My Past Life Adventure
Posted by hannah on April 26th, 2010
Past Life Regression was the first thing I wanted to do when I started my hypnotherapy training. I’ve since branched out, and I trained at CECCH, where I learnt about Eriksonian hypnosis, cognitive approaches and NLP.
But Past Life Therapy is still close to my heart, so last weekend I adventured to Sheffield, to spend 3 days with Lionheart Training and 14 other therapists. Through pair work and group meditation, we looked briefly into several past lives each. I remembered being a bored young woman in Colonial England, a pilot, and an adolescent boy in Thailand.
Often clients seek past life regression simply out of curiosity. Other times, a client has a long-standing issue which evades treatment – and past lives turn out to be the reason. Trainer Steve Burgess teaches a system for asking the client’s subconscious to ‘diagnose’ whether a problem comes from this life or a previous one, and exactly how many past lives need to be explored before the client’s difficulties are resolved!
By the end of the second day, I was feeling very low. I had a sad feeling all that evening which I couldn’t find a reason for, so the next morning I asked whether anyone else in the group had been feeling similar. Steve suggested I ‘volunteer’ to be a client in the demonstration of a full hour-long regression. Another student, Sue, also wanted to work on a particular issue, so we began a joint session, while the other students sat in a circle around us to observe!
Almost immediately I felt so miserable that I couldn’t keep from crying. I saw myself as a youngish woman living in a cold country, and I felt that my partner in that life was dying. I hadn’t forgotten that a group of people were watching me; in fact I was wearing a biofeedback monitor which suggested that I was only in the lightest level of trance. These dejected feelings were already so strong that I barely needed to be taken into hypnosis, yet when I arrived on the course, I hadn’t been aware of anything that was troubling me that much.
While I was wailing, Sue was re-enacting being violently sick. She described being a baby, seriously ill in hospital. We could both hear and understand each other throughout the regression. I honestly felt that I could be making the details of this past life up – it felt like daydreaming, except I wasn’t in control of where the daydream went. But the emotions and physical sensations that Sue and I both experienced were overwhelming.
There’s a popular argument that past life experiences are not ‘real,’ but are metaphors for how the client feels in this life. I think that if you get strong images or impressions during hypnosis or meditation, it’s a good idea to work with these, whether or not they be literal recall of actual events. To me, it’s more important that clients get better, than that they can check the factual accuracy of every memory. But Steve refutes the ‘metaphor’ idea and says that past life regressions are too intense to be the client’s imagination.
Not all past life ventures are as dramatic – or traumatic – as mine and Sue’s were last week! If it’s just an ‘interest session’ you’re after, then you don’t need to delve into any difficult memories at all. But for clients with problems they want to resolve, discovering that those problems come from a past life can be a huge release. Once the locked-in emotion from past events had been expressed, clients can then move on from their old limitations. If you’ve experienced this kind of therapy, you’ll almost certainly feel fantastic after it, and the healing it brings is very long-lasting and deep.
Click here for more info about the Past Life Therapy I offer.
April 29th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
This is really interesting. I’m intrigued about what you experienced during the regression – what was it that made you feel so sad? Do you still feel better now, or has the feeling worn off?
May 3rd, 2010 at 12:15 am
Hi Georgina. It was so strange because to begin with, all I knew was that I felt totally dejected. I didn’t know what that feeling was connected to; no images came to mind. I felt it emotionally, and as physical sensations in my body – I know that my body was jerking around, I was sobbing of course, and I wanted to keep saying, “no” as in, “no, this can’t be happening!”
Steve, our tutor, prompted me a little to say where I was and what I could perceive. For a long time I couldn’t explain anything at all. After a while I saw myself going home to a house made out of pale grey stone. I knew that I was a woman, not much older than I am now. I then felt intuitively that my partner was dying of some kind of illness. That was why I was grieving, and because he was only young I couldn’t accept it was happening. I didn’t get a look at him though, which is a shame. I’d like to know if it was someone I know in this life. I think in a further session I could explore that further, and also find out more about who I was, the time period and so on.
But it’s not unusual for people in regression to remember feelings and physical sensations, without any images. One theory is that the subconscious protects us from seeing things we’d find very difficult – for example if someone is recalling abuse. Or it might simply be that the client isn’t very ‘visual’ – we also remember things through feelings, sounds and intuitive ‘hunches.’
I don’t feel any worse or better in myself than I did before this session. I think there was more for me to explore in that lifetime. But I’ve been in touch with Sue, the other ‘client’ that day. She’s been feeling great and has seen massive improvements in her particular issue – a great success!
May 3rd, 2010 at 6:29 pm
I’m quite interested in the aspect of memory. We know (‘we’ as in neurologists/psychologists – not me, personally!) that the memory is made up of quite a lot of fictionalising and imagination, and that there is very little ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ retained — just a mixture of our perception at the time and our perception now. So, from that point of view, it would be impossible to really ‘remember’ a past life. Do you agree? Of course, there is also the issue that memory is stored in a physical place (our brains), so it isn’t really possible to have memories from a different body, is it? Unless perhaps you could remember someone else’s memories, which I guess does happen. I know I have one or two memories which actually don’t belong to me at all, but they feel like mine. I wonder if there is something like this going on with past life regression? It’s not memory as we know it, but a mixture of imagination and our subconscious mind bringing images up for us to explore?
I guess if you believe in reincarnation, AND the idea that somehow memories are stored in the soul, rather than in the brain, you don’t need these kinds of angles. I find it all intensely interesting and would really love to have a go!
May 5th, 2010 at 1:33 am
Hey, great to hear that you’re interested in trying it out! These are tricky questions. Personally I do believe in reincarnation as a possibility – and I suppose that would mean that as you say, memories are stored in the soul. But I don’t have enough scientific knowledge or certainty of my own beliefs to say exactly what I think the soul is or how it links from body to body!
Funny you should mention taking on other people’s memories. A lot of hypno- and psychotherapists are now also talking about genealogical memory. There’ve been experiments done on animals which suggest that creatures can ‘remember’ information which was gathered by their ancestors – not learned behaviour but something which is actually passed on through the genes. So it’s suggested that a client might present with an emotional complex or trauma which has been ‘inherited’ from a previous generation. In regression, they might well re-experience the memory as if it was their own.
I suppose I’m pretty pragmatic in that I don’t know or mind how Past Life Regression works, if it comes up with compelling experiences which ‘ring true’ to the client and make for good healing!
June 9th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
Hi, have to say another great post
I’d been reading recently about (admittedly somewhat unpleasant) experiments which show that learnt behaviour (in this case aversion to some sort of harm) can then be observed in isolated newborns, so I definitely believe that memory can be encoded in DNA. How clearly these memories can be recalled is obviously a huge unknown though, scientifically speaking at least…
Very interesting, keep up the good work!
September 2nd, 2010 at 10:12 pm
i know i’m a little off topic, but i just wanted to say i love the layout of your blog. i’m new to the blogging platform, so any suggestions on getting my blog looking nice would be appreciated.
September 7th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Thanks, Russ. My site was created using a free wordpress theme – pretty simple to use, and I haven’t needed to play around much with the original layout of my blog!
October 4th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
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