Is there a past life that still affects

Short answer: the spread doesn't point to a past life as a fact; it points to a pattern you keep re-enacting, and the useful part is in the middle card, not the far-off past.

The three positions, this turn's draw

• Past — The Star, reversed. Something that once gave you a direction has gone dim or gone distant; the "who am I doing this for" is not being answered. That reads as an inheritance rather than an event: an old story about your place in the world that you inherited and have partly lost the thread of.
• Present — Six of Swords, reversed. The crossing is not completing. You are still mid-transition, still talking on the shore you said you were leaving — arguing a case from an old battlefield, carrying the whole kit when only three things are actually needed. This is the hinge of the reading.
• Future — Four of Cups, upright. A tendency, if the middle card continues: something is being offered at your feet and not picked up, because you've already decided nothing here is for you. Not a prophecy — the seat only describes what happens if the Six of Swords stays stuck.

Two of the three are Cups, and two of three are reversed: the whole thing runs through feeling and memory rather than event, and it runs inward. That is why the "past" here is best treated as inherited material, not a date and a place you can look up.

What I'd hold you to: if the pattern is really an unclosed crossing — if you are actually moving and only carrying old arguments — then the near-term risk is not a ghost, it is tuning out. If instead you have already left and the coast is gone, then this reads the other way: the Star reversed is a thing still worth re-aiming, and the Four of Cups becomes a live option rather than a mood.

The one step, in the next 48 hours: pick the most recent episode where you reacted more strongly than the situation warranted — an argument, a message, a table at a family meal — and write down the actual facts of it: who said what, in what order, and what you did next. Then take one specific question about your family's or your own earlier history to the one person who was actually there: not "what was I like as a child," but a single dated, checkable thing. Whatever comes back is the inheritance you can work with. What the cards say is yours is the pattern; the dates and names have to come from people and records.

Want the spread drawn as a picture, or this reading saved to your journal?