Enriching Your Life
BLAIR WAS A VERY WEALTHY AND ATTRACTIVE WOMAN who sought therapy to help her deal with her marital problems. She felt that her husband was undermining her, causing her to feel powerless.
In regression, Blair remembered being a Native American male belonging to a Great Plains tribe. She recalled a day in her life as this Native American in which she was alone, walking northward in the deep white powder of a fresh snowfall. Blair described the crunching sound her feet made in the snow, how at one she felt with nature and her surroundings, and how peaceful she was savoring the simple act of walking through this landscape, moment by moment. She relished the complete and perfect solitude.
As the walk through the snow continued, Blair marveled at this person’s strength, knowledge of nature, sense of balance, harmony, power, and beauty. She began to appreciate his ability to become absorbed in the natural flow of things and the pleasure this brought.
As we integrated this memory after the regression, Blair recognized that this sense of freedom and the other attendant qualities were exactly what she needed in her current life situation. She could make herself happy; she could revel in solitude. Her contentment was not dependent on her husband, and she was just as strong and self-sufficient as he. These attributes were no longer hypothetical to Blair. She had experienced them. Whether purely a past life memory or one amplified by metaphor, it allowed her to tap into the strongest and freest part of herself, in the process allowing her to transcend what she perceived as the limiting circumstances of her life.
Although past life therapy can heal significant physical and emotional problems quickly and deeply, it is not necessary to have a serious problem to benefit from this process. Many productive, highly functioning people suffering from seemingly minor problems and worries can also profit.
Felice, an attractive woman in her early thirties, also had symptoms that were not acutely dramatic but that, nonetheless, significantly influenced her quality of life. Felice suffered from low self-esteem and loss of confidence. She was also afraid of the dark. In regression, she recalled an ancient lifetime in which she had been an ugly and deformed girl who lived in a cave with her clan. She had been taunted and rejected by her community because of her appearance, and she had suffered from severe loneliness as a result. Felice recalled how she had spent much of her time huddled in the farthest and darkest recesses of the cave so that no one could see her. Eventually, this physical outcast died at a young age.
That lifetime obviously bore a relationship to her current low self-esteem. Felice had brought forward some of the pain and the poor self-image of that time, although there no longer was a physical basis for it. That lifetime also seemed to explain Felice’s fear of the dark.
Once Felice understood these sources of her symptoms, her poor self-image and her confidence levels both improved.
Hank was a young man who seemed to have it all. A successful attorney in his late twenties with a significant income, he also had all-American good looks and athletic abilities, and he was quite popular with women. Overall, Hank functioned quite well in the world. However, he came to therapy reporting lack of satisfaction, malaise, and periodic depression and anxiety. Hank felt as though his life lacked a real purpose.
In regression therapy, Hank accessed a memory from the year 1874. In that lifetime, he had been a freed black slave. The memory was nothing more than a brief, fragmentary key moment, but it was a vivid one. In it, Hank was confined in a dark woodshed, and he was being whipped across the back by an unknown authority.
Despite its brevity, the experience affected him deeply. Although this memory did not provide earth-shattering illumination of the current specifics of Hank’s life, he thought that it did shed light on some old shadows in his life history, such as an unusual degree of teenage rebelliousness.
After the session, Hank felt much better. Having the experience of recalling a past life seemed to give Hank a new sense of direction. The malaise and unhappiness evaporated. Although the outer circumstances of his life, already good ones, did not change, he was more content, knowing that his life contained a higher wisdom. He realized that the circumstances and events of his current lifetime have a purpose and that death will not end it.
Past life therapy can unleash sources of hidden strength, as Blair discovered. Like Felice, many people can benefit from past life therapy’s ability to pinpoint the source of distortions in self-perception. And Hank’s case shows how, in offering a direct, personal experience of spirituality and higher wisdom, past life therapy can replace vague feelings of lack of purpose and unhappiness with a new sense of serenity and direction.
If you have a creative block, past life therapy can sometimes reveal the prior life source of the block as it also removes it, leaving you with a new avenue of creativity, empowerment, and play.
Tricia is a well-known political talk show host. She is very successful at a demanding and high-pressured job. She is also popular and well liked. Tricia wanted to write a book. However, this intelligent and flexible woman who ad-libbed on a dime was unable to sit down and let words flow onto a page. She sought therapy to help her resolve her writer’s block.
Tricia’s regression was to a lifetime as a male somewhere in Europe several centuries ago. For many years, this person had been a tax collector who used a quill pen to record information in a thick book. One day, a poor woman dressed in burlap came to see the tax collector, accompanied by her many hungry children. The woman begged him to forgive her tax debt. She needed the money to feed her starving family.
Because the tax collector was afraid of the consequences if he overlooked the debt—losing his job and becoming impoverished himself—he had simply continued to write in the thick book. However, this man had always regretted making this decision.
Tricia was able to connect this memory to positive qualities in her present life, including her zeal for social justice. She could also connect her present creative block now to the fact that her writing had caused so much pain in the earlier life.
Not only did the session give Tricia more insight into herself, but she was able to start writing her book.
I once regressed a famous musician who had become unable to create new material. As a result, this performer made fewer appearances and no new recordings.
It took us one session to fix the problem.
The musician quickly entered a deep hypnotic state and vividly recalled an Irish lifetime in the nineteenth century. He had been talented then, too, but he had been severely punished for neglecting his studies, as well as for exceeding the talents and abilities of his father and older brother. It was a Catch-22. He did not have the strength or the courage to resist his family, upon whom he was too dependent for material comforts and social position. Thus, he did not pursue his talent, his passion, his joy.
Years passed. Increasingly despondent, the young man finally broke away and set sail for America, but he died en route as the result of an epidemic that had broken out on the ship.
We discussed that lifetime from the higher perspective of his superconscious self after his death aboard ship. He was still deeply hypnotized.
“I wasted my life,” he observed. “I should have had the courage and the faith to pursue my talent. I did not love myself enough, and I valued the wrong things in that lifetime. I gave up because of fear, not because I loved my family. I feared rejection. They would have loved me anyway, but I didn’t realize this. And it was their fears that caused them to hold me back. They also need to learn about love. Love is everything.”
After he emerged from the hypnotic state, he seemed to be deeply moved by his experience. His creative block quickly disappeared, and he began to perform brilliantly and much more frequently.
Dr. Robert Jarmon had a fascinating case involving a young, well-functioning business executive who became inexplicably anxious and fearful whenever the moon was full. The reason for this fear turned out to be more complicated than gravity, tidal effects, or fluid balances.
Dr. Jarmon regressed this patient to an incident when, as a youth, the patient had to turn down a joy ride with some friends because he had to work the evening shift as a gas station attendant. The joy-riding friends had a serious accident, and two of them were killed. The moon had been full on that tragic night. The youth’s grief and guilt seemed linked to that memory of the moon. Dr. Jarmon began to explain therapeutically that the accident was in the past, that the grieving and other internalized memories and feelings could now be released.
The hypnotized patient interrupted him.
“They might catch us. We have to be very careful. The moon is full tonight.”
Much to Dr. Jarmon’s surprise, his patient had spontaneously gone back to a lifetime as an American soldier in Europe during World War II. The soldier was caught by the Germans. His last memory was of being shot in the back as he faced a river, the moonlight reflecting up from the water’s surface.
The patient was able to give his past life name during this incarnation as the soldier. He also provided the date, branch location, and site of his college graduation in the late 1930s. The patient’s wife later did some research and was able to confirm that a man with that same name had indeed been graduated from that particular branch of that college. The date was off by one year.
After this regression and the memory of his death as a soldier, his strange reaction to the full moon disappeared.
Perhaps “lunacy” and much of the folklore surrounding the often profound and strange effects of the full moon on our psyches have some roots in our ancient memories. After all, we have all been looking up at the full moon for thousands of years.
Ruth was a policewoman in her mid-thirties. Her job required calm nerves and a level head, and she performed admirably. Nonetheless, when she went home at night she suffered from nightmares, rage, and anxiety. Many law enforcers might have similar reactions, and it might be plausible to say that this was a case of job-related stress. However, when Ruth came to see me, she regressed to a lifetime in which she had been a pale woman in Normandy wearing a white bonnet. She had been imprisoned unfairly in an unidentified building.
In that lifetime, Ruth had apparently been passive in accepting her confinement. She had never released her anger or corrected the wrongs that had put her there. She realized that this was a lesson she needed to learn in her current lifetime. As a policewoman, she has a strong sense of justice, a personality trait that was probably influenced by the past life experience. However, that experience also seemed to have left her with residual anger that was keeping her from being happy. In one sense Ruth seemed to be compensating for the experiences of the other lifetime in a healthy way, but in another she seemed to be overcompensating, to be clenching her teeth and saying, “No way am I ever going to let that happen again.”
Sometimes, a cause-and-effect message such as this one is the point of a regression session. There may be a particular piece of information that needs to be learned, and once the patient learns it, he or she is able to assimilate it, grow, and simply go on. Ruth’s memory helped her discern why she was so angry. It also helped her understand that the theme of her nightmares, which usually had to do with being trapped, confined, or paralyzed, was probably related to her imprisonment.
Ruth’s nightmares have now disappeared, and her anxiety has lessened, although she still experiences anger at times. Whenever she begins to feel that rage, however, she is now able to control it much more quickly, and she is less frightened by it. Past life therapy helped her to clear two shadows in her life, and to lessen, control, and manage the one that remains.
Alice is a twenty-seven-year-old woman who suffered from anxiety and inability to trust, two very common symptoms in our society. Her symptoms had started in childhood. After her father locked her in a closet one day, severely frightening her, she had never again trusted her parents.
In regression, Alice returned to ancient times, to relate that she was a small child buried alive. Alice had fallen ill from a plague that had swept through her village. She had become feverish and was probably unconscious or even in a coma when she was mistaken for dead. She awakened in the grave and panicked. She was furious as she left that lifetime, realizing only later that the mistake had been an honest one. In life review, Alice was able to link that experience with lack of trust in this life.
Alice had a second past life memory of panicking as a child, this time during a war. People had collapsed on her during a bombardment, triggering symptoms of claustrophobia and extreme anxiety. After these two memories were accessed, Alice’s symptoms began to dissipate. Understanding helped her symptoms, as it had also helped the musician, Tricia, and Ruth.
Revealing the source of a fear may not only alleviate that fear, it can also reveal talents from other lifetimes.
A young single mother and successful professional photographer named Caryn came to therapy to explore a number of relationship issues with family members. She was having some success in this arena with past life therapy. In addition, Caryn had another, very specific, problem. It was an uncharacteristic one for such a successful and independent woman. Caryn was terrified of getting lost while driving. To her dismay, she often did lose her way, perhaps more than the average person. At times, Caryn became so scared of this happening that she had to have someone drive her to appointments.
We decided to also address this fear with past life regression therapy. In hypnosis, Caryn recalled having been a navigator on a submarine during World War II. During one mission, she had become confused, had made a mistake and taken the ship way off course. The ship was so far off course that it had become lost in enemy waters. Detected by the enemy, the ship was destroyed, and Caryn and the other crew members were killed.
After this session, Caryn’s fear of getting lost vanished completely.
Later, her young daughter observed how much better her mother had become, how much more loving.
After several months, Caryn dropped me a note. Even though she had been successful and functioned well prior to therapy, she described how “whole and full of love” she now felt and how at peace with herself she had become. She also reported that not only doesn’t she get lost any more, but other people are asking her for instructions, and she draws maps for them so they don’t lose their way!
Not only was Caryn able to overcome her fear, but she was also able to access her navigational talent from her previous lifetime and add it to her many others.
Past life regression sometimes gives great joy to adopted families by showing them that, although they are not biologically related and although blood may be thicker than water, spirit is thicker than blood. I have done regressions that indicate that the bonds between adopted children and their adoptive parents may be stronger than the bonds between these children and their biological parents. When various members of these adoptive families are regressed, they often recognize each other in prior lifetimes.
Experience has shown me that if a parent-child relationship is destined to take place, and the physical outlet is blocked, another way is found for it to occur. Parent-child relationships are never random. A friend of mine, an astrologer, has discovered the same thing. She has told me that if you compare the charts of adopted parents and children, you often see the same correspondences and connections that are seen in the charts of biological families.
Sometimes past life regression is the beginning of a spiritual path that brings not only understanding and special talents to consciousness but also peace, bliss, inner joy, and wisdom to the most mundane and unexpected moments of life. As an unforeseen result of past life therapy, many of my patients have become oriented toward spirituality or metaphysics without withdrawing, in any way, from productive careers and existing relationships. In fact, the other aspects of their lives have also improved and strengthened as a result of their spiritual growth. Many of them report more “peak” or transcendent experiences, more intuitive knowledge that leads them to betterment of both their inner and outer lives, and more peace, calm, and centeredness in their lives no matter the circumstances.
I know what they mean. As a result of my own spiritual growth, which in many ways began with my experiences with Catherine, I have had my own personal transcendent experiences. After the first one, I knew immediately that this state is a goal in itself.
The first one actually began about a week prior to the experience itself. Several years ago, after a ten-hour day of seeing patients, I was beginning to relax by meditating in a reclining chair in my office. After only a few minutes, already in a deep state without any particular thoughts in my mind, I heard a booming voice inside my head. It was like a telepathic trumpet, and it shook my whole body.
“Just love him!” the voice thundered. I was instantly wide awake. I knew the message meant Jordan, my son. At this time, he was a typically rebellious teenager, but I had not been thinking about him at all on this day. Perhaps, subconsciously, I was wrestling with how to deal with his behavior.
One very early and dark morning a week later, I was driving Jordan to school. I tried to get a conversation going, but he was particularly monosyllabic in his responses to me that day. Jordan was just plain grumpy.
I knew I had the choice of being angry or of letting it go. I remembered the message “Just love him!” and I chose the latter.
“Jordan, just remember that I love you,” I said as I dropped him off at school.
To my surprise, he replied, “I love you, too.”
It was then that I realized that he hadn’t been angry or grumpy at all, he just wasn’t fully awake yet. My perception of anger had been an illusion.
I continued driving in to the hospital, about forty-five minutes away. As I passed a church, the sun was just rising above the treetops, and a gardener was leisurely mowing the grass.
Suddenly I had a feeling of great peace and joy. I felt immensely safe and secure, and the world seemed to be in perfect order. The gardener, the trees, and everything else I could see were luminous and glowing. I could almost see through them; everything had a transparent golden quality. I felt connected to everyone and everything—to the gardener, the trees, the grass, the sky, a squirrel climbing a tree. There was the total absence of fear or anxiety. The future seemed perfectly clear . . . perfect.
I must have seemed strange to the other rush-hour commuters. I felt a kind of detached, universal love for them, too. Even as other drivers cut in front of me, I just waved them in and smiled. I wondered why all these people were rushing so much. Time seemed to stand still and then to disappear. I felt incredibly patient. We were here to learn and to love, I could see this so clearly. Nothing else really matters.
The luminosity and transparency of objects continued as I drove to the hospital. So did the state of detached loving-kindness and great peace and joy. So did the feelings of patience and happiness and interconnectedness with everything else.
This state stayed with me as I began my workday. I was unusually intuitive with my patients that morning, especially with two new patients I had never seen before. I could perceive light in and around people: everyone seemed to glow. I could really experience how everything in life is connected. I knew with certainty that there was no such thing as danger, no need for fear. Everything was one.
This experience lasted until I attended an administrative meeting later in the day. The subject of the meeting—How to Increase Hospital Profits—angered me. I knew that I again had a choice: to leave the meeting and maintain my state, or to stay and tell the truth about how I felt about their ideas. To stay and talk about ethics and honesty, I would need my left-brain, logical faculties. Immediately there was a profound shift. I was back to my “normal self,” analytical and “down to earth.” Afterwards, I was unable to bring back the wonderful, peaceful state. It was gone, no matter how hard I tried to remember, recall, recreate.
I have had this beautiful experience five or six times since then. Each time, it has come unbidden. Meditation does not create this state. It cannot be forced. It is not the result of effort. It is almost a gift, a gift of grace.
When I relax into a feeling of love, without asking for anything in return, I can sense that the state is very close by.
I also try now to help other people reach these states of inner peace, joy, and bliss that are the result of the sort of path of personal growth that can begin with past life regression. It is so important. For me, it is really the goal of all my therapy. It is this state of inner peace that is so healing, so therapeutic.
There are times when it is not necessary or even recommended to begin this path with past life regression therapy. Sometimes, hypnosis reveals a different path to be taken.
Occasionally a highly functioning, happy person comes to my office because of curiosity or “just for the experience.” Often, such a patient has excellent results like Martha in Chapter Eight who was able to resolve the remaining grief she felt about her father’s death as a result of her curiosity-motivated session. But sometimes these patients are not “successful.”
Frequently, there is a reason memories are not forthcoming. Sometimes, these patients are trying too hard. The very act of trying is a conscious behavior that can block the subconscious from coming through. This block is easily overcome, however, as the patient relaxes and becomes more skilled at being passively receptive. Sometimes there is a fear of reliving a death experience. As discussed previously, I point out to my patients that they can choose whether to go through a death experience or not and that if they do, the majority of people do not find the death experience traumatic. This makes the success rate even higher.
But there are times when the patient has something more important to accomplish.
Armando is a tax attorney from New Jersey who came to see me for past life regression. He is an elegant man, impeccably dressed and charming, his mind ever attentive and quick. He was not having any significant psychological or physical problems, but he desperately wanted the experience of a past life regression. Armando was very serious about seeking spiritual growth.
Armando’s personality style bordered on the obsessive-compulsive. He had difficulty relaxing and preferred spending leisure time alone or with his wife rather than with other people. Although always polite and considerate, he was not overly giving or charitable toward others. Politically, he was conservative and somewhat of a “hawk.” As a student, he had abandoned his musical interests and talents for a more practical career in law.
During our second session, I hypnotized Armando to a deep level. He experienced an ecstatic state, filled with peace and love. He saw vivid colors, particularly purple, a deeply divine and holy color, a color traditionally associated with spirituality. But he could not retrieve any memories at all of past life experiences, although he was trying very hard.
I gave Armando a regression tape to play at home. His wife, whom I had not met, also listened to the tape. She had vivid visualizations of several past life scenes, and she recounted them to her envious husband. But Armando saw nothing of his previous lifetimes. Over the week between sessions, Armando’s wife continued to have past life recall whenever she listened to the guided regression on the tape. Armando had none.
However, on the same tape I instruct the listener to meet a wise person, a guide or helper, to ask a question or two of this person, and to listen for the answer.
Out of Armando’s purple light, his guide materialized. Armando’s wise helper was a nineteen-year-old male with long blond hair, wearing blue jeans and a lumberjacket shirt. His name was Michael. The age, style, characteristics, and dress of his guide were not those one would expect a formal person like Armando to conjure up or imagine. Even Armando was surprised.
Michael was smiling. He put his arm around Armando and told him to “lighten up, relax, don’t be so serious.”
Whenever Armando listened to the tape, Michael would emerge out of this purple light and talk to him. He imparted spiritual advice, helped with practical wisdom regarding Armando’s business and personal relationships, and made several accurate predictions of events that actually occurred over the next few days.
But Armando still desperately wanted a past life regression. He partially minimized the beauty and importance of the encounters with Michael, his guide.
Armando came in for his third session, still complaining that he could not recall his past lives. He envied his wife’s easy recollections.
I hypnotized Armando to a deep level and had him find Michael.
“Ask him why you cannot remember your past lifetimes,” I instructed.
Michael’s answer was swift and to the point, as usual.
“You will be allowed to remember your lifetimes as a reward when you give up your present fears. There is nothing to fear. You are afraid of people, and you should not be. Do not worry about others; they will be all right. Do not expect them to be perfect. Go to them to help them, even if you begin with just one at a time.”
Armando did not really need to remember other lifetimes. His work is to be done in the present. Someday, if he is able to follow Michael’s advice, he will be able to glimpse his past. But that glimpse will be a reward, a just desert.
The remembering of one’s prior lifetimes is not essential or necessary for everyone. Not everyone has carried over blocks or scars that are significant in the current lifetime. Frequently, the emphasis is to be placed on the present, not the past. In his desire to remember his past lives, Armando nearly missed the incredibly beautiful and important meetings with Michael.
Armando’s experience also begins to demonstrate the unlimited potential and resources of the subconscious mind in the hypnotic state. In this relaxed, peaceful state all kinds of things can happen. In a sense, when I conduct a regression I feel like a facilitator, a helper. It is the patient who ultimately controls the healing. Many different types of altered states, psychic insights, perception of beautiful colors, feelings, thoughts, and solutions to present problems may pop into the mind of a patient under regression, as well as experiences with guides and memories of past and present lifetimes. A patient may even have experiences that seem to take place in other realms altogether, realms that are very beautiful and sacred.
To see the answers to one’s problems emblazoned in golden letters across a violet light is healing. An expansion of consciousness such as this is very therapeutic, a wonderful thing, and can be just as healing as past life regression.
The healing potential of the subconscious mind under the guidance of a good adviser or under one’s own guidance seems limitless. I learn as much about healing from my patients as they do from their experiences, if not more. We are all teachers and students; we are all patients and healers. The journey through time into the mind, soul, and feelings is one that we all share.