Past Lives

My introduction to hypnotherapy was through the past-life portal. On a whim, I attended a meeting of past-life hypnotherapists with a friend and kept going back. I began training a year later with a PhD psychologist from Austin, Texas, and became certified in 1998 after some 220 hours of lecture and hands-on practice. It was great fun and the source of several lasting and deep friendships.

But the most profound effect from visiting one’s own past incarnations and helping others visit theirs is the reminder that we never really die; we only change form...and we do it over and over again...often with the same souls playing different roles. Did you ever meet someone for the first time and feel like you’ve known them before? And maybe that person is now your best friend...or your spouse.

Or, perhaps you chose to incarnate this lifetime with a familiar old soul as your sibling or your parent or your child. It happens more than you realize, according to practitioners and academics who have researched the topic. In his first book, Journey of Souls, Michael Newton, PhD, condensed very similar descriptions of the in-between-lives scenario from more than a thousand of his clients to give us an inkling of how and why we reincarnate so often with the same souls in different physical “costumes.”

Past-life regressions can also explain feelings of deja vue. If you’ve experienced a strong feeling that you’ve been here before, you probably have. The subconscious mind holds all our memories...even from other incarnations. So you can recall that joy you experienced in a happy past life or reawaken special skills or talents you practiced while in another body.

What’s really enlightening is to regress into a lifetime when you were the opposite gender. One or two trips into the body of the opposite sex gives you far more insight about their challenges...and far more empathy...than you could glean from reading 100 books on the subject. Those gender-bashing jokes that clog your inbox don’t seem so cute anymore.

But a past life can be the source of a deep emotional scar, and some clients will spontaneously regress into a past life when searching for the root cause of a current-life issue. Physical scars, birthmarks, deformities, even tumors can also have their roots in a past life. In Children’s Past Lives, Carol Bowman describes how a stubborn case of eczema on her five-year-old son’s wrist disappeared only after he recalled being shot in that wrist during the Civil War. She also details some of the extensive academic research done on past lives by Professor Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia.

I can help you time travel to a country or an era that you think you want to relive; but your subconscious mind may have other plans. Often, it will shift you into another life in order to resolve some issue or release a trauma. I attempt to assist you in satisfying both your conscious itinerary and your subconscious side trip...and enjoy the ride.

To learn more about past-life research and practice, visit the International Association for Regression Research and Therapies, Inc. Click IARRT.