The best of prophets of the future is the past.
Byron
JOE Keeton is a hypnotist who has conducted several hundred past-life regressions. One of his most intriguing cases is that of Ann Dowling, a housewife from Huyton, near Liverpool, who during sixty hours of regression recounted her life as Sarah Williams, an orphan living in the slums of Everton in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Ann originally approached Joe Keeton in the hope that he might help rid her of two recurrent nightmares that had plagued her for many years. In one she was sitting alone in a small bare room, bewildered but filled with a terrible and growing sense of apprehension. In the other dream she was standing in a sordid basement with a roughly dressed stranger who was brandishing a knife. Both dreams left her feeling very disturbed for many hours afterwards.
Joe Keeton’s experience of past-life regressions is that it is memories of the most traumatic events in a previous existence which tend to emerge first. During Ann’s first regression the events that formed the stuff of her nightmares seemed to be spelled out in horrifying detail.
Q: You have a complete set of memories . . . you are free in all time. . . . You can remember everything . . . Where are you?
A: Instantly a terrified panting. In . . . a . . . basement.
Q: What is your name?
A: Frightened whisper. Aha . . . Aha . . . Sarah . . . aha. . . I . . . ca . . . ca . . . Hysterically. I . . . don’t . . . like . . . this . . . room.
Q: Who is with you?
A: Lindy . . . and Tony . . . and Jimmy an’ Jacky.
Q: If all of these people are with you, why are you so afraid?
A: I. . .don’t. . .like. . .this. . .room.
Keeton then told Sarah to go into a deep sleep and brought her forward five years in time. Her head dropped and her breathing became deep and regular, but she would no longer respond to any of his questions. This, says Keeton, is usually an indication that the personality is dead. Keeton told her to return to the previous period; her chest began to heave with terror, and her face became contorted with fear.
Q: Where are you now?
A: Breathless with fear. In . . . that . . . room . . . I don’t like . . . this room.
Q: I know you don’t, Sarah, but why are you so frightened? Why don’t you like this room?
A: It’s that man . . . it’s . . . that man.
Q: What man? Remember.
A: Aaah. . . . Breaks down in bitter crying. Get the kids out.
Q: All right, Sarah. We’ll get the kids out.
A: Oh . . . he’s. . . . got . . . got a big . . . it’s like . . . a knife. Screaming. He’s hitting me . . . He’s coming . . . coming.
She gave a cry of anguish and became silent. But first, at Keeton’s insistent demands, she gave a vague description of a rough man, someone she thought was an Irish navvy from the railway building, whom she had seen once before lurking in an alley as she took the four children she was minding back to their parents.
Does this suggest that Ann’s nightmare consisted of fragments of a dimly remembered past-life? Or that she had constructed a past-life memory that was an elaboration of the nightmare that had troubled her for so long? An even simpler explanation is that under hypnosis she had recovered not the memory of a past life but a more complete memory of the dream itself.
Virtually all children suffer from at least the occasional nightmare. In Western culture nightmares are attributed to unresolved conflicts or anxiety or stress. Often a nightmare doesn’t seem to relate to any concern of the dreamer which can be identified, but we explain this by saying that we tend to dream in symbols, and our dream are much more a reflection of our emotions than a straight rerun of events. Many people have a specific dream that recurs whenever they are anxious. In cultures where a belief in reincarnation is widespread, it is natural for such dreams to be accepted as past-life memories.
Ian Stevenson (Children Who Remember Previous Lives) has noted the similarity of some children’s vivid and recurrent dreams to their spontaneous, apparent past-life waking memories. And occasionally even Western families with no belief in reincarnation conclude that past-life experiences might indeed be influencing their child’s nightmares. Antonia Mills describes a case in which a child whose nightmares seemed to bear no relationship to any events in her present life was helped by the explanation that they might relate to some experience in a past life.
Heidi Hornig (pseudonym) was born in British Columbia in July 1982. She was a healthy, normal baby, but her mother noticed that she cried whenever anyone touched the top of her head. As she grew older she still hated having her head touched or her hair washed. When she was four she was thought to have “perceptual problems”—she had, for example, a very odd reaction when playing with blocks. She would refuse to build block towers, and when asked to copy a tower she would instead make a horizontal structure along the floor. When her younger sister made a brick tower and knocked it down, Heidi would get very upset.
In the autumn of 1987, when Heidi was five, her kindergarten class was involved in a project to make a house out of cardboard blocks painted to look like bricks. Heidi avoided going anywhere near this, and whenever it was knocked over (which happened frequently) would become very upset. Finally, and very fearfully, she was persuaded to add a single block to the structure. That night she woke up and went running into her parents’ bedroom trembling and saying that bricks had fallen on her head. She insisted that her head hurt, that there was blood on it, and that she could not see. She told her parents that the house had fallen on her head, that the animals were very hungry, did not have enough to eat, and were dying. This nightmare, always followed by the pain in her head after she awoke, recurred about three times a week for four months. She then began to experience the same distressing feelings while she was awake.
There seemed to be no medical reason for Heidi’s odd symptoms, and doctors concluded that she was suffering from night terrors. The family doctor eventually suggested that the child might be remembering some incident from a previous life in which bricks had fallen on her head. He suggested that Heidi’s mother should try reassuring her by telling her that she had no need to be frightened any more because what she remembered had happened in a previous life and could not affect her now.
The idea of previous lives wasn’t something Heidi’s parents had ever thought about; indeed, her engineer father found it quite unacceptable. But her mother was prepared to give it a try, even though she was not convinced it would work. She started a bedtime routine of massage and soothing music, and reassured the little girl that she need not worry about bricks falling on her head now because it had happened in another life that was over. She told her that only she, Heidi, could make the unpleasant feelings stop. She also asked Heidi to tell her a little more about her dreams, and Heidi told her she had been big, like her mother, when it happened.
Four months after the onset of the nightmares. Heidi woke up early in the morning, went to her parents, and announced: “It is over. I’m not having that any more.” Her behaviour changed; she no longer minded having her hair washed or her head touched, she no longer became tearful and anxious when her sister built towers and knocked them down.
Two days later she asked her mother how you knew when someone was dead, a question her mother interpreted as Heidi trying to integrate the concept of death with her experience in the nightmare. Two years later, when a neighbour died unexpectedly, Heidi took the news calmly and later said that the neighbour had left her body for a while but that some people return after being away for a time. Heidi’s mother felt that her daughter understood and accepted the concept of past and future lives more readily than she herself was able to.
Do we need the concept of a previous life to explain Heidi’s fears? Many small children hate having their hair washed; on its own, this is not particularly significant. Many small children have fears that seem to be quite irrational. And many small children have nightmares or night terrors. Is it possible that Heidi’s phobia about bricks arose from a nightmare or night terror, and not that her nightmare was a memory of being injured by falling bricks in a previous life?
Night terrors are not like ordinary dreams. The imagery in night terrors is not clear visual imagery as in a dream but consists much more of feelings—and a terrifying feeling of being trapped, or of the walls of a house collapsing in on one, is quite commonly part of night-terror content. But night terrors are not usually remembered, and in Heidi’s case the memory of the nightmare/terror persisted into waking life in a way that does not occur with a night terror and is rare even with a nightmare. Finally, phobias do not usually arise from nightmares, though nightmares certainly do arise from phobias.
It is impossible to say whether Heidi’s fears really did have anything to do with a past life. But from a practical point of view, using the past-life explanation worked and got rid of both the nightmares and the phobia.
Past-life therapy is becoming increasingly popular. People are often anxious to explore their past lives under hypnosis out of curiosity, or just for fun, but most reputable hypnotherapists now will refuse to regress someone for this reason alone. They offer past-life regression only if they think it might help to solve someone’s present problems. But it is still a controversial area. Is it really good therapy to look for the origins of present-day problems in a past life? As a general rule, the origins of most of our problems, both physical and emotional, lie fair and square in this life, which is where they should be tackled.
A common belief among healers is that some present-day illnesses originate or are carried over from a previous life. There is no known way in which any physical problem could be caused by something that occurred in a past life. But there are areas in which looking for the cause of a problem is difficult or unproductive. It is often difficult to find the source of a nightmare or a phobia, for example, or to eliminate the stresses that trigger psychosomatic illnesses. Here, any kind of psychotherapy which can change the patient’s mental “set” and attitudes may work. Regression therapy is one way of doing this.
Gillian Goddard described to us the way in which recognition of past lives had helped her. From the age of about seven Gillian suffered a recurring nightmare followed by sleepwalking, panic attacks, hyperventilation, etc. When she was 45 she decided to go to a spiritual healer, feeling that she had nothing to lose. She says: “The depression and panic attacks went away. The cause—three past lives—started to come to the surface in several ways: dreams, meditation, etc.” In one of these lives she was accused of witchcraft, ducked, tortured and burned. In another she was burned as a heretic; in a third she seemed to see a human sacrifice. Discovering traumatic past-life episodes would probably have been enough to make anyone feel grateful for whatever the fates may have dealt them this time around.
Elizabeth Royce (pseudonym), herself a healer, described an experience she had during a meditation which involved not only herself but another healer. In the experience:
I was a very small child in America, and I was on a very long walk or trek. My father was with me, and I recognised him as my friend and mentor in this life. The scene then changed, and I was a few years older, about nine or ten, and I was playing in a very large field. Suddenly, five Red Indians appeared in war paint, whooping and circling. I turned and ran and at the same time I saw my father on horseback galloping frantically towards me to save me. Just as he got to me I was brought out of the vision or memory by a sudden intense pain in my right lung (I felt this as a real physical here-and-now pain, not a remembered one), and I knew I’d been hit by an arrow. I felt, although I didn’t actually see it, that my father had also been hit.
Elizabeth’s “friend and mentor” in this life is another healer, Barry, a man who is a strong Roman Catholic and did not believe in reincarnation. A few months after her experience, Elizabeth and her husband called to see Barry and found him feeling unwell. He explained that he had severe recurrent chest pains for which no explanation could be found, and he asked Elizabeth for some healing. This she did, but didn’t say a word about her experience because, she says, “I was afraid he’d think I was off my head or worse.”
A few months later they again met Barry and this time Elizabeth suddenly decided she would tell him about the Indians. To her astonishment, as soon as she mentioned feeling the pain in her lung, Barry abruptly broke in and said: “I always knew I was shot in the chest.” He then told her that every time he had this pain he felt it was because he’d been shot or hurt in some way but didn’t understand how or where or when. “He completely accepted the fact that we had probably shared a life together as father and child: hence the connection in this life, albeit in very different circumstances.” Can one prove that these two really did share a past life together? Of course not, but certainly Barry hasn’t suffered any chest pain since.
David Bryant has also described how he found past-life healing effective. For over sixty years David had suffered from “an extremely nervous bowel.” Finally, after trying many different medicines he plucked up the courage to see a hypnotherapist. In a trance state he was taken back to what he saw in his mind’s eye was 1700. He saw a young man standing before a big house in the country and “just knew” it was himself. Then he watched a man whose face he could not see coming towards him, attacking him. They fought with swords, and his assailant was killed. He himself was taken away and locked up somewhere very dark. He feels pain in his lower abdomen and knows that he is dying. At this point the hypnotherapist brought him round and said: “Now, we do not know if that is fact or fiction, but all will be well now.” And indeed it was. That was three years ago, and Mr. Bryant has not had any problems with his bowels since.
Phobias, too, seem to respond well to past-life therapy. Phobias are irrational; most people who have a phobia have no idea how it arose and accept that their fear is illogical. Invoking a past life may at least make them feel there is a reason for their fear.
Denise Chamberlain’s mother remembers that as soon as Denise could draw, she would spend many hours unaccountably drawing image after image of people dying from stab wounds. Understandably, this troubled her mother. Denise remembers drawing the pictures but had no idea why she drew them, only that she felt she needed to. She had, she says, “a feeling of an awful shadow hanging over my life, but nothing more tangible than that. As I grew older, the compulsion gradually ceased.” She wonders now whether the experience could be indicative of a past life. As an adult she continues to have a great and unexplained fear of knives. Although she is not usually squeamish, once when she cut her hand chopping vegetables she became nearly hysterical, although she knew the wound was only superficial.
Sometimes recognising the apparent origin of an anxiety is enough in itself to help resolve it. Marion Pearn had had a number of hypnotherapy sessions in the past in which nothing had emerged to indicate a past life. Then she spent a week at Findhorn at a workshop that was concerned with spiritual growth and quite unconnected with reincarnation. In a relaxation session at the outset of the workshop, “I found myself on the Somme, in the First World War, as an ambulance stretcher-bearer. All around was utter desolation, bodies everywhere, and I felt so bad at knowing I could not save everyone. But I tried my hardest and saved all I could. As this was happening, I actually felt a cracking feeling in the groin area and almost heard it too. It was the release of tension that was manifested when my mind was accepting I could not help all the casualties of the war on the Somme.” For Marion, the effects of this release of tension on her anxiety problems continued for months afterwards.
Although the regression therapist may explain present-life fears in terms of past-life traumas, it is, of course, equally logical to say that a fantasy past life is very likely to embody present-life fears. The following account by Dr. Wambach, an American hypnotherapist who believed that she herself had had a past life and who, before her death in 1985, had conducted at least 1,000 past-life regressions, demonstrates this very clearly. Here she is describing the regression of one of her patients, Betty, to a fifteen-year-old girl in England in the seventeenth century.
She was despondent because she had just escaped from a fire that destroyed her home and that of many others . . . Because all other members of her family died in the fire, she was apprenticed to a tavern-keeper, and thereafter led a very difficult life as a barmaid. Although her personality as a feisty wench who fought for herself came through, she was repeatedly abused and mistreated, and eventually died, very painfully, after being raped and beaten by several drunken men.
Betty experienced considerable emotion . . . after she came out of the hypnotic session. “You know, I smelled the alcohol on those men,” she said, “and I felt the same feeling that I’ve had in this life . . . I’ve always been unusually afraid of people who are drinking. Now I feel I understand why. It’s because I died at the hands of drunken men.”
That Betty’s terror of drunkenness had its roots in her rape by drunken men in a previous incarnation is one way of looking at it. But just as valid and perhaps more credible is to conclude that her past-life memory was a fantasy that took that particular form because of her fear of drunkenness. “I felt the same feeling that I’ve had in this life,” she says.
A literal belief in reincarnation is not necessary for regression therapy to work. How credible someone finds the past life they are regressed to will depend more on the beliefs, attitudes and expectations they hold before the therapy starts, or which are transmitted to them by the therapist, than on anything they experience during the regression. Some hypnotherapists present reincarnation from a point of view that assumes some notion of ongoing self. Others find it more helpful to suggest that the past-life experience is fantasy or metaphor.
Robert Jarmon and Roger Woolger are two of the most experienced practitioners of regression therapy. They use it because they have discovered it works. Whether or not their patients are literally regressed to a past life is of secondary importance to them.
Robert Jarmon is an American psychiatrist who had never been particularly interested in reincarnation until he was consulted by a woman, Anna, who wanted him to help her lose weight. Dr. Jarmon had previously used hypnosis to help patients lose weight, and Anna proved to be a good hypnotic subject. However, after two months of successful treatment, she suddenly developed abdominal pain, swelling and tenderness on the right side of her lower abdomen. She also stopped menstruating. Despite extensive tests, no medical reason could be found. Then, during a session with Dr. Jarmon five months after her last menstrual period, Anna started to talk about her mounting, though vague, feelings of anxiety and depression. She seemed to have some personal problem that she could not or would not put into words. Dr. Jarmon decided to put her under hypnosis and instructed her to go back to where her problem started. In deep trance, Anna held her right side and began to moan as Dr. Jarmon questioned her, asking what was troubling her, and where and when it was happening.
Anna then started to talk about a different lifetime in which she was a nineteen- year-old girl, Elizabeth, in her fifth month of pregnancy. She said little about the time and place, apart from the fact that she was in Europe and that the time was “centuries ago,” but was much more concerned about the specific scene she was remembering—her difficult, painful pregnancy and the priest and physician she could hear talking at her bedside. The doctor wanted to remove the unborn child from the womb to save Elizabeth’s life; the priest was insisting that it was wrong to take life even to save a life. “If God wills that the woman die,” he said, “then she dies.”
At this point Dr. Jarmon noticed that Anna became visibly weaker, and a look of serenity came over her face. Suddenly, she became absolutely still. Asked what was happening, she replied: “I’ve died. I’m floating now. I’m floating up—into a tunnel of light.” Dr. Jarmon then talked to her soothingly, reassuring her that the pain of her previous life had died when that body had died and would no longer afflict her. When Anna was brought out of her trance the pain had gone, and so had the swelling and tenderness. And that evening she started menstruating for the first time for five months.
What is interesting in Dr. Jarmon’s account of this experience, described in his book Discovering the Soul, is that, although the patient is evidently “cured,” he does not let matters rest there. The following week, in another session with Anna, he again regressed her to “Elizabeth’s” deathbed scene. He explains his reasons thus: “Without her consciously realising it, something in her mind or soul had been awakened or activated, had prepared her to go more deeply and in a more direct way into that life and death she had experienced centuries ago.”
What happened this time was a surprise to them both. Anna was Jewish, Dr. Jarmon a practising Roman Catholic. As Anna/Elizabeth lay on her deathbed once more, she began to recite what Dr. Jarmon recognised immediately as the Act of Contrition, the prayer a Catholic says at the end of confession or during last rites, a prayer that Anna, born and brought up in the Jewish faith, did not know and claimed after the session that she had never heard before.
For Dr. Jarmon this was a revelation. For him, regression therapy is a form of spiritual medicine, a way of “discovering the soul” and healing it. He accepts that the underlying concepts of the soul and the afterlife which are central to his work may not even be valid, but believes that this is irrelevant to healing effectiveness. His attitude is: if it works, it works. And he also accepts that it is not a cure-all; not all problems are purely or even mostly spiritual by nature. But he believes that the goal of healing should always be total healing, and that by working through past lives he has found a way of working on the whole human being, body, mind and soul.
Roger Woolger, in an interview with Reincarnation magazine, also maintains that he practises regression therapy simply because he has found that it works. He is not trying to “prove” reincarnation, though he gives the impression that he himself believes in it. But this is incidental to his work as a therapist, which involves using stories that may or may not be true. He says: “When the unconscious mind is given the opportunity to play stories as if they were past lives, it comes up with staggering solutions, releases, and spontaneous healings which you don’t get in other therapies!”
In the workshops he holds, Roger Woolger finds that one of the quickest ways to get people into past lives is to start from the idea that everyone has within them inner characters, secondary or sub-personalities which appear in our dream life. If you dig into these characters with a slightly different perspective, he says, you find that they have past-life biographies. Participants are asked to do very simple exercises to call one or two of these characters up. Then they try to find one or two places in the world which either attract or repel them, and to imagine they are living there in another lifetime. These countries are, he says, “charged” because the soul remembers them at some very deep level.
Although he believes that between 10 and 30 percent of what comes up is fantasy, he also believes that he can distinguish between a fantasy reconstruction and a genuine past-life memory. This goes for his own past-life memories too. Some of them he can’t accept but treats as fantasies; others seem to him to be parts of himself, but not his whole self, just as his dreams are part of him, but not him. It is as if a sub-personality within him has a memory of being, say, a thirteenth-century soldier, so that he will say, “I have the remnants of such and such in me today,” rather than, “I was such and such. . . .”
Regression therapy very seldom provides any evidence of reincarnation. It is used as a tool to help the patient achieve insight into a problem, in the same way as dream therapy is often used by psychotherapists. The questions the therapist asks have only one aim—to discover whether traumatic events in a past life lie at the root of difficulties in this. A past-life regression that is attempting to prove reincarnation will take a quite different form. The hypnotist will try to elicit as many details as possible—names, dates, places, anything that can be checked to see how well the past-life story hangs together. It seldom does. Neil Robinson, however, has told us of one occasion when both therapist and client were taken aback when he decided to check out the memories of a past life.
Neil is a professional hypnotherapist and member of the National Society of Professional Hypnotherapists, practising in Edinburgh, who uses both past-life and present-life regression to resolve problems. Sometimes he finds that a client in a present-life regression will regress spontaneously to a past life. One day when he was regressing a client:
Under hypnosis she regressed to a past life in the 1920s and recounted details of her life—her name, where she lived, what she did and names of her relatives. She particularly mentioned her favourite aunt, Aunt Aggie. The client’s previous life ended in 1934. She was born in this life in 1946 and so therefore it seemed likely that some of her previous relatives were still around.
This lady had never been to England, and yet she had given specific details about names and addresses in Burnley. After the session, with the client present, I telephoned Directory Enquiries and gave them the surname and address that she had relived. I was given two telephone numbers for that name in that street in Burnley. One was identical to the house number that she had said she lived at. With the client’s permission, I telephoned that number and asked for Aunt Aggie. I was told by the person who answered the phone that Aunt Aggie had died about five years ago.
My client was freaked out by this and, understandably, did not want to continue any further.
Neil Robinson adds that his client had no relatives in Burnley—in fact, hadn’t even heard of the place. After the session was finished, one of the first things she asked was: “Is there such a place as Burnley? I have never heard of it before. Where is it?” Coincidence is really the only rational explanation for this, and yet the account would involve four coincidences: name, house number, street name and town all checked out. Is this really that much easier to believe than the idea that Neil’s client had somehow tuned in to memories of a past life, whether her own or someone else’s?
There are dangers in past-life therapy. The psychological effects of a past-life regression can be dramatic and can create emotional reactions that an inexperienced or inadequately qualified therapist may be quite unable to deal with. The following two accounts hold a warning.
Christine Pye told us that she had been fascinated by aircraft ever since a boyfriend first took her gliding at the age of seventeen. She became a regular attender at airshows and “spent many hours crying underneath the belly of aircraft unable to move, racked with emotion and totally unable to explain just what I am crying about.” She became involved with spiritualism and in a trance state one day experienced the horrific death of an airman. “The burning explained why I have always felt something different about one side of my face, why my face changes when I stare into the mirror, why I fear flames.”
After several past-life regression sessions with a hypnotherapist, Christine eventually relived in the spiritualist circle the exact death sequence she had experienced. For her it was a healing experience. “Since that experience of going back I have become my ‘own’ person. I am able to cope with situations I once feared, stand up for myself . . . I believe my insight into my past lives has given me much strength and inspiration to better this one.” She also adds that her belief that we live many lives has eliminated any fear she may have had of death. But she also adds a warning note for anyone who contemplates exploring their own past lives. “The state I was in after that session was fairly distressing—taking a few weeks to settle. I was sweating, crying and terribly emotional and had vivid dreams for several weeks.”
Katherine Callaghan (pseudonym) also questions the wisdom of anyone who decides to have hypnotic regression out of curiosity. She herself went to a hypnotherapist looking for stress relief. After four or five sessions in which she recounted her dreams, one day in a session she found herself in a quite different state, “in a dream, but it wasn’t one”:
My name seemed to be Irmgut, and I was driving a buck wagon home. My dress and the stuff it was made of was so important to me. I could feel the fine cotton petticoat against my lap, and my hands with the bridle in them were on my lap. I just loved the dress. It was blue and white fine gingham with small red rosebuds sewn around the hem. My young child, about six months, was in a carrying crib and was dressed in a linen bonnet and dress that was creamy white with fine embroidered trims my mother had done. I was on a country road with a slow gradient down. On the right was tall grain, corn or maize, which was golden. It was a beautiful Sunday evening in summer, and I could smell and feel all of it more pronounced than in any waking dream. To the left the grass was green and sloped down to the small group of trees on the horizon. I saw one young brave come over the horizon on horseback, followed by another three. I was in terror because I could see they were either drunk or drugged. I looked at the baby and lifted the gun under the seat. I checked it was loaded and went on. I fired at the Indians first and brought one of them down. They came screaming and yelping. I woke up in terrible pain; my baby lay dead by the upturned wagon. My dress was all torn, which upset me so much, and I had obviously been beaten and raped. When I next awoke I was lying on bracken and wood. They’d cut my beautiful long golden-brown hair and I knew they had brought me to a village. I could see a totem pole, which terrified me because it was so tall. I realised that the crackling sound I could hear was the fire below me. I was more terrified than ever, although very dopey as if half-conscious. Thankfully, the smoke started choking me as I felt my feet and legs burning, but I could smell the burning skin. I never wanted to experience it again.
At this point Katherine came out of the trance state, very agitated. At the next session the same thing happened. At that point she told her therapist: “I’m pulling the curtain shut on this—this is enough.” The effects of the experience persisted for several weeks—at one point, she says, she came across a totem pole at a garden festival and had “an intense and frightening reaction to it.” The whole experience made Katherine question the wisdom of anyone who wants to explore their past lives out of curiosity.
Was this imagination, cryptomnesia or a past-life memory? Had the whole scenario been lifted from some episode of Wagon Train? Katherine doesn’t know. She says herself that she has a vivid and lively imagination and always has had. But cowboy stories have never been of much interest to her.
Katherine does also remember that when she was four years old and looking at an old National Geographic magazine with her granny, she told her granny that she could read Chinese. She insisted that she had another granny who watched her in a parade with lots of other little girls, and she could take only tiny steps. She remembers that her Chinese granny sat on a seat to the left of the parade, which took place under a closed terrace. In this memory, too, she was immensely conscious of what she was wearing—a green silk outfit. This is one clue that the experiences may owe at least something to Katherine’s present life rather than a past one—when she was a small child her mother was a seamstress and tailoress and Katherine grew up very aware of materials.
Predictably, Katherine’s Scottish granny told her not to be so silly and to forget the whole thing—and, she says, she more or less did.
How effective is past-life regression as a form of psychotherapy? In the hands of an experienced and qualified hypnotherapist, past-life regression can be a useful tool to help patients deal with fears and emotions that may be too difficult or painful for them to face in full consciousness. By distancing them from reality, the therapist can make it safe for them to face and deal with these emotions. The whole process of hypnosis, which involves physical relaxation and rapport with the therapist, together with the fact that the patient is being offered an explanation for his or her experiences are all likely to have a therapeutic effect.
In the hands of a good, charismatic therapist, almost any therapy—or even none at all—will probably work. The placebo response is good evidence of this. But in the hands of non-professional therapists who themselves have a strong belief in past lives, and who may try to persuade vulnerable clients of the truth of the memories induced, regression therapy has huge risks.
Perhaps the greatest danger is that regression therapy is too easy. It is not difficult to induce a hypnotic-trance state—virtually anyone can learn to do it. In the UK this area is not controlled by legislation: anyone can set himself up as a past-life therapist. An unqualified or poorly trained therapist may unintentionally reinforce or encourage or even implant a belief in false memories. When these memories suggest an innocent belief that you have been a thirteenth-century Italian peasant, this doesn’t much matter. But belief in a false memory of sexual abuse in this life, for example, may devastate families and ruin lives. There is also no doubt that some patients are severely traumatised by the lives or memories that are evoked. Handling traumatised people requires professional training: an inexperienced or unqualified therapist may not have the skills to help the client deal adequately with any traumatic memories or strong negative feelings that arise.