Have You Explored Your Past Lives?

Many years ago, I had a client who specialized in past-life regression. That's where a person is hypnotized and taken back to experience their past lives. Practitioners believe that people, after death, are reborn and live again, learning something new in each lifetime that helps their soul evolve. This notion is the basis of reincarnation. By taking their patients back to past lives, past-life regression therapists can help them sort out problems in their current one.

My client told me that if I was going to write materials for her on her past-life regression services that I would need to experience them, myself, first. So she hypnotized me and took me back to several past lives. What surprised me most was that in some lives I was male and in others I was female. Some of my lives were happy and others were quite tragic. This stirred my curiosity and I decided to do some reading on the subject.

The first book I picked up, Many Lives, Many Masters, was written by Dr. Brian Weiss, a psychiatrist who accidentally became involved with past lives when trying to help a patient with many phobias. He had found during his years in practice that he could help people overcome their fears if he could hypnotize them and bring them back to the original event that had initiated their negative feelings. That usually happened during childhood. So he picked one of her phobias, fear of water, and suggested they try to bring her back to what had caused it. She agreed, but what happened next turned the doctor's perception of psychology upside down.

He asked the woman, under hypnosis, to go back to the incident that had traumatized her about water. After a moment, she began to describe a scene. She was standing on the stone steps of an ancient temple with a baby in her arms. Flood waters were rushing in and the temple was the highest point in her village. But it wasn't high enough, and she and her baby eventually drowned.

His patient was in her early 20s and did not have the educational background to have described the ancient temple or other details that she had mentioned during the session. Also, in this life, she did not yet have any children. However, after he hypnotized her, her fear of water went away. Intrigued, he began hypnotizing other patients, with their permission, to find out if they had past-life memories. To his surprise, regardless of their education level, nationality or religious background, they did. He eventually wrote a book about it and, as I mentioned earlier, it was my first literary introduction to reincarnation.

Since then, I've enjoyed reading numerous books on the subject. One book that particularly fascinated me was called Journey of Souls. That author also hypnotized many people but with an entirely different purpose in mind. Instead of interviewing them about their past lives, he asked them what they did between lives. The answers were intriguing. Among them, was the revelation that we reincarnate in peer groups!

 In the upcoming book, Loitering at the Gate to Eternity: Memoirs of a Psychic Bystander, among the more than 100 stories of the paranormal in the book, some include tales about reincarnation. Time frames range from ancient Egypt to the American Civil War. I continue to find the subject fascinating and hope you will, too!