Healing the Body by Healing the Mind
ELAINE IS A RESPECTED PSYCHOLOGIST IN THE MIAMI area. She came to me to see if past life therapy could alleviate a chronic physical condition. For years Elaine had suffered intermittent, excruciating pains in her neck, shoulders, and upper back. During the initial interview, I discovered that Elaine also had a lifelong terror of heights, a monosymptomatic or single-symptom phobia. This is how Elaine later described her experience during hypnosis and what happened to her life as a result:
“I saw a lot of darkness—blackness—and I realized that I was blindfolded. Then I saw myself from the outside. I was standing on top of a tower, one of those castle towers made of stone. My hands were tied behind my back. I was in my early twenties, and I knew that I was a soldier on the side that had lost the battle. Then I felt an excruciating pain in my back. I could feel my teeth gritting and my arms stiffen and my fists clench. I was being lanced, I could feel the lance in my back, but I was defiant, I wasn’t going to scream. Then I felt myself falling, and felt the water of the moat closing around me.
“I’ve always been terrified of heights and drowning. When I came out of it I was still shaken, and I spent a couple of days in agony. I couldn’t even touch my facial bones, the pain was so great. But the next morning when I woke up I thought, ‘Something’s different. Something’s very different.’”
What was different was that Elaine’s back pain and her fear of heights had disappeared.
In a subsequent session, Elaine vividly reexperienced a lifetime in medieval France. In this lifetime, Elaine had been an impoverished, dispirited, and hopeless male in his twenties. This man lacked the courage to be different, to speak out, to emerge from his rut and change his lot in life. Dispassionately, Elaine described the filthy brown rags that had been the man’s only clothes. Eventually, the authorities wrongly accused Elaine of a crime she did not commit. But a scapegoat was needed, so Elaine was arrested and hanged in public. She went to the gallows grieving and mired in her hopelessness, almost relieved to be leaving her wretched existence.
After this session, her chronic neck pain disappeared. So did something else. As a result of her experiences in the French lifetime, Elaine was able to pinpoint a new area for emotional growth in the present. She saw that her experiences then had influenced her current reluctance to speak out and to take risks. Elaine decided to take the plunge. She risked her professional reputation by telling newspaper reporters and other therapists about her remarkable experiences in her past lives. And this time, instead of being hanged in public, she was congratulated.
Elaine’s experience demonstrates how past life regression is expanding the repertoire of known techniques for accessing what has recently been dubbed “the mind-body connection.”
Both old physical and old emotional cycles were broken in Elaine’s therapy. Although she came to therapy for relief of physical symptoms, Elaine was not only able to rid herself of debilitating pain but also of a long-standing fear. As an additional bonus, she identified and pursued a new area of emotional growth for herself when she uncovered a block—the fear of speaking the truth—of which she had previously been unaware. During therapy, connections were made between Elaine’s mind and body that interacted synergistically, playing off each other and opening new doorways of growth and wholeness until a new level of well-being emerged.
It is well known that the mind can strongly influence the body, causing symptoms, disease, and even death. All physicians know of hospital patients who gave up on life for one reason or another. Despite the best medical treatments and technology available, these patients wither away and die. Patients who possess a strong will to live usually fare much better. We are just now in the process of defining the physical mechanisms of “giving up” and “the will to live.” These are the basic mechanisms of the mind-body connection, a connection that was made in a very healing way as Elaine shed her neck and back pain. In this chapter, we will explore many more examples of the mind-body connection as it is made during past life therapy and many of the different ways it can heal physical ailments.
Early data from Stanford University indicate that support groups significantly increase the quality and quantity of life in breast cancer patients. Harvard University researchers have found that some types of meditation can prolong life in the elderly. In his excellent book Head First: The Biology of Hope, Norman Cousins carefully documented work at UCLA and elsewhere that has helped to develop the new area of medical research known as psychoneuroimmunology, the interaction between the mind-brain and the immune system. Bernie Siegel, M.D., has also described mind-body correlations and the profound healing potential that is accessed through this linkage in his best-selling books Love, Medicine and Miracles and Peace, Love and Healing.
Research at Pennsylvania State University has shown that hypnosis can increase the quantity of certain white blood cells in the system. Numerous studies document correlations between improved athletic performance and visualization techniques. Many researchers and clinicians have used hypnosis to eliminate addictions to tobacco, food, and even to alcohol and hard drugs. Meditative techniques have also proved effective in many cases.
Past life therapy under hypnosis can also achieve some of these same results. I have done hundreds of therapeutic past life regressions since my first experiences with Catherine. I have seen that physical as well as psychological symptoms can rapidly resolve as a result of past life therapy, even without the use of medicines.
I am still not able to identify the exact mechanism of the physical cures that take place as a result of the therapy, although I do have some ideas. The cure might lie in the simple act of remembering and reexperiencing an initial trauma, just as the act of reexamining a childhood trauma during conventional psychotherapy results in an emotional cure. Or, the knowledge that the soul never dies, only the body does, could be the great healer. Healing may also occur as the patient acquires an understanding of the factors that precipitated the illness in the first place. Or, the secret may lie in a combination of all of these processes, all of which are typical of past life therapy.
Although I can only hypothesize about the reasons that past life recall heals, I can attest to the results of that recall. In my experience I have found that past life regression under hypnosis can be an important part of the treatment, amelioration, and even the cure of certain chronic symptoms and illnesses, especially those affected by the functioning of the immune system and those that may have a psychosomatic component.
Past life therapy is particularly effective in treating musculoskeletal pain, headaches that do not respond to medication, allergies, asthma, and stress-induced or immune-system-related conditions such as ulcers and arthritis. In some cases, it appears to improve cancerous lesions or tumors. Many patients of mine have been able to stop taking pain medication for formerly debilitating conditions after they experience past life therapy. It also resolves deep, underlying emotional issues as the relationship of the emotions to the physical discomfort and its past life source is revealed.
The medical exploration of this field is just beginning. However, it is safe to say that past life therapy must be seriously considered as a potent and cost-effective addition to the roster of effective holistic therapies, that is, therapies that concentrate not on alleviating a single symptom or condition but on healing the whole person, body and mind.
Wherever the secret lies, the therapeutic effects and benefits can be startling.
Jack is a forty-year-old cargo pilot who came to me for help with a cluster of physical and psychological symptoms. Physically, he suffered from migraines, gouty arthritis, and high blood pressure. Psychologically, Jack stored anger for weeks before suddenly venting his feeling in an intensity that approached rage. Jack also suffered from a very particular monosymptomatic phobia. Every morning as he buckled himself into his pilot’s seat and taxied for take-off, he’d anxiously and repeatedly look out the window to make sure that his plane still had a right wing.
Having been an Air Force pilot for years before he became a commercial flier, Jack was an extremely seasoned and responsible pilot. He had never experienced any emergency situation that could have caused his current anxiety. Yet every morning when he woke up, all he could think about was whether the wing of his plane was going to fall off that day.
In therapy, Jack experienced a number of past lives in a combination of classical regression and the key moment flow process. In his first session, Jack recalled a life as a cowhand in the Old West. In that lifetime, Jack died when he was crushed by a falling boulder as he rode his horse through a mountain pass. As he relived the death experience, Jack recalled the suffocating feeling. As the regression continued, Jack moved into a different life and a second key moment.
He discovered that he had been a German air force pilot shot down by friendly fire over Germany in World War II. The friendly fire had blown away the right wing of his airplane. Jack died as the crippled craft plummeted to earth. As he reexperienced the death and the between-life stage that followed it, Jack also relived the terrible anger and frustration he had felt because of the mistake that had prematurely cost him his life and had forced him to abandon his young family.
After this regression process, Jack felt elated, as if a huge weight had been lifted from him. Now he had an explanation for the irrational anguish he had been experiencing in his present lifetime. Within two weeks, he and I both noticed that his wing phobia had entirely disappeared. Finally, he was able to get into the cockpit without casting a terrified glance out to the right side of his plane. His anger about the pointlessness of that death also helped him begin to understand more about the source of his frequent rages.
At Jack’s second session, we decided to explore the origin of his gouty arthritis. Once in trance, Jack immediately slipped back into key moment flow regression and recalled a prior lifetime when he suffered severe bilateral knee injuries from running into a low fence. As a result of this accident, not only had he torn up both knees, but he had also endured serious infections, and eventually, atrophy of his lower legs. He never recovered fully and required care for the rest of his life. He had become angry and depressed and had an early demise.
Another connection between a current physical and emotional discomfort had been made.
Next Jack recalled an ancient lifetime in which an animal horn had penetrated his head, pierced the occipital lobe of his brain, and emerged from his body just underneath his right eye, the site of his present migraines.
Since that session Jack has not had another migraine. Although only time will tell if past life therapy has eliminated this chronic condition completely, there is a marked improvement in his level of well-being. His gout has also lessened. And much of Jack’s anger has been replaced with peacefulness. His values have changed since he has experienced some of his previous lifetimes, and his perspective on life and its meaning has widened. Now that his fear of death has begun to erode, the things that previously angered or enraged him seem silly, small, irrelevant. This is a common result for many patients who have undergone past life therapy.
Selma is a forty-four-year-old woman who owns a printing business. Like Jack, Selma suffered from more than one chronic physical condition. Selma had a cancerous lesion on the vulva that had been removed several times but kept coming back. When she came to see me, she had been using a chemotherapy cream on the lesion with no effect. When we discussed her medical and psychological history, Selma related a number of physical and emotional challenges in her life. She suffered from allergies, skin rashes, and a history of stomach ulcers. At the age of eleven months she had badly burned the skin on her left thigh and had received one of the first skin grafts performed in America. Selma had numerous childhood surgeries on her thigh, accumulating a total of five hundred stitches. After an operation she underwent at the age of fourteen, Selma’s body finally reacted to all the pharmaceuticals that had gone through her system by breaking out in an angry and painful red rash all over her body. After this, she became generally weakened, experienced more physical illnesses, and developed an intolerance to the sun. In addition, cancer ran in Selma’s family. Her mother and her sister had died within the previous two years—her mother from brain cancer and her sister from cancer of the pancreas. And as a child, Selma had been sexually abused by an uncle.
Despite her many physical and emotional hardships, Selma came into therapy with hope and confidence that she could turn her life around. In her first regression, Selma saw herself as a dark-haired boy of thirteen, apparently a resident of a feudal village. Selma entered the lifetime at the moment of death, as armored men on horseback pillaged and destroyed her village. One soldier stabbed her in the chest with a sword and she died instantly. Selma’s spirit immediately left her body. As it did, she felt a wonderful feeling of floating, a feeling of peacefulness and relief at leaving that earthly existence.
Selma then entered a centuries-ago lifetime in Holland and recounted how a relative living in that family’s household had abused her sexually. She recognized that relative as the uncle who abused her in this life as well.
The factual details of these memories may have been hazy and fragmented, but the emotional content of the memories was very vivid and dramatic for Selma, particularly the memory of previous abuse. As we finished the session, Selma felt calm and composed, especially when reviewing the history of abuse with the Dutch man who was now her uncle. Selma experienced a great relief and clarity from being able to link these details together in a cause and effect pattern in her mind. As she discovered this pattern, she also seemed to free herself from some of the emotional residue of this traumatic childhood experience.
Eight days later, when Selma arrived for her next session, she reported that the cancerous condition had improved. The formerly recalcitrant lesion had shrunk dramatically and had become much less sensitive.
Selma also reported that in the interim she had experienced a dream about an aunt of hers who had burned to death at the age of sixteen, many years before Selma was born. Selma bears a close resemblance to this aunt, and family members tell her and photographs show her that they even have birthmarks in common. Since dreaming is also a common method of past life recall, Selma and I discussed this dream before proceeding with the session.
In the regression of that day, Selma recalled being a nurse on a large London hospital ward, probably in the nineteenth century. As she made her rounds, a soldier entered the room and shot her in the stomach and the chest. This session was extremely emotional for Selma, who relived the death experience before she floated upward. After this session, Selma’s ulcer began to improve. Once again, she experienced what was for her the clarifying liberation of cause and effect.
Both Jack and Selma were able to make the mind-body connection through past life recall. Both of them discovered that past life therapy can not only trigger the amelioration of physical conditions but it can also heal emotional scars. In past life therapy, as the mind heals the body, the body can also help heal the mind.
Other physicians have contacted me to relate clinical vignettes about their patients’ past life experiences. Dr. Robert Jarmon of Spring Lake, New Jersey, wrote me because he had a patient who, like Catherine, spontaneously regressed to a traumatic past life experience.1 This patient was also cured of her symptoms. This particular case of Dr. Jarmon’s also illustrates how physical problems from past lives can carry over into the present lifetime.
Dr. Jarmon had been using hypnosis as a method of weight reduction for a Jewish woman in her mid-thirties. After two months of therapy, his patient began experiencing severe lower abdominal pain. Thinking that her symptoms could be caused by an ectopic pregnancy, a life-threatening condition in which the fetus develops in the fallopian tubes instead of the uterus, he sent her to a gynecologist. The area near her right ovary was tender and swollen. Her menstrual periods had stopped, but the woman was not pregnant. All tests were negative.
Five months passed, and her symptoms persisted. During a hypnosis session, Dr. Jarmon, working with her on a psychological problem, instructed her to “go back to the time when your problem began.” Her subconscious mind chose the gynecological problem.
He was flabbergasted when the woman described a scene from the Middle Ages in which she was nineteen years old and five months pregnant. She was about to die because “the baby was out of place.” A priest and a doctor were present.
“She started speaking to me as if I were the priest,” Dr. Jarmon reported. “I answered her. Then she repeated the Catholic Act of Contrition, word for word. Her breathing became shallow and she described her death.”
But the woman is Jewish. When she came out of hypnosis, she did not recognize any of the words she had just uttered. She had never heard of the Act of Contrition, which Catholics use to atone for their sins. Her abdominal pain was gone. Her menstrual periods came back that evening, and that pain has not recurred.
The spiritual component of past life therapy is also a great healer. As patients personally experience that they do not die when their bodies die, they realize that they, in fact, have a divine nature that transcends birth and death. The will to live, to be healed, and the faith that healing can and will take place often increase with it. Patients learn of the higher power within all of us that helps us orchestrate our lives to learn and to reach our godlike potential. They become less anxious, more relaxed. More of their energy can be directed toward the healing process and away from fear and suffering.
Past life therapy also seems to develop those traits of hardiness that seem to correlate with good health, including increased resistance to the debilitating effects of chronic illnesses and with strong immune functioning. It promotes happiness, peacefulness, and the tendency to accept obstacles as challenges and adventures. Patients who have undergone past life therapy to alleviate physical problems become more hopeful, and they live life more joyously and fully. They are more independent. They sleep better. Their depression lifts.
Dana came to a small workshop of mine complaining of a problem with her throat. Her throat felt “lumpy,” she often choked, she had frequent respiratory infections, and she was losing her voice. In a group regression, she had a vividly dramatic memory of a male lifetime in the Italian Renaissance in which she had been stabbed in the throat, although she did not know why she had been murdered.
After this workshop experience, Dana made an appointment to see me privately. In the office, she related a history of being abused by both parents when she was a child. In hypnosis she again relived the Italian Renaissance death experience, and this time it became less dramatic. This is a typical reaction. Each time a past life is relived, the emotion becomes less intense, and the possibility of gaining insights from the experience is increased.
During this session, Dana learned that she had been murdered because she had known an important secret that others were afraid she would reveal. She had not revealed this information, fearing the consequences of speaking out. This time, Dana continued on to the life review stage after the death was reexperienced. Here she learned that she will experience throat constriction and put herself in danger if she does not speak the truth.
At her next session, Dana entered a life that appeared to take place on a Pacific island, possibly Polynesia or Hawaii. In that lifetime, Dana was a young woman with psychic abilities who was absorbed with tribal dancing. She was so absorbed that when she was left to watch a fire, she neglected it. When the fire burned out of control, she neglected to warn her people. The community she lived in was consequently destroyed. One of the victims was the woman who is her abusive mother in this lifetime. The theme had recurred. She had not communicated when she should have.
After these sessions, Dana’s throat symptoms improved. Moreover, she gained an important, wider perspective about her mother. She was able to step back and see her mother as someone with whom she had been playing different roles in many lifetimes. As a result, she was able to detach from the tyranny of the abusive situation in the present lifetime, one that had wounded her so deeply. This part of her past began to assume a smaller and less influential role in her present. Dana also learned that she needs to speak the truth, no matter what, whether about her abusive situation or a minor life detail, that secrecy is harmful and hurtful.
The healing process that occurs during regression sessions is not always all-encompassing. Sometimes it is a simple matter of discovering the past physical origin of a present physical pain. A patient who does not need to explore complex emotional issues as part of the source of current physical discomfort will not do so during past life therapy. The healing can be simple and direct.
Chronic headaches are one of several conditions that respond particularly well to past life therapy. My wife, Carole, had been suffering premenstrual migraine headaches for many years. Every month like clockwork she would develop severe and disabling migraines, and she would often have to rest for a day or two until the pain and nausea subsided. In addition, a neck injury suffered in an automobile accident in 1976 not only exacerbated these headaches but also resulted in a similar migraine whenever she served a ball on the tennis court or made certain types of overhead movements with her right arm. The menstrual periods and the overhead motions invariably precipitated a migraine headache. Gynecologists and neurologists had told her that nothing could cure the problem, that only medication could ease the pain.
In the late summer of 1988, Carole had a series of particularly severe migraine headaches. Meditation, which sometimes lessened her pain, did not alleviate the severity of these headaches. She did not want to use narcotic-like drugs, so she made an appointment with a hypnotherapist to learn hypnotic techniques to deal with the pain. I had once tried to hypnotize Carole, but our closeness interfered with the distance needed in a therapist-patient relationship.
Carole had no expectations as she dreamily drifted into a trance state. After a period of relaxation and stress reduction, the therapist told her to ask herself why she was getting these headaches. A scene flashed before her eyes, and Carole suddenly watched herself running from a mob. She was a poor peasant male who was wearing filthy brown or black burlap clothes. The time was about one thousand years ago, and the scene was taking place somewhere in Central Europe. The mob caught up to her and began to club her, punishing her for unacceptable beliefs and heresies. A blow caught her above the left eye, the very spot where the pain from the migraine was most severe. Suddenly, in the hypnotherapist’s office, Carole began to experience that stabbing pain over the left eye, a pain that rapidly spread to the entire left side of her head. Carole knew that she had died as a result of this clubbing. The therapist said, “You no longer need this pain; let it go.” Immediately the pain disappeared.
There is no way to prove whether this was an actual past life memory or not, but Carole has not had an incapacitating migraine headache since that session. Fantasies and daydreams do not cure such severe symptoms. Past life therapy very often does.
Tricia was a twenty-eight-year-old engineer suffering from temporomandibular joint pain (TMJ), migraines, and a stiff neck. She recalled a death experience somewhere in a valley of Asia Minor in the year 893 B.C. In that lifetime she had been a man living a very peaceful and happy life, which she related to me in great detail. When I asked her to look at her feet, she described the sandals she was wearing. Next Tricia switched to another ancient lifetime, again male, in which she lived in a cave in Greece. This time when I asked her to describe her footwear, Tricia was wearing sandals of a completely different style. Tricia described a warrior standing over her with a spear. The warrior then speared her face.
As she reexperienced her death, Tricia told me the pain she had felt then was very similar to the migraine pain she experiences in this lifetime.
Tricia’s neck stiffness and TMJ improved gradually and significantly after her regression, and her migraines have diminished, freeing her from the need to take medication for them.
This ability to be free from medicines can be as important as relief from the pain itself. Alberto, a physician specializing in radiology, had suffered from severe back pain and spasms for many years. Medical treatments had been unsuccessful in alleviating the excruciating pain. If Alberto had not had such a strong and positive personality and character structure, he could have easily succumbed to the addictive potential of the potent pain-killing medicines he required during flare-ups of his back pain.
Falling into a relaxed trance state, Alberto uncovered two past lives where he had suffered mortal injuries to his back. One was especially revealing. In this lifetime as a soldier several hundred years ago, Alberto recalled dying painfully on a European battlefield, and he reexperienced the numbing pain of his fatal wound. The location of this wound corresponded exactly to the source of his current lower back pain. After the regression, Alberto’s back pain and spasms quickly improved.
Once again, mind and body had come together to facilitate healing. In Alberto’s case, the result was more focused than in many of the other cases described above. Alberto came to have physical pain relieved, and he achieved his goal.
Although Alberto’s results were very specific, they still influenced his life in a broad way. As a result of his past life therapy, Alberto was able to stop taking the powerful painkillers that had previously provided his only source of relief.
Betty was another patient who used regression therapy to end a dependence on medicines. Betty had been afflicted with asthma, allergies, and a weakness of her respiratory system since childhood. She required injections of adrenaline and doses of steroids and other medicines to control her attacks and symptoms. She seemed destined to live out the rest of her life plagued by these terrible bouts of asthma, dependent on medicines just to breathe. Betty’s personality and life circumstances were different from Alberto’s, and she had even become addicted to a nasal decongestant spray.
During regression therapy, Betty began choking and gasping for air. She related to me that she was being burned at the stake, sometime in the late Middle Ages. The smoke was overpowering; her lungs were being seared. Betty eventually floated out of her body, hovering above it and the crowd, to watch the gruesome destruction of her body in the flames.
After the regression session, her asthma improved almost immediately. I still marvel that such a severe, life-paralyzing, lifelong symptom could resolve literally overnight. It seems miraculous to me. Yet it did, along with most of her other allergies. After her experience, Betty quickly stopped using the addictive decongestant, experiencing only minimal rebound stuffiness. Not only did the affliction disappear, but the quality of her life improved immeasurably. Her fears diminished markedly.
Betty is not the only patient of mine who had healed herself or himself of chronic allergies or respiratory problems through recall of a death experience that included the searing of the lungs or suffocation. Like migraine headaches, asthma, respiratory infections, and allergies are physical conditions in the current lifetime that seem to have origins in suffering experienced in previous lifetimes. Past physical trauma seems to leave present physical residue.
Lacey was a high school teacher in her late forties with a long history of asthma and a fear of water. During our first session, she went directly to a death scene and found herself as a girl of eight or nine falling off a cliff and drowning. Lacey recalled how her most vivid experience of this drowning was a sensory one, of the coldness and surprising depth of the water. Very quickly, she began to float peacefully out of her body. Next, Lacey found herself recalling a life in which she had been a young slave girl of eleven or twelve in the ancient Near East. In this lifetime, her task was to help make bricks out of wet hay or straw. Lacey died at this age when a wagon of wet straw fell over on her, and she suffocated. As she recalled the death experience, Lacey related the agony, panic, and terror she felt when she found that she could no longer take a breath. This death experience was quite different from the first one. Since that session, her asthmatic condition improved considerably, to the extent that for the first time in her life she was able to go through an entire allergy season without taking any medications or experiencing any symptoms.
Anne, an intensive care unit nurse, alleviated her respiratory allergies with a past life memory that began to well up spontaneously during a vacation. Anne was exploring Paris for the first time with her husband when she began to feel anxious for no apparent reason. As her anxiety increased, she also realized that she somehow also knew her way around the historic district she was exploring. She could easily navigate its twists and turns. Suddenly, as she turned a corner and looked down at the small square at the end of the street, Anne had an experience of déjà vu. She saw herself being burned at the stake several hundred years ago for her psychic healing abilities.
Anne subsequently came into the office for hypnosis therapy to explore this experience. In the structured therapy setting, Anne remembered the scorching heat and how she had died inhaling the thick, suffocating smoke that arose with it. Anne’s recurrent respiratory allergies had not been her impetus for entering therapy; the spontaneous memory had. But this registered nurse later reported to me that her allergies had shown a marked improvement as a result of exploring this memory.
Another of Dr. Jarmon’s patients, a fifty-one-year-old female executive, began hypnosis to trace the origin of her respiratory problems. Her name was Elizabeth.
“Now I want you to go to an old scene,” Dr. Jarmon instructed Elizabeth. “I want you to go back to the first time you had that problem where you couldn’t breathe, the feeling you couldn’t catch your breath. As you see that scene, describe what you see.”
Elizabeth began to tremble. She grimaced.
“There it is,” Dr. Jarmon said. “I want you to look down at your feet. What are you wearing on your feet?”
“Dark shoes,” she reported, in a child’s voice. “Old lady’s shoes.”
The doctor probed further. “Where are you? What are you doing?”
“Sewing. But I know what’s going to happen. There’s going to be a fire.” Elizabeth stammered and began coughing. Her breathing became rapid and shallow. “Smoldering . . . the rags over there in the corner.”
Elizabeth described herself as a sixteen-year-old girl named Nora who lived in Sterling, Massachusetts, in 1879. Nora worked in a shirt factory. She was deaf, could not speak, and wore braces on her legs. She had been working in this factory since age twelve.
“Smoke . . . flames!” she coughed. “They are trying to put it out . . . they are hitting it. They’re beating it. Someone threw water on it, but there’s not enough water,” she cried. Her breathing became very labored.
“Everybody’s trying to get out,” she sputtered.
“How about you? Are you trying to get out?” Dr. Jarmon asked.
“I can’t,” she answered. “They won’t help me!”
“Why do you need help?”
“I can’t walk . . . I have braces on my legs,” Elizabeth cried, gasping for air. “They don’t even see me. I’m there. I can’t breathe. I can’t stand it any more,” she gulped.
Suddenly she went limp. After several silent and tense minutes, Dr. Jarmon asked her to describe the scene.
“Is the fire still raging?” he asked.
“Yes . . . but I’m resting . . . I’m dead . . . still sick . . . have to rest. Some need more rest than others. But it’s okay. Now it’s peaceful.”
Elizabeth’s respiratory problems disappeared after she reexperienced her death in the fire. She lost her lifelong fear of suffocating. Her values and her life changed dramatically.
All these cases and so many others show that there is more than increased strength deriving from the clear awareness of our inherent divinity and the higher power guiding each of us throughout our lives. There is more than the immune system boost from living life more joyously and completely, with hardiness and power. There is also recovery through understanding the true root causes of our symptoms, our fears, our impairments, our dependencies.
When the core reasons are seen and experienced, understood and resolved, the symptoms disappear. The illnesses improve. The splinter has been removed, and the pain is gone. The recurrent drama has finally ended, and the dance is over. There is no need to project, to defend, to anaesthetize, to use drugs, to be sick any more.
Perhaps this is why therapy conducted in this state, from this higher perspective, seems to be extremely effective. Learning occurs at a highly accelerated pace. Sometimes regression to childhood or to a past life is not even necessary. When therapy is done in a relaxed, meditative, “higher” state, learning, acceptance, assimilation, and improvement frequently take place quite rapidly.
The benefits of the “higher” state can be experienced in forms of therapy other than past life therapy. I have been incorporating some of its elements into traditional psychotherapy with some of my nonregression patients. I tell the patient to gently close his or her eyes and to take a few deep breaths, letting the body completely relax. We then converse therapeutically. The patient’s vision is directed inward instead of outward. There are many fewer distracting sights and thoughts. Concentration is focused. The subconscious mind can be accessed and influenced in a positive, healing manner.
Frequently the patient experiences visual images that accompany the thoughts and emotions we are reviewing. These images seem to be very important and to be directly related to the symptoms or blocks the patient is experiencing. We discuss and integrate the meaning of these images, whether they are symbolic or actual memory fragments. Learning and clinical improvement are enhanced.
Evelyn has a particularly virulent form of premenopausal breast cancer, which has metastasized. Only two years before her own diagnosis was made, Evelyn experienced a severe grief reaction to her sister’s death from cancer. When she came to see me, Evelyn had already been through numerous courses of radiation and chemotherapy. She had undergone a surgical menopause in order to negate hormonal influences on her cancer. Evelyn was despondent and losing hope, and her clinical course was heading downhill.
In a hypnotic state, we patched up some old family problems. In this hypnotized, superconscious state, Evelyn met her deceased sister. They talked, hugged, expressed their love for each other, and knew that they would “always” be bonded together in some way. Evelyn realized that her sister was not dead, that she had merely left her body behind.
Next Evelyn visualized lights like laser beams zapping her tumors, cleansing her body, adding a turbocharge to her immune system. Spirit guides came to help with the laser zapping.
Evelyn began to improve. She gained weight and went into remission. She became more hopeful, fighting to live. Her grief and depression rapidly disappeared. She felt joy and peace reenter her life.
Was her improvement due to the hypnosis and the healing visualizations? The time course suggests a correlation. There were also other factors. Her oncologists were able to use higher amounts of chemotherapy medicines because she was feeling better and stronger. Perhaps the added medicines were the crucial factor. Yet, without the hypnosis and visualizations, she could not have tolerated the increased doses of the powerful chemotherapy drugs.
In a study reported in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, medical researchers found that a combination of diet, exercise, and the practice of stress reduction techniques can reverse blockages in coronary artery disease. Changes in diet and exercise alone were not sufficient to reverse heart disease. Stress reduction was a necessary factor, more important than originally believed.
Dr. Claude Lenfant, a researcher at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, stated that these lifestyle changes “can begin to reverse even severe coronary artery disease after only one year, without the use of cholesterol-lowering drugs.” Relaxation techniques are very important.
“This finding suggests that conventional recommendations . . . may be enough to prevent heart disease but not to reverse it,” commented Dr. Dean Ornish, who coordinated the study.
In another study of more than one thousand heart attack victims, researchers from Stanford University presented a report at the International Congress of Behavioral Medicine in Uppsala, Sweden. They found that anxiety, fearfulness, hostility, and anger are psychological traits that predispose people to second heart attacks. Interestingly, anxiety and fearfulness seem to be more harmful to women while hostility and anger are more harmful to men.
Relaxation, visualization, imagery, and regression are used in order to eliminate stress, tension, fears, and phobias, in a holistic way—the health ramifications seem endless.
We need more research into the mind/brain/immune system/body continuum. How do attitudes and particular states of mind help to prevent, ameliorate, and sometimes cure addictions, chronic illnesses, infections, cancers, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and other diseases?
It has been my experience, and that of many other doctors as well, that regression therapy and hypnotic visualization can transform the mind to reach these healing states. These methods can be used in conjunction with traditional medical approaches and medicines. They are not mutually exclusive, by any means, as the treatment of many of the patients in this chapter demonstrates.
Here is one final example. Frances is a woman in her mid-forties who came to me to work on some relationship issues. She had also been recently diagnosed as having two masses in her right breast. The breast masses had been definitively identified as solid, striated masses, not as the fluid-filled cysts that can come and go at different stages of the menstrual cycle. I conducted the preliminary interview, noting Frances’s psychological and physical history, and we made a second appointment.
On the day of her second appointment, Frances arrived in an agitated state. Since our first session, she had gone to see an oncologist about her breast lumps, which were possibly cancerous. The oncologist had tried to perform a needle biopsy on the breast masses, but Frances had fainted. Her doctors had decided they wanted to remove the two masses surgically, and Frances was very anxious, not only about the possibility that they would prove to be cancerous, but also because she had once had a bad experience under general anaesthesia similar to a near death experience and was afraid she would repeat it.
During our session we did visualization work with healing lights, just as Evelyn and I did and as many other patients have done. I gave Frances the audio tape with a relaxation and healing meditation and suggested that she do the same work at home. We made a third appointment for the following week.
Frances had quite an astounding story to tell during the third appointment. She had arrived to have her surgery as planned early on a Monday morning. As part of the preparation for surgery, her radiologist had run a final breast X ray.
When he looked at the film, the lumps that had been present on a previous workup taken only three days before were completely gone.
The startled doctor immediately scheduled Frances for an emergency mammogram.
As Frances lay on the operating table with an IV in her arm, her radiologist announced the results to her surgeon while also showing the man the data.
Frances’s surgeon told her radiologist that he wanted to operate anyway, on the basis of the last set of X rays.
The two physicians proceeded to have a disagreement right in front of their sedated patient, who was waiting on the table to have surgery. The surgeon was recalcitrant, and refused to believe the new evidence even though his highly qualified associate, the radiologist, saw that two separate and highly reliable tests had shown that Frances’s breast lumps had disappeared.
Finally Frances took matters into her own hands.
“There aren’t any lumps there,” she said. “So I’m going home.”
Later, Frances sent me the following message in a holiday greeting card:
Thank you for the meditation regression tape. I am “living proof” that the healing light works! I experienced a miracle today when I went into the hospital for my lumpectomy. Both lumps had disappeared from Friday to Monday. I’ve been 100% healed!! (amazing, powerful stuff, that “white light”)
Now all of my friends and relatives are believers, too, and want copies of the tape! All the skeptics and doubters, including my husband, are beginning to listen to the value of meditation, etc. I will always remember this Hanukkah as the “turning point” in my life. And I will always celebrate the “Festival of Lights” with a new meaning! P.S. I look forward to even more wonderful experiences toward HEALTH.
Frances’s experiences may be much less uncommon than people think.
The transformational power of the mental attitudes induced by hypnotic past life regression and visualization can be of real practical use to traditional medical practitioners. Here are safe and strong healing forces, forces with no side effects because these forces are basically spiritual and intuitive in nature. This is truly holistic medicine.