In 1994 a 41-year-old English-woman, Jenny Cockell, was filmed by an American TV crew in the overgrown ruins of an Irish cottage. With her were the former inhabitants of the cottage, three brothers and two sisters, all old enough to be her parents. According to Jenny, however, it is they who are her children from her previous incarnation as an Irishwoman called Mary Sutton.
Jenny Cockell next to 71 year old daughter Phillips in 1994; Mary’s children have said she looks very much like their disincarnate mother Mary Sutton.
Since childhood, Mrs. Jenny Cockell relates she has had constant dream-memories of another Irishwoman, eventually identified as Mary Sutton, who died more than two decades before Cockell was born, leaving behind eight young children. Jenny says that as a child she had a clear picture in her mind of Mary's cottage and its surroundings and could draw rough maps of the nearby village. This 'incomplete jigsaw' became a little clearer when she was at school studying a map of Ireland. Summoning concentration, she found herself repeatedly coming back to the village of Malahide, just north of Dublin.
After many years researching the clues given in her memories, she finally tracked down Mary Sutton's children and wrote a book about the experience, Across Time and Death: A Mother's Search for Her Past Life Children. This is a well-written, persuasive account of a past life, as well as the story of a mother's love for her children, a love that would reach across time and transcend temporal reality. For those who discount the concept of reincarnation and think that this is all that there is, I would suggest that they read this book and think again.
A warm, articulate woman, Jenny now lives in Towcester, Northamptonshire, with her husband and two school-age children. As well as the dream, she says she had many 'memories' from Mary's life, mostly of a happier nature and largely concerning the children, of whom she believed there were eight. Even as a child, her feelings towards them were maternal.
'I remember in emotions first, then pictures,' she says. These include snatches of personality. 'The eldest boy was straightforward, my little soldier; the eldest girl, patient and helpful; an energetic boy full of mischief; and a younger boy, a slightly nervous child I wanted to wrap my arms around but feared would be smothered by the affection; a tomboy, always out the house; and a lovely blonde girl with blue eyes.' The compulsion to find Mary's children remained with Jenny through adolescence and into her married life. Having her own children, she says, rekindled her maternal feelings for Mary's. In 1988 a local hypnotist, investigating the phenomenon of 'remembered' past lives, offered Jenny a free course in regressive hypnotherapy in return for help with his research. Under hypnosis Jenny was able to expand on many of the images she believed to be from her former life, details that would later help in her search for Mary's children.
Jenny then set off for Malahide. There her 'memories' were gratifyingly reinforced by reality. A jetty by which she recalled waiting was where she expected, although constructed of concrete, not wood as she had imagined. The layout of the village also matched her memories, she says, with the butcher's shop in the position she had given under hypnosis. The cottage itself remained elusive, though she felt sure of its approximate location. A letter written on her return to the owner of a farm she had seen in the vicinity was to bring her first big break. The farmer believed Jenny's description could only fit one family, that of John and Mary Sutton.
From this lead, Jenny then wrote to all the orphanages in the Dublin area. A reply soon came from a priest at a Dublin boy's home, who had found the baptism records of six of Mary's children: John (1923), Philomena (1925), Christopher (1926), Francis (1928), Bridget (1929) and Elizabeth (1932). Jenny was sure, however, that there were still two children missing from the list.
Filled with trepidation about how to approach the children, Jenny put an advertisement in the Dublin Evening Press, early in 1990. The first contact was to end in disappointment. John's daughter rang Jenny and he spoke to her briefly himself, but was reluctant to continue communication. He did, however, supply phone numbers for Sonny and Francis. The brothers had been reunited in 1985, although the whereabouts of the sisters remained unknown. This marked a significant turn in Jenny's life. Her search was no longer an isolated, subjective one, open to the criticism that her tenacity was the product of an over-active imagination. Other people were becoming intimately involved.
'I didn't know what to think,' Sonny says of Jenny's phone call. 'We are all Catholics, and Catholics don't believe in reincarnation. But when she came up and I saw her get out of the car, I could see my mother in her. There was a bond between us from the beginning.' First, Sonny saw a physical resemblance. 'Jenny has the same loving look, a way of looking at you and beyond you, the misty look they call it in Ireland.' To back this up, there were her memories. Sonny was convinced: 'Jenny remembered waiting at the jetty in Malahide but didn't know why. I told her I used to caddy on the golf course over at the island on a Saturday and my mother would wait for me in her black shawl until the boat returned,' he says. Sonny would come to accept Jenny Cockell as his mother reborn.
Frank's belief that 'she was appointed by our mother to re-unite us' closely mirrors that of Christy, a devout Catholic who accepts the explanation of his local priest believing 'my mother is working through Jenny'. But he now thinks of Jenny as a 'second mother'. Phyllis feels that her mother's soul has transferred to Jenny. 'I feel I'm protected when Jenny is there,' she says. This theory is rejected by Spiritism as it is much more complicated than the theory of reincarnation.
A few months previously Jenny had contacted an authority on regressive hypnotherapy, Dr Stephenson, who in turn referred her story to a BBC team working on a series about the paranormal. The series researcher, Gitti Coats, had already extracted a lengthy and detailed list of memories from Jenny. She now did the same with Sonny before allowing the two to meet, 'to avoid the evidence being contaminated'. She was impressed: 'The two sets of memories tied together very well,' she says. 'Nearly everything tallied.' 21 years had passed between the disincarnation of Mary Sutton and the reincarnation of Jenny Cockell: her determination to meet her 'children', who are now old enough to be her parents, has reunited a shattered family.
(Published at Correio Fraterno do ABC Nº 364)
taken from
www1.uol.com.br/bemzen/ultnot/cantodeluz/ult494u31.htm