Lynn Sparrow Christy - A lifetime of helping people reach their spiritual potential

An Edgar Cayce student at age 16 who has now done thousands of past life regressions, Lynn Sparrow Christy has a lot to talk about!  

Please enjoy spending time with a very loving and special person as she explains Neuro Linguistic Programming, how it works hand in hand with hypnosis, and encourages us to make the most of every lifetime. 

This is the first of two episodes with this author of three books and very accomplished public speaker and life coach.  Please enjoy

Transcript

1:23

We're here today with Lynn Sparrow Christie, and I'm very very excited to have you here. Welcome. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here Currently you live in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Is that right? I do. I've lived here since 1976 Oh my goodness, you are not a native, but you gotta be edging up on it, I guess. I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere else, I can tell you that. Okay, but did you grow up in Virginia Beach? No, I'm a Jersey girl. Oh, my goodness. I grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, which some of your listeners will know is right outside New York. Oh, okay. Oh, so that's really a New York City suburb, right? It is a New York City suburb. You can walk a block from my house and get on a bus and land in New York. Okay. Okay. Oh, wow. Did you go to a public high school there? I did. I went all through the public school system in a little town called Creskill, New Jersey. Okay, and were you active in sports or band or what, what kind of things did you do when you were a schoolgirl? Oh my gosh. I was, I was not a joiner, I have to tell you. I was always kind of a, I, I loved to, to play with a group of friends, but I never liked what I called organized fun. I remember one summer I signed up for the summer rec program that the school was doing, and One day told me I had made the most terrible mistake and at suppertime my father said to me You know, you don't have to keep going and I started to cry. I said really but can I keep the t shirt? I always like to just make my own fun and I never liked organized kinds of things Interesting interesting. You like to be with other people or no of playmates in the neighborhood and, and, as was true of my generation, we played outside from morning till night and we came home at suppertime and went out again to play after supper in the summertime. Absolutely. You were only indoors if it was raining or so cold that you were starting to freeze your nose. Or somebody got hurt somehow. Yeah, right. Exactly. So I had a pretty normal, I had that. What we kind of make fun of now is that ideal 1950s, early 60s childhood, but I've got to tell you, it was a wonderful childhood. I had the same, but up in upstate New York and just was, yes, I was very, very lucky to have two good parents and, and a lot of fun as a kid. We're going to talk today about spiritual things. Yes. And, when you were a school girl I don't know if, were you spiritual then or did that happen some later time? Well, it actually happened when I was a fairly young child and it, and it kind of has to do with that childhood I'm talking about. Okay. There is a distinct memory of lying on my bed, looking at my raggedy Ann and raggedy Andy wallpaper. And all of a sudden I was absolutely consumed with a desire to go to Sunday school. And we were not a church going family. And we had been to the neighborhood Sunday school some years back, but by then I was nine. It had been several years. And because I was a bit of a loner and a shy child. It took every ounce of courage I had, but I finally worked up my courage to go to that little Baptist, of all things, Sunday school, and something happened when I went there. something was awakened that has really stayed with me for all of these years over the course of my life. Obviously, it's changed, it's grown, it's evolved, but that initial experience in the placement of that little Baptist Sunday school. That only happened because I, I had that something that came up as I was just lying on my bed thinking. And that often leads to pondering about what is it? Spurs, that spiritual impulse. Some people will live their whole life and it will never happen. Right. For some people, even if they're active in a religious community, it is pro forma, it's cultural. But for other people, there is that direct encounter with the something more. I have to attribute that to a soul history. I don't know any other way to explain how some people have that. Thirst. And for me that thirst characterized the trajectory of my entire life from the age of nine onward. I think that's so fascinating because I do totally agree that I just saw something about this, this child that is autistic and he was from this poor family and they found a keyboard in his basement and without any lessons or anything, the kid just started to play. And, and it's like, well, hello. Yeah. And that's, it's kind of like what you had too. It's like, it didn't start playing the piano, but you did dive right. I mean, you went, you're, you went without any prompting into that spirit. Exactly. My father was an agnostic. My mother was a lapsed seventh day Adventist who only knew that she didn't want her children to be under such a rigid So I, there was nothing, but at the same time my family was supportive and I've often thought how glad I was that my family was not wedded to a particular religion. My agnostic father bought me a Bible. He was so pleased that I was going to Sunday school. And my brother, by that time, was a rebellious teenager, and I think he thought, Oh, good, the Baptist will keep her from going down that route, because he was always in favor even though he himself was not a believer in anything. That is very interesting. And you did. You got into the flow of it. I did. And, and I think, when I think about my agnostic father, what he taught me from the earliest time is that You can be a truly, truly good person in every sense of the word, and you don't need to have a particular religion or faith. To justify yourself, it is not the domain of the religious to be good people. There are good people in churches and synagogues and mosques, and there are not so good people in all of those institutions. Exactly. but what a wonderful context that your parents gave to you, and your father's example, especially. You can be a wonderful, loving, kind, good person and not attend any church or believe in any particular thing. Yes. And meanwhile, while the Baptists were hammering in the idea that only those who believe that particular way would go to heaven. I had counterexamples. My best friend, to this day by the way old, old friend, was Jewish. And I would come home from Sunday school where they told me that only those who accepted Jesus into their heart could go to heaven. And I thought something doesn't fit here. Because it was easy for me to accept Jesus. I had Everybody in favor, for Barbara to accept Jesus, she would have to turn her back on everything her family stood for. Right. The deck is stacked, if this is true. So, there were things from the beginning that let me know that there had to be a more universal outlook to the love, the mercy of God, and our being beloved by God. That divine creator. As you grew older this, you got started there quite early, you went through high school, you got out of high school was this something that, as you, did you go to college? I did, and, and in fact, one of the things that happened was that I did part ways with that little Baptist church, and I think the straw that broke the camel's back was the beetles. Because. They were busy talking about how sinful and awful it was to listen to Beatles music. And I was a huge Beatles fan. By now I'm the tender age of 11 and I'm thinking, what's wrong? You know, it didn't, it didn't compute. And the minister always talked about the Bible being the way God spoke to us. And so finally I thought, okay. I want to hear what the Bible says to me, and I stopped going to the church and I started studying my Bible by myself, just pursuing key things that, that mattered to me, and doing Word searches of what certain things meant in the Bible. And along the way, I developed an interest in other religions of the world. So I started reading a little bit about other world religions. And meanwhile, over in what at that point was another department of life, I was always fascinated by stories about psychics. We had lots of good supper time conversation at our house, and my mother would often have read something in the paper about a psychic having helped the police, and she would talk about it, and anyway, this idea of the psychic really appealed to me. And when I was 15, I read my first book about the American psychic, Edgar Cayce. Okay. And when I read Cayce, what happened was, the deeply spiritual, that Embraced ideas beyond the limits of a little church on the next street, a deeply spiritual principle, and this other tantalizing realm of the psychic came together in the story of Edgar Cayce. And that was when I first saw these things coming together. So, I became absolutely consumed with a passion. for the work and the story of Edgar Cayce. Okay, and just so, if people want to look up Edgar Cayce, the name does not have a traditional spelling. That is correct. It's C A Y C E. Okay. And even in my mind, when I was first reading the books, I was calling him Edgar Cayce, because I've never heard anyone pronounce it. And it was there that I encountered My first serious treatment of reincarnation. based on the Edgar Cayce story called The World Within, which was the sequel to Many Mansions, Edgar Cayce's treatment of reincarnation. Okay. That was what set me on that path of embracing the idea of multiple lives. Now, if some of your listeners have not heard of Edgar Cayce, he was a pretty remarkable person who was quite ahead of his time. He was born in 1877, he died in 1945. So, to just put him in a time context. Around the turn of the 20th century, so we're talking here around 1900, he discovered an ability to enter an altered state of awareness and give information, in the beginning it was all health related, for people who were sick and needed care. Some kind of physical remedy and he was able to, with something like x ray vision, describe what was going on in the various systems of the body, where the problem was, he would recommend approaches to treatment that today are called holistic or more, more commonly now, integrative or functional medicine, where all the different And healing modalities and all of the systems of the body are looked at as a whole. And his track record was so good, that over time, other questions about the purpose of life, and about the nature of the soul, and so on, were asked of him. So that it, a huge body of nearly 15, 000 of these, psychic discourses were given. Fortunately, they had the foresight to bring a stenographer on quite early in the story. She took down every word verbatim. Wonderful. And so we have the records. Let me interrupt you for just a second. And that's,, the fact that Edgar Cayce, I don't think was claiming that this was his own intelligence or knowledge, right? Right. This was coming to him from outside him. Exactly. But not in the sense of a medium who has a spirit guide who channels. Edgar Cayce was pretty clear on that being a little bit risky if you didn't know very clearly who and what you were attracting to talk through you. Okay. Right. So it was more an attunement of his awareness. and one of the things he stressed a lot was the importance of a personal ideal that acts as kind of a guide star. When you're getting in these So in his other realms of consciousness exploration, it can be kind of murky water if you don't know where you are going or what you are doing. akashic records have anything to do with this? Definitely! He suggested that, when he gave somebody information about when and where they had lived before, that he was in fact reading the akashic records. And do you mind just explaining what that means? Yeah. Because it seemed to me that that's what you were talking about. It was. What is Akashic records? What are they? Well, the Akasha in the in the Sanskrit means sky. And so poetically we could say the record written in the sky of all that has ever happened. The way we might understand it now is The record that is there on higher planes where everything that has ever happened in this three dimensional world is Recorded in some sense and that's a pretty reductionistic word, but the impression is left Okay, the analogy I like to use we hear when we watch programs about astronomy, that light travels out into the far reaches of the universe. So that if, if we could be far enough out in the universe and we were observing earth, we could be watching the earth be born or see Washington crossing the Delaware because those light waves are still traveling out to infinity, carrying those images. And in some way, apparently our souls. create and leave a record on the Akasha, the sky, the ethereal realms. Oh, that is a great explanation of it. And some people are able to get access to those records. Yes, some people are, which is quite astounding in itself. It is quite astounding. You were a young girl to be doing all this research, and I don't think there was an internet at that point in time. No, there wasn't. I wrote a blind letter to the Edgar Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach, because I had read in the biography that that's where they're saying, Are you still there? And if so, can I get involved? And I was 16 at that point, and I got a whole packet of information mailed back to me, and it included a list of the organization's study groups, which were groups of interested individuals who met in one another's homes on a weekly basis to deal with the spiritual growth. information in the Edgar Cayce readings. They're called Search for God groups, and good fortune, providence, whatever you want to call it, would have it that there was one such group about 20 minutes from my home in Durban County, New Jersey, and I began attending that group. I couldn't even drive yet because in New Jersey the driver's license age was 17. So my parents, bless their hearts, and this is another, they would drive me to study group and come back and get me when it was over. Every Friday night. And, how many parents would, I mean, there are parents who will take their kids to sporting events, and mine took me, and the first time they took me, they dropped me off and they weren't, Looking back, they were pretty laissez faire. They didn't know anything about these people. No, we could have been mass murderers. And when they came back to get me, the cars were still all parked outside, but the house was dark. And this particular study group always turned out the lights for us to meditate. We meditated at the, that was a, that is a part of every meeting. The last half hour is a deep meditation. And they sat out there. Looking at this dark house, thinking, what do we do? Why is the house dark? And before they had to make a clear decision, the lights came on. And then they were invited in for the refreshments that always flowed abundantly after the meeting. And when they met that group of people, there was never another minute's doubt that their daughter was in good hands. Wow. Wow. You know, here I am just turned 70 and I am spending time looking into different parts of spirituality and whatever I come upon. And here you were. at 16, doing that same thing. You were called into it, I, I say. Yeah. And then. But, strangely enough, not coincidentally, there was a group right near you. And then you were able to get the benefit of people who were a little older, probably. They were, yeah, they were my parents generation, all of them. Okay. And they had been studying Edgar Cayce, and, you must have just soaked that up like a sponge. Oh, it was, it was absolutely wonderful, and looking back, I understand it had to happen that way, because my life path was to be involved with helping disseminate This information. Tiger Woods had to be born to a father who put him on the golf course at age, whatever it was, two or three or four. So we are exposed to those childhood influences that reflect what our soul path is. So that's why one of the best ways we can kind of get a sense of our past lives is to look at what fascinated us as children. What really struck us? Yes. Because everybody has a different path. It doesn't really matter what age we start a spiritual path. And I, I am really very, very clear on that in my own mind, that somebody can discover the spiritual path relatively later in life and get exactly. The growth, the insight, the enlightenment, that is what they came here to get and maybe get it more quickly because it comes on the heels of life experience and as we well know sometimes life experience can be pretty rough and it can open us up to be more receptive to things. You just never know why things happen in the sequence they do. I'm just so thankful that I'm here and I'm in it and you're helping. And thank you for that. Oh, I'm happy to be able to help. there came a time when you, looked into a lot of different things like hypnotherapy. Yeah. That was quite a bit later. When it was time to go to college. I knew I wanted to study things spiritual, but again, there were not a lot of programs that were tailored to my somewhat different orientation. Right. You're not going to go to seminary to be a Baptist. Right. But there was at a Christian college that was right over the border into New York state from where I lived in New Jersey. And it was evangelical in its orientation, but I thought I, at that point, did think I wanted to go to seminary because that was the only path I could see that might be. Give me a role in things spiritual. Yes, I don't think at that time there were the variety of Opportunities for people with different thinking and different spiritual paths like today on the internet You can find people that have things in common with you very easily, but at that time you were either going to be a soldier or a sailor or what were you going to do? And so that certainly made sense that this, seminary spiritual thinking your direction. And in fact, in my generation, if you were a girl, you We're going to be a teacher, a nurse, or you know, I had good friends who were good students who got college degrees and both ended up having to go to secretarial school so that they could get a job. So it was a time when things were very, very different. So I decided I would enroll in this very Evangelical Christian College as a theology major. And because I was already up to my eyeballs in Casey, and I didn't want to have to hide that, I'd already been through a few experiences where Churchy people were constantly trying to tell me I was in league with the devil. I didn't hide that on my college application. So they invited me up there for an interview before they accepted me. And they asked me a lot of questions, including, Would I want to form cells on campus? That was the word they used. Self. Not a positive word. And I reassured them that I had no interest in doing anything like that. There was the tacit agreement that I could come to their school if I promised not to spread my heresy while I was there. I gotta just laugh. Hey, you agreed they were, it was good that they went that way. And, I have never regretted my choice. I had what I thought was a good education, a lot of good theology and Bible and new Testament, Greek and psychology courses. I did a lot of, of things that were a good foundation. for everything that I went on to do. Yes. And so it was exactly for me the right place at the right time. But it was after college that my desire to be closer to the Edgar Cayce work in Virginia Beach caused me to move here. I was Pretty much fresh out of college when I moved to Virginia Beach and I began working for the interpacy organization Oh my goodness. So that was like going to Mecca and getting hired, you know Yeah I started as a bookstore clerk and I worked my way up through and it was in that context that I started Speaking and writing it was only actually after I decided to go freelance that I took trainings in hypnosis and neuro linguistics and whatnot and added that to my training so that I could work with private clients one on one. I was already going out doing workshops on how to remember your past lives and lecturing on things like that. But I did not have a grounds upon which to build a one on one clientele. So that was I see. You needed a different service. You needed something Right. And I, I wanted to, to be properly trained in hypnosis. Mm-Hmm. in order to do regressions one-On-one. Yes. Yes. Had you written your book by that time? Yes. When you did, you studied your hypnotherapy you wrote a book, Edgar Casey in Christian Faith. Right. And that I wrote during the early years that I was working. at the KC organization. And that was I wrote it in 84, I think the first publication of it was in 1985. And then subsequently in the late 80s I wrote the second book, Reincarnation. claiming your past, creating your future. And that was largely the distillation of things that had kind of been pulled together in my time on the road teaching seminars on remembering past lives and so on. I, wanted to get into a little bit of talk about reincarnation in this interview. So I'm going to just basically mention that you trained in hypnotherapy. You became a hypnosis trainer. You also work as a life coach, a master neuro linguistic. what is NLP? It's not a very nice name. It's Neurolinguistic Programming. You know, the whole movement kind of sprang out of Near the Silicon Valley in California and the idea of programming the mind. I see. Became a big deal. The people I trained with called their brand humanistic NLP, because they brought a spiritual perspective as well. And essentially it is really just about learning how we can better work with the functions of the mind. to create desired states of being and desired outcomes in our life. I know that there are some, people that do past life regressions that use both hypnotism and NLP. The truth is, the two things are so closely related. The founders of NLP were steeped in Ericksonian hypnosis. Oh, okay, okay. And so, It is a rare hypnosis practitioner who isn't leaving NLP in and most NLP practitioners are using hypnotic modalities. So the two almost speak, it's a matter of emphasis, I think. Because anytime you have somebody, let's say you're, in the middle of a past life and the person has encountered some trauma and you have them. Remove themselves from the scene and see it from above, which is one tried and true, way of not getting sucked back into past trauma. That's a very NLP ish technique because when you change your inner visualizing perspective on something. You change the way it impacts you on an emotional level, on, on many different levels. So that's one very simple example of how it's almost impossible to do effective hypnosis without some amount of NLP thrown In talking about past life regressions, is that something that you have done I've done thousands of them, yes. I've done many, many past life regressions. So you've done thousands, you said of past life regressions, and I have had a past life regression with Carol Louie. Mm hmm. Who organized the, the seminar that you spoke at. And it was my first one, and it really was tremendous. In and of itself, if you have a past life, then there's more than one life. And that means that it's proof that there is reincarnation, there is such a thing. I believe firmly that we do reincarnate, but why? Well, I think that if you look at what all of the spiritual traditions of the world tell us, whether they embrace reincarnation or not, it all seems to be about a deeper quality of being, some level of connection with the divine, some ability to manifest the divine in our capacity to love, to forgive, to be all those good things that humanity generally agrees about. And then the question becomes. Well, one life is very short as the older we get, the more apparent that becomes. And so much growing to do. We look at the inequities in life and we wonder, you know, it's not enough to say everything gets evened out in the afterlife. That just, that just doesn't cut it for me. It's like, you know, somebody is wrongfully convicted and spends. in jail, it's not enough that for the remaining 20 years of their life, they're happy. They still lost 30 years. And I feel that way about heaven and hell being the great equalizers. That just doesn't make sense. Okay. But we are, we are powerful spiritual beings. who need lots of practicum time to master our capacities and also to tame our less than ideal versions of ourselves. The opportunity to live again and again means that no effort is ever lost and there will always be an opportunity to correct and improve whatever it is we have experienced in the past. Well, that is a a wonderful thing to think about, which is yeah, I may have messed this up or may have messed that up, but I might as well start trying to improve on it. And if I don't get that totally done now, I'm going to have another lifetime to work on it. Exactly. And there's a wealth of detail underlying that, as you well know, but we probably don't have time to get into that in this. I know there are a lot of people that I was raised with that say Oh, I can't wait for this life to get over and you know This is like hell on earth and blah bidi blah and then when I finish this life I'm gonna go to heaven and I'm gonna have eternity with nothing but happiness forever. So it's like Now, bad. Future, good. And that's really not the way you think of it. Not, not in the least. And I think that's a carryover from an earlier time in human existence where there, this life was so bleak for generation after generation. People had to think of a better life beyond. I see. I see. If you were just trying to survive. Every single day. Exactly. No fine points to it. Exactly. But I think the real beauty that reincarnation points to is that there is a far, far greater destiny unfolding for us. Okay. Well, I'd like to go into that in great detail in another interview, if that's okay with you. I would love to go there. Okay. Well, let's do that then. And I'm so glad we got a chance to get to know you a little bit here today and to find out about how you got to where you are, because you have spent a lifetime doing this work and wonderful. And we're going to, we're going to get a lot of the benefit of that in our next interview as well. So, thank you so much, Lynn. Thank you, Jim. It's been a pleasure.