How have you affected my life?AS A PHYSICIAN and psychiatrist my mission is to heal physical and emotional illness, sometimes separately but more often simultaneously since the mind affects the body’s health, and the body the mind’s. I am aware of the concept of “spiritual health,” but to me the soul is always healthy. Indeed, the soul is perfect. When people talk about healing the soul, I don’t know what they mean. It is our distance from being soulful that makes us feel the soul needs to be healed.
Poor health tends to make narcissists of us, and narcissism makes us blind to compassion, empathy, anger management, and patience—all the elements that, when mastered, will lead us higher up the evolutionary scale toward immortality. Often, if we are sick, we can think of nothing but the sickness, and there is little chance for progress. Thus in this chapter, I write about physical illness and diseases, and diseased states of mind—phobias, fears, depression, anxiety—and how to alleviate them. Do past lives have an impact on them? Absolutely. Do future lives also have an effect? More and more—the evidence continues to accumulate—I believe they do.
I am about to introduce you to two remarkable people, Victoria and Evelyn, the first with a cancer that made every day a time in hell, the other with such profound anxiety that an outwardly successful life was actually made virtually unmanageable. I cured Victoria by bringing her into her past lives; I’ve helped Evelyn by showing her the future.
* * *
By this time I’m used to amazing regressions, astonishing revelations, but Victoria’s case filled me with a sense of the miraculous I had not often experienced since I first met Catherine twenty-four years ago.
Victoria is a physicist living in Manhattan, a renowned member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. I met her when she came up to me at the start of a five-day workshop at the Omega Institute, a healing and learning center in Rhinebeck, New York. She told me that for the past sixteen years she had been experiencing severe back pain caused by a cancer that multiple operations and a series of chemotherapy and radiation treatments had been unable to cure. She handed me a file on her condition several inches thick. Her pain was unremitting; she described it as being like the relentless bombardment of an abscessed tooth. At night she had to take high doses of a morphine-like drug because the pain was so severe, but during the day she endured the agony so she could continue to work with a clear mind. Though not old—she was in her mid-fifties—her hair had turned gray from the pain. She didn’t like the way it looked so she dyed it black.
Victoria had stopped taking her medicines a few days before the workshop, she averred, so she could concentrate on my lectures. But now she asked, “How can I last five days without medicine? I’ll have to go home in an ambulance.”
“Do your best,” I said, “but I’ll understand if you have to leave.”
She stayed for all the sessions and at their end approached me with her report. It was so important that I asked her to share it with the group. During the week, she had experienced several regressions, all covering the same life, which took place near Jerusalem at the time of Jesus. She was a poor male peasant, a powerful man with huge arms and shoulders, but spiritually sensitive and fond of birds and animals. He lived in a wooden house by the side of the road with his wife and daughter, bothering no one. Victoria recognized the daughter; she was her daughter now. One day, the peasant found a mourning dove that had broken its wing, and knelt to care for it. A Roman soldier, marching with an elite corps of the palace guard, was annoyed by this man blocking his path, and kicked him savagely in the back, breaking several vertebrae. Others of the corps set fire to his house, killing his wife and child. The peasant’s bitterness and hatred of the Romans burned bright within him. From that moment on, he trusted no one. His back never healed.
In despair, broken physically and emotionally, he moved close to the main temple within the walls of Jerusalem where he lived in a lean-to, existing on the vegetables he was able to grow. He was unable to work, getting around only by leaning on a sturdy walking stick and his one animal, a donkey. People thought he was senile, but he was merely old and broken. News of a rabbi who was becoming famous as a healer caught his attention, and he traveled a great distance to hear a sermon by this man—it was the Sermon on the Mount—expecting not to be healed or comforted in any way, but curious all the same. The rabbi’s followers were appalled at the sight of the peasant and shooed him away. He hid behind a bush and was able to meet Yeshi’s eyes.I “It was like looking into bottomless pits filled with endless compassion,” Victoria told me.
Yeshua said to the peasant, “Do not go far,” and he obeyed for the rest of the day.
The encounter brought the peasant not healing but hope. He went back to his lean-to, inspired by the rabbi’s sermon, which he found “ringing and true.”
When the rabbi was about to return to Jerusalem, the peasant became stricken with anxiety. He knew Yeshua was in a dangerous situation, having heard rumors of what the hated Romans had planned for him. He tried to reach the rabbi to warn him, but he was too late. The next time they communicated, Yeshua was struggling under the weight of a huge wooden beam on his way to being crucified. He was, the peasant knew, extremely dehydrated. Amazed at his own courage, he reached out to Yeshua with a cloth soaked in water to wet his mouth, but Yeshua had already passed by. The peasant felt terrible, but then Yeshua looked back at him, again with infinite compassion in his eyes despite his physical struggle, dehydration, and fatigue. Though Yeshua did not speak, the peasant became aware of his words that etched themselves telepathically in his mind: “It’s all right. This was meant to be.” Yeshua walked on. The peasant followed him to Calvary, to the crucifixion.
Victoria’s next memory was of herself as the peasant standing alone in the pouring rain, sobbing, minutes after Yeshua’s death on the cross. Yeshua was the only one he trusted since his family was killed, and now the rabbi, too, was dead. Suddenly he felt what Victoria described as “electricity” at the top of his head. It shot down his spine, and he became aware that his back was straight; he was no longer hunchbacked or crippled. He was strong again.
“Look,” Victoria cried in the present. “Look!”
She began to dance, swiveling her own hips, completely pain free. There had been no witnesses when the peasant stood straight; two thousand years later, everyone at the conference watched Victoria dance. Some were crying. My own eyes filled with tears. Sometimes when I go over my notes as I review a case, I forget the sense of magic, the sense of mystery and awe that regressions evoke in me, but now it was palpable. This was not hypnotic suggestion. That she had severe vertebral damage and cartilage loss was documented by the MRIs and other tests reported in the file she gave me.
I remember thinking, “How will this physicist, this woman of science, incorporate what has just happened into her life?” It was an intellectual question that might in time be answered. For the moment, as I watched her, all I could feel was her joy.
* * *
Something more wondrous was yet to happen.
In Only Love Is Real, I wrote briefly about a past life memory of my own. I was a young man from a very wealthy family living in Alexandria some two thousand years ago. I loved to travel and roamed the deserts of northern Egypt and southern Judea, often investigating the caves where the Essenes and other spiritual groups lived at the time. In fact, my family contributed to their well-being. During one journey I met a man somewhat younger than I who was exceptionally bright, and we camped and traveled together for about a month. He soaked up the teachings of these spiritual communities much faster than I did. Though we became good friends, eventually we went our separate ways, I to visit a synagogue near the Great Pyramids.
I did not relate the rest of this story at that time because it was extremely personal, and I did not want people to think I wrote out of self-congratulation: “Dr. Weiss in the time of Jesus.” You’ll see shortly why I do so now, for it is Victoria’s story, not mine.
I saw my companion again in Jerusalem, where I often traveled because my family conducted much of their business there. I experienced myself in that storied city as a scholar, not a businessman, though I was still wealthy. By this time I had affected an immaculately trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and wore an extravagant robe, my own “coat of many colors.” I saw it then, as I see it now, vividly.
At the time there was a traveling rabbi who was able to inspire huge groups of people and thus was a threat to Pontius Pilate, who placed him under a death sentence. I merged with the crowd gathered to see this person on his way to execution, and when I looked into his eyes, I knew that I had found my friend, but it was too late to even attempt to save him. All I could do was watch when he walked by, though I was later able to financially support some of his followers and his family.
I was thinking of this as Victoria, very much in the present and still exhilarated, was talking, so I only half-heard her when she said, “I saw you there.”
“Where?” I asked.
“In Jerusalem. When Jesus was on his way to the cross. You were someone powerful.”
A thrill went up my spine like fire along a fuse. “How did you know it was me?”
“By the expression in your eyes. It’s the same expression I see in them now.”
“What was I wearing?”
“A robe. It was sand colored with vivid burgundy piping, very elegant. You weren’t one of the authorities, not one of Pilate’s men, but I knew you had money because of the robe and because your salt-and-pepper beard was so neatly trimmed, unlike most of the people’s. Oh, it was you, Brian! No doubt about it.” Both of us felt goosebumps, and we looked at each other in wonder.
A psychiatrist might say, “Well, that’s projection. You were teaching at Omega, an authority figure and a healer, and her pain is gone, so naturally she’d believe she saw you in her regression.” True, but she described the robe, the beard, my appearance, the scene, and the situation exactly as I had seen it many years ago in my own regression. I had told only three people the full story of that regression; in no way could she have known what I looked like or what I was wearing.
There is something extremely remarkable going on here; to me it is inexplicable. It goes beyond health and healing into the realm of the transcendental. “This was meant to be,” Jesus the healer told her. I sense these are important words, but I’m not sure how to interpret them.
She called me the night after the conference ended, still shaken. Both of us, twin scientists, realized that her vision of Jesus had been validated. For some reason that neither of us understood, we had been taken beyond our science to two points where we had been destined to meet so that she might heal. It was neither accident nor fantasy that she saw me in Jerusalem; it meant that two thousand years later I was to be the instrument of her healing.
I asked her to keep in touch with me, and we speak regularly. She still moves without pain and can swivel her hips with the best of them. When she went back to her hairdresser, he marveled that her hair had kept its dye so well—and then realized that it had grown in black, its natural color. Her internist was, she said, “flabbergasted” by her ability to walk and dance without pain. And in October her pharmacist called her, concerned because she had not renewed her prescription for pain medication. “I don’t need it anymore,” she told him and, amazed at all that had happened, began to weep. “I’m fine.”
* * *
Evelyn worked in mergers and acquisitions, meaning that she helped effectuate the merging of two companies or the sale of one to another. When the companies were large, there were often hundreds of millions of dollars involved, and the fees paid to the company that Evelyn worked for routinely came to seven figures. Evelyn was paid a substantial salary, which was often doubled or tripled by her year-end bonus, a reward for bringing in new business.
She was in her mid-thirties, slim, physically attractive, with black hair cropped short, almost a cliché of the young woman executive. Her clothes reflected her success: a Chanel suit and handbag, a Hermès scarf, shoes by Gucci, a Rolex watch, and a diamond necklace. Yet when I looked into her eyes—not easy since they darted away from me when she became conscious of my gaze—I could see sadness. The light was in the diamonds at her neck, not in her expression.
“I need help,” she said the moment we shook hands. While she sat, agitated hands twisted and untwisted on her lap. I quickly learned that she was given to simple declarative sentences spoken in an unnaturally loud voice.
“I’m unhappy.”
There was silence. “Go on,” I prompted.
“I have of late lost all my mirth.”
The phrase seemed oddly formal. Then I remembered it was a quote from Hamlet. Patients sometimes use someone else’s words so they don’t have to use their own. It’s a defense, a way of masking feeling. I waited for her to continue. It took a while.
“I used to love my job. Now I hate it. I used to love my husband. Now we’re divorced. When I have to see him, I can barely look at him.”
“When did the change come?” I asked.
“With the suicide bombings.”
The totally unexpected answer stopped me short. Sometimes mood swings from happy to depressed are caused by the death of a parent (Evelyn’s father, I learned later, died when she was a child), the loss of a job (clearly not Evelyn’s problem), or the effects of a long illness (Evelyn was in excellent health). Suicide bombings, unless one was directly attacked, were, to say the least, an unusual impetus.
She began to weep. “The poor Jews. The poor Jews.” She took a deep breath. The tears stopped. “Those damn Arabs!”
The swear word seemed out of character, an indication of the rage beneath it. “You’re Jewish, then?” I asked.
“With all my heart and soul.”
“Your parents, were they as passionate as you?”
“No. They weren’t very religious. Neither am I. And they didn’t care about Israel. To me it’s the one country that matters. The Arabs are out to destroy it.”
“And your husband?”
“He claims he’s Jewish, but he doesn’t care about Israel, either. It’s one of the reasons I hate him.”
She stared at me antagonistically, perhaps because I remained calm in the force of her passion. “Look. I’ve lost my appetite—for food, for sex, for love, for business. I’m frustrated and unsatisfied. I can’t sleep. I know I need psychotherapy. You have a good reputation. Help me.”
“So you can find out where the anger and anxiety come from?”
“I want my happiness back.” She hung her head. “I go to the movies. I go shopping. I go to bed. And I think about how much I hate the Arabs. I hate the U.N. I know they’ve done good, but they’re dominated by anti-Semites. Every vote goes against Israel. I know I’m overreacting. I know I should care about something else. But those damn Arabs. How can they kill Jewish babies? How can I care about anything else?”
* * *
We tried conventional psychotherapy, exploring her childhood in this life, but the causes of her anger and her anxiety did not seem to reside there. She agreed to a regression.
“Go back to the time and place where your anger first began,” I instructed her when she was in a deep hypnotic state. This was as far as I would lead her. She would pick wherever and whenever that was.
“It’s World War Two,” she said in a deep masculine voice, sitting up straight with an expression of disbelief. “I’m a Nazi officer, a member of the SS. I have a good job. It is to supervise the loading of Jews into the cattle cars that will take them to Dachau. There they will die. If any of them tries to escape, I shoot them. I don’t like to do that. It’s not that I care that the vermin dies. It’s that I hate to lose a bullet. Bullets are expensive. We’ve been told to save ammunition whenever possible.” Her cold-blooded recitation was belied by the horror in her tone and a slight trembling that possessed her body. As a German she might have felt nothing for the people she killed; as Evelyn, remembering, she was in agony.
I’ve discovered that the surest way to be reincarnated into a particular group of people, defined by religion, race, nationality, or culture, is to hate those people in a previous life, to be prejudiced or violent against that group. It did not surprise me that Evelyn had been a Nazi. Her intense pro-Israel stance in this life was a compensation for her anti-Semitism in her German one. But she had overcompensated. The hatred she had felt for the Jews had been transformed into an equal hatred for Arabs. No wonder she felt anxious, frustrated, and depressed. She had not moved very far on her journey toward health.
* * *
Evelyn went to another part of her German life. The allied army had entered Poland, and she had been killed at the front during a fierce battle. In her life review, after the death in that life, she felt remorse and enormous guilt, but she still needed to return now to confirm that she had learned her lesson and to make up to those she had hurt in her German life.
We are all souls, all part of the One, all the same, whether we are Germans or Jews, Christians or Arabs. But apparently Evelyn had not learned this lesson. Her hatred had not disappeared.
“I want to try an experiment,” I told her after I had brought her back to the present. “Are you game for it?” She eagerly agreed.
She made herself comfortable; her hands stopped their anxious play. She looked at me expectantly.
“I believe that we are capable of influencing our future lives by what we do in this one,” I said. “Right now you are influencing your future life by your anger toward Arabs, just as you influenced the other one by your hatred of Jews. Now I want to progress you to your next probable life, your life if you stay on your present course and are Evelyn unchanged from the person who came to me for help.”
I put her in a deep hypnotic state and directed her to a future life that would have connections to the German soldier’s life and to her present life’s anti-Arab bias. Her eyes were closed, but it was clear that what they were seeing was vivid. “I’m a Muslim girl. An Arab. A teenager. I’m in a hut made of tin, like the Bedouins use. I’ve lived there all my life.”
“Where is this hut?” I asked.
She frowned. “In the Palestinian territories or in Jordan. It’s not clear which. The boundaries have changed.”
“When did they change?”
“They are always changing. But everything else is the same. The war with the Jews goes on. Whenever there is a period of peace, the radicals destroy it. It means we are poor. We will always be poor.” Her voice grew harsh. “It’s the Jews’ fault. They are rich, but they don’t help us. We are their victims.”
I asked her to go forward in her Arab life, but she died soon after “of an illness” and could add nothing further. Instead, she had a brief glimpse of the life after that one. She was a Christian man living in East Africa, angry at the rapidly growing Hindu population in his part of the world. (It’s amazing, I thought. Prejudice never ends.) In her life review she recognized that there were and would always be people to hate, but now at last there was an epiphany. “Compassion and love are the antidotes to hatred and rage,” she said, her voice full of wonder. “Violence only perpetuates the suffering.”
When I brought her back to the present, we discussed what she had learned. She knew she had to alter her assumptions about other peoples and cultures. She needed to replace hatred with understanding. These concepts are easy to understand in the brain, but not easy to assimilate as a way of behavior.
“It took you two possible lifetimes to come to this recognition,” I pointed out. “But what if you could speed the change now that you understand the concept in the present? What would your future lives look like then?”
* * *
In our next session I progressed Evelyn to a future life that connected the German soldier’s life and her present anger. “This time, though, you have to let go of all prejudice in your current life. You see all souls and people as equal, connected to each other by the spiritual energy of love.”
A calm came over her. Apparently, her future life changed completely. She did not find Arab or East African lifetimes but instead: “I’m the manager of a hotel in Hawaii. It’s a spa as well. A beautiful hotel and spa. There are flowers everywhere. The guests come from all over the world. From different countries and cultures. They come to find recuperative energy. It’s easy to find it because the spa is so well managed and its setting is so splendid.” She smiled at the vision. “I’m blessed. I get to enjoy the hotel all year round.”
It is, of course, a nice fantasy to imagine yourself as the manager of a great spa in a gorgeous setting surrounded by the smell of hibiscus. What Evelyn saw in this voyage into the future might indeed have been fantasy, projection, or wishful thinking. When I regress someone, it’s sometimes difficult to separate actual memory from metaphor, imagination, or symbol. In visualized past lives, however, if a person is speaking a foreign language he or she never learned in this one, that is a sign of authenticity. So is accurate historical detail. If the memory brings up intense emotion, that is also a sign. But while intense emotion often accompanies progressions, validation is much more difficult. I operate on the assumption that even though a progression can’t be checked out, it is still a powerful healing device. Yes, metaphor and fantasy are possible, but healing is the important part. In regression and progression, symptoms disappear, illnesses get better, and anxiety, depression, and fear are relieved.
No one has figured out a way to confirm that the imagined future is really going to happen. Those few who have joined me in this field are inevitably faced with that ambiguity. If a patient is progressed to a future time in his present life, you can confirm it when the vision comes true. But even then it is possible for a patient who has seen her future to veer her life in that direction. Just because a vision is a fantasy doesn’t mean you can’t make it come true.
People sit in front of me with their eyes closed. Whatever comes into their minds, whether metaphor, imagination, symbol, fantasy, or actual memory, is all grist for the healing mill. This is the foundation of psychoanalysis, and it is the foundation of the work I do, though the scope of my work is broader in that it takes in the distant past and the future.
From my healer’s perspective, it does not matter whether Evelyn’s visions of what was past and what is to come are real. It is probable that her German life was real, for it was accompanied by intense emotion. And I know that her visions of her future lives influenced her in a powerful way because they said to her: If you don’t change, you’re just going to be repeating this destructive cycle of aggressor and victim, but if you do change, you can break the cycle. Her different visions of the future taught her that she had the free will to shape the future and that the time to start exercising that free will was now.
Evelyn decided not to wait until her next life to bring healing recuperation to herself and others. A few months after our final session, she left her firm and opened a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont. She regularly practices yoga and meditation. Outwardly and inwardly—profoundly—she has let go of her anger and her prejudices. Her progressions enabled her to attain the happiness she came to me to find. And in her I found a model for the power of progression and further confidence to use it as a therapeutic tool.
* * *
Victoria and Evelyn probably could not have taken their journeys without a therapist to guide them. While it is difficult to practice regression and progression alone, in my workshops I teach healing exercises that can be used at home even when there is no therapist around. I have also made some regression CDs that can be used to aid the process. They can be used to alleviate physical or emotional problems. For any of them to be effective, you must be in a state of deep relaxation.
Many therapists tell you in their books how to relax; whatever works for you is fine. In short form, my method is this: Find a place where you can be alone and will not be interrupted—your bedroom or den, say. Close your eyes. Focus first on your breath, imagining that with each exhalation you are ridding yourself of all the tensions and stresses in your body and that each time you inhale you are breathing in beautiful energy. Then concentrate on the different areas of your body. Relax the muscles of your face, your jaw, your neck, and shoulders. Go on to your back, abdomen, stomach, and legs. Your breathing is regular, relaxed; inhale energy, exhale tension. Next, after relaxing all your muscles, visualize a beautiful light above your head, a healing light that is flowing into your body from the top of your head and down to the tips of your toes, growing warmer and more healing as it descends. When I am leading the exercise, I count backwards at this point from ten to one, but you don’t have to do that if you are alone.
Pick one—and only one—symptom, mental or physical, that you would like to understand and, by understanding, heal. It could be the arthritis in your joints, your fear of heights, or your shyness when you meet a stranger. Notice the first thoughts or feelings or impressions that come into your mind. Do this spontaneously, without editing; these should be your first thoughts, no matter how silly or trivial they might seem. Get in touch with that part of your body or mind that is troubling you. Try to make the symptom worse at first, experiencing it as fully as you can, and observe how you did that. Then, switch places with the symptom; you are the symptom, the symptom is you. This is so you can be most fully aware of the symptom. It knows where it is located and how it affects the body or mind. Next, have the you that is outside the symptom ask the symptom a series of questions.
How have you affected my life?
What are you going to do with my body/mind now that you’re in it?
How have you affected my relationships?
Do you help convey something I can’t convey without you, some message or some information?
Do you protect me from anyone or anything?
This last is the key question, for people often use illnesses to avoid confronting the issues that lie behind them—a form of denial. Let’s say, for example, that you are experiencing sharp pains in your neck. The exercise will let you locate exactly who or what that pain in the neck is—your boss, your mother-in-law, a way of holding your head so you don’t have to look somebody directly in the eye.
In workshops I ask the questions, so the illness is free to concentrate on its host. If you are doing the exercise at home, prerecord the questions, leaving intervals on the tape long enough for mindful, considered answers. Or you can work with a friend.
This exercise, like the others, is not a panacea; a cancer won’t disappear, nor will a mother-in-law. But often the exercise will alleviate symptoms, and occasionally a “miracle” occurs and a cure is effected. We do not know the extent of the mind-body connection—in multiple personalities a rash or fever will disappear when one of the multiples switches to another, or one may be an alcoholic and another intolerant to alcohol—but we know it exists, and these exercises are a means of maximizing the dual force.
Here, too, I’ve adapted the exercise, this time from a number of sources. Again, in workshops I lead the participants, but it can be done at home with the use of a recorder or with a friend or loved one at your side. After a few repetitions you will remember the steps; it is a simple yet often extremely powerful exercise.
With your eyes closed and in a relaxed state, go to an ancient island of healing. The island is beautiful, and the weather itself is a balm. There is no more relaxing place in the world. Embedded in the floor of the ocean, a short way out from the beach, are some very large and powerful crystals that impart a strong healing energy to the water. Step into the water, going only as far as is comfortable; the sea is warm and calm. You’ll feel a tingling on your skin. This is the supercharged energy of the crystals absorbed by you through the water that touches your body. Direct the energy to the part of your body that needs healing. It need not be one place; perhaps your entire being is crying out for health. Stay in the water for some time, feeling relaxed and letting the energy work on you in its benevolent way.
Now visualize several tame and loving dolphins swimming up to you, attracted by your calmness and the beauty inside you. Dolphins are master diagnosticians and healers; they add their energy to the energy of the crystals. By this time you can swim as well as the dolphins because the water is so supercharged with energy. Together you play in the water, touching each other, diving, and coming up to breathe the beneficent air. You are so entranced by your newfound friends that you forget the original purpose of the swim, which is to heal, but all the while your body is absorbing the healing energy from the crystals and the dolphins.
When you are ready, leave the water and go back to the beach. You are comforted by the knowledge that you can return as many times as you wish. The sand feels good under your feet. So special is the water that immediately you are dry. Feeling content, happy, and well, you sit quietly for a time experiencing the warmth of the sun and the caress of the breezes. Then you allow yourself to emerge from the visualization, from this soft dream, knowing that you can always go back and that the healing will continue even after you are awake.
In a relaxed state and with your eyes closed, imagine a spiritual being, someone who is very wise. The spirit can be a relative or a beloved friend who has passed over, or it can be a stranger whom you nevertheless trust and love as soon as there is contact between you. The essential factor is that this person loves you unconditionally. You feel totally safe.
Follow your spirit guide to a beautiful ancient temple of healing and memories. It sits high on a hill surrounded by white clouds. To reach the entrance you climb up beautiful marble steps. When you reach the top, the great doors swing open, and you follow the spirit inside where there are fountains, marble benches, and walls inlaid with scenes of nature at its most abundant. There are others in the room, voyagers like yourself with their own spirit guides; all are relaxed, enchanted.
The spirit leads you to a private room, as elaborate in design as the first but bare of furniture save for a couch set directly in the center of the floor. You lie on it, realizing you have never been so comfortable. Above the couch are suspended crystals of different sizes, shapes, and colors. Under your direction the spiritual being arranges the crystals in such a way that light of the perfect color—green, yellow, blue, and gold—goes like a laser beam to that part of the body or the emotional body, the mind, most in need of healing. The light changes; the crystals have broken it into the colors of the rainbow, all of which you absorb as part of your healing. The spirit directs you to look at one wall of the room, and to your amazement it is blank like a movie screen.
In group sessions I count slowly backward from ten to one and tell the attendees that images of their past lives will appear. In your home you will have to pause before the images take shape. You don’t have to go into that past life—there may be more than one—but simply imagine it. The life may appear as a series of photographs, or it may come like a movie. Maybe one scene will keep repeating. It doesn’t matter; whatever you see is fine. And all the while you are looking at the screen, your body is absorbing the healing energy beamed from the crystals. The healing is taking place not only in this life but in the past where the wound may have originated. If you see a direct connection between past life roots and present-day symptoms, the healing becomes more pronounced. But even if you don’t draw a connection, as often happens, the healing remains powerful. You, the spirit, the temple, the crystals, and the light are working in concert to heal; all are powerful.
In workshops and seminars I have the people in the audience break up into groups of two, preferably strangers to each other. Each is asked to pick an object in his or her possession to hand to the partner, something small like a bunch of keys, a bracelet, glasses, a necklace, or a ring. The partners exchange objects, and then I have them go into the relaxed state common to all the exercises. “You will receive an impression about the person whose object you hold,” I tell them. “It may strike you as strange. It may seem as if the impression has nothing to do with the man or woman you’re facing. But no matter how silly or unusual or weird the thought, remember it and then share it with your partner. After all, what seems bizarre to you might have deep significance for him or her.”
This is far more than a parlor trick, though it can be great fun. There is a diagnostic component. About one-third of the audience at a workshop I gave in Mexico City picked up a physical symptom of their partner, and participants may be able to discover often forgotten but significant childhood episodes in their partners’ lives. For example, at a class I taught at Florida International University in Miami, one young man, who had not met his female partner until that moment, completely and accurately described her tenth birthday party, the one where she was humiliated by her older sister. There was another young man who had been shot in the left forearm while trying to flee a thug attempting to rob him. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, buttoned at the wrist, so his partner, a woman, couldn’t have seen the scar. Yet when she held his car keys, she felt a sharp pain in her own left forearm. Some described others’ past lives; many described the house where the partner grew up as a child.
At the end of my Mexican workshop I had five people take the microphone to share with the group what they had undergone. Four of them had mediumistic experiences! They received messages from their partners’ deceased loved ones, all of them recognized by their partners whom they had never met until that moment. Some were able to describe what the dead person looked like. One told of a six-year-old girl whom he saw walking backward, which to him meant that the girl had died. The girl was saying, “I’m fine. I’m okay. You don’t have to grieve so much. I love you.” His partner, a woman, started to weep. She had lost her six-year-old daughter a few months before.
This exercise can be done at home, though it is most effective if you do it with someone you know casually or have only recently met. While you are healing your partner by delivering a message or picking up a physical or emotional symptom—anxiety, depression, sadness—an extraordinary connection quickly develops, and there is a feedback effect that is as powerful for you as it is for your partner.
In a relaxed state, with your eyes closed, visualize loved ones who may be physically sick or emotionally troubled. By sending them healing light, healing energy, your prayers (you don’t have to believe in any formal religion), and your love, you can actually affect their recovery—as far out as this sounds. Scientific evidence backs my statement. Dr. Larry Dossey’s book, Reinventing Medicine, points to a number of studies which show that among heart patients, those who were prayed for from afar had better clinical outcomes than those receiving medical therapy alone. A double-blind study of advanced AIDS patients found that even when they did not know they were being prayed for, they experienced fewer and less severe AIDS-related illnesses.
My own technique is to take one person in a workshop of, say, eighty people and put him or her in the middle of a circle formed by the rest of the attendees. I ask them to project healing energy into that person, silently but with all their spiritual force.
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I have said that the healing exercises are most effective when directed toward one specific ailment. With Victoria it was the cancer in her back. With Evelyn it was the anxiety that consumed her night and day. Most people have a susceptible organ or part of their body that seems to be the first affected under conditions of stress or incipient disease. It may be the throat and respiratory system, the back, the skin, the heart, and so on.
In Michelle, another remarkable woman, the area was the knees. She remembered her left knee being lacerated by a submerged rock when as a child she went into the water at the beach near her home. When she was under stress as an adult, she often felt migratory stabbing pains in both knees but more so on the left. Anxiety, she told me, left her “weak-kneed.” She occasionally experienced swelling and edema, particularly after an athletic injury in college that required minor surgery on her left knee; arthroscopic surgery was needed later. By the time I met her, CAT scans and X-rays showed cartilage loss. She could not fully extend her left leg because of the damage, and by now she walked with a slight limp. She was aware, though, that the damage was emotional as well as physical, which is why she came to see me.
Her first regression brought her back briefly to the rural Midwest of nineteenth-century America. Her name was Emma, and in middle age she had been run down by a horse-drawn wagon. The accident shattered her left knee and shin and also badly damaged her right knee. A subsequent infection left her permanently disabled. In a glimpse of another life, Michelle saw herself in medieval Japan as a male soldier whose left knee was pierced by an arrow.
Both regressions explained her present knee troubles but did not get to the origin of the karmic lesson, so we kept going and soon reached North Africa in pre-Roman times. Michelle was once again a man, this time a warden at a particularly brutal prison who took special delight in destroying the legs of the prisoners so they could not escape. Sometimes he would hamstring a prisoner with a sword or knife; sometimes he smashed their knees with a hammer or a rock. He broke femurs, drove spikes through knees, and severed Achilles’ tendons. Many of his captives died from the infections of their wounds, but he reveled in their misery. His superiors took a vicarious delight in dispatching prisoners to his care, and he was well rewarded for his violence, living in considerable luxury amid the squalor of the place.
Michelle was disturbed by this regression, and it took another session before she achieved complete integration and understanding. Eventually she realized that we have all passed through barbaric lives and that she, like the rest of us, should feel no shame or guilt for what we did millennia in the past. Our journey is upward. We have all evolved through lifetimes of violence and cruelty. The Old Testament says that the sins of the father are visited on the children into the third and fourth generation, that we are being affected negatively by what our fathers did before us. But we are our fathers, just as we will be our children. The sins of our own pasts will haunt our presents until we can understand them and earn absolution. The sins of this lifetime will darken our futures, but as we acted wisely in the past, so our presents are made lighter. If we act humanely now, we will bring our future selves closer to the One.
Michelle was able to see why her knees and legs were so painful in her present life. She had paid a heavy price for her past behaviors, but now, she recognized, she could be freed. During a deep trance state she went back again to that North African life, but this time instead of inflicting pain, she was the one who felt it, and she asked for forgiveness and grace. She could not change the facts and details of that life, but she could alter her reactions to those events on a spiritual level. This process of going back is called reframing. It doesn’t change the facts, but it changes how you react to the facts. Michelle sent thoughts of light and healing to the prisoners or, rather, to their higher selves, their souls. And she was able to forgive herself. “I know how to break the cycle,” she said through tears of gratitude. “Through love and compassion.”
She began to get better. The inflammation in her knees receded. She developed full range of motion in her legs, and radiographic examination showed both knees completely healed. Her stress-related weak-kneed state was erased. She was free to explore and understand other more sophisticated lessons of compassion and empathy. She supported organizations that advocate for the abolition of land mines (which often cause crippling leg injuries) and those that fight against cruelty to animals. She has received grace.
Michelle did not want to go into the future, but I know what it will be. In this life she will continue her humanitarian work, and with each act she will progress toward a better state in her next lifetime and the lifetimes to come. In those lives she will be free of the physical problems with her legs, for she has expiated her North African sins. I don’t know what her professions will be or whom she will meet and love, but she will perform and love with charity and compassion.
I. Victoria called him Yeshi, the diminutive of Yeshua, the rabbi’s Aramaic name. Jesus, the name we know him by, is Greek. Victoria had never heard the name Yeshi until she encountered it in her regression.
II. I have adapted this exercise from similar ones taught by Elizabeth Stratton and others that are used by gestalt therapists.