I have called tattoos past life anchors, and while that phrase came to me naturally and still holds, the more I work the more I think portal is actually closer to what I mean. The idea of an anchor implies something being held in place, something fixed, whereas what I have come to understand through many years of practice and meditation is something more like a mark that moves, that recurs, that gathers.

There is power to this idea, too. To anchor, as in to steady oneself in the energy of this moment.

My experience of time is cyclical or overlapping rather than linear.

I see the essence of self in various expressions throughout time, which looked like different lifetimes from our vantage point of perception. Because time bends and folds, it seems that we can actually experience ourselves in this lifetime as well as in other lifetimes, embodied differently.

Expressions of self, stacked one upon the other across spiralling time, and the mark of remembrance… Tattoos emerge from the landscape of the intersection of the mind-spirit complex and the physical body. They are revealed as something that is inked or anchored throughout each incarnation, like a kind of information portal throughout time, as a way to gather the information from all that has been learned.
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retrieval, not addition

What this means in practice is that some tattoos seem to feel like they have always existed there, as if you are just excavating something that emerges from underneath, or remembering something rather than adding something to the energy field.

It is the experience of retrieving something from the depth of your being that is asking to emerge and manifest, as if you are revealing something hidden rather than placing something new. The body is not a canvas receiving new marks in that moment but a landscape being uncovered.

the field

My understanding of why this is possible came through many years of meditation, where I realized that I was both interacting with past life versions of myself, as well as interacting with the essence of a particular person who had passed on from this lifetime, such as my mother.

I wondered a lot about why it was possible to interact with both myself in a past life and someone who had moved on from this life, and I came up with a theory: there is a black hole at the center of every atom.

Black holes are mathematically infinitesimally small and infinitely possible, and as I continued to try to understand what was at the center of the atom through my meditation, I began to believe that everything is just moving energy, and that at the very center of every concentration of energy was in fact a black hole portal. So it is through the energetic field that we are able to interact with both ourselves in previous or future lifetimes and in different expressions, as well as with the essence of a particular person in this lifetime… because time is in fact a field by which we can move throughout at every grid point connection.

how it announces itself

In a session, when a tattoo is a portal image rather than a new arrival, there is a particular quality to the recognition that announces itself in the room. For a client, it may feel like excitement, it may feel like tingles or goosebumps, a sense of something being confirmed rather than chosen. For me, it may feel like lightness in my eyes or my shoulders, it may feel like fluttery feelings or butterflies, where I sense that we are reaching something that has a particular energy quality that makes me want to go further into it and explore it. There are two instruments reading the same signal, and when they align the work carries a different quality entirely.

the dots

My own past life anchor tattoos include the dots around my eyes, as well as different numbers of dots in different locations on my body. These came to me as apparitions in meditation, not as design ideas but as visions of what was already supposed to be there.

When I tattooed them, they felt like keys that allowed me to download information that is beyond my logical mind into this physical body avatar. This is so that I do not need to learn and understand again, but that I am working from that place of knowing, embodied awareness, from this information flowing through the mark of cyclical memory.

if you do not believe in any of this

The philosopher Kant wrote that perception without conception is blind, and that conception without perception is empty. The example that has always stayed with me is this: if you hear a language you do not know, you cannot even perceive the difference between individual words, it just sounds like a continuous stream of sound. But once you begin to understand even a little of that language you start to perceive the cadence, the spaces between words, the structure underneath. The framework does not create what is there. It allows you to finally see it. That is what I am offering here: not a belief system to adopt but a language for something you may have already felt without having words for it.

"Perception without conception is blind;
conception without perception is empty."
- Emmanuel Kant

If you are someone who does not hold a spiritual framework, if the idea of past lives or a broader energetic cosmology is beyond your scope of belief, that is completely fine! If you are a person who believes that the mind-body structure is fully integrated… then you are basically just working with your base psychology, and that is just as important. Your base psychology is the framework from which you create reception.

If you intuitively know something, you can imagine that you have a deeper intuitive guide within yourself that is reaching for a sense of healing, connection, and alignment. Here, then we are just in the process of naming it rather than trying to connect it with a larger framework, that might ask more of you than you are ready to give at this time. “Meet people where they’re at,” or something like that.

tattoos are transformative talismans

What tattoos give us is not new information but access to knowing what has been earned already, in a body we now inhabit, from whatever lifetime that information is coming from. It is not something we need to learn and understand again. Tattoos are transformative talismans, empowering us to work from a place of deep knowing.

tattoos as past life anchors