Profound Memories and their Stories Part 6
July 25, 2025
Profound Memories and their Stories Part 6
Recently, a TV journalist interviewed a noted chef in her restaurant. The chef gave the journalist sample dishes of her farm-to-table menus. The journalist tasted several but couldn't contain her emotions when she sank her teeth into one of them….
Obviously fighting back tears, she said, “This is the exact taste of my grandmother’s cornbread.” Then she took a deep breath and said, “I thought I’d never taste it again.” Her body center’s sense of smell bypassed her mental cognition and directly contacted her soul child’s “saved” feelings around her grandmother. These strong feelings flooded her with early heart-centered emotion. She composed herself and continued the interview.
Not only our taste buds, but our touch, vision, smells, hearing, and tactile receptors save memories that find their way back to us through our three centers. Each of our three centers has its own memory bank. There are body memories, heart memories, and mental memories, which are all connected to one another.
Why are childhood memories important to our development? They lay the foundation for all our experiences. The memories of our soul child are positive and beautiful, as well as negative and ugly. But any new experience starts a new category, a new phenomenon, a new “wrinkle”, expands our reality and sets expectations for the future. That is why early memories are so important.
Just think, our soul child era contains more formative experiences than any other era. There are thousands of firsts in seeing, being held, tasting, hearing, smelling, and feeling different textures and sensations. Then come our first experiences of attachment, interpersonal relationships, logical thought, memory, problems, and problem-solving. Also, we experience our first developed emotional responses and encounters with the natural world.
At our making, our pure soul entered our body and then, through the three centers, learned how to be in the physical world. Without memory, the soul would have to learn everything repeatedly. So, everything we perceived in our soul child years, and our memories of them, are foundational to who we are.
Our earliest positive memories engender the desire for life. Unfortunately, the dear souls among us who lack enough positive memories, frequently succumb to a living death. They require help in transversing their trauma. This can be done by healing the trauma through processing it, and by making and reliving positive experiences. So, drawing on our good memories, especially our first ones, is life-giving.
Spiritual practice: This exercise involves thinking of a painful experience and feeling the associated feelings. If that is too disturbing for you, please skip it.
When it is the right time and you feel ready, think of one of your most painful experiences and feel the feelings. You may have buried it or pushed it into the very back of your being. You may have resolved it, but remembering it still feels painful. It could come from a loss, trauma, or personal failing. After re-experiencing this pain, reflect on what memories in your soul empowered you to reflect on those memories. How might love in your soul child years have been involved in your being able to think back on those painful memories?
Self-inquiry: What early experiences in your soul child first empowered you?
Dear God,
I give thanks for those earliest experiences that taught me to say “Yes” to life. That same “Yes” gives me the faith to feel my pain. Amen
