by Bryan Jameison

Who the first person was to recognize the therapeutic benefits of past-life regressions I don’t know. As I discovered many years after beginning my research, there were several others, Edith Fiore and Dick Sutphen among them, who also were conducting similar research. Because of the controversial nature of past-life regression, many of us kept our findings to ourselves for fear of ridicule. During the 60’s and 70’s, the idea of someone exploring his past-lives was considered bizarre. But to make any claim that there also could be a therapeutic benefit from regression would have been too much for most people to accept, especially traditionally trained psychotherapists.

Although I can offer you no prestigious clinical study supporting the effectiveness of past-life therapy, thousands of my clients, and clients of facilitators I’ve trained, have attested to achieving positive and lasting results after experiencing the amazing healing power of past-life therapy. Because of this ongoing and positive feedback, I absolutely have no doubt that past-life therapy is one of the most remarkable methods of healing the soul’s deepest wounds ever discovered and developed.

By reviewing our past lives, we usually can uncover the genesis of compulsions and longstanding emotional blocks that are preventing us from expressing our talents and abilities, fulfilling our desires and achieving our goals. By using past-life therapy (P.L.T.), we are able to neutralize and release the detrimental emotional charges associated with the causal events from the past, which have held us hostage. The result is their effects on our lives almost always are eliminated immediately. After releasing these pent-up feelings, a person usually is able to recover without further therapy, a feat most mental health professionals thought impossible to achieve before P.L.T. was discovered.

As Dr. Sigmund Freud, the “father of psychology,” once said, “We are the sum total of all we ever have been.” If this is true, there should be no doubt that past-life experiences must be taken into account when attempting to understand the workings of the human psyche. Just as each of our ancestors has contributed to the formation of our physical characteristics, so too, has each of our past lives left its imprint upon us as Spiritual Beings. Each life in its own way has helped to create all that we are now, the way we act and react to life’s situations, our character traits, our choice of career, our sex, our relationships and even our physical appearances.

So why aren’t more therapists taking this into consideration? I believe the reason is because the importance of the soul’s influence on human behavior either has been inadvertently overlooked or deliberately disregarded by those responsible for training generations of psychotherapists and other mental health professionals. While I assume that most psychotherapists acknowledge we have souls, the majority of them, nevertheless, steadfastly have excluded it as a factor capable of influencing human behavior. Regrettably, most authorities in the mental health field see man’s spiritual nature as something completely separate from his psychosomatic function. Because of this critical misperception, most psychotherapies are based on the assumption that the causes of a person’s behavioral problems are traceable solely to genetics, the environment and/or physical dysfunction.

For this reason it’s not surprising why past-life therapy never has been, nor is yet, included in the curriculum of any accredited medical school or major university. Despite this, an ever-increasing number of enlightened psychotherapists are employing it in their private practices. Although most of them use it in a highly selective manner, more and more of these dedicated healers are coming out of the closet because of the seemingly “miraculous” recoveries experienced by their patients after undergoing past-life therapy.. To their amazement, significant results usually can be achieved after only a few hours of regression time.

Interestingly enough, P.L.T. initially was not conceived, pioneered or developed by professional psychotherapists, but rather by non-professional metaphysicians whose only agenda was the pursuit of spiritual truth and healing. Since we metaphysicians had no vested interest in preserving the status quo of either religion or psychotherapy, we were free to explore the hidden depths of the human psyche without risk to our professional standing.

Whereas, most clinically trained psychotherapists see Man basically as an end-product of his genetics and environment, most metaphysicians, including myself, view the human being as an eternal soul (spirit), which only is temporarily occupying a physical form. To us the body is nothing more than a costume or a sensing device for the soul. Because we see man as an intrinsically spiritual being, we see his present life as only one of many incarnations, any one of which may be affecting him as much or more than either his present-life ancestry or circumstances.

Granted, no knowledgeable person would deny the important influence our genetic background and significant events have on shaping our character, physical appearance, personality, life’s expectations and disposition. However, from what I’ve observed, these factors are generally less important than is the soul’s influence upon an individual. This is because as an intelligent spiritual entity operating through the agency of free will, the soul alone is responsible for choosing its earthly ancestry as well as those circumstances into which it will incarnate. Its choices, however, are influenced directly and indirectly by its experience and conduct in its former incarnations. Everything it has ever done, every experience it has ever had, everything it has seen and every emotion it has ever felt from its first to its last incarnation combine to create opportunities and limitations for the soul to experience after incarnating.

With this in mind, it becomes apparent how the responsibility for the conduct and outcome of our lives rests directly with us at soul level, rather than with either our heredity or environment. As Pope Pius XII once said, “Human beings are psychosomatic units controlled and directed by the dictates of the soul.” Obviously he also believed that as souls, we choose our life experiences and determine our own destinies.

The following allegory illustrates how the soul’s choices may influence or even create its physical environment. Let’s pretend we are all souls playing a game of poker. The difference between this hypothetical game and a real one is that in our imaginary game each player knows which cards are going to be dealt to him before the game because he already has chosen them. Because of our past-life performances, some of us will have earned the right to choose a “full house” and others, a “straight,” while still other souls have earned the right to choose only a worthless pair of three’s.

Now, let’s equate our imaginary poker hand to our family, race, gender and cultural environment. Obviously, some hands are better than others, just as some families and environments are better than others. However, they alone are seldom the only cause of one’s being a success or failure as a human being. There must also be another factor, because there are too many people who were born into distressed, dysfunctional families and detrimental environments who, nevertheless, grow up to be healthy and well-adjusted. Then, of course, there are others who were born into the best of families and circumstances who end up being losers.

As I see it, from the moment of incarnating, it’s the attitude, skill, wisdom, intelligence and daring of the player (the soul), which ultimately will determine who will win and who will lose. As anyone knows who plays poker, the real power in the game rests with the player’s experience and competency. Many a poker game has been won on a bluff by the player holding the worst cards or lost by the inept player with the best hand. The same is true in life. The bottom line is that it is not the cards we are dealt that count, but rather how we choose to play them.

Being unaware of the previous experiences and choices the soul has made prior to incarnating, the conventional therapist is at a distinct disadvantage when attempting to discover the cause of his/her client’s problem. Without an awareness of the long-forgotten causal events in their past lives, many therapists inadvertently attribute their clients’ behavioral problems to an assumed childhood trauma, when in fact, the causes of their current-life problems may be based in past-life experiences. From their limited view, such therapists generally strive to determine the cause of a person’s behavior largely by checking his family background, his socialization and/or his physical makeup.

Because they are unaware of past lives, let alone karmic patterns, many well-intentioned therapists may spend years attempting to help their clients learn to cope with the present-life manifestations of their past-life traumas, without ever realizing what they’re doing. Because of their ignorance of past-life “bleed-throughs,” it appears these therapists usually concentrate on helping their patients “manage” the symptoms without ever getting to the root cause. An example of this would be behavior-modification therapy.

As I understand it, if this therapy is successfully employed in treating agoraphobia, the patient eventually will be able to venture unescorted outside of his home, then walk down to the corner and finally be able to go to a busy shopping mall all by himself. This type of behavior modification is, of course, better than nothing, but in my opinion, only the person’s symptoms are being treated. Unless the initial fear that caused the problem in the first place is directly confronted, felt again and spiritually released, it will continue to affect the individual even though he may be able to function in a relatively normal manner after treatment.

Contrary to this way of dealing with emotional trauma, I believe the best and quickest way for someone to get rid of the fear of being thrown from a horse is to get back on the animal as soon as possible. Returning to the scene, facing the cause of the fear, feeling it once again, moving through it and releasing it from consciousness is what frees a person once and for all.

Some traditional, as well as some past-life therapists, differ with me on this, believing, instead, that one’s simply knowing about and understanding the cause of a life problem is sufficient to neutralize its effect. Others believe their clients must also express their previously repressed feelings of fear, grief, guilt, hatred or rage if they are to be healed. I, too, believe it’s necessary to acknowledge and express one’s innermost feelings. However, in my opinion such therapy only provides temporary relief at best, unless the client’s acknowledgment and expression of these feelings is also accompanied by a spiritual release.

To understand how past-life therapy works, it may help to think of your soul as the hard drive of your computer and each of your incarnations as a document. Since our computer’s hard drive, the soul, has limitless-capacity, as souls we have absorbed and assimilated everything we’ve ever experienced, both good and bad.

At the moment of our physical death in each incarnation, all of our earthly experiences/documents are downloaded instantly to the soul/hard drive. In most cases this presents no lasting problem; however, once in awhile we may create a few dysfunctional documents/incarnations, as well as internalizing a few detrimental emotions/viruses before we die. If these distortions/viruses still are active within our mind at the time of our physical death, they automatically will be downloaded into the soul where they inevitably will remain to create havoc in the future. Sadly, the presence of a soul-virus, or distorted perception may go unnoticed for centuries until such a time when we are creating a new document/life, which inadvertently contains a certain trigger-experience and/or date. When this trigger is tripped, it reactivates the long hidden virus, and the life we happen to be in at that time suddenly will go haywire for no apparent reason. Such might well be the case when someone “flips-out” and goes on a shooting rampage in a shopping mall or violently assaults a co-worker without apparent provocation.

Unlike computers, which have anti-viral programs to safeguard their hard drives from being damaged by a virus, after incarnating, our souls blindly accept whatever programs we, or others create for them. Unfortunately, they have no anti-virus programs to protect them from our distorted perceptions and/or detrimental feelings. Like computers, which transmit contaminated programs from one hard drive to another, our spiritual self (soul) also unknowingly transfers negative feelings from one incarnation to another. The result is that as time passes, our souls often become so encrusted with feelings such as hatred, grief, shame, rage and worthlessness, their accrued effect eventually can cause us to crash spiritually, mentally and emotionally.

Excerpt from Exploring Our Forgotten Lives: The Amazing Healing Power of Past Life Therapy

See Part II here