Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve lived before? That you have been in this certain place before? That you lived in a different century. That you have known this person before? That you have loved him before?
Past Life Regression is the responsible and life-affirming use of hypnosis in the exploration of past lives – for the illumination and healing of our present lives. It challenges the conventional limitations of mortality, time, space, and ego while revealing the glorious creative power, courage and beauty of the human soul. Past life regression is about Love. It is based on the philosophy of reincarnation, or rebirth. It is not as crazy as you might think! Most of the planet’s population live their lives according to this concept of existence. After all, except for saints, isn’t one life far too shockingly brief for a human being to evolve into wholeness, into Love? How are MANY lives more miraculous than ONE life?
REBIRTH allows us to keep exploring, learning, growing, loving through many lifetimes. We can refine ourselves, touch more lives, become more compassionate, and recognize the Sacred in all that lives. Inherent to rebirth is personal responsibility. In reincarnation there are no victims. Oh, there are terrible things that can happen during a lifetime. But no victims. Between lives, with the guidance of the Sacred, we choose our paths for the next lifetime. We choose our challenges, our parents, our kicks in the seat of the pants, our illnesses, even our spouses. All so that we can grow the most we possibly can in a lifetime. It is like choosing the school you will go to, and picking the classes and the teachers and the fellow students. Then, throughout that life, in the course of our schooling, we choose our responses, our thoughts and actions.
Why experience past life regression? Not for a lark (sometimes it is hard work). Not to see if you were powerful or famous (odds are, you were a peasant). Not to see how you died (probably hundreds of ways). EXPERIENCE PAST LIFE REGRESSION TO SEE HOW YOU LIVED AND HOW YOU LOVED. To learn from your past choices and patterns. To let go of that which haunts you. To heal your present life. In past life regression, YOU REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE, A SOUL IN A BODY ON A MIRACULOUS ADVENTURE. A divinely human being growing into LOVE. As with any mystical or paranormal experience, past life regression can remove the fear of death. It robs us of that sense of meaninglessness that we can be prone to. It easily relieves phobias and shatters negative, repetitive patterns.
In past life regression, karma emerges, not as punishment for past errors, but as the means of correcting the imbalance our past errors caused. Karma becomes the opportunity to become a more loving human being by making more compassionate choices in the next life. Karma is the offspring of free will. We write the scripts of our lives. We choose the plot, the theme. We cast the play, choose the obstacles, the tragedies, the challenges. Even our parents, we choose! Not because they will be fantastic role models, but because of the challenges they will be for our growth!
In my experience as a past life regressionist, there is nothing linear about reincarnation or the recollection of past lives. Sometimes, a client will narrate two past lives which occurred in the same time period and therefore should overlap. Occasionally, a future life will be remembered. Past lives are rarely recounted in linear sequence. And the evolution of a soul never appears to happen linearly. We don’t seem to move from bad to good in a predictably orderly fashion. In hypnosis in general, there are not the traditional boundaries of time and space. We travel backwards and forwards, cyclically. We visit the future to transform the present. We go back into the past to rewrite the future. It is all mysterious and miraculous, but no more so than the birth of one child. Past lives follow suit. Often, past life regression reveals answers. But it always reveals more questions.
When I began conducting past life regression sessions years ago, I became discouraged. The lives held so much pain, so much loss. Most of us were peasants. And we struggled. There was famine, and war, and death in childbirth. There were crops to sow and harvest. Our lives were short. Our gains in a lifetime seemed so small. After dying, when I ask the spirit about the soul-lesson of that life he just lived, he responds in the character of the person he was in that lifetime. Not like an ascended master, but quite simply. And rarely is word ‘love’ used. The response is deeper than that. One man answered, ‘well, I stayed with Maggie and made sure she wasn’t afraid as she died’. How can you beat that on the evolutionary scale? Gradually, I began to see how glorious it is to be human, a simple, struggling, flawed human wrapped up in this divine dance of love. I began to see how noble and courageous human souls are. We keep coming back, toiling, suffering, laughing, growing… all for human LOVE.
In past life regression, it is common for death to be a relief. The exception is with violent death in which case the subject will often refuse to believe he died. He will present confusion about what happened after the bomb hit the plane and say that he can’t remember what happened next. A few people will experience their death with powerful emotion. In that case, they are instructed to pull back and view it like a movie. Past life regression is always safe. Parameters of goodness and beauty are set. Usually, much more emotion is attached to how they lived, rather than to how they died. In the interim between lives, critical questions are asked. What were your biggest challenges in that life? Why choose those challenges? Are you satisfied with the choices you made? Would you do anything differently now? What were you afraid of? Were you compassionate? What did you love? What patterns have you carried into your present life? What would the woman you were advise you to do in your current life? The interim state is complex. Answers are not as pat as contemporary authors in the field would like you to believe. There is not sudden enlightenment. Nor are there the nice, neat linear stages of afterlife clearly defined and put in a box by some pedants. The interim state provides the peace to heal. Then to assess. And then to script a new life.
Death in past life regression is very much like a peaceful death in real life. The hypnosis subject releases the air from their lungs in a soft, very gentle sigh, almost of relief. (And that’s how I know they have died.) Their features soften. A kind of peaceful bliss settles on their faces. Often, their lips curve in a small smile. And they drift and float. Recovering from a lifetime. This can happen even after a violent death. The state is so very beautiful, that they would stay that way for a long time, if I were not to ask them what they were experiencing. Often the subject is so deeply peaceful, that my questions feel intrusive.
Many books have been written on past lives, interim lives, and past life regression. The hypnosis subjects discussed in these books are those with extraordinary talent for hypnosis. Perhaps, one out of four people is a natural at past life regression. Others need to be taught while in hypnosis to trust their intuitions, to speak their memories without judgement or critique, and to trust the first image/feeling that comes to mind. In my sessions, depending on the fluency of the subject’s past life memories, clients usually visit about three lives. Those with the best recall often take the two and one-half hours to examine just one lifetime. All the lives recounted in past life regression are true. Most, I am convinced, actually happened or are happening even now. I don’t pretend to know. A few are clearly metaphorical. They reveal a truth about your current life and the challenges which must be addressed. Each time you are hypnotized, you become more relaxed and experienced with it. You go deeper. You see the patterns and the themes of lifetimes.
How do you remember past lives in hypnosis? Some people see. Some feel and it is like seeing with your feelings. Some can hear, even taste and smell. Some can tell you the weave of the fabric of their doublet. The remembrance of names and dates is not as common as you would think because, to the soul, they seem more irrelevant than not. Some people view the past life through the eyes of the individual they once were. Others watch themselves as if the past life were a movie. Cautious people may recall only safe memories. No one recalls memories with which they cannot cope. No one reveals secrets they do not wish to reveal.
One thing, I know. Past Life Regression is about LOVE. About how we create ourselves, our lives, meaning and beauty. It is about touching other lives. Living with honesty and integrity. About being creators rather than victims. About how we live, not how we die. About how we loved.
Are we one separate person, with one face and one rigid perspective of the world? Or are we more complex than that? How many roles do we play in this dance of becoming? Perhaps we must walk in every man and woman’s shoes? Perhaps we must be homeless, then soldiers, then sailors, then lovers, then farmers, then betrayers, then abandoned… until finally, you are me and I am you and we are no longer afraid or separate or alone. We are the heart of the Sacred.
