Joyce’s Story
During those two weeks, Joyce tried every holistic and alternative treatment available to her, including body realignment, rebirthing, colonics, breathing techniques, and past-life-regression therapy. When she went in for the surgery, she requested that another ultrasound be performed. The cyst had shrunk to half its size, and the operation was temporarily delayed. After another two weeks, she went back for another ultrasound, only to find that the cyst was completely gone!
Joyce, who was very skeptical and always rational, said to me, “It really took an amazing experience for me to say, ‘This too shall pass and I’ll be well again.’ My faith has been restored. Once I accepted this, it was like a load was lifted from me. I knew I could live through it, get through it, and I would be fine. I just had to accept the fact that I would be okay and could deal with it.”
Joyce is a perfect example of someone who truly came to accept and believe in the healing benefits of holistic work. By working intensely and in a focused fashion, she ended up with an astonishing outcome.
One of Joyce’s regressions was to a relevant past lifetime that took place during the Holocaust, when her current mother was her sister. Both innocent, gentle, and loving girls, she and her sister – ages seven and nine – were overcome with pain, agony, and despair as they died in the gas chambers. In that previous lifetime, a Nazi guard had struck Joyce in the abdomen with the butt of a gun, and in this life, she developed a tumor in that area of her body. Being diagnosed with an ovarian cyst aroused pain, agony, and a sense of despair; hence, the repetition. This time, however, Joyce would be able to change her reaction – and she did.
In that past lifetime, Joyce was small, frail, helpless, and powerless. In the current one, she was strong, healthy, and vibrant – and an adult who had options. Having experienced the intensity of those emotions in the past life, she was now able to release them and let them go. Because Joyce took the responsibility for owning her story and facing her difficult emotions, and because she had the courage to make a shift in her beliefs and engage in healing practices, she was able to experience an extraordinary healing. This story has a wonderfully happy ending because Joyce eventually got married, had two children, and now leads a very rich and full life. Today, 13 years later, she’s healthy: The ovarian cyst hasn’t recurred.
Robert’s Story
With closed eyes and a few fast breaths, Robert was transported to a lifetime in the Middle Ages when he was a knight named Neville:
Clad in heavy armor, perched high and solid atop his steed, Neville fixes his eyes on Perceval, his opponent. Their lances are raised, and they’re ready for the joust. Little do the tournament spectators know that Neville and Perceval are vying for the same woman, making this their personal battle – a duel – for the hand of their beloved. With horses galloping head-on and eyes blazing, the two knights face off. Perceval fells Neville with one swift blow, decapitating him.
As soon as Robert experienced this past lifetime and the drama of the joust, with its disastrous outcome, he began to breathe more slowly and calmly, releasing the emotional charge he’d just experienced. He commented that he felt “dazed and a little buzzed, but my head doesn’t hurt as it did before.” By the time he left my office, his headache was completely gone, never to return.
During therapy, we also explored Robert’s commitment issues, and the connections between his past-life trauma and his patterns in this life again came to the surface. In the current lifetime, Robert had been engaged to three women during a ten-year period but had broken up with each of his fiancées only a few months prior to the wedding. He commented, “I always fall so deeply in love that I’m afraid of losing my head.”
Was he at an unconscious level avoiding commitment with females because in that past life he’d literally lost his head over his beloved? In that lifetime, he was very handsome and trim and cut a dashing figure as a knight. In the current one, he was plain and riddled with many medical conditions that were disabling. Because, as I’ve said, we tend to go from one extreme to the other, from one lifetime to another like a pendulum, always unconsciously seeking balance somewhere in center, he may have come into this incarnation fearing intimacy with a woman. His soul may have chosen a body that would be unattractive and afflicted with illnesses.
Robert’s relevant past lifetime set the scene and the tone for the creation of issues of commitment and intimacy and feelings of conflict and distress in the current one. When Robert became an adult, he was unable to fully commit to a relationship that would lead to marriage.
Traumas leave indelible impressions on our conscious and unconscious minds. If death occurs immediately upon our experiencing such an event, as happened with Robert, the probability of that experience being instantly buried in the psyche is very great. His unconscious kept tugging at him so he would become aware of the story, own it, change his reaction, and then finally let it go.
The point of regression hypnotherapy is to re-experience the emotions, know the story of the past, own it, and then release it in our current experience. When we do so, we often heal physical ailments that we don’t realize are caused by our patterns of repetition.
Christina’s Story
Since Christina had been feeling frustrated and depressed because of her choices with men, she thought that therapy would help her. She spoke of two serious relationships she’d had with men who weren’t married, back when she was in her late teens and early 20s. Although she was successful and a high achiever, she was unhappy and extremely dissatisfied.
Christina reported that her father, a brilliant physicist who was also charming and funny, had carried on affairs with women as far back as she could remember. Her mother was lovely, kind, and nurturing but consistently seemed to turn a blind eye to her husband’s philandering. On the surface, Christina’s mother seemed accepting of her situation, but the dark family secret of her husband’s betrayals devastated her emotionally, and at one point she even attempted suicide.
Christina admired her father’s success and hoped to emulate him in that way – not realizing that unconsciously, in order to be more like him, she was choosing to have affairs as well. Much as she’d hated knowing that her father was cheating on her mother, here Christina was, having to admit that she, too, was sleeping with partners whose wives, like Christina’s mother, might be suffering due to the adultery. Deeply uncomfortable with this reality, Christina was living her emotional life in hiding, just as her father had done, without feeling any sense of fulfillment or openness in her relationships.
In order to heal the issues that were driving her to have these affairs with married men, she underwent a regression to access a relevant lifetime, one that took place in Egypt in the first half of the 20th century,
when her name was Layla.
Layla is a healthy and attractive young woman who loves learning. A brilliant student, she’s immediately accepted into the most prestigious university in Egypt. She has such an outstanding mind for detail and a retentive memory that she ends up studying law. Upon graduating, she is to work with her uncle, who is also an attorney. She is eager to start her job in eight weeks, after taking some time to rest from the grueling routine of study.
Meanwhile, Layla’s parents insist that she marry. They arrange a marriage with Fouad, a wealthy businessman 20 years her senior. Although Layla doesn’t love him at the time, she complies with their wishes. They marry six weeks later.
Layla, now eagerly preparing to begin her exciting career, is to start work in a few days. Fouad, infuriated that she still intends to be a lawyer, insists that her only profession from now on is to be his wife and eventually, mother to their children. Layla is heartbroken. Her desire to express herself and work in her profession is totally squelched as she obediently but resentfully goes along with her husband’s demands.
Layla becomes pregnant and has a baby, and as she and Fouad begin to raise a family, she gradually falls in love with him even though he is emotionally distant and rarely at home. They end up having three children, and Layla never works in her chosen profession.
Feeling oppressed, alone, and unfulfilled, Layla begins to experience bouts of depression and isolation. She is unable to be assertive or speak up about her desire for self-reliance, independence, and self-expression. Fouad has complete control over her and never really hears her.
When Layla is 42, she finds out that Fouad has been having a longtime affair with a woman who has borne him two children. This throws Layla into the depths of depression. She never leaves the house after that, nor does she ever leave her marriage. Five years later, while Fouad is at work and the children are at school, Layla dies of a broken heart, alone in her home.
In the current lifetime, neither Christina’s father nor mother were interested in her deepest feelings and thoughts – she received no feedback, encouragement, or validation. Her mother, who always felt unfulfilled, participated very little in Christina’s life and was emotionally distant. She suffered from depression, and her husband’s affairs led her to attempt suicide. Similarly, Christina, in her incarnation as Layla, was depressed and, after learning of her husband’s infidelity, died of a broken heart.
Christina had felt unheard by her husband in her lifetime as Layla, and in this one, she chose a father who was emotionally unavailable. This same father had affairs with women other than her mother; her husband in the Egyptian lifetime had a longtime affair with a woman with whom he had two children. In the current lifetime, Christina reenacted this dramatic experience by repeating the theme of becoming involved with married men. In the incarnation in Egypt, after Layla found out about Fouad’s lover and their children, she never left him and was heartbroken. This was an exact repetition of Christina’s mother’s inability to leave her husband in the current lifetime.
Three months later, Christina met Rick, a physician from South Africa who had come to do research at a major hospital in her city. They met at a conference and immediately fell in love. Both single, they dated in earnest. Rick, like Christina, was ambitious, a high achiever, and very successful. He was also a very hard worker and committed to his profession.
However, Rick had an all-consuming passion for soccer that took up a considerable amount of his leisure time. His preoccupation with the sport aroused feelings of abandonment in Christina, but the repetition of unavailability was now much gentler than it had been in her past relationships, so she was making progress.
Eight months later, Christina and Rick were married in a beautiful early-spring ceremony.
Lisa’s Story
Lisa came to see me after walking out on her ninth job. She’d been having recurring problems with co-workers as well as bosses, kept changing jobs, and could never seem to settle into any kind of profession or stable work situation. She felt depressed, anxious, frustrated, and angry; and she told me she was now having temper tantrums regularly. She recognized that she had to address her anger-management problem and low tolerance for frustration if she was to be steadily employed in work she enjoyed.
Lisa told me she was the middle child in a family of seven kids and was the product of a mother who rejected her family emotionally. Her mom was critical, cold, and distant; and like her siblings, Lisa experienced this as rejection. Her father was a serious alcoholic who was raging drunk nearly every day. Lisa’s parents finally divorced when she was six years old.
Bright, creative, and highly emotional, Lisa grew up with a great deal of fear and anger that she was never able to express. She was also constantly tormented by her oldest sister, who would hit her, pull her hair, pinch her, and ridicule her because of a slight speech impediment. Her sister’s relentless torment exacerbated Lisa’s stutter, particularly when she was angry and felt helpless.
Eventually, Lisa married an alcoholic and had two daughters with him. He encouraged her to drink with him; soon she, too, became an alcoholic. During seven years of excessive drinking, Lisa and her husband were arrested several times for drunken driving and had explosive fights, many of which resulted in physical harm to both parties.
After an exceptionally brutal altercation one night, Lisa and her husband decided that for their own sake as well as that of their children, they would have to become sober, so they both joined Alcoholics Anonymous. However, after they’d achieved sobriety for a stretch, their depression, which had been masked by their alcohol use, became painfully evident to them. Both were dissatisfied with their lives and their marriage, and were unable to work out their mutual issues. They divorced three years later.
Because of Lisa’s alternating rages and deep depression, she was having problems at home and work and felt completely overwhelmed and incapacitated. In order to aid Lisa’s healing and recovery, we decided to explore her relevant past lives using regression hypnotherapy. Lisa was Henrietta in a former lifetime in the Deep South:
Henrietta is orphaned at the age of eight when she loses her immediate family in the Civil War. Her parents and siblings are dragged off their land in Alabama, beaten, and killed by Union soldiers. She survives by hiding high up in a tree. After the dust settles, a neighbor takes her to the home of her uncle, a wealthy plantation owner. He and his wife have four children, the youngest being a daughter who is three years older than Henrietta.
When Henrietta arrives, instead of being welcomed as a member of the family, her uncle makes it clear that she is expected to work as a maid in the house. She takes care of everyone’s needs, particularly those of Sybil, the youngest daughter, who torments Henrietta relentlessly, often hitting her, pulling her hair, and making fun of her. Henrietta’s uncle is an alcoholic who beats her and berates her while her aunt looks the other way.
Although she is bright and curious, Henrietta isn’t allowed to learn to read and write and has never gone to school, but she secretly teaches herself how to read using the books in her uncle’s library. She begins to dream of becoming free and independent, having her own life, and being able to pursue different interests that go beyond the day-to-day drudgery of a maid.
As an adult, Henrietta makes her way to New York City, where she is able to procure a job as a maid for a family living in a tawny-colored townhouse in Manhattan. While the couple is educated, kind, and cultured, their oldest daughter, Myrna, is overweight, plain, mean, and physically abusive to Henrietta. Myrna hates the other girl, is jealous of her because she’s so pretty and polite, and never gives her a moment’s peace.
Henrietta tolerates Myrna, works hard, and indulges her love of reading whenever she can. Five years later, she persuades the local librarian to give her a job organizing the books and cleaning the library every night. She leaves the townhouse and rents a tiny room in a boardinghouse. Henrietta is thrilled with the changes in her life and is finally happy. Soon, however, three of her co-workers begin to resent her. One in particular puts her down constantly, making fun of her accent, saying she talks like an “uneducated little Southerner.”
Once again, Henrietta feels tormented and picked on by her peers. The repetition in her life becomes evident as she goes from one situation to another, feeling alone, abandoned, mistreated, and unheard. She is always at the mercy of a female who taunts her, and she feels bereft and without emotional support as a result.
One spring morning, after an especially difficult week in which she is the target of extreme and brutal harassment at the library, Henrietta slits her wrists with a knife, committing suicide.
When Lisa accessed this lifetime, she cried intensely as she relived Henrietta’s anguish and torment. She was coming to understand that the themes she’d been experiencing, such as alcoholism and suicide, were already present in this troubled 19th-century life. In addition, her pattern of being stuck in jobs below her skill level and dealing with peers who were abusive to her were repeating in lifetime after lifetime.
In the incarnation as Henrietta, she committed suicide out of sheer despair. In her present life, Lisa had attempted suicide while she was in an abusive marriage and drinking heavily. Experiencing and realizing these repetitive patterns in her past lifetimes as well as her current one, she now understood the importance of changing her reactions and learning ways to deal differently with her depression. This is how she would transcend her past, affirming self and life.
When therapy was terminated, Lisa reported feeling a new-found sense of clarity and happiness. She was now dating a divorced co-worker, an art teacher with whom she was able to laugh, share many stories, and feel safe. He was gentle and supportive and truly listened to her. In keeping with Lisa’s pattern, he was an alcoholic, but he’d been sober for more than 15 years – an example of the fact that as we heal, our repetitions play out in a much gentler way.
Excerpt from Repetition: Past Lives, Life, and Rebirth
See Part I here.