nothing to live for, so why does he keep living? From my view, he's just scared of dying.
I remember when I was a kid, I was not scared of dying. I didn't even have a concept of dying. I didn't have a concept that I couldn't exist. I remember the exact moment in third grade where you could say I lost my innocence and found out about death. My grandfather was sick, and that's how I found out about death. I thought, oh my God, you can die? And that was, in a way, a loss of innocence.
The Moment I Broke My Fear of Death
As soon as I broke my fear of death, everything shifted. I remember the exact moment it happened. I was doing a Buddhist death meditation in 2014, or maybe the very beginning of 2015 in January. I had been sober about nine months by then. In that moment, I realized something simple and overwhelming at the same time: hey, I'm alive right now. And nothing else really matters. If I'm alive now, and I've always been alive, then I don't have anything to worry about. This whole death thing may be overrated.
Getting sober was, to me, a kind of death of its own. It was a change I genuinely think of as dying. It killed off a lot of my old personality. It destroyed my old ways of thinking and my old ways of being. From that view, it felt like I regained my innocence. I came to see that I'm not just a body trying to get through life and live as long as possible.
What Innocence Really Means to Me
For me, playing a game like Warzone is a perfect picture of maintaining your innocence. It's going around having fun playing the game, not worried about when somebody is going to kill you, just having a good time. I treasure that today. Most people think of innocence as being naive, as being dumb about how the world works. That's not it to me at all. In my experience, innocence is about reclaiming your power. If you don't have power, if you don't remember being here, then there is no innocence from that point of view.
When I look at kids, I've come to believe there's really nothing to lose, because you can always get it back. You can always regain your innocence, so to speak. You can always be a kid again.
Take Care of This Body
I tell my kids this all the time. Hey, you take care of this body, or you might have to be a baby again. You won't have to, but you might choose to be a baby again. So take care of this body, because if you don't, you might wind up being a baby again. They look at me and say, I don't want to be a baby again. And I tell them, I feel you. I don't want to be a baby again either. I've worked hard to get here. I worked hard for this. But at the same time, you can always go back to being a baby again.
I hope sharing this is helpful. If you want to go deeper into how I think about sobriety, fear, and the lessons I've picked up along the way, you can explore more in my Life playlist.
Flying Back to Earth: The Evening I Chose to Incarnate Again
From my video published October 24, 2024.
It's June 15th, 1983, and the way I picture my own beginning, I've been resting in the sun. This is the evening I decide to leave the sun and go incarnate on Earth. In my imagination of it, I'm flying like a phoenix. My body is a giant red phoenix, as big as the Earth depending on how I size it, but not visible to humans right now. It's a big journey.
Deciding my time has come
I've talked it over with the other beings here, the other souls, and I've decided my time has come to go back to Earth. It's been a nice rest after that last lifetime, and it's time to get into the action again. So I'm flying to Earth. The journey is nearly instantaneous if I want it to be, but I choose to take my time to think about whether this really fits what I want to do.
With my creation, do I want to experience another life on this planet after I've had so many? Will I actually be able to live past my 30s this time on this planet? And what kind of a life do I want?
Where on Earth do I want to land?
I arrive on the evening of June 15th, 1983, and I'm looking around the planet to get an idea for where I want to incarnate. I think I'd like to be on this planet ready, coming out as a baby about a year from now. And the first question is: where?
Do I want to incarnate in some of the most populated areas, like China, like India, Africa, South America, where there are so many people and so much happening? Or do I want what will probably be an easier ride, a more luxurious material life but with some different challenges, somewhere like the United States or Canada? I don't know yet.
It comes down to my desired incarnation time and the vast fields of probability for the basic kind of life I can have if I pick this parent or that one. This is really a lot to think about right now, so I've got my work cut out for me. I think I'm going to take a few months to just explore and really take in the state of this planet right now, because I've had some other adventures, went off into some other realities, and it's taken a little while to jog my memory on the current state of the planet.
Why I'm drawn back to North America
Currently, I'm leaning more toward a North American incarnation again, where my previous one was, if you're doing linear time. I think I want to go back there again because that life ended rather early, in my teens. It was a rough ride. The way I remember it, I was a violent person in a violent environment, and it cost me my life, and I was disappointed that incarnation ended so quickly.
So I'd like to find somewhere we could have a bit longer incarnation on this planet, somewhere I could come teach and bring these teachings to the planet.
The parents I'm looking for
And I'd like to pick some parents that will have a nice combination of interesting qualities. I don't want some boring, perfect parents. I want some parents that I can help, and I also want some parents, though, that won't be too rough of a ride — parents that will really love me and really take care of me and really prepare me to teach here.
This is how I like to imagine the journey that brought me into this life. If you enjoy these reflections, you can watch my newest videos in my Life playlist, and you can hear how the rest of it actually played out in my life story in 10 minutes.
Remembering Being Born and Choosing My Parents
From my video published August 8, 2024.
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. If you want to get into a conversation like this, you can join me in 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.
I Remember Choosing to Incarnate Here, and You Can Too
From my video published April 16, 2024.
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.