Buddhism

You have a seed in you, the Buddhata, which is the core of your consciousness. This core collects all the experiences and lessons throughout every lifetime. Even if you are born with a different gender, in a different culture, the tendencies, reactions and cravings will be the same. Your way of being stays the same, as long as you don't work on yourself. If you want to change profoundly, in a way that persists throughout lifetimes, you need to work on yourself. This means that you have to study yourself, your behaviors (physically, emotionally, mentally) and then change your behaviors according to the eight-fold principles.

Here is the thing, we will touch a very advanced point here: Just changing your behavior will only persist a little. You have your psychological tendencies, preferences, cravings, etc. because your Buddhata is trapped in psychological aggregates. An aggregate is a psychological function. For example, in one moment one of your aggregates tells you that you'd like some ice cream. In the next moment another aggregate says, that you wanted to have that beach body by summer time and you shouldn't eat this ice cream. Then another aggregate takes over your attention and you end up binge-watching Netflix shows. These aggregates are carried over from lifetime to lifetime and keep us trapped in our typical behavior.

So here comes the advanced aspect: these aggregates need to be destroyed inside of us. This is called psychological death and needs thorough meditation, contemplation of oneself and finally the help of the deities, who have the power to dissolve these aggregates. This dissolution can take several incarnations, until the essence, the Buddhata, is finally free of all karmic tendencies and debts and can pass into Nirvana (karma = repeating cycles, Nirvana = beyond cyclic existence).

If you want to know more about this process, you can study the following course. It's Gnostic, but its core is esoteric Tibetan Buddhism: https://glorian.org/learn/courses-and-lectures/bhavachakra-the-wheel-of-becoming