One of the most noticeable benefits of past-life knowledge is how it can improve our health. The mind affects the body all the time. Many people now think that there is a psycho-spiritual dimension to every ailment. Past lives, in particular, can have a direct influence on our physical wellbeing. Understanding how this works is one of the biggest health breakthroughs in recent history. It means that we can alleviate, and even completely heal, a wide range of physical problems by understanding the emotional reason behind them. Those reasons usually come from a past-life experience.
As with all important breakthroughs, this was simmering under the surface but resisted for a long time. In the nineteenth century, King Ferdinand of Naples ordered Lafontaine, a Swiss hypnotist, to leave Naples unless ‘he made no more blind people see nor deaf ones hear’.
When he heard about this, Pope Pius IX commented. ‘Well, Monsieur Lafontaine, let us hope that, for the good of humanity, hypnotism may soon be generally employed.’
Over a hundred years later, the seed of that hope is now flowering. It was tended and watered by the pioneers who discovered how past lives affect our health.
Edgar Cayce, the great psychic healer, diagnosed many physical issues as having a past-life cause. In one of his readings, he said that a woman had beautiful hands because of lives spent in selfless service to others.
On another occasion he told a deaf person not to shut his ears again to those who asked for help. That past-life deed was the cause of his deafness in this life.
In another diagnosis, Cayce stated that a woman had been born disfigured because she’d persecuted others during a life in imperial Rome. In her lives since then she’d achieved great spiritual development. Her physical problems in this life were the last bit of karma she had to deal with around that issue. All she needed to do was accept it, and after this life she’d start incarnating on higher planes.
The woman said that in childhood she’d been fascinated by anything to do with ancient Rome. After this reading she worked on overcoming her difficulties with ‘willpower, patience and prayer’. In this way she completely healed herself – not just physically, but spiritually and emotionally as well.
Past-life therapist Dr Morris Netherton didn’t believe in reincarnation to start with. He went for counselling because of feelings of inadequacy made worse by a chronic bleeding stomach ulcer. As he talked about all the pain he was in, a past-life memory came up. He found himself in a nineteenth-century Mexican prison for the criminally insane. A guard had kicked him in the stomach in the exact spot where his ulcer had developed in this life.
He had been in that prison because his wife had committed him as mentally unsound. She did this so that she could seize his land. With a shock, he realized she was also his current wife. She had become his wife again to make up for how she’d treated him in their former life together.
That night, he took her out for dinner. When he told her about this, he said ‘She passed out in her mashed potatoes.’
After that, the pain of his ulcer never returned. He went on to get a doctorate in psychology, and became a leading light in the field of past-life therapy. In his writings he described many cases in which finding the past-life cause helped to cure serious physical complaints such as epilepsy, migraine and incipient cancer.
Psychiatrist Dr Arthur Guirdham was also sceptical about past lives at first. But he later declared ‘There is no disease known to man the cause of which is entirely determined in what is called his own lifetime.’
Past-life researcher and author Dr Helen Wambach regressed a woman who was having occasional seizures. There was no medical reason for them and no attempts to cure them had worked. When they happened, the woman said it felt like ‘Going a million miles an hour’.
In the regression she went back to a life in sixteenth-century France. She’d been to visit a sick child. When the infant later died, the villagers said she’d killed it with witchcraft. In a torchlit procession, they carried her to the cliffs. Then they threw her over them to her death. The seizures were her body’s memory of the terror of hurtling to the ground below. After the regression, her seizures stopped and never returned.
Hypnotherapist Dr Michael Pollack had a lower-back pain that grew steadily worse over the years. In his article Have We Really Lived Before? he said he’d experienced at least three past lives in which he’d been killed by a knife or a spear in his back. Once he knew the cause of the pain, his back problem disappeared.
Professor Ian Stevenson described a case in Sri Lanka of a boy who’d been born with a deformed right breast and arm. His right hand couldn’t hold anything.
When he was about three years old, his mother said he started muttering to himself in a dark, solitary way. As she listened in, it became clear that he thought his arm was deformed because he’d murdered his wife in a past life.
The boy mentioned a number of verifiable details about that life – and it all checked out. He turned out to be the reincarnation of his father’s brother. That man had been executed in 1928 for the murder of his wife. His father said the boy had always reminded him of his late brother. From then on, both parents did everything they could to help and heal their child.
Dr Roger Woolger said ‘The body and its various aches, pains and dysfunctions is a living psychic history book when read correctly.’ He found that the body as a whole, as well as any part of the body, can carry the imprints of past-life shocks. These can come out in all kinds of weaknesses or disabilities.
He recommended the following healing methods:
In my experience, the most common and widespread past-life effects on health are:
In her extensive past-life researches Dr Helen Wambach found that until the sixteenth century, people lived mostly on gruel, roots and berries, fruits from trees and the occasional, small wild animal.
They had to scavenge for most of these things themselves. None of it was abundantly available, especially in bad seasons. So for the majority of people, hunger and starvation were always waiting in the wings, ever ready to strike.
Many people have experienced this kind of past life. Being reborn into a world that’s full of cheap and satisfying food would be like one of their wildest dreams come true. Survival is our strongest instinct. The basic compulsion for a lot of people would be to have as much of this food as possible before it all goes away again.
Dr Edith Fiore found that practically all her patients who were overweight by more than 4.5kg (10lbs) had been through a lifetime in which they either starved to death or suffered long periods of food deprivation.
One of my clients, Leila, came for a regression about the problems she was having with losing weight. She went back to a past life in ancient Egypt, when she was a little girl in a large family. In times of famine or shortage the most important members of the family were fed first. She was always at the end of the queue. As a result she died of malnutrition at a young age.
That life created an unconscious fear of famine. This drove her to eat as much as possible when food was available. When Leila realized where the problem had come from, it lost its hold on her.
Even when food deprivation is voluntary, it can have a similar effect in later lives. When Peter came for a regression he went back to a life in a monastery near London. He said his father in that life could remember the coming of William the Conqueror.
As a monk, he was very aware of the need to be humble. This meant always looking down, hardly talking and eating as little as possible. He believed in it all – but felt that the monastery applied it too harshly.
In later years, an epidemic killed many of the monks. When that happened, the old strict ways softened. The monks were allowed to talk to each other more. Life in the monastery became gentler.
Then Peter also fell ill. As he lay dying, he saw with joy his mother coming to take him to the higher worlds. He said it was a relief to leave that life behind.
Afterwards he told me that he was now the manager of a fast-food outlet. He could eat whatever he wanted there, and had overdone it. Now on a diet, he said he’d lost four stone, with ‘four more to go’.
The regression showed him that gorging on fast food had been his way of making up for the strict monastic life. With the help of this knowledge he lost even more weight, and soon moved on to a better job.
Sometimes food issues from past lives can show up in more troubled ways than simply overeating. For example, Dr Bruce Goldberg wrote about a woman who had anorexia nervosa because she was punishing herself for a past life when she’d been a fat and selfish man.
‘Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia often reveal old stories of starvation due to crop failure, famine or disease’, wrote Dr Roger Woolger, adding that ‘more and more cases of starvation from World War Two, especially in concentration camps, are now surfacing from the unconscious in contemporary cases of anorexia and other eating disorders.’
Those words turned out to be prophetically true in Venetia’s case. She’d always been interested in having a past-life regression. So for a birthday treat her husband arranged for her to come and see me.
She had a bubbly personality and was slightly plump. That turned out to be a good sign. In her teens she’d become bulimic but was now on medication to keep the bulimia under control.
In her regression she went back to a church. It was wartime. She was a nun, trying to hide a group of terrified people. To keep them safe, she was desperately repeating her rosary. But Nazi soldiers suddenly broke in and took them all away. They ripped off the wimple that covered her hair. Then they threw her into a concentration camp for having tried to hide the others.
The only food there was very thin soup – almost water – and stale bread. Close to starving, she had vivid memories of stuffing the bread into her mouth as fast as possible. Because of the conditions there she didn’t survive for long. Afterwards she said the way she’d gobbled the bread while in the concentration camp reminded her of her bulimic episodes. At those times, she’d eat as much as possible and then throw it all up.
As a nun in that life she’d felt guilty and ashamed about eating at all. Others in the camp needed that food. She’d blamed herself for not being above such ‘selfish’ behaviour.
After the regression Venetia realized that her experience as the nun had given her needless guilt about eating. This was the unconscious cause of her bulimia. Now that she understood its underlying dynamics, it would be even easier to leave behind.
In an interesting postscript, she told me that some time before she’d seen some photographs in a newspaper of concentration-camp victims from the Second World War. At the time, she’d had a strong feeling that she knew one of the men in the photographs. After her regression, she realized that she really had recognized someone from the concentration camp.
Of course, not every eating disorder or weight problem may stem from such dramatic causes. A life of just scratching and scrounging for bits of food can have its effects as well. But when we understand the causes of previously unconscious behaviour, it puts us, rather than our syndromes, in charge. We can then shake off those effects and move ahead in a more conscious and healthier way.
The skin is especially sensitive to our emotions. It can express unconscious fears, anger or guilt with symptoms like acne, warts or rashes.
Persistent conditions, such as eczema or psoriasis, may come from:
In her regression Molly went back to a life as a young man in a tribal society. He was newly wed and they had a young baby. He’d just returned home after a time away. His wife was delighted to see him again. But there was something bad he had to tell her. He couldn’t bring himself to do that. To avoid it, he kept busy feeding the chickens.
In the end he went to consult the village elder. There he confessed that in an argument, he’d killed a man from another village. He felt deeply sorry about it. The elder said he’d have to pay the full price because the other village would insist on it.
The price was death by fire. He accepted his fate. He went home to tell his wife and they wept together.
After a while he asked for the execution to go ahead soon, as he couldn’t bear the wait. He was overwhelmed with guilt about having ruined so many lives and for having thrown his own young life away.
When they led him to the fire he went willingly. But he lacked the final courage to walk into it by himself. They had to push him. He felt the agonizing flames licking around his feet and ankles – and then remembered no more.
After the regression, sipping a restorative cup of tea, Molly showed me the psoriasis she’d always had on her feet and ankles. It looked just like the burns from a fire. She said when she had been at school she’d had some bizarre reactions to the fire drill. It had often sent her into a panic. This memory explained why she feared even the suggestion of fire.
Molly left feeling optimistic that she was well on her way to resolving her issues and curing her psoriasis.
In one of his talks, Dr Roger Woolger said that when a traumatic event occurs in our life, we take in a big gasp – and psychologically never let it out again. From then on, through future lives, this holds us in a stasis of fear until we can find a way to release ourselves from that stuck moment.
This is why deep breathing exercises can do so much to heal emotional issues. Everyone who has a regression starts by breathing slowly and deeply, which is an important part of the whole process.
Persistent coughing, shortness of breath and asthma are the three most common ways past-life experiences can affect the breath. Deaths by drowning, smothering, asphyxiation, gassing or strangulation are the main culprits. Experiences of emotional suffocation can also cause these conditions.
Colleen came for a regression because of a mild but persistent asthma problem. She told me that she already knew of two possible past-life causes for it.
She’d accessed the first one at a workshop a few years earlier. It was a mostly happy life in the sixteenth century, but she’d contracted tuberculosis and died young.
The other possibility came from a vivid dream she’d had of being a Cornish fisherman. He had died with something covering his face, so that he couldn’t breathe.
The third big clue came when she went into a museum and saw a display that produced a lot of mist as one of its effects. That sent her into a panic, as she felt terrified she was about to die.
In the regression we did she didn’t go back to any of those lives – perhaps it would have been too traumatic. Instead, she accessed a memory that gave her an important message about staying positive and trusting in life. That memory is described in more detail in Chapter 14 (see Trust in life).
In the second part of her regression, she asked a spirit guide about her asthma problem. He said it came from a deep-seated fear that she needed to release – the fear of death. He told her that she could never die and her spirit will always live on. As he continued reassuring her about this, she let out some huge sighs of relief. I felt it was a positive sign that healing was already under way.
The spirit guide also said that breathing in the sea air would help to cure her asthma, because it had come mainly from the life as a fisherman. She’d panicked about the mist in the museum because mist had caused her boat to crash onto rocks and turn over, leading to her death in that life. She was partly suffocated by the sail before she drowned. Her asthma was her body’s way of still trying to gasp for air.
Her guide said that taking deep breaths of sea air – especially in misty conditions – would be especially healing for her. It would finally lay those fears to rest.
Afterwards she told me that she’d felt drawn to the sea for a while now. Lately she’d been thinking about moving to the coast. This session confirmed her decision. She left in an optimistic mood, looking forward to the future.
The spirit self transmits past-life effects to the body through the chakras, which are invisible energy centres in the body, aligned with the major glands. The glands respond to the chakras by secreting enzymes. These are chemical messengers that have a huge influence on our mental, emotional and physical lives.
‘Chakra’ is a Sanskrit word, meaning ‘wheel’ or ‘vortex’. The chakras are also often likened to the petals of a flower, which can be open or closed. When the petals are closed, the chakra is inactive. Negative past-life experiences can cause a particular chakra to weaken or close down. For example, the heart chakra may be closed because of hurtful experiences in a former lifetime.
When it’s open, the energies of the chakra can flower and flow freely. The ancient Indian symbol of the thousand-petalled lotus represents the higher consciousness that comes with a fully opened chakra system.
Healing the past-life issues that are holding us back is one of the most effective ways to transform our lives. The chakras are like the engine room of all our issues. This is why a regular chakra-clearing, balancing and strengthening exercise can make a huge difference to our health and wellbeing.
Each chakra has its own colour. The clearer and brighter this colour, the healthier the chakra. Working with colour healing is a powerful therapy on its own – and it’s even more effective when combined with a chakra-clearing exercise.
Location: at the base of the spine
Colour: red
Affects: adrenalin glands
Influences: physical energy; actions; survival; security
Location: about 7.5cm (3in) below the navel
Colour: orange
Affects: reproductive glands
Influences: creativity; sexuality; emotional drives and desires
Location: just above the navel
Colour: yellow
Affects: pancreas
Influences: mental activity; willpower
Location: heart area
Colour: green
Affects: thymus gland
Influences: higher emotions, such as love, kindness and joy
Location: throat area
Colour: blue
Affects: thyroid gland
Influences: communication – both speaking and hearing
Location: forehead
Colour: violet
Affects: pineal gland
Influences: second sight; visions; spiritual views
Location: top of the head
Colour: white
Affects: pituitary gland
Influences: connections to higher consciousness
Get into a relaxed and comfortable state, when you won’t be interrupted. Let go of all outside concerns. Breathe slowly and deeply. Imagine all your muscles softening and melting.
Imagine yourself completely surrounded with a warm, clear shade of red. The colour fills your whole body. It releases tensions, bringing you energy, vitality and a deep sense of security.
Visualize a red flower becoming brighter and more open every time you do this exercise.
See the red now gradually change to a beautiful warm orange colour. It fills you up and completely surrounds you.
This colour brings a healthy balance to your emotional life, especially your creativity and sexuality.
Envision an orange flower becoming brighter and more open every time you do this exercise.
Imagine the orange colour now smoothly changing to a beautiful warm shade of golden yellow, like the rays of the sun. It surrounds you and fills you up.
This colour brings a healthy balance to your mental activities and the use of your willpower.
Visualize a yellow flower becoming brighter and more open every time you do this exercise.
Watch as the yellow now slowly changes to a warm shade of green – the colour of nature and fresh growth. It surrounds you and fills you up with the energies of love and joy.
Envision a green flower becoming brighter and more open every time you do this exercise.
See the green now softly change to a beautiful shade of warm blue, like the sky on a sunny day. It surrounds you and fills you up with a calm sense of openness.
You can speak out in safety and clarity. You are open to hear all the good things that life can teach you.
Imagine a blue flower becoming brighter and more open every time you do this exercise.
Watch as the blue colour now gradually changes to a beautiful and vibrant shade of violet, like the colour of deep twilight.
This surrounds you and fills you up, giving energy to your third eye, your second sight and your ability to see beyond physicality.
Envision a violet flower becoming brighter and more open every time you do this exercise.
Imagine the violet now smoothly changing to a clear white light, with some sparkles of gold in it. This light surrounds you and fills you up.
It brings you a clear connection to the guidance of higher consciousness and your soul’s purpose for this life.
See a white flower becoming brighter and more open every time you do this exercise.
Now envision the white joined by all the other colours – violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red – to create a rainbow energy.
The warm, clear rainbow completely fills and surrounds you, bringing healing and peace to all aspects of your being – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
You can do this exercise as often as you wish. The more you do it, the more it will benefit you.
The particular kinds of flowers you see may have personal significance for you. They may also give you clues about past-life experiences in the area they represent.
Over time, you may notice the flowers that you visualize getting clearer and brighter. It means that your chakras are becoming open and energized. This will help to heal a wide range of past-life issues, and have a positive impact on your health at every level of your being.
Over the last century, major breakthroughs have taken place in understanding how much our minds and emotions affect our bodies.