How strange. I was thinking of posting a similar thing on my blog. I would like to think my soul's been around the block a few times and will continue to do so. If everyone gets multiple varied lives it seems a little more fair for the "human experience" in general if we get to try and live as other people.

Don't you ever hit it off shockingly fast with someone and feel like you've known them forever? It would be nice to think that you've met them before and will continue to bump into each other in a cosmic sort of way...

I grew up inland and never saw the ocean until I was well into my college years, but seeing it I feel such a call and wonder if I was a sailor or something like that before. It's such a strong overwhelming feeling. And I get the impression in a lot of these past lives I was probably a guy some of the time. I feel so jealous of male camraderie and feel the lack of it so keenly in my own life now, being a woman, that it just makes my heart ache.

I have always sort of believed in reincarnation...I don't know about anyone else, but I am CERTAIN that I knew my sisters in a past life. I don't know who or what I was, probably someone mousy.

The thing that has concreted it for me is what I am uncovering in my Tarot studies, I am using Mary Greer's workbook and in doing so I've found out that my "soul card" is The Emperor and I've worked that out to have something to do with father figure issues. And you know what? I honestly don't think this is the first time - or lifetime - that I have had these issues. I seriously got chills when I realised that!

Thanks for the responses, guys.

I think a lot of issues are recurring, because the point of reincarnation, in the way I understand it, is to find our root issues and ways to work them out. As a kid, I always sort of felt like I'd been here forever, but now I feel like I'm way younger than most of the people I know.

Who was I? Well, I think I was Irish at one point.

The people who feel familiar to me are my mom, my husband, a couple of friends from high school I haven't seen in ten years, and some people online, particularly Rob, whom I've never met, or Kate, who I never will meet. Thankfully.

I think I've been both a man and a mother in past lives, although I'm neither in this life. (A cosmic tournament bye: "You don't have to deal with a penis or babies in this round...") I don't know what it is about some people, but especially in recent years, there's ones that when we met, we looked at each other and boom, there's a recognition. I don't know if it's reincarnation or that we simply rode in on the same dust cloud during the big bang, but it's there. Jung's theories about synchronicity and the collective unconsciousness also really hold true with those people, often eerily so, although anymore it doesn't really suprise me when things like that happen.

Most of my immediate family, with a few exceptions, were a collection of people with whom I've had karma, but not the good kind. I'm spending the rest of my life running into the people who are my real family.

I'm not sure who or what I was in past lives, but I definitely feel like I've met some people I've known before. I also think I haven't met some of them again yet... there are times when I feel like I'm missing someone important who should be with me.

Since as far back as I can remember I've considered myself a middle-aged soul: I've always had a niggling feeling of "oh, this is not what I should be doing, but I still don't know enough to steer around it" plus a certain mirthful cynicism (too old to be in wonder of serendipity, too young to recognize kismet's beauty).... but I haven't had any moments of recognition with other souls ever. I wonder if I was a hermit before, or maybe someone who died very young and didn't have a chance to really strike out the first (few) times(s)? I can "click" with just about anybody, but anybody who has stuck around with me through my life is either related to me or doing most of the work.

When thinking about past lives, I always get the image of me being a male doctor who was killed in a helicopter crash.

Can't say where, or when. And I am not afraid of helicopters. I like them a lot. But that's what I intuitively feel.