The Techniques of Regression
IT IS NOT ALWAYS NECESSARY OR SOMETIMES EVEN POSSIBLE to visit a past life regression therapist. I even recommend that my patients and those who attend my regression workshops augment their therapy or group experiences with techniques that can be used at home. You can use the same techniques to explore your own past lives and access your own higher wisdom. My patients tell me that the techniques described here have given them many kinds of stimulating, relaxing, and healing experiences.
A script for a version of a tape-recorded relaxation and regression meditation I give to patients and instructions on how to make your own tape appear in Appendix A. This exercise will guide your subconscious mind to uncover the most pertinent childhood, past life, or perhaps in-between-life memory for you to experience. The more often you use it, the more results you will get.
This script is similar to what I do in my office, but there are other very valuable techniques to a past life regression. These techniques appear in this chapter, and I recommend that you sample all of them to see which ones are the best and most enjoyable for you, and that you practice them regularly.
The other techniques that I recommend fall into four categories. They include keeping a dream journal, meditation and visualization, self-awareness techniques, and “play” techniques that you can try alone or with a friend. All will help you relax and focus your mind, allowing subconscious information to surface.
All of these techniques are safe. If you have a severe symptom or are anxious about the experience, you may want to begin your exploration by first consulting a trained therapist. Honor these feelings if you have them, but remember that the subconscious is very wise. It will usually give the experience appropriate for the moment and circumstances in which you find yourself. Even some of my patients with very disturbing symptoms have successfully used regression techniques at home between sessions.
However, the therapeutic process is very helpful in its ability to integrate an important past life experience into your present stage of growth. Therefore, if you ever have an experience you feel warrants help in order to integrate it into your present life situation, you may want to consult a professional therapist.
Explore, trust, play, and above all, be flexible. Allow yourself to be surprised at the directions in which your higher wisdom takes you as you begin to tap the many layers of your mind, body, emotions, and soul.
Start to keep a dream journal. Dreams often contain clues about past lives. Not all dreams are Freudian dreams with symbols, distortions, and wish-metaphors. Some dreams convey literal past life memories.
I have found the following method to be the best way to keep a dream journal. Upon awakening from sleep, lie quietly and try not to move. Try to remember your dream. Go over it in your mind. Then, go over it again, and more details will emerge.
Next, give your dream a title, such as “Paralyzed with Fear and Running without Moving” or “Being Lost in Labyrinths of German Castle.” Giving the dream a title will help to identify its theme and will enable you to organize by category for subsequent retrieval. Writing down all of the dream’s details will insure against the inevitable forgetting of the dream’s content. Journal writing will also stimulate your mind to have better recall of your dreams and their details.
The more dreams you record, the more clues about your past lives you may receive. You can recognize a dream that holds a clue from a past life when you find you have dreamed you were dressed in clothing from a different period of time or when you are using tools or other implements that seem to date from a different place or time. For example, if you dream that you are dressed in the style of the American Revolution, or that you are repairing ancient Native American cliff dwellings, or that you are making candles from tallow, the odds are that your dream contains a clue to a past life.
You don’t need to determine immediately the meaning of the clue. Simply write a narrative, give the dream a name, and occasionally review the contents of your entire journal for trends or patterns.
Do the details seem interrelated or random? Details of other places and times that can be integrated into a theme or picture may be giving you indications of the most important or relevant past lives for exploration, while the more random ones may be just that, random details, or else memory fragments that are not yet organized.
When you would like to more fully explore a past life detail or theme, meditate on it. Focus your mind on it as if you were doing a self-regression. Visualize that scene, image, or fragment and let it expand and move and become more detailed. Try not to inhibit your impressions mentally. Do not censor them. A fairly complete past life memory might evolve from a single meditation, or over several, or not at all. This is a natural variation. In the beginning it is common to receive a collection of past life fragments that do not seem coherent. The more you practice this technique, the more skilled you will become.
In my office, I sometimes ask a patient to play the parts of all the people in his or her dream. You can adapt this technique to use by yourself. For example, if you have a past life dream where you are surrounded by an unfamiliar family, imagine and perhaps enact the roles of the father, the mother, the younger sister, the boyfriend, etc. What does it feel like to be each of them?
Frequently, by using their intuition and imagination to play different roles and parts, people start to understand more about what their dreams really mean. They learn more about the motivations of each character. In past life dreams and also when working with actual regression material, playing each role in this manner may uncover a strong identification with a particular character.
Or, if you already identify with a particular character, the technique may allow you to empathize with the motivations of other people in the dream. You may come to recognize that one of the other characters in the dream is someone now in your present life. For instance, you might say, “This person feels just like my father.”
In using this role-playing technique to interpret your more typical dreams, you may be able to find the patterns reflected in your present life.
Meditation, a practice I recommend highly, is another basic method for opening up your awareness of past life memories. Meditation clears the mind, and when the mind is clear, insights, perceptions, and perhaps past life memories may spontaneously surface.
However, I also recommend meditation for its many other positive and far-reaching effects. Like keeping a dream journal, meditation is a technique that gives you a foundation of self-awareness that can be useful in many areas of your life. It teaches peacefulness and joy. It shows how to focus on the present moment and not to worry so much about the future or ruminate about the past. It can teach you to be in control of your mind and emotions instead of the other way around.
The practice of meditation is much easier and simpler than most people believe it to be. The beginner’s anxiety about doing it correctly, the right way, is what creates the difficulty. However, there is no one right way to meditate. Whenever you are relaxed, when your mind is quiet and observant, when you are not reflexively engaged in thought, you are meditating. You could be sitting cross-legged on the floor with your back straight, or in a chair, or lying down, or in any other comfortable position. Whatever position you’re in, the observant, aware, quiet mind is a meditating mind.
In meditation there is an active awareness, a state of open receptivity, an observing consciousness that breaks down the barriers between the observer and the observed object. Great insights and revelations can occur in this state. Meditation takes practice and patience, but the very act of meditating creates more patience.
As a psychiatrist, I know how difficult it can be to quiet the mind. Thoughts always seem to be popping up into our consciousness. As a matter of fact, most of us are not even aware of these thoughts or that we are constantly thinking, visualizing, or daydreaming. In my workshops I ask people to close their eyes and think of nothing for thirty seconds—no thoughts, no images, just a blank mind.
Almost no one can do this. After the thirty seconds are up, I ask people to tell me whether they had any thoughts, and, if so, what they were. “Why is he asking us to do this?” “This is silly.” “My back hurts.” “I wonder if I left my headlights on.” “I wish that person would stop coughing.” These are examples of the constant inner chatter that floods the minds of my workshop participants. Try it for yourself and see.
To meditate, find a quiet, peaceful place and just relax and try to quiet your mind. Pay attention to your breathing. Breathe slowly and gently, slowly and gently, until your breathing settles into a calm, even rhythm. Become aware of your thoughts and then softly let them go. Do not judge yourself. Do not become frustrated or impatient. Just observe your thoughts as they pass by.
As you do so you will learn a great deal about yourself, and as you practice the techniques in this chapter and in Appendix A, you may access a past life memory. With time, meditating may enhance your success with other techniques of regression.
Some people prefer to meditate by concentrating on a word, a number, or an object. Again, the specific technique does not matter. As your mind and body relax, the brain’s electrical activity slows, and you enter an alpha or even a theta state, states in which the electrical wave activity of the brain decreases to a much slower rhythm than that of the normal waking, or beta, state.
When you are in these relaxed states, you are meditating; you are restoring yourself; you are rejuvenating. Other people prefer visualizing, or picturing things in their mind’s eye as a meditation technique. This is very similar to daydreaming. But when I measure the electrical activity of the brain in people who are meditating and people who are visualizing, I find the same alpha and theta states. Those who visualize are also meditating, but in a more guided way.
Visualization can be used as a powerful healing technique to augment the body’s immune system, accelerate natural homeostatic and healing mechanisms, and eliminate many types of illnesses. It can also be used to enhance a physical performance, as a form of prayer, or even to reach transcendent states.
To discover a past life from a meditative state, visualize yourself in a different time. Let the images flow into your conscious mind. The material that comes up will be arising from your deeper mind, your subconscious. Don’t analyze the images. Just let them flow forth and observe them as if you were a witness to the events or scenes they portray. Use your imagination. After you are finished, record your experiences in a journal, perhaps in a separate section of your dream journal. Look for patterns and meanings the same way you do when you examine your dreams.
If you’d like more information about different meditation techniques, consult some of the books on the Suggested Reading List in Appendix B. Many different types of meditation tapes are also available.
Your current life and circumstances often contain clues to your past lives. So, when you’re relaxed and have some free time, try some self-analysis. From a detached, nonjudgmental, and uncritical perspective, observe and ruminate upon your talents and abilities. Where do they come from? Did you inherit them from your parents, or could they be connected to a past life?
A classic example of a talent potentially inherited from a past life is Mozart’s ability to write symphonies at the age of five. It could easily be hypothesized that Mozart might have been a musician in prior lifetimes, improved upon his talents, and brought them over to his current lifetime.
A facility for a particular language or an affinity for a certain culture may also be a clue to past life origins. For example, in a lecture of mine I met a Caucasian man from Oklahoma who spends all of his vacations in Jamaica. He loves the people and the culture and understands it as well as a native. What’s more, he felt “at home” upon arriving there for the first time. You can use your current talents as a focus for accessing past lives through hypnotic regression techniques or through visualization.
The remnants of negative experiences you had during other lifetimes might have surfaced as fears or phobias in this lifetime. Take an inventory of yourself. Become aware of any fears or phobias you have. Ask yourself, Where does the fear come from? Why do I have it? Did something happen to me as a child to cause it? Did I always have that fear?
If you can’t find a source for the fear, and you realize that it is one you have always had, start playing, dreaming, and visualizing, and you might find the source in a past lifetime.
It’s important to stress that to be successful in this exercise, as in all the others, you need to be nonjudgmental and uncritical. For instance, if you address a fear of water by saying, “Oh, I’m just afraid of water; I’m a coward and that’s all there is to it,” you’ll never find a possible past life connection to a drowning.
Although some people find an affinity to a certain culture, others are repulsed by certain areas of the world. A housewife and mother of three recalled having a severe panic attack when her plane landed at Athens Airport for the start of her honeymoon. She insisted that she and her husband leave Greece at once. They flew to Rome and later to Paris with no recurrence of the terrifying symptoms, and they had a wonderful time.
In a regression session years later, this woman remembered a Greek lifetime when she was pushed off a cliff to her death by people who had violently disagreed with her beliefs. Critics might argue that this woman’s panic upon landing in Greece was the result of repressed fears about her new marriage. But the complete disappearance of the symptoms when they arrived in another country refutes such an argument.
Others uncover clues about past lives through experiences of déjà vu. Have you ever had a strange feeling of “having been there before” when first visiting a place? After one of my lectures, a couple in their early fifties told me about a recent trip to Italy. This was their first trip to this country, where neither one understood or spoke the language. The couple rented a car and lost their way while driving through northern Italy. Becoming increasingly anxious as nightfall approached, they entered a small town.
The wife suddenly had a strange feeling of déjà vu. The town seemed hauntingly familiar to her. Her husband described the glazed look that came over her eyes at the moment. He was shocked when she began speaking Italian to the villagers, who assumed that she knew their language. In fact, she had never studied or spoken Italian in her life. Not in this life.
Have you ever had a spontaneous reverie of being in a different place, different time, different body? This might not be just a daydream. Children frequently report such reveries, which might be past life memories. But many adults do, too.
Have you ever noticed a particular, unexplainable attraction to someone or a puzzling dislike for another person? You might have been together before.
Observe your likes and dislikes, your clothes, and your habits. What are your dominant personality traits? Look around your home. What art and furniture motifs are present? What decorative styles? Keep a clear, calm, and open mind as you look around. One patient of mine couldn’t come up with any pattern to her collections. She denied having an affinity or attraction to any particular historical period or culture. It fell to the friend who had accompanied her to the session to point out that the patient’s entire home was filled with nineteenth-century Japanese art! So relax and do not neglect to see what might be looming all around you.
Don’t worry about whether or not this information is “real.” Your mind is producing this material, and the exercise will have the same effect as dreams. That is, this process will stimulate your mind to render more and more valid past life material. Your aim, initially, is to open doorways and establish pathways. Later on, with experience, you can be more analytical. You’ll know when that time has come.
Free-associating with emotionally charged words and phrases might help you access your past lives. There are certain universal words that transcend cultures and lifetimes; they are fixtures throughout the ages. A partial list of them, adapted from Gloria Chad wick’s Discovering Your Past Lives, appears below. Feel free to add your own words and phrases to the list.
When you are relaxed, close your eyes and think or say one of these words. Then observe the mental images, scenes, and feelings that result. Or, tape record the list and play back the tape. Take your time, lingering with each word as the scenes and feelings arise and flow across your mind.
War |
Church |
Peace |
Spear |
Desert |
Ocean |
Soldiers Marching |
Mountain |
Cave |
|
Gun |
Sunset |
Knives |
Pain |
Mob |
Music |
Hanging |
Officer |
Execution |
Horse |
Hunger |
Animal |
Starving |
Flood |
Slave |
Poison |
King |
Healer |
Book |
Medicine Man |
Pen Writing |
Body |
Night Sky |
Funeral |
Stars |
Birth |
Afterward, write down the images in your journal. Use them later to look for past life patterns or themes, or use them as clues for your regression and visualization sessions. For example, if you free-associated with the word soldier and then saw yourself marching in the Civil War, you might write the image down in your journal and then meditate upon it the next day, week, or even months later. It helps to be open and playful when trying this exercise.
As an aside, past lives during the Civil War are very common.
Many people have a déjà vu experience when visiting Civil War graves and battle sites.
The technique I call “Faces” is another “play” method to remember past lives. Sit a few feet across from a friend, with the lights dim and with soft music in the background. Look into the other person’s face. Watch to see if the person’s face changes. Observe and describe the changes you see. Features often do appear to change. Eyes, noses, and hairstyles dissolve and re-form. Headgear sometimes appears.
You can also try this exercise alone, by using a mirror and observing the changes you see in your own face.
If you notice a white light extending one to several inches from your friend’s head or even your own mirrored reflection, you might be seeing a manifestation of the energy field extending outward beyond the physical body. Many people report seeing this “aura,” which sometimes appears in colors. I have studied several people who have independently described the very same pattern of colors in the aura of another person. When I had them watch or “read” another person’s energy field, their descriptions were also identical to each other.
I first tried this exercise with several people in my office, and they were able to see the transformations in facial features, in skin color, hair, eyes, and so on. Still, I worried that this simple approach might seem silly or foolish, or just be perceptual distortion, and I was reluctant to introduce it as an exercise in my workshops. Finally, near the end of an exciting workshop with a cooperative group of several hundred people, I decided to take the plunge.
Over one hundred pairs of workshop participants sat facing each other in a dimly lit hotel ballroom, gazing into each other’s faces. After a period of time, people were instructed to find a new partner and again try the exercise. The results surprised us all. The majority of people saw their partners’ faces change dramatically into a series of faces, some very ancient-looking. Some people had psychic experiences, in which they saw faces that they later discovered resembled their partner’s dead relatives. Others saw features that looked as though they belonged to spiritual guides. Still others saw the faces of figures their partners have seen only in past life regression, or that psychics had described to them.
When we changed partners, oftentimes the same faces were observed in the very same people by their new partners. Many people saw auras for the first time. One fourteen-year-old boy was able to psychically pick up information about his partners. He had never done this before. Since then, I have included Faces in every workshop. The results are consistently dramatic, and it’s a lot of fun. The only secret to Faces is to make sure you try it in a dimly lit room. This frees up the left brain and allows easier passage of intuitive impressions.
Faces can provide clues to many different past lives. As in other methods, meditation, visualization, and/or free association to the observed changes can fill out the memory. Let them expand and develop, without censoring the material. A face may become a group of faces, or a whole scene may unfold behind the face. You may hear a voice or an important word. Try it and see.
Visiting a reputable psychic who can also do past life readings is another interesting recall technique that can be very enjoyable. The psychic might be able to provide you with valuable clues, or you might feel something resonate within you as he or she speaks. Memories might even be triggered. A psychic reading is not as emotionally charged as a regression session, when your own memory bank is stirred, and your own images and feelings flood your awareness. As a result, therapeutic change does not occur. Yet, a session with a good psychic can be an enjoyable experience and might provide some thought-provoking clues to your past.
Beatrice Rich, a well-known psychic in New York and Miami, told me about a client who wanted more than the usual psychic reading. This man, a business executive, wanted a past life reading, too. Working with psychometry, which is the art of receiving psychic impressions from holding an object belonging to the client, Beatrice saw this man’s body change. His arms became darker, much thicker, and more muscular. She saw that he was a soldier and a skilled archer. Unbeknownst to her, the man, who lived in New York City, had one passion above all others—archery. Had she psychically picked up on his interest? Was she reading his mind and elaborating a scenario? Or was she actually viewing a scene from one of his past lives, a life that was also pertinent to this man’s present?
While Beatrice was reading another client, the room became hazy to her and she saw the woman transformed into a Turkish lady who had sold bracelets and trinkets in a bazaar hundreds of years ago. Afterwards, the client removed her jacket and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse to reveal an arm covered with bracelets. They both laughed. Was Beatrice’s vision just a psychic impression of her client’s wardrobe? Or was it an actual scene from a past life? Even Beatrice is not sure.
On another occasion, she kept seeing a woman change from an ancient Hawaiian to someone from an old Northern European culture, back to her current body, and then the cycle began over again. This client repeatedly vacations in only two places, Hawaii and Scandinavia.
Beatrice saw another client, a college student, in a different body living in a primitive culture thousands of years ago. She described an ancient spoonlike device with which this man was able to sling objects, such as crude arrows or darts. She described the long row of huts along the riverbank and the fierce warrior tribes who lived upriver. This student’s archeology professor claimed no such weapon had ever existed, but the client finally found a picture of it in a textbook. Beatrice had never seen this weapon before she had her psychic vision.
Another method for triggering past life recall is body work. Some memories appear to be connected to actual areas of the physical body, a sort of cellular memory. Many people undergoing acupressure massage, kinesiology, reflexology, and other methods of stimulating key areas of the physical body experience flashes of past life scenes. A person who in a former life was lanced in the lower back, for example, might reexperience this traumatic event during a vigorous massage stimulation at the identical site in the current body. Sometimes the trigger site is in a different place, often in the lower legs and feet.
The experience I had during acupressure massages, described earlier, is a good example of this phenomenon. During one session while the acupressure therapist worked on my feet, I had reached a very deep state of relaxation. Suddenly, I began to have a vivid and detailed memory of having been a priest in the ancient Near East!
If you have such a memory, or even a fragment of a memory, write it down in your journal. Later on, you may see that it is part of a larger pattern, or you might be able to elaborate on it with the techniques described here.
A final but important point. Do not be surprised if these techniques or the regression exercise in the next chapter lead you to a place that is not a past life. When I regress patients, I do not know where their higher wisdom will take us. Often the destination is a past life or series of past lives. But sometimes that destination is childhood, or a healing garden, or the mystical, light-filled place that seems to exist between lives. In every case, it will be your subconscious wisdom that decides the best place for you. Often, when conducting a regression, I feel as though I am only along for the ride.
You may also experience new places and experiences when you use these techniques, perhaps even places and experiences that are not described in this book and where I have never been. Allow yourself the possibility of being surprised by an unexpected experience. Often, these are the ones that induce the most growth.
Instead of experiencing a past life, you may go to a place and read the mystical records, like Beth did in Chapter Nine. You may meet a loved one in a garden who gives just one sentence of advice, as Betsy’s father gave her in Chapter Five. You may even experience other realities, other dimensions, beyond the traditional reference points of space and time.
Let your growth evolve in an intuitive, nonlinear way if that is the pattern that it takes. As long as you allow yourself to feel playful and nonjudgmental about your experiences, you will always continue to grow.
Remember, if something comes up that really troubles you, you can go to a therapist to resolve it. Most people, however, remember experiences, whether from childhood or a past life or elsewhere, without significant discomfort or anxiety. I have regressed many people in large groups and have never had any problems. You will never get “stuck” in the places where you go. You always have the option of opening your eyes or floating above your experience. You have the choice. Your subconscious mind is always in control; it is not going to allow something to happen that you cannot handle.
Finally, these techniques for recalling your past lives, or, at least, for being able to become aware of some of the clues and signposts along the way, are by no means the only ones. Studies have been done of past life recall that occurs during electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain, of memories retrieved while on drugs or in altered mental states, from comas, near death and out-of-body experiences, and in many other ways. There is excitement in this exploration and study. There is an exhilaration when you realize how much greater you are than your current, confined ego or personality. The real you, the immortal you, is the you that is present from body to body, from life to life. How exciting it is to meet yourself!