I had been working as a hypnotherapist for two or three years when one client, whom I had been helping to regress back to the source of her problem, went spontaneously into a past life where she was drowning in a millrace, followed in quick succession by two more deaths by drowning and suffocation. You can imagine how I felt, sitting there on the edge of my seat, and praying that she was not going to die right here in this life. I fell back on my training that: 1. no one is ever sent more than she can cope with, and 2. never interrupt an emotional process, my own included at that point. I do not know who was more relieved when she had finished reliving (or perhaps redying is a better word) that episode but the outcome was such that she took a big step forward in her awareness and felt immediately lighter. The big stick, fear in case it happened again, and the carrot of curiosity impelled me to find out more, which ultimately entailed studying with Dr. Roger Woolger, an expert in the field of past life therapy (I seemed to have a fortunate knack for finding the best teachers.)
My first past life intensive turned out to be my kind of nightmare, even before we got into therapy. I was pitched into a large room of around 26 people, mostly students like me – nothing womb-like there. To start, we were asked to pick a card of an animal we felt represented us and, to my horror, to describe why to everyone. I chose a deer, which apparently represented timidity and was therefore an apt choice. However, there had been a few more synchronicities to get me there, and therefore I was going to see this ordeal through. First, the flyer advertising had seemingly floated out of a magazine, then I bumped into someone who wholeheartedly recommended the course. I had been dithering up until that point since it was held so far away from where I lived. Then I had a written off debt repaid and it ‘happened’ to be for the exact amount I needed, and finally there just ‘happened’ to be someone in the next village to me in the Highlands who was going, who knew the ropes and would organize for us both the seemingly impossible journey down to an isolated village in Devon. I was beginning to realize that the synchronicities ‘happened’ once I made up my mind to do something.
Before setting off, I contemplated on which of my patterns no longer served me and came up with a half dozen straight away. Prioritizing them was impossible, because I wanted to be perfect immediately. So I metaphorically shrugged my shoulders and got on with the work. My first ‘life’ turned out to be that of a nun around the 16″ century – though dates are not important since it is about a personal journey rather than a sightseeing or historical fact-finding trip. I was astounded when all the patterns I had agonized over sorting came together. This poor nun was torn between a sense of duty, a life of isolation and a passionate love for a local knight, to the extent that she forgot herself and ran away with him, only to be left alone and disgraced. You can imagine the number of conflicts that surfaced there. No wonder I did not like crowds, hated being alone, and felt shame, guilt and confusion as a matter of course when feeling pushed by events. Though complex, the distance of the life enabled me to have a more comprehensive understanding and sorting out in such a short time than would be possible in my immediate past. Facing myself at several removes, though stretching, was oddly comforting, despite being surrounded by fellow therapists who it later turned out were suffering all sorts of rape, torture, beatings and murder (do not let this put you off – therapists are a special breed who have enough experience to have a certain relish in these things.) I came away feeling more confident and grateful for the additional tools with which to work on my clients. It was also the start of a deeper understanding of energy, the metaphors that present themselves as guides in our lives, and the paradoxes that beset us when we try to make sense of the physical world on that basis alone.
Whether we are aware of it or not, when working on the mind/body/spirit connection we are working on three corresponding ‘bodies’ in our auras. They are intertwined, which is why working on one level alone is often not enough to promote significant change. The components of, say, a migraine headache in one case arose in a past life out of a stab in the back, triggering a fall: the head hit a rock in the exact spot where the migraine began. The physical pain was accompanied with a sense of shock and betrayal and the thought that ‘I can’t trust anyone’. An attempt to deal with it in the narrower frame of the current life, though possible, does not have the same impact for change when the patterns are more deeply seated. A phobia of spiders, for instance, may well arise out of a time when the client was once bitten to death by them and so there is little use seeking answers in our present childhood. The fear survives even though the reason for it has long gone, but I would not call it irrational, just that the time scale is larger than you would expect. The fear, the physical reactions to it and the rationalizing take up a great deal of energy which could be used more productively elsewhere, had we known it.
An asthmatic woman whom I treated had lives of being suffocated, hung and buried alive, lives of rejection and a perverse pride in the face of opposition or authority, any one of which would have provided a good reason for her restricted breathing. We seem to get plenty of opportunity to learn! After three sessions she felt her asthmatic symptoms had improved and visited her GP for a check up. The doctor declared that her asthma must have been misdiagnosed, which I suppose is an easier way to deal with it if you’ve been trained in an exclusive, analytical way.
Whether you believe in the validity of past lives or not, one surprising case in the early days of practicing gave me food for thought. A client visited a past life where she was a prisoner of war and was shot trying to escape. She was shocked to find that the guard who killed her was her husband in this life (we often recognize past life characters as being connected in some way to us now). She was unable to talk about it to her husband, who also came to see me independently. He immediately regressed to the life as a guard who shot prisoners trying to escape, and recognized his wife. His task in this life is apparently to redress his past actions. Once they understood this aspect of their past, they were able to relate to each other on an entirely different level.
I have been talking here of my own and some of my clients’ personal experiences, culled over several years. To my mind the personal development achievable through past life therapy is empirically beyond doubt. Although the experiences of my clients have been altered slightly or grouped into one account in order to preserve their anonymity, their essence remains. In my own example, I had a horror of teaching but was determined to overcome it – after all, I was a therapist and knew how to sort it out, I thought. But the nightmare of standing in front of others was crippling and I came away feeling deeply ashamed of my efforts and cringing at what I had said. Later, as a defiant reaction, I taught dogmatically and heavily, and still ended up feeling ashamed and cringing. The turning point came only when I decided to seek help from a colleague. I experienced that I had been part of a community in medieval France, a happy band of folk who lived a simple, spiritual life in the forest. As a youngster then, I felt let down by the excesses of the official church and left my family to join them. I was a bookish sort, happy to live quietly there, but when the leader died I was suddenly expected to take his place. I would have survived as a reluctant leader had not the political climate changed, and the heretic hunts begun. My band were caught and tortured, and my punishment was to see it all and live. As a penance for leading them into a trap, I buried them with my bare hands, sealing them up in a cave and then eventually venturing for food into local villages and towns, where I was reviled and humiliated. Looking back, I know now that they dared not help me for fear of bringing the wrath of the Inquisition upon themselves. The story is not exactly a wonderful recipe for confidence in front of crowds of people I do not know nor bands of people that I do. What I learned was that we were surrounded anyway, any decision I made would not have changed the outcome, and that my followers did not blame me in the slightest. The shame and fear of isolation in crowds dissipated a great deal after a couple of visits to the monkish character, and that hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach when standing up to teach went away too.
My experiences with past life therapy, both personal and professional, taught me a great deal about myself and therapy, and also about energy, and not just on a physical level. I have already mentioned the energy in our auras, but there is more to psychic energy than that. It is a lovely thought that each person who lets go of some of his negativity is contributing to the lightening of universal consciousness. Jung posited the idea of Universal Consciousness to the Western world, perhaps the first ‘scientist’ to do so, although it was by no means a new concept then. Rupert Sheldrake, the controversial modern scientist, has expanded on it in his morphic resonance theory to explain why inventions and discoveries take place simultaneously in different places on the globe (though only one person manages to patent it). Despite the depressing current state of world affairs, especially as dwelt on by the media, there is also a rise in awareness which we can see evidence of around us. Vegetarianism and Greenpeace movements were once thought barmy; ecology, a comparatively infant science is now acknowledged by many governments as a matter of urgency, and who believed that the Berlin wall would topple before it did? If you think back to that time, you will remember that similar incidents of détente were happening worldwide. Is that purely coincidence? Or is there an energy outside of our mind/body/spirit auras that is connected to a greater extent than we can imagine?
I could now begin to appreciate the metaphors that are thrown at us daily and accept them as signposts to guide us forward through the maze of paradoxes that we may not have notice before! Once fear is dealt with, the energy that is expended on it can now be put to use more constructively. Our internal negative voices are distracting and demanding, which means that we have less concentration for dealing with our daily affairs. Once released, or at least dissipated, we are able to pay more attention to the present. Situations that we once deemed threatening have less of an emotional charge, so that we can deal with situations that have previously sent us into a tailspin of blame and recrimination.
Our language is so peppered (see?) with metaphors that they hardly register. But an optimist does talk in terms of half-full and a pessimist in terms of half-empty. The phrases we use which we dismiss as unimportant have meaning if we follow the thread through. After past life therapy, a stabbing pain does not quite have the same distance it once had. Maybe ‘he’s a pain in the neck’, ‘that sticks in my throat’ or ‘it tore me apart’ are more literal than we give them credit. If you use a phrase like this regularly, maybe there is an indication of a past life event that is affecting you. If you have difficulty with that, maybe look at a past life as just a metaphoric expression to help us understand and release what we feel is no longer useful – because we think of our defenses as useful until we learn that there are more productive ways to be.
Our intuition speaks to us through metaphors more often than we imagine. After all, our perception is actively engaged in interpreting what we experience around us in terms we understand according to our predispositions. That is, we have a certain framework of vocabulary, values, beliefs and emotions that we use to make sense of events and the sense we make of them will differ qualitatively from our neighbor’s. That is why eyewitness accounts of the same incident differ. So if you pay attention to the specific language you use, there is helpful information there for you.
If the language we use on a personal level gives clues to our unconscious workings, maybe, as with energy, there is another, broader level to look at. For instance, some metaphors, while not exactly universal, have a wide currency and, where they differ, the discrepancy may be accounted for by historical perception. In the case of color, for example, the Romans did not have a name for blue, because they did not recognize it as distinct from yellow. Aboriginal, Native American, Eastern and Western cultures agree – although there is room for individual variations – on the colors of the chakras, the energy points in our bodies that are visible to some clairvoyantly gifted individuals. Red for rage and danger is the color of the base chakra, that of physical survival. Yellow for cowardice is the color of the solar plexus chakra, that of the tribal consciousness and the seat of fear. Don’t we talk about fear in the pit of the stomach? And doesn’t our stomach churn with fear? Green is the heart color, the color of envy and peace, and we say someone yelled blue murder, blue being the color of the throat. Where do these phrases come from, if they do not tap into an unconscious level beyond our five senses?
Metaphors as personal, national and international indicators then can be understood to have some meta-physical meaning. Freud wrote at length about the symbols in dreams and called them the ‘royal road to the unconscious’. There must be enough validity in them to justify the number and popularity of dream books. Fire is a symbol of anger and water of emotions, for example. They can be modified to mean ‘drive’ and ‘tranquility’ respectively, according to their context. Suppose you keep burning yourself when cooking or ironing. It could mean that you are feeling minor irritations. A leaky tap, the washing machine flooding? Which one may depend on the extent of your upset feelings? I found this hard to accept until one day I was so angry that I went out in the car to cool off and ended up blowing a gasket…. One-off events do not necessarily mean that you need to go rushing off to discover a deeper meaning, but looking at symbolism could be useful if you are experiencing a pattern of events.
Anything that forms a pattern could be a symbol for you. Does a particular number keep cropping up? Do you keep seeing a particular animal? Does a song replay interminably in your head? And yes, do you have a recurring dream or a dream where the scenes are similar? Books on symbols are just guides, but we can also look at the personal meaning. Butterflies may mean generally a transition and growth, but not, by association, if you saw one just before a traumatic event, perhaps. I would like to add a word of warning here about the kind of book you consult. If it is not uplifting, then search out another one. The time for doom and gloom is past and we need to seek out the proper learning and move on, rather than dwell on what we term ‘bad luck’. Symbols may be warnings, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. They can point the way to change, to letting go of what is no longer useful in our lives, and it is less wearing on the nerves to see them as such. Nothing is ever written in stone, since we have free will and the ability to change. Some patterns do stick longer than others though. Metaphors act as guides to intuition, to help navigate our uncharted territory.
The Interlife is where we learn a great deal about the soul’s journey. Once we have peeled away the shocks, hurts and angers and shame that have remained frozen in our memories, we are able to find the nuggets of compassion, not the least for ourselves, contained in even the worst situations. In so doing, we can communicate with our higher selves and begin to realize our higher purpose.
Take, for example, a knight who has just been killed in battle. After death, the emerging soul will linger near the body, and the therapist can conduct a review of the life just gone in order to draw out the information that has been gleaned. Through yet more distancing, the opportunity to gain valuable information usually unavailable in current life therapy is increased.
Therapist: Where are you now?
Subject: Floating…. I can see my body lying there on the battlefield.
Th: How do you feel about that body?
S: It was a good, honorable death. I fought well.
Th: Is there anything you feel is left unfinished about this life?
S: I won’t see my sons grow up. I am sad about that.
Th: Are there any other feelings left that you need to let go of?
S: Guilt that I was not able to protect my lord.
Th: Anything else?
S: Yes…. I am angry that my servant was needlessly killed.
Th: How is that life similar to your life now?
S: I am still battling to right wrongs, trying to protect everybody…. I don’t want to let go of those close to me, and I get angry at the slightest injustice.
Th: So what have you learned?
S: That I must let others learn for themselves, that it is not my job to be everyone’s knight in shining armor…. They need space to breathe and be independent. I tend to rush in and save others before they have a chance to sort things out themselves.
Th: Do you recognize anyone from that life?
S: My goodness! I have the impression that my son there is my sister now. We are so close. And the one who slew my servant is my uncle. No wonder I never trusted him.
This is a gallop through a straightforward session that can take up to two hours. Firstly, it is important to glean the pertinent information that needs to be worked with before unpicking it to facilitate awareness. Since linear time is not a restriction, a client can journey back and forth between some unfinished business and the Interlife to understand his reactions better. In the example above, the knight was concerned about his sons growing up without his guidance. The simple device of speeding up time so that he can watch his sons grow and eventually join him where he is helps him to be at peace. Unfinished physical business, such as concerns about the body being mutilated and unburied, can be carried out by asking the soul what it needs to do to move on. Perhaps the body parts need to be joined together, or some ceremony enacted to finish letting go. As both matter and time can be manipulated, passing over presents a new dimension in which purely physical laws no longer apply, thus allowing greater scope for healing.
The therapist takes time to help the subject accept and deal with the past, because once accepted it no longer assumes the same importance. An understanding of where ‘irrational’ emotions come from is often enough to lessen their intensity, and an understanding of how the past has played a part in current life associations can effect a lessening of animosities or a deepening of a close relationship. Old, unuseful ties that bind us in unrewarding relationships are cut and it is common to find that when a client lets go of a hatred that did not arise in this life, the other person is healed too. Thus if your mother is someone you sacrificed in a temple somewhere, I would guess your relationship had been a difficult one but the opportunity for a healing reconciliation is possible for you both, because the animosity did not belong in current time. It is usual for groups of souls to incarnate together, in different roles and as either sex, so that a lover in one life may be a son in this one. Thus apparently irrational likes and dislikes can be explained, as can phobias. An otherwise unexplainable fear of snakes, for example, makes sense after a death in a snake pit. A phobia of spiders was an earlier example. Once a fear makes sense it does not keep replaying like a stuck record. It can be tidied away and forgotten about, because there is no longer an emotional charge to the memory.
The depth and complexity of possible understandings in a single session continues to astonish me. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the variety of scenes explored present reams of opportunities for unraveling difficulties once thought insoluble. What we consider to be separate issues often merge neatly in one package, so that it can take months, even years for the head to make sense of what has already been accomplished in a few sessions. In concentrating on one issue, say of a flying phobia which becomes manageable once you realize you are not a kamikaze pilot any more, you might not realize that the chronic niggle in your back, the result of a wound in a crash, has gone, or that a general feeling of resentment – ‘How did I get into this situation?’ – has disappeared. What is obvious once we make the realization has been lost in the immediacy of other issues. In concentrating on the fear of flying we may ignore the healing that has occurred as a result. We have a tendency to assume that what we are living is the way it has always been until a situation develops where the penny suddenly drops that ‘last week/last month/last year I would have been in tears when this happened, and I handled it differently this time’. It does not mean that the changes are small and unimportant. It just means that they are subtle.
If we see ourselves not as bodies with souls but souls with bodies, we gain a new balance in our perspective. It helps us to work with a more idealistic and paradoxically more realistic perception of who we are – a spark of the divine. Life is a lesson in becoming our potential, with no failures, only opportunities for learning, which is what we are here for. Since we do not get just one shot at them, maybe we can let go of the desperation to ‘perfection’ and be more at one with ourselves.
Did you learn best and blossom with a threatening teacher or a patient one? I am not talking about the kind of teacher who let you get away with everything, but the one with a framework where you knew where you stood. Suppose your child is keen on learning to swim. He enjoys his lessons, practices often and is not afraid to make mistakes, knowing that he has a float at first, and later a watchful eye to give him confidence, until at last he proudly makes his first few unaided strokes. Could you learn your confidence that way too? It is possible, even though it was not the way we were brought up, because for the most part, neither were our parents brought up this way. Do we continue the old way or break the cycle? As someone once said, “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood”, which is another way of saying we can change our perspective of ourselves. Breaking habits of behavior is like being on a seesaw. The old way is heavy, but each foray into a different response detracts from it, so that eventually the new way gains weight. It is not a question of a sudden, overnight change, although that is possible, and giving ourselves credit for the efforts we make increases our chances of repeating what we want to achieve. The carrot is much more useful than the stick.
We learn from the Interlife and fetal stages that we choose our bodies and our lives in order to best learn lessons we missed in earlier lives. The reason that most of us forget our previous existences in the early stages of this life is to enable us to understand our lessons better. After all, we learn best by doing, not by being shown. I have a fridge magnet that says: “This life is a test – it is only a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do.” We have an innate sense of what feels right. The conscience or superego that Freud claims we learn at around age five is already in place even before birth, but having poor verbal and motor coordination handicaps its expression. Is it a coincidence that Freud says the superego develops at the same time as the child becomes more expressive?
If this life consciousness begins before birth, miscarriages and abortions take on another dimension. In miscarriages, the soul decides not to incarnate, perhaps because the experience in the womb is all that it needs for its spiritual development this time around, or because the incoming soul just does not feel ready to be born. A miscarriage can be devastating for the parents to be, yet still present an opportunity for great learning that would have been ignored but for anguished soul-searching. Tragedies have the capacity to transform, if we let them. The easy path presents few opportunities for growth, because we see no need to rock the boat that is sailing along just fine, thank you.
We learn other lessons from terminations. This time the mother has made a decision to end the pregnancy, for social, financial or health reasons. In my experience in therapy, pregnant women were given little help beyond the practical medical considerations, despite feeling overwhelmed, guilty and desperate. Remember, rationalization does not help at a deep level and the thin veneer of acceptance can still be shattered by an apparently innocuous trigger many years later. The emotions are often compounded by the unthinking behavior of some of the medical staff who believe they are trained to preserve life, and their internal conflict can manifest in the way they treat their patient. But since the soul does not die, is a termination or miscarriage as harmful as we are conditioned to believe? It is possible for the fetus to spontaneously abort when the mother communicates with it and explains the reasons for the impossibility of this birth. Once it has physically left, then a new birth in a new body becomes possible for the soul. There have been cases of the soul reincarnating to the same mother when she can more appropriately handle a pregnancy. The soul does not continuously reside in the womb anyway, and may not join its body fully until just after birth. Many of my clients when regressed to the womb report a reluctance to go through the birth process, or even to be born at all. After all, they knew what they were in for – life!
I am not condoning the taking of life here. There is a difference between a soul deciding on its parents and the mother, in particular, agreeing to the contract, and the taking of a life that is already well under way. Murder takes away the individual’s right of free will, and our free will cannot override that of another except in exceptional circumstances.
In other words, there are no simple rights and wrongs. We do not walk in another’s shoes and therefore cannot say what would be best for him or her. Advice, not the informative kind but the ‘I know best’ kind, does not work for that reason. We can neither see the whole picture nor have enough of the facts to make a complete diagnosis of what another’s needs are. How common is it for us to advise alcoholics and smokers to stop, and how often do they act on it? They know what they should do, but as long as they do not feel empowered, it is not going to happen. We have the capacity to grow, to let go of old hurts, learn to be happy despite misfortune, but we do not have the right to impede others from learning from their experiences, though the distinction between helping and taking over can be a fine one.
Looking at the bigger picture beyond birth and death, rights and wrongs takes on another dimension. As long as we do not harm others, we have the moral right to free will. This fits in with the concept of Karma. Karma means action, not punishment. There is just as much opportunity to seek at-one-ment by helping others as there is to suffer the consequences of our actions. But if we are to believe in one life only, how is it that some seem to have wonderful, easy lives as a passport to their own particular paradise, and others have a real battle on their hands? The opportunities for living a ‘good’ life are hardly equal – compare being born to a wealthy, loving family at one extreme to a poor, harsh existence at the other, to say nothing of the cruelty that children in such backgrounds may undergo. Still, I may learn a lot more in the latter life. The apparent disparity and unfairness between individuals provides a solid argument for multiple lives and multiple experiences.
Changing the interior is easier than struggling when the tide of life seems to be against you – though it does seem hard at first, yet another of life’s paradoxes. In developing the shell to protect us from people and events, we end up hiding the interior from ourselves. We are too frightened to face it because we feel we are bad or it is too raw, too difficult to expose. The effect is paralyzing and debilitating. However, once we bring it into the light of an accepting environment, the wound heals and cannot hurt us in nearly the same way. The fuller the understanding we gain, the stronger and more rounded we become, because we have the energy to be in the present moment instead of ducking and weaving away from it out of fear.
There is a wonderful story about God and the Angels deciding to give Man knowledge, but making it a challenge to find so that he values it appropriately. After rejecting the top of the highest mountain and the bottom of the deepest ocean as being too easy, they agree that hiding it deep within Man himself is the biggest and most rewarding challenge of all. The interior knowledge that we have lived before, as Jews and Muslims, as black and white, as rich and poor, shifts the solid ground of prejudice somewhat. It conflicts with our dyed-in-the-wool belief that we assumed was natural from our upbringing. That’s another thing to sort out – thank goodness we do not have to do it all in one go, and that we are such perfect vehicles for learning. Accepting that we are here to grow is the key to a loving, fulfilled life, if we dare accept the challenge.
Excerpt from Releasement: This Life, Past Life, Other Life