How to Love Past Grief — and Past Lives

Bruna Nessif on the moment a Peruvian shaman read her leaves and her life

I had just woken up from a midday nap.

I don’t even like to nap. But I was wrung out in a way that only certain seasons of life can produce — the kind of tired that lives in your chest.

I had been checking in on my family in Lebanon, making sure they were safe. I had dragged myself out of bed early enough for a 7:00am Pilates class. And there was the Blood Moon Eclipse rippling through the cosmic field, that quiet but unmistakable hum that those of us tuned to these things can always feel. So when 30 minutes opened up between work and meetings, the universe seemed to be insisting I close my eyes.

I did. And then, barely presentable from the waist up, I opened my laptop and hopped on a Zoom call to meet Puma Singona for the second time.

Puma is a Peruvian shaman who has done profound work with The Shift Network. I’d only spoken to him (briefly) once before, but his name had a way of arriving in conversations followed immediately by the same three words: “He’s so great.”

Even through a screen, I understood why immediately. He radiates warmth the way certain people do — not performed, not polished, but simply present. It travels. You feel it without being able to explain where it landed.

We were in a development meeting, mapping out an upcoming free online event he’d be offering, and at some point the idea of reading coca leaves came up as a possibility. His face lit up. Without missing a beat, he reached into what appeared to be his pocket and pulled out a handful of dried leaves.

“I always have them with me,” he said, as though this were the most natural thing in the world.

What followed was one of those unexpected gifts that only arrives when you’ve stopped looking for it. Puma gave each of us on the call our own reading, one by one, blowing gently on the leaves before letting them fall out of his palm and speak. And then it was my turn.

“For Bruna…”

He held the leaves. Blew. Let them scatter.

“Open your heart. Especially for love. There have been a lot of fears, or maybe doubts, and it’s not letting you open your heart completely, because there is love. There is abundant love.”

Less than 30 seconds, and somehow, the entire last decade of my life compressed itself into that moment.

I held it together for the rest of the meeting… barely. The moment I closed my laptop, I was somewhere else entirely.

Roughly 10 years ago, I arrived at The Marrakesh House in Culver City to experience my first soundbath.

I was sitting on a mat in a lavish backyard. The air was thick with incense and Palo Santo, and I watched as strangers began claiming their chosen space for the journey, writing their intentions for the evening on white index cards. I didn’t know what to expect.

I’d arrived quietly desperate — yearning for something to believe in beyond the visible edges of my life. That hunger had launched me into an exploration of all things spiritual, and I’d been following each thread wherever it led.

That night, as the shamanic drumming deepened and the room fell away, the first of what would become many past life visions arrived. It came with a clarity that startled me — not dreamlike or hazy, but vivid and immediate, the way a memory feels when it’s yours.

Suddenly, I was sitting beside a fire. The night was dark and open. Across the flames sat my partner — I could feel him completely, the specific gravity of his presence, though his face remained just out of reach. We were Indigenous people living simply, quietly. And then men on horseback broke through the darkness.

I ran. Hid the children. Through the sliver of a cracked door, I watched one of the intruders moving toward my husband with unmistakable intent. I didn’t think. I grabbed a dagger, and I made sure he never reached him.

The vision lurched forward in time. Quick flashes of unclear images that led to the final image — the one that has never left me.

My husband was gone. I don’t know how. I only felt the weight of it, the absolute and irreversible wrongness of a world without him in it. I watched myself walk out into the night, barefoot, naked, a dagger still in my hand. The stars above me, indifferent and ancient.

And I took my life.

That life ended. But the grief — the grief didn’t.

~~~

Love has always felt like something just beyond my grasp. While the people around me moved through dating and flirting and the ordinary rituals of romance, I’d walk into rooms scanning for a face I couldn’t describe, carrying a sense of longing I couldn’t name. I didn’t know who I was looking for.

But I knew the feeling of him — the particular frequency of a presence I’d loved so completely that it had worn grooves into my soul.

The love wasn’t lost. But the terror of losing it again? That never left, either.

I felt it again in Egypt, in 2024. I was visiting Saqqara — the sacred burial site that holds a different kind of silence than any other place I’ve known.

Something pulled me toward a particular wall. When I raised my hands and pressed them to the stone, I wept before I understood why. The grief came first. The knowing arrived after. Another life, another beloved taken. The same ache, wearing a different face.

All of the healing work I’ve moved through in this lifetime has circled back, again and again, to the heart. To what I call the bridge between our humanity and our divinity, that tender and terrifying place where we are most ourselves.

Puma’s words did what the best spiritual encounters do — remind me of something I already knew but had stopped embodying.

I often share with my shadow-work clients that everything has a polar opposite. That the intensity of any darkness is always a precise measure of the light it mirrors. And so the grief I’ve carried across lifetimes — that still-raw, still-present ache — is not evidence of damage. It is evidence of depth. Of a capacity for love so vast it left marks on the very fabric of who I am.

The question has never been whether I’m capable of that love.

It’s always been which wolf I choose to feed: the one who knows that love and runs toward it, or the one who has felt the loss of it and can’t stop bracing for the next one.

For a long time, I’ve been feeding the wrong wolf.

The truth I keep returning to is this — we will never have enough time with the people we love most. That’s not a tragedy to be solved. It’s the very nature of love. It exists in bodies, in lifetimes, in the specific and irreplaceable texture of moments that will not come again.

All we can do is be present inside them. All we can do is choose, again and again, not to let the fear of loss be louder than the call of love.

And maybe — just maybe — the most radical thing any of us can do, especially in the world we’re experiencing today, is to love so completely, so without armor, that it writes itself into the root of our souls.

So that it travels.

So that it echoes forward through every lifetime there ever was and ever could be, and whatever version of us arrives in the next one already knows, somewhere beneath language, that this is what it’s here for.

There’s a lot of fear. But there’s abundant love, too.

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Bruna Nessif, also known as Mystic Bru, is a writer, psychological astrologer, and shadow integration-focused intuitive guide for people who are deeply self-aware yet still feel stuck in repeating emotional and relational cycles. She is a certified professional coach for high-conscious living, author of Let That Shit Go: A Journey to Forgiveness, Healing, and Understanding Love, and founder of Return to Self, an online publication devoted to storytelling and guidance around shadow work, self-trust, and the art of balanced embodiment.