Step into the profound world of soul connections with past life researcher Joanne DiMaggio, who guides us through a deep dive into the real meaning of soulmates—far beyond Hollywood’s romanticized notions.

Joanne shares her wisdom, challenging the idea that soulmates are simply that “one true love.” Instead, she reveals that our soulmates are a group of souls—our “soul pod”—who journey with us across lifetimes, showing up as parents, friends, coworkers, and even challengers. These soul companions help us grow, heal, and learn the lessons our soul chose before this incarnation.

Here are three uplifting insights from the episode:
🔹 Soulmates Are Everywhere: Soulmates aren’t just romantic partners; they’re fellow travelers—including family, friends, and even those who test us. Each soul connection is part of an intricate tapestry woven for our evolution.
🔹 Love and Forgiveness as Lessons: Challenges with others may be soul agreements made before birth, offering us opportunities for growth and forgiveness. By seeing the higher purpose, we can free ourselves from pain and step into wholeness.
🔹 Twin Souls and the Power of Purpose: Joanne distinguishes between soulmates and twin souls and shares how twin souls support our soul purpose, sometimes from the other side, and are rarely romantic.

Through compassionate stories and real-life examples, Joanne reminds us: you are already whole, not missing your “other half.” Each relationship, whether harmonious or difficult, is a classroom for your soul’s evolution.

Ready to discover the truth about your soul connections? Tune in for a heart-opening journey and let Joanne’s insights inspire your mystical path. Explore more at joannedimaggio.com and deepen your mystical journey with us this week!

 

Transcript:

Linda Lang:
Soulmates… What does it truly mean to have a soul connection with another person? Are soulmates always romantic partners? Join us as we explore the deeper meaning of soulmates and discover how these special connections shape our journey through multiple lifetimes.

Announcer: Welcome to Exploring the Mystical side of Life with your host, Linda Lang.

Linda Lang:
Hi, this is Linda Lang from ThoughtChange.com we are Exploring the Mystical Side of Life once again this week. If you enjoy our conversations, remember to subscribe, share with a friend. Today we welcome back past life researcher Joanne DiMaggio. Welcome, Joanne.

Joanne DiMaggio:
Thank you, Linda. I’m so glad to be here.

Linda Lang:
Joanne, tell us a little bit about how you define a soulmate.

Joanne DiMaggio:
Well, it’s actually quite simple.

A soulmate is anybody that you have had a past life connection with. So I like to tell my clients and when I’m doing a talk that we travel together as a soul pod, almost a soul family. So the same group of people that are with you today have been with you since the beginning of time. It’s just that it in every succeeding lifetime, we change her gender, we change the roles that we play in each other’s lives. But it’s the same souls over and over again.

Those are all your soul mates. And so you could look and see a soul mate in your parents and a relative and a friend. They’re your coworkers, they’re people at your church. They’re people in an organization that you favor. So they’re all around us and it isn’t just one individual, it is a group of individuals who have their own role to play in our ongoing awareness.

Linda Lang:
I think Hollywood has had an impact on what people think of as a soulmate, that it’s their “one true love” and that’s the person who will make them happy for the rest of their life, right?

Joanne DiMaggio:
Right. And when I started doing research on this topic, I saw that it went back thousands and thousands of years to antiquity. And there are stories of how Zeus split a soul in half, and ever since then, you know, we’ve got this mistaken impression that we’re only half of a person, and that somewhere out there in the great unknown is this other half, this other mystical half. And if we find that person, that other half, then we’ll become whole and we’ll be happy and live, you know, these wonderfully loving lives. The truth is that you are not half of a person. You’re not missing anything.

You’re whole the way that you are. And these individuals who come in and out of your life are meant to assist you with whatever you decided you wanted to work on in this particular lifetime. So they’re, they’re here to aid you. They’ll support you; they’ll challenge you. But they all have a role to play, and it’s all something that they’ve agreed to with you. And it’s really quite ingenious the way the whole thing comes together.

But I agree with you. Hollywood has, you know, made this… I mean, you hear commercials on tv… I saw a commercial for a paper towel product, and they mentioned soulmate, you know, talking about his wife of 50 years being his soulmate. I saw an article in the AARP magazine for seniors talking about soulmates. So it’s just so prevalent in our society. And it’s one of those terms that gets thrown around to the point where people don’t really know what it means anymore.

And they’ve got this idea in their head that it’s this romantic partner and that’s… you can’t convince them otherwise. So my book is really to talk about what other people in the field, in the field of regression therapy and research, have discovered about soulmates and twin souls, and hopefully to better educate the public about what they are and what they are not.

Linda Lang:

And when you say a soul pod, it’s like a family of souls, right? Maybe we think of our immediate family. But would it not extend further out? These pods must have some girth to them. There has to be a lot of souls in them to fill all the roles…

Joanne DiMaggio:
There are but, you know, you have a nucleus right in the center, and those are the ones that are closest to you. Those are the ones that are taking on the most challenging roles. And then you’ve got people in the periphery, so you’ve got people on the outskirts who’ll kind of come in and out.

And some of them will come in for a little bit, do what they need to do, and then leave. Others will be with you for your entire lifetime. But they all have, they all agree to a different role. Because in your pre-life planning session, when you’re in the afterlife and you’re planning your next lifetime, you are very, very delicately putting this thing together.

And you’re saying to them, “Okay, when I go back in and I become Jane Doe, I want to work on X, Y and Z. These are all issues that I didn’t finish from this other lifetime. And this new lifetime is going to be perfect for me to work on those.” And then you tell that to your soul group and they go, “Okay, you want to work on that issue? I’m going to come in with you. And I’m going to help you, and this is how I’m going to help you.”

Now sometimes when they come in with you, they’re going to challenge you and it’s going to be difficult to deal with them. But you’ve got to look at the bigger picture. You’ve got to look at what’s the end goal of all of this? What is the lesson that’s going to come out of this, that they’re helping to teach me?

That’s their role, basically. And you’re doing the same for them. So it’s very reciprocal. And like I said, it’s just a beautiful thing the way it all works out.

Linda Lang:
On a human level. It’s not all love and light and rainbows and sparkles when you’re interacting with the potential soulmates here, but up in spirit, it’s all organized with love and the soul’s evolution in mind.

Joanne DiMaggio:
If you have someone who has really wronged you in this lifetime and really hurt you, deeply wounded you to the core, if you can find the strength to step back, look at the situation, say to yourself, “Okay, well, what did I learn from all of that?” And “how did that person play a role in my learning that lesson?” Then it becomes a lot easier for you to forgive them, and forgive yourself, and to assimilate that lesson so that you don’t have to deal with it anymore.

It becomes part of your karmic attributes and positive characteristics. You don’t have to deal with them again. They’re yours for all time. So learning the lesson is the, is the hard part because you do have to put all that hurt aside and you have to step back and look at the situation objectively. Like by that person coming into my life and doing what they did, how did I change? What did I learn? You know, and then once you know what that is, that’s half the battle right there. You, you graduate to the next level.

Linda Lang:
As a past life researcher, have you ever came across any animosity in the spirit realm between lives, or is it really just a human trait?

Joanne DiMaggio:
It’s really a human trait. A lot of people think when they pass over and they go before, like what we call the Council of Elders, which is like the equivalent of guidance counselors at school. They get a sense of, I’m going to be judged. And there are some past life researchers that I know that talk about different tiers, you know, of souls that are at a higher level than others or, or, you know, this is a “young soul,” this is an “old soul.”

This is a… Mmm-mmm… I’m not… In the 35 years I’ve been doing this work, that has not been my experience. There’s nothing but love and non-judgmental support on the other side. We’re each dealing with our own issues. That is, that is for certain. And I remember, I think it was Edgar Cayce made this comment, “dead don’t make you smart,” you know, or not that.

No, it wasn’t Edgar Cayce. I think it was a Native American chief that said that or something. Somebody said that and it always made an impression on me. You think I’d remember who said it if it made such an impression. But I always remember that because it was like, okay, you know, am I going to run into any animosity on the other side? Am I going to run into any resentments or any people that are out for revenge or any of that?

And I have never found that to be the case when people talk about their afterlife experience and their planning of the next lifetime. So basically what it is, is you’re just looking at all the issues you just didn’t finish. You didn’t get around to doing. You know, it’s like going to school, right? You have your curriculum when you attend school and you’re taking X, Y and Z classes.

Well, if you fail a class, you’re going to have to take it again. But if you pass it, you never have to take it again. So that’s basically the way the Universe operates in this realm as well.

Linda Lang:
There have been people that have died holding on to grudges, resentments, animosity. So there must be something that changes when they cross over.

Joanne DiMaggio:
Yeah, and I, and I… One of the questions I ask in a regression is what were your last thoughts as your soul left your body? Because that often sets up the next lifetime, but that doesn’t seem to impact other souls. It’s really their own issue that they’re dealing with. They’re setting themselves up.

I had a woman who had head-to-toe psoriasis. I don’t know if I talked about this on one of your previous podcasts, but she came to me with head-to-toe psoriasis, wanted to know what its source was. Turns out she was a prostitute in the Old West. Her last thought when she passed was, “I don’t want to be touched again.”

And so that thought, I don’t want to be touched again translated into this life in which nobody wants to touch her because she has a skin condition. She manifested this skin condition. So there’s all sorts of ways for it to manifest. It doesn’t have to be tit-for-tat. It isn’t necessarily exactly the way, you know, you did X, and now X is going to happen to you. Although Mr. Cayce talked a lot about people’s attitudes.

Like, for instance, he had some folks come to him that were dealing with obesity, and he told them it was because they made fun of of people who were obese in a previous lifetime. So there’s that kind of an eye-for-an-eye kind of thing going on as well. But it’s usually a lot more subtle than that, which is one of the reasons why past life regression work is so important. Because it takes a look at those issues from all angles to enable the client to see what it is that they agreed to work on in this life and how to get past it.

Linda Lang:
You’ve been involved with the A.R.E. for a long time, the Association for Research and Enlightenment. What did Edgar Cayce have to say about soulmates?

Joanne DiMaggio:
Well, he didn’t believe that they were, you know, in that traditional mode of fulfilling you or being that other half of you. You know, he basically felt like, you know, nothing is random. So we come together for a purpose. And that purpose is, you know what I had said earlier, was to enable us to learn whatever lessons we needed to learn. And that includes your parents. You know, the choice of your parents is part of the whole soulmate process. Yeah. So to him, it wasn’t random at all.

It was very deliberate. And the reasons that we came together, and he used the phrase a lot “to meet self,” meaning that we come into another lifetime and we’re smack dab right in front of us are the issues that we brought in with us. And these folks around us are here to help us see that.

Linda Lang:
So would you say that it’s safe to say that your partner, your parents, the main relationships of your life are actually soulmates? That maybe there aren’t really that many new relationships in your life?

Joanne DiMaggio:
So if you use the definition of a soulmate as somebody that you’ve had a past life connection to, then yes. But there are people, like I said, on the periphery who may come in and out for the first time. My mother was like that. My mother… I didn’t have any sense of who my mother was on a soul level. And I knew my father. I knew that I had had past lives with him, but, you know, they came as a package deal.

So if I wanted to work things out with my father, here’s my mom with him. I found out much later that she had said that the reason, she wanted to see what it would be like to be my mother. Poor thing. And, and so, so we may not have had a relationship before, but because she was connected to my dad, it sort of came around that way.

Linda Lang:
How interesting that such a pivotal role in your life could be an actual new relationship. So I guess that teaches us not to assume, right?

Joanne DiMaggio:
Right.

Linda Lang:
Now tell us the difference between a twin soul or a twin flame and a soulmate.

Joanne DiMaggio:
Well, okay, so you have many, many, many soulmates. You only have one twin soul. And the easiest way to tell the difference between them is that a twin soul has a common purpose, the same purpose as you do.

So if I’m talking about giving an example, those of your listeners who know about Edgar Cayce… Edgar Cayce’s twin soul was his secretary, Gladys Davis, not his wife. Gertrude was his soulmate, but Gladys was his twin soul. How do we know that? Because when Mr. Cayce died in 1945, Gladys took it upon herself to save the readings that he did, those 14,000 readings that he did over his lifetime.

And she safeguarded the readings; she safeguarded the legacy and, and she safeguarded the A.R.E. That was her singular focus. So that’s an example of a twin soul. That would be somebody that you’re both working on the same issue. So it’s like a two-for-one kind of deal.

Now, the other thing about a twin soul is that they don’t have to be incarnate at the same time as you. They could be working with you from the other side. That’s happened quite a bit. And another thing you can recognize is that there’s a lack of competition between the two. There’s no one-up-man-ship, you know, like one’s trying to outdo the other.

That doesn’t exist in a twin soul relationship. You may never meet in any given lifetime. There’s no… and it is not… very seldom is it a romantic relationship. So there’s those sort of differences. But the focus is on whatever work it was that you decided you wanted it to accomplish together.

Linda Lang:
So not necessarily male and female? Not like a yin and yang kind of thing?

Joanne DiMaggio:
No. You could have two females, two males.

Linda Lang:
And not one soul created in one moment that is split.

Joanne DiMaggio:
No, no. I mean, you’ll find many, many past life researchers or authors or lectures will say that, yeah, there’s… the soul will split. I’m of the opinion after all these years that is one soul to one body. It’s very simple. I think we tend in, in this field, we tend to get a little heady in that we want to come up with all of these scientific theories that talk over everybody’s head. And my sense is we need to keep it simple because it’s really quite. It is quite simple.

If you want to complicate it, you’re welcome to do that, but it doesn’t help anybody. I believe past life work is a healing tool. It’s one of the most transformative healing tools that we have in our spiritual little backpack. Because with a past life regression, you generally only need one session. You don’t need to come back over and over and over again because you get right to the core. You get right to the root cause of what is going on in your life now, that you brought it in with you.

I remember Dr. Norm Shealy, who I so admired. I saw him at a medical intuition conference at the A.R.E. once. He was a medical doctor, since passed. He came up on stage and he said, all chronic illness is past life related. Now for a medical doctor to say! That blew my mind. That was the reason I wrote my book about karma can be a real pain, looking at chronic illness and its source in a previous lifetime.

Joanne DiMaggio:
But that’s basically how it works, you know. And you’ve got people out there talking about quantum physics and parallel lives and walk ins and all of this stuff. And I think it scares the average person. And if you’re going to scare the average person, they’re not going to want to even explore a regression when it could be so healing for them if they did. So that’s why I say I like to keep it really simple. And I don’t get into all those fascinating theories. By all means fascinating, but they just don’t seem to apply to the thousands of people that I’ve worked with over the last 35 years.

Linda Lang:
I’ll have people ask me if I think reincarnation is a real thing. And I do. But I also say that even if it isn’t true, it’s like the message from your unconscious and your soul to explain the circumstances of your life and give you insight that you need in a way you can get it.

Joanne DiMaggio:
Exactly. Because you know, in my line of work, when people have an “aha moment,” and they often do, it is so humbling for me to know I was a part of that. Because under normal circumstances, in a conscious state, they never would have thought of that. That never would have entered their mind.

But when you’re working with the subconscious, and here it comes, you know, I have so many people say to me, “Everything makes sense now. Now I understand.” Well, that little light bulb that went off is because of the regression and because they were able to cut through and see the origin of the issues they’re working on.

And it’s just so incredibly powerful. And for me, so incredibly humble to know that I was a part of that. So sometimes, Linda, when I ask myself, why am I doing this work again? (laugh) I think about that, and then that really just keeps me going.

Linda Lang:
Over the years, you must have had a number of people who have inquired about their soulmates, maybe what the past entailed or how they could meet them again in this life, or even if their current partner is their soulmate…

Joanne DiMaggio:
You know, like I said, if you use the broader definition of soulmate, that it’s anybody and everybody. if they’re looking for a specific romantic partner… This last research project I did on soulmates, I had several women and a couple of men who talked about a romantic partner as a soulmate.

And in every one of those cases, there was something going a little awry in the relationship now, and they couldn’t figure out why. When they went back, they could see a pattern. They could see a history of dealing with the same exact issue with that soul over and over and over again. They never got it right. They never resolved it. It just keeps coming up, some of them… It’s pretty devastating.

I had one woman who dealt with her husband in this life, was her father in a previous life, and he strangled her. It turned out she had multiple lives with him, all of which involved some sort of throat chakra trauma. He dragged her by the throat with a rope from a horse once, killed her that way. And now here she’s married to him in this life. Right?

She’s wondering, why are we having all these problems? So a lot of times they’ll go back and they’ll see, “Oh, it was financial all the time. He used me for my money. He stole money from me. He embezzled money from my family.” You know, so there’s always a pattern that gets uncovered when we do the regression.

Now, are there some who have a happily ever after? Absolutely there are. I’m not trying to say that you’ll never find that true love if you’re meant to. I remember once in a channeling session, I was talking about finding T.J. Davis, whom I wrote about in one of my previous books. He was the nephew of Edgar Cayce’s secretary, Gladys.

And Cayce had said he had been the reincarnation of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander the Great. I don’t know if we talked about that on your program or not. Anyway, I did an eight year long research on him because I was curious what was it like to grow up knowing you had been somebody that famous? Well, trying to meet him was the hard part for me. It took me years and years and years. And I went to a channeler once and I said, “Hey, am I ever going to meet this, this…?” I mean, every time I try to meet him, some obstacle gets thrown in my face.

And I never forget. I was told, “If you’re meant to meet, nothing you can do will stop it from happening. But if you aren’t meant to meet, nothing you can do will make it happen.” So that’s the way I feel about soulmates. If you’re meant to be together, heaven and hell will not keep you apart.

But if you’re not, if there’s some reason that you’re not intended to be together in this lifetime, there’s nothing you’re going to be able to do is going to affect that, that meeting. So throw it up to the heavens, put your trust in the Universe… even though sometimes that’s not easy, and go with it.

Linda Lang:
I think that’s a beautiful piece of wisdom and one that we can utilize in many areas, right? Absolutely. I wonder if any of your clients change their minds about what a soulmate was after having the experience of their regression.

Joanne DiMaggio:
I don’t know, because it seems like that whole idea is so entrenched in people’s minds that no matter how much evidence is in front of them, they still, you know, want to hold on to that. The one person that I had that affected me the most was Melanie and Mustafa, who I write about in my book.

They met through a Facebook group. She lived in Chicago, he was in Morocco. And their story is in the book. It’s one of the case histories in the book. But she kept insisting they were mirrored souls. And I had heard the term “mirrored souls,” but I really wasn’t sure how that applied to the research I was doing.

Well, as it turned out, this was going to be her last incarnation. And I don’t say that lightly because I have a lot of people who coming to me and they go, “I’m not coming back anymore. This is my last lifetime.” And I’m like, “Oh, are you sure about that? You have nothing left to learn?” Right?

But Melanie, we were going to do a regression with her to find out when did she first meet this soul. And nothing. And I thought, the thought came to me that they had never had a past life together. And I talked to her about It.

And she said, you know, I think you’re right. I don’t think we did well. Turn as it turned out, long story short, he was like the emissary that was sent to prepare her to complete her last lifetime. And then he was going to be accompanying her. They did get married, and then he passed on just a few years after they married.

So he’s working with her now on the other side. So it’s a fascinating story, but it’s a true love story. I ended the book with that because I wanted everybody to have a smile on their face at the end and not look at all these other examples I gave as, “Oh, so tragic.”

Linda Lang:
And one thing you talk about, which I found kind of interesting, is comparing soulmates to cellmates and how they can actually be kind of the same thing, right?

Joanne DiMaggio:
A soulmate is someone who comes into your life and keeps you emotionally imprisoned. So their purpose is to create chaos, and that chaos challenges us then to address the karma that’s going on between us. They come cloaked as soulmates.

So when you first meet them, it’s like, “Oh, I found my other half. I found my love of my life.” But they have a completely different agenda than what you think they have. Sometimes when you meet them, you might experience an immediate threat. There’s something… you can’t be around them without being on guard. Even though you love them, even though you’re attracted to them and you want to be with them, there’s some underlying thing kind of going on there.

This does not make them bad people or bad souls or whatever. They’ve come in with a… sometimes, you know, out of deep love for your soul, they’ve come in to really help you deal with some of those hardcore challenges that you need to work on.

I had that experience, certainly dealt with it for many, many, many, many years. Many more years than I should have but you know what I say? I’m an old soul, and old souls are slow learners.

Actually, I don’t believe in old souls because we were all created at the same time. But I like to think that old souls are just slow learners. We come back a lot because we have a lot to learn. But I’ve experienced that sort of… and I write about her in my book. And she affected my entire family. It was a really negative, painful situation, but all I could remember was how much I loved that soul in the prior lifetime in which we had a male/female relationship. And we’re truly together in that one.

So, like I said, that’s why you need the help of a past life regression so that you could obtain that objectivity that you need in order to open your eyes and see what’s really in front of you and then work through it.

Linda Lang:
Joanne, what words of wisdom would you like to leave the listeners with?

Joanne DiMaggio:
I would just say always, always… what I said in the beginning… you are not a half of a person. You are not incomplete. You know, our creator would not have created an incomplete version of himself or herself. Know that you are fully you and there’s nothing really, there’s nothing wrong with you.

There’s nothing somebody on the outside has to come in and fix. Go into these relationships with love, but with open eyes and understand that everything that happens to you in any given lifetime is a lesson. That’s all that it is.

It’s a lesson for you to learn. And once you learn the lesson, you graduate and you move on to the next level. And I hope everybody graduates very, very soon.

Linda Lang:
Beautiful. And your book is called…

Joanne DiMaggio:
Soulmates and Twin Souls Traveling: Companions on the Road to Enlightenment. And you can get it on Amazon. And if anybody’s interested in exploring their soulmates, you go on my website, which is www.joannedimaggio.com and I have all of the types of regressions that I do.

Linda Lang:
Joanne, it’s always a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for being my guest.

Joanne DiMaggio:
Thank you very much.

Linda Lang:
And thank you for listening to this week’s edition of Exploring the Mystical Side of Life. You will find all of our conversations on YouTube and your favorite podcast platform. Come visit me at www.ThoughtChange.com. Pick up your copy of Learning to Listen. And while you’re there, check out my program, Alchemy from the Inside Out. That’s it for this week. We’ll see you again next time. Bye for now.