Echoes Across Lifetimes: How Past Lives Shape the People We Meet

Inspired by the themes of Let The Fish Fly by Ekta Bajaj

Have you ever met someone who felt strangely familiar? Or someone who stirred deep emotion, positive or negative, without any logical reason? Across spiritual traditions, from Vedanta to Buddhism to metaphysical studies, there is a shared belief:

The relationships we encounter in this lifetime are rarely accidental.They are continuations, threads carried across lifetimes, woven through karma, memory, and unfinished stories.

Every person we meet carries a story, not just the one they tell us, but the one our soul recognises long before our mind does. Some connections feel instant, electric, familiar. Others are heavy, challenging, or strangely unresolved. And then there are those rare encounters that shift the direction of our lives entirely.

The souls around us may have walked beside us before, simply taking on new roles, new faces, and new lessons in this incarnation. Sometimes these recollections surface subtly, through déjà vu, a recurring dream, a sudden emotion, or a voice of the heart that feels older than our years. Each person we meet becomes a mirror, reflecting truths we have forgotten and ones our soul still remembers.

When Karmic Memory Speaks

Living with the awareness that every connection is a manifestation of our karmas brings immense clarity. It softens the unnecessary battles we fight. It releases us from taking every conflict personally. And it reminds us that not every emotion needs to be carried into the future. But this awareness becomes truly transformative when it arrives through experience.

A Personal Story of Past-Life Healing

Years ago, I met a woman who had never harmed me, never spoken ill of me, yet I felt an uncomfortable, sharp resentment whenever she was near. It confused me.This wasn’t a feeling I normally carried, nor a reaction I understood.

For months, I questioned my spiritual journey, felt guilty about my emotions, and avoided her presence. Something within me tightened every time we crossed paths. Then one ordinary day, while driving, I was struck by a vivid vision, clear, uninvited, undeniable.

I saw a past life unfold: She was my stepsister, favoured, loved, protected. Our stepmother adored her and dismissed me. My father in that lifetime played a passive role, allowing emotional wounds to deepen. And in this lifetime, both souls returned, playing eerily similar roles.The step-sister figure who triggered resentment. The father figure who, once again, stirred my emotional instability by judging my intuition.

In that moment of revelation, everything clicked into place.The emotion I felt wasn’t rooted in this lifetime, it was karmic residue seeking release. Over the following years, I worked on forgiveness, meditated through the knots of old emotion, and slowly released the karmic charge.Today, when I meet her, we engage without friction.The heaviness is gone. We are at peace.

This experience became the seed for the world of Let The Fish Fly. Every character in the novel carries a past-life connection, a fictional narrative woven from real visions and karmic memories.

How Past Lives Shape Our Present Relationships

Understanding karmic continuity reframes how we perceive the people in our lives. We stop seeing them as random participants and begin recognising them as souls we share deep, timeless bonds with.

Here are three ways this awareness shifts our understanding:

1. Familiarity Beyond Logic

Have you ever met someone and felt instantly connected, as if remembering them rather than discovering them?

These are samskaric impressions, soul imprints stored in the subtle body. In LetThe Fish Fly, twenty-four-year-old Naina experiences this repeatedly through dreams and visions where faces from her past lives return as teachers, guides, and reminders.

2. Karmic Lessons Through Conflict

The people who challenge us often carry the deepest karmic significance.They arrive to push our growth, break old patterns, or restore strength we lost in a previous lifetime. Bonds that feel heavy usually carry unresolved history. Conflict, when viewed through this lens, becomes an opportunity for karmic resolution.

3. Soul Contracts of Healing

Some relationships feel soothing, familiar, grounding.These are healing partners, souls who return to help us complete what was left unfinished. In Let The Fish Fly, the letters Naina discovers act as bridges between timelines, uncovering the emotional roots of her present struggles.

A Shift in Awareness

When we begin to interpret our relationships through the lens of past lives:

• Conflicts turn into catalysts

• Attraction feels like recognition

• Pain becomes guidance

• Love becomes remembrance

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This awareness doesn’t remove responsibility, it deepens it. It encourages us to approach our connections with compassion, consciousness, and courage. Just as Naina learns that her present challenges are woven with forgotten lifetimes, we too are invited to trust our intuition, those subtle nudges, repeated patterns, and mysterious emotions that arise without clear cause. They are often the echoes of who we once were.

How to Recognise Karmic Connections

Here are simple ways to identify past-life bonds in your present relationships:

• Notice instant emotional reactions: Strong comfort or discomfort often signals karmic ties.

• Observe repeating patterns: Recurrence usually points to unfinished lessons.

• Reflect on dreams and flashes of imagery: The subconscious often remembers what the conscious mind forgets.

• Pay attention to synchronicities: Especially when someone appears at strangely perfect timing.

• Ask what the relationship is teaching you: Not why is this happening to me? but why is this happening for me?

  
  

Closing Thought

In this lifetime, we meet thousands of souls. But only a few carry echoes loud enough to shift our destiny. Let The Fish Fly invites its readers, just as Naina discovers, to listen deeply to these echoes. Because behind every connection lies a memory, a lesson, and a path that stretches far beyond the visible world.

Love, Ekta Bajaj