by Doris E. Cohen (Past Life Therapist)

George’s Story

George came to me because of insurmountable problems with his two ex-wives that had led to both divorces. Forty years old, George was down-to-earth, plain, and lacking in imagination – a very left-brained, logical man who worked as an accountant. While I’d found past-life regression therapy very helpful for myself, I didn’t think this type of therapy would work for him. I thought that his rational mind would block his soul’s memories from coming to the surface – but I was proved wrong.

George told me that whenever he’d had sexual intercourse with his former wives, he couldn’t maintain an erection. No matter what position, additional stimulation, or preparation he tried, the outcome was always the same. After he’d experimented with a wide variety of behavioral techniques I’d suggested (I was also trained as a sex therapist), he began to relax and experience some desensitization of his fears and anxieties. (This was years before Viagra.) He made a little improvement and left therapy after a few months. However, three months later, George returned to therapy. He now had a girlfriend but was still unable to complete intercourse and ejaculate. He admitted, “I feel better, but the real problem hasn’t been solved.”

At this point, I suggested that perhaps he might be willing to explore other lifetimes, which could potentially give him a broader perspective on the situation. Looking at the bigger picture might finally lead us to the source of his problem so that he could resolve his sexual and emotional difficulties.

Accessing George’s relevant past lives took three sessions. In the first one, he was regressed to a lifetime in 16th-century France when he was a gambler and womanizer who took gross advantage of everyone around him. Interestingly, in his current life, he was a man of relatively modest means and worked with money, but the large funds that he handled weren’t his. George expressed regret that he had greatly abused women as well as money in that first lifetime.

In the second lifetime George accessed, he was extremely rich but ended up a pauper, having lost his money as well as all his friends. This raised the issue of trust: How could he really trust people, opening up and giving of himself, when all his friends had betrayed him?

I pointed out the contrast between the two lifetimes and the lessons that he’d learned. He went from one extreme to another; from being the womanizer and the user to being the one who had been taken advantage of and abused. It was a perfect example of the universal law of the pendulum. George began to see the startling choices that we make in selecting our stories in order to move beyond our painful experiences. (Again, we always do this with the intention and the hope of healing and recovery.) The profound issues to be addressed were trust, intimacy, and relationships with women. These were complex pieces that together added up to the whole picture.

In George’s case, he seemed to be working through his issues about money by having access to large sums that didn’t belong to him. Would he meet the challenge of being able to work with money without stealing it or abusing it? If he could, he would resolve that karmic issue at last. His issues with women and abandonment, however, were still playing out in this lifetime, and I suspected that his sexual dysfunction was related to them.

The two sessions we’d had together were very valuable, but what was revealed about those previous lives still didn’t bring us to the crux of the issue: Why was George having sexual problems with his partners? George dug a little deeper during the third session, and then – boom! – it came. (The awareness always comes when we’re ready to face and experience it, so George may have needed to access other lifetimes before he could tolerate the pain of confronting the traumatic one he was about to recall.)

In a dirty, isolated cabin in the woods in 19th-century Colorado, George is slumped over, sitting at the edge of his bed. His head is cradled in his left hand, and a bottle of rum is loosely dangling from the fingers of his right hand. He is miserable, alone, and guilt ridden. Emaciated and drunk, George crumbles to the floor and dies… .

One evening six years earlier, George had gotten all spruced up to go down into the valley for the monthly village dance. He lived alone in a cabin he built in the woods on a mountaintop. The view was spectacular and the land lush and fertile, but he yearned for female companionship. As soon as George arrived at the dance, his eyes fell upon the most beautiful and delicate young woman he’d ever seen. She had black curly hair and wore a long yellow dress with tiny orange rosebuds printed on it. George and the young woman danced all night and fell madly in love. His feelings for her were intense, and his heart was fully open to her. They soon married, and he took her up to his mountaintop cabin.

Nine months later, George and his pregnant beloved were walking hand in hand in the clearing in front of their cabin. Without warning, leaving no time to summon help, she gave birth to a baby girl, bled profusely, and died immediately thereafter. George was too grief stricken to take care of the baby, who was a painful reminder of the loss of his beloved. He gave the newborn to friends who lived in the valley.

Five years later, George was sitting in his bedroom, crying and drunk. In a deep depression, he was finding little comfort in the bottle. His pain overwhelmed him as his thoughts constantly drifted toward suicide. Finally, having stopped eating, he died of starvation.

When George came out of the regression, we engaged in what I call a debriefing. This is an important part of the past-life regressive work that I do, because it helps clients make the connection between the events of a previous lifetime and their current situation in order to ascertain which lessons were learned and which ones still need to be addressed. Why was George feeling so guilty? What was he feeling so terrible about that had led to such a tragic ending in that lifetime?

George immediately responded that his greatest distress stemmed from impregnating his beloved. Had she not become pregnant, she wouldn’t have died in childbirth. Unconsciously, in this lifetime he was avoiding this tragic outcome by preventing himself from getting another woman pregnant. His inability to keep an erection and ejaculate into a woman ensured that he would never again suffer a similar fate. In other words, if his partner didn’t get pregnant, she wouldn’t die. Understanding at last the source of his sexual dysfunction, George began to recover from his trauma.

In our fourth and final session, George came in saying, “My fiancée thanks you, and I thank you!” After a couple of weeks, the effect of the regressions was so freeing that he was finally able to have full and satisfying sexual relations with his present girlfriend … whom he was now engaged to.

Mary Lou’s Story

Mary Lou, 43, was married with two children, both of whom were in college. She’d been a surgical nurse in hospitals for 20 years before being promoted to a supervisor on the surgical floor. While she loved this work, she became very stressed from the pressures of the job and was diagnosed with fibromyalgia – a condition that can cause fatigue, sleep deprivation, difficulty focusing, muscle pain and spasms, and irritability. Her doctor advised her to stop doing whatever was causing the excessive stress.

Mary Lou realized that the sense of urgency and emergency that’s inherent to a medical setting was almost surely aggravating her condition. Therefore, she left the hospital and found a job with a private company as a visiting nurse, working with the elderly and disabled in their homes. Her stress began to diminish significantly, and her fibromyalgia symptoms decreased. She started a low-impact exercise program and began doing yoga. She was happier and healthier in all aspects of her life.

It seemed that Mary Lou had solved her problems, but [past-life] repetition was at work, helping her face her unresolved issues. The company she was working for got a contract to do home visitations for the parents of school-age children in a district with many blue-collar workers who had very little money and many social problems, including drug and alcohol abuse and unemployment. Many of the students were truants, and when they did come to class, they were often either hungry or unfocused. As a visiting nurse, Mary Lou was expected to find out what was going on at home that might be causing the children’s problematic behaviors. The job seemed like a perfect fit for her, since visiting nurses are experienced in and familiar with going into people’s homes and assessing the family for the presence of problems, medical conditions, and social disturbances.

She thought that this work would simply be an extension of what she was currently doing. To her surprise, within three weeks she started having anxiety attacks for the first time, which occurred every morning before visiting the students’ homes.

Her symptoms of fibromyalgia also returned, and her blood pressure was elevated, so Mary Lou went back to her doctor, who prescribed anti-anxiety medication. After taking the drugs for two months, she began to feel a little better. However, she knew that there had to be an underlying problem because she was having nightmares. She decided to seek therapy in order to learn stress-management techniques so that she might lessen the severity of her symptoms or get rid of them altogether.

Mary Lou told me that she was the oldest of five children from a very poor family who had lived in the hills of West Virginia. Her mother worked nights in a factory; and her father, a drunk, was unreliable, irresponsible, and often depressed. As a little girl, Mary Lou felt she had no choice but to take care of her younger siblings. It was clear that her childhood was similar to those of many of the students she was visiting. The experience of dealing with children from troubled homes was causing the same anxiety and stress she’d confronted while growing up.

Mary Lou told me that when she was four, her third sibling, Jimmy, had been born with severe physical and mental impairments, requiring extra help and support from everyone in the family. Since her mother wasn’t home nights and her father was unreliable and distant, the main responsibility of taking care of Jimmy fell onto Mary Lou. The fear and anger stemming from having all that responsibility and all those burdens placed on her came through and revealed themselves with a vengeance. The little four-year-old was filled with resentment. When Mary Lou was seven, the fourth sibling was born, which heaped even more obligations upon her. She was utterly bitter and angry at that point and more conscious of her emotions than she’d been when she was four.

Mary Lou was now able to identify the reasons for the return of her fibromyalgia when she visited the blue-collar families: She was reliving the feelings she’d experienced as a child and had left unresolved. As she started working through those feelings and soon felt significantly better, both physically and emotionally, she terminated therapy after three months.

Six months later, however, Mary Lou returned to therapy because she was having intense anxiety attacks again. I asked her when they were occurring, and she said that it was when she visited one home in particular. She knew that the attacks must be a sign of underlying issues that still needed to be addressed. We then decided to explore her relevant past lives.

The lifetime that Mary Lou accessed occurred in the 1700s in the hills of West Virginia. Mary Lou was Lightning Feather, a Native American warrior who had been given that name because he was as fast as lightning and so light on his horse that no one heard him coming. Lightning Feather’s tribe was experiencing chaos and tremendous distress. The French and British were trying to take over their land. The tribe was in a constant state of tension and readiness, uncertainty and war.

Lightning Feather, riding bareback on his roan horse, Wind Chaser, races through the mountains to reach his sister tribe. Their village is about to be attacked, and Lightning Feather must warn them. Known for his courage, stealth, and silent movements, Lightning Feather is determined to get to the tribe in time to save his allies.

As Lightning Feather gets closer to the tribal village, he slows down and quietly approaches. Not a footstep, not a sound, not a breath must be heard, because the enemy is near. As he enters the village, he sees that the entire tribe is gathered around the chief, listening to his wisdom. The medicine man speaks, warning his people of terrible losses and longtime suffering.

Lightning Feather comes forward, and all welcome him with a nod of their heads. They are already aware of the danger lurking in the air, but Lightning Feather explains what is going to happen.“Your tribe will be caught in the middle of a great battle between the British and the French. You will be destroyed. You must listen and do as I say.”

Lightning Feather’s own tribe will be spared because of their location, but the sister tribe must escape – quickly. He tells them to flee and lets them know the routes of the advancing armies. After spending a few hours with the tribe and sharing a meal with them, he gets on Wind Chaser and rides off into the night, quietly and swiftly.

Lightning Feather loves to ride Wind Chaser at night in the peace of the forest. He is intimately familiar with every sound, with every movement. He always knows when a rabbit is surprised out of sleep, a squirrel is pushed from its perch, a snake is shedding its skin, or a bear is silently searching for food. Lightning Feather loves the forest: the animals, the sounds, the smells, the feel, the air. The forest is his home away from his tribe.

Lightning Feather finally arrives on the outskirts of his own village. As he noiselessly approaches, he doesn’t hear a sound. When he sees the tribal encampment, he dismounts and falls to his knees sobbing, beating his chest, and then pounding the ground helplessly. His people have been brutally massacred in the French and British attack! Crawling to his collapsed wigwam, he sees the bodies of his sister, mother, and grandfather. Their throats have been cut, and their heads are barely attached to their bodies.

Enraged, devastated, and overwhelmed, Lightning Feather mounts Wind Chaser and flees to the secret cave that he has been going to for solace since he was five years old. Sitting cross-legged, he barely recognizes the echoing sound he hears: It is that of his own sobbing as his whole body shakes with grief and disbelief. All the warriors have been killed, his family has been slaughtered, and no one in the tribe has survived … except him. He doesn’t know what to do next.

In the midst of grieving, a horrifying thought comes to him: He now realizes that Red Heron, his cousin who had married a French woman, betrayed him. It was Red Heron who sent Lightning Feather to warn the tribe of the movements and plans of the French and British, lying about their strategies. Lightning Feather realizes that he has unknowingly passed along this false information to his sister tribe, and now they, too, will be massacred.

Lightning Feather leaps onto Wind Chaser’s back, and they race along the mountain paths through the forest, hurrying to reach the other tribe before it’s too late. As he gets closer, he slows, moving silently so as not to endanger them or himself.

When he reaches the village, he is immobile with shock, unable to make a sound, avert his eyes, or flee: The entire tribe has been slaughtered. He is too late! Bodies are strewn everywhere. The men and women have had their throats slit; babies have been sliced in half. The women’s clothes are ripped to shreds, and he knows they must have been raped before being killed. Lightning Feather, shocked and enraged that he has been the instrument for such death and destruction, pledges to dedicate the rest of his life to destroying Red Heron and everyone in his family. He will wreak his anger on Red Heron by taking vengeance with his own hands.

Meanwhile Red Heron, knowing that Lightning Feather will kill him when the warrior realizes he’s been betrayed, stays on the move with his family. It takes Lightning Feather more than a year to finally track down his people’s betrayer.

One early spring morning, Lightning Feather spots Red Heron’s oldest daughter, Hummingbird, a beautiful 16-year-old maiden with shiny black hair, dark eyes, and tawny skin. She is bathing in a small stream. Lightning Feather hides behind the bushes, waiting for Hummingbird to come out of the water. He jumps out, puts an ax to her throat, and cuts off her head in the midst of her terrified scream.

Lightning Feather finds Red Heron and decapitates him in the presence of his two youngest children. He then plunges a knife in the belly of the little four-year-old boy before turning to the five-year-old girl. Red Heron’s wife, paralyzed with grief and horror, watches the last of her family being killed before her eyes. Lightning Feather can taste the bitterness of his intense vengeance and rage. He allows Red Heron’s wife to live – by doing so, he will inflict pain that is even worse.

With no family, tribe, or land to go back to, Lightning Feather retreats into the forest and lives out the rest of his life isolated and angry. He survives on herbs, berries, plants, and small animals. Within two years, he gets very sick and realizes, too late, that he has eaten poisonous berries. He had been so preoccupied with his anger and loneliness that he didn’t notice that the berry he was eating was of a slightly darker shade than the variety that is safe to consume.

Doubled over with cramps and pain, Lightning Feather suffers in agony until he collapses in death, draped over Wind Chaser. Finally, his tortured soul leaves his body.

When Mary Lou described Lightning Feather’s death, she said that she kept seeing him hovering over the areas where the French and British were camped and over both of the tribal villages. I began to work with her to aid the soul that was the brave warrior Lightning Feather. We allowed that part of her to finally leave and go into the Light, to rest and be at peace.

When Mary Lou came out of the regression, she was crying hard for having caused so much pain and yet having lost so much herself. After doing some deep breathing, releasing the past through imagery work, and returning to the present, she decided to tell me about a few of her hobbies she hadn’t disclosed earlier.

Mary Lou had always loved horses – roan ones were her favorite – and as an adult, she had finally been able to afford riding lessons. Riding through the woods seemed to comfort her, yet she would feel restless on her way back home. She was always fascinated with herbs, Native American flute music, and drumming, which seemed strange to her since no one around her shared in any of these interests. She participated in drumming circles at least once a year and felt unusually connected to the change of seasons, particularly during the winter and spring solstices. Winter was the time of the tribes’ massacres, and it was spring when Lightning Feather had killed Red Heron and his family. Mary Lou now understood the basis for her overriding interest in Native American culture, given the pain and anguish she’d experienced in that past life.

We then clarified the connections between her previous reincarnation and her current one. The soul goes from one extreme to the other – from one lifetime to another – like a pendulum, always seeking balance somewhere in the center. When Mary Lou was the warrior Lightning Feather, she had been healthy, vibrant, and strong but still ended up as a vengeful killer. Her soul was devastated by the slaughter of the tribes and the guilt over feeling responsible. In her current lifetime, Mary Lou was raised in the hills of West Virginia, the same area where the tribes had lived 200 years before. She came to this life having made a clear decision, albeit unconsciously, to become a healer and a helper – the other end of the continuum, or pendulum, from being a warrior and killer.

Becoming a surgical nurse was an unconscious repetition of seeing cut-open and slaughtered bodies in the past life. In her current life, she observed ones that were cut open in surgery, but they were sutured and the people brought back to health. At an unconscious level, this was precisely what she needed to see and experience after having witnessed the massacre of her people and then killing Red Heron and his family.

In order to help poor and troubled families, Mary Lou was required to report to the school system any signs of neglect or abuse that she saw – just as she’d brought alarming information to her sister tribe in that past lifetime. Since this created a repetition of being the bearer of bad news, she reacted by having anxiety attacks. Unconsciously, she had stimulated her soul’s memories of the anguish, pain, and horror of seeing the massacres and causing the deaths of Red Heron and his family. Mary Lou was fascinated to see the connection, as well as details of the past life and their relevance and meaning in her choices, both conscious and unconscious, in the present.

Mary Lou then made more connections between the past and present lifetimes. Her current father, with whom she was always angry, was the same soul that had been her cousin Red Heron. Both drank, were irresponsible and unreliable, and ultimately betrayed their families. Hummingbird, Red Heron’s 16-year-old daughter in that past lifetime, was now Mary Lou’s husband. Mary Lou deeply loved her husband even though she found out that he’d had extramarital affairs on three separate occasions. Just as Lightning Feather had betrayed his cousin Hummingbird by killing her, now Mary Lou’s husband (Hummingbird) was betraying Mary Lou (Lightning Feather). The healing of their souls would take place when both of them transcended the past, opened their hearts and minds, and moved beyond the pain of the old story.

After exploring, understanding, forgiving, and healing the aspect of herself that was the warrior in the past, Mary Lou found that her anxiety attacks subsided [with healing results].

Excerpt from Repetition: Past Lives, Life, and Rebirth

Part II coming soon.