Life Is A Series of Adventures
Birth is not a beginning, death is not an end. Chuang Tzu (369 – 286B.C).
Life is a series of adventures rather than a single episode.
Most people think of being regressed back to past life, they think of hypnosis. Unfortunately, the word hypnosis scares many people. They have a mental picture of being brainwashed or losing control. Some people think that the hypnotist will ask them to do something embarrassing. None of these things are possible. When you are hypnotized, you are more aware than you are normally. You know exactly what is going on. If, for instance, you go back to a lifetime at the court of Henry VIII, you would be aware that you were in the hypnotherapist’s office. If phone rang or a car honked its horn, it would not disturb or bother you as you are in both places at the same time.
People get hypnotized by television and movie screens all the time. We drift in and out of hypnosis all the time. If the film is exciting, we’ll become engrossed and absorbed in it. If the film goes on and on with very little happening in it. We’ll probably come out of hypnosis and become aware of the chair we’re sitting. We’re different. You might be engrossed in a particular film, but the other person sitting next to you may not. Consequently, you’re in a state of hypnosis, but she or he is not.
Hypnosis is not something to fear. When you visit a hypnotherapist, he or she is simply guiding you into a hypnotic state so that the right messages can be placed into your subconscious mind.
Many hypnotherapists also conduct past life regression. If you decide to go to a hypnotherapist to experience a regression, choose the person carefully. Not every hypnotherapist is interested in this subject. Also you do not want to waste your time having a session with someone who has no interest in anything other than your money. Find a hypnotherapist or physician who specialized in past-life regressions. This person will be interested in the subject and able to guide you through a regression smoothly and safely.
These are comments about hypnosis from Brian L. Weiss, M.D:
(Brian L. Weiss, M.D., a physician and psychiatrist, lives and practices in Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Yale Medical School, and is the former Chairman of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, Florida.)
“Hypnosis is the main technique I use to help patients access past life memories. Many have questions about what hypnosis is and about what happens when a person is in a hypnotic state, but there is really no mystery. Hypnosis is a state of focused relaxation and concentration. When you are relaxed and your concentration is so intense that you are not distracted by outside noises or other stimuli, you are in a light state of hypnosis. All hypnosis is really self-hypnosis in that you, the patient, control the process. The therapist is merely a guide. One goal of hypnosis is to access the subconscious. Within your subconscious mind are all the memories of your soul. This is the part of our mind that lies beneath ordinary consciousness, beneath the constant bombardment of thoughts, feelings, outside stimuli, and other assaults on our awareness. Hypnosis makes past-life recall easier by bypassing the critical conscious mind to give access to the subconscious memory banks. It is not the only tool used to reclaim memories of past lives but hypnosis is the quickest and most direct one.
The way to begin to open up to your past-life memories is to relax completely. This allows you to tune into your subconscious mind, and in turn allows your subconscious mind to tune into the memories. Relaxation is the art of allowing your physical body to completely let go of all tension, while allowing your conscious mind to free itself from all cares and worries. As you allow the feeling of relaxation to replace tension, all the muscles in your body begin to relax. As your conscious mind becomes calm and quiet, your subconscious mind becomes more aware and your brain enters an alpha level, where you’re open and receptive to your past-life memories.”
It is a good idea to visit a hypnotherapist or physician for your fist hypnotic regression. This enables you to experience a past life in a safe environment. Your hypnotherapist is likely to be a sympathetic person who will be prepared to discuss the past life with you afterward.
However, it may not be possible for you to do this. There may not be any hypnotherapist in your area, or you may not able to find one with an interest in past-life regression. You might prefer to do it on your own. Fortunately, it is a simple matter to use hypnotic techniques to experience your past lives on your own.
Four Stages to Hypnotic Regression
There are four stages to hypnotic regression. The first and most important part of the process is to be able to relax completely. Once you are completely relaxed, the second step is to go back through time to one of your many past lives. The third step is to explore that past lifetime. Finally, you return to the present with all the memories of everything you did in that past life intact.
Step One – Relaxation
Sit or lie down comfortably. Make sure that you are wearing loose-fitting clothes and that the room is reasonably warm. You lose about one degree of body heat during hypnosis. You might like to cover yourself with blanket.
Some people like to have gentle mood music playing. Music can help to eliminate outside distractions. If you have music playing, choose something that has no recognizable tunes as you may find yourself humming with the music instead of returning to a past life.
It is important to become as relax as possible. The more relaxed you are, the more able you will be to open to those deeper levels of the subconscious mind. There are a number of ways of doing this. Taking deep breathes and exhilarating slowly is a good method, particularly if you silently tell yourself to relax each time you exhale.
The method I prefer is to slowly work my way through my body, relaxing every area in turn. I start with my toes and by the time I reach the top of my head I am totally relaxed. I do this by first becoming aware of my toes, and then relaxing them. I then become aware of my feet and relax them as much as possible. I then do the same thing with my ankles, calves, knees, thighs, abdomen, chest, and shoulders, before moving down first one arm and then the other. I then relax the muscles in my neck and face. Finally, I scan my entire body to see if any area is still tense. I then focus on relaxing that area. I usually spend a few moments enjoying the feeling of complete and total relaxation in every parts of my body.
We live in a highly stressful world and often we do not achieve this state of complete and total relaxation even in our sleep. This is why we sometimes wake up in the morning still feeling tired. This exercise is extremely beneficial and is worth practicing, even if you have no desire to use it for exploring your past lives. If we can relax our body completely six hours sleep a night is sufficient.
White Light Protection
You can protect yourself with the pure and positive energy of white light. The white-light protection is a universal and a powerful source you can draw from at any time you may need it and for any reason. By surrounding yourself with a white-light protection, you keep yourself safe on a physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual level from feeling any negative past-life energy and from bringing them into your present life. It keeps the energy and your awareness of past-life and emotions on a positive level. You can remember and re-experience everything in your past lives and learn from them without being affected by any negativity.
Imagine the white light mist above the rainbow. The mist is a universal white light that is very powerful and very pure and positive in its energy vibration. See and sense and feel yourself in the mist above the rainbow. It feels peaceful, comforting, and warm. Immerse yourself in it completely. Breathe it inside you. It feels like a breath of pure, fresh air that revitalizes and replenishes your energy on every level of your body, your mind, and your soul. Feel the warmth that flows through your body like a heartbeat, pulsating in a rhythm of protection and safety that feels natural and comfortable as it rejuvenates you with pure and positive energy.
Feel the energy inside of you as it surrounds every muscle, every bone, every tissue, and every organ in your physical body. As the warmth begins to flow through you, you may feel yourself vibrating with the pure and positive energy. As the white light enters your mind, and you accept it and absorb it within yourself, you feel your level of awareness expanding.
Feel the vibrations of energy as you surround your body with the white-light protection. Wrap the white-light energy around you like a warm and safe cocoon of very pure and powerful energy and keeps you safe on all levels. Feel your increased energy and your expanded awareness as you completely encircle yourself with the white light.
You have access to the white light any time you may need it, just by thinking about it. The white light will cleanse and purify your emotions and will shield you from any and all negative energy vibrations and feelings you may encounter. It is of utmost important that you protect yourself from past-life pain or trauma. By completely encircling yourself with white light, both inside and outside your physical body and your mind, you’re protected from re-experiencing any negative energy vibrations and from bringing their influence into your present time. If you’re not protected with the white light, you can bring past-life energies into your present where they may adversely affect you. This is similar to when you have a bad experience in your present life. The energies cling to you for a while, before they gradually wear off. The past can seem very real in the present. If past life emotions are a bit overwhelming, you can rid yourself of any negativity by completely immersing yourself in the very pure and powerful white light. This will cleanse and purify the past-life energies, and return you to your present.
Step Two – Back Through Time
There are many ways to move back through time and space to unlock the doors of a past life. The most common method is to imagine yourself walking along hallway with doors on both sides. Behind each of these doors is one of your past lives, and you can stop at any one of them, open the door, and move immediately into a past life.
Another method is to imagine yourself leaving your physical body and floating several hundred feet up into the air. When you are ready, slowly descend and you’ll find yourself in another time and place.
Another method similar to this is to imagine yourself sitting in the basket of a helium balloon as it takes off. You feel very comfortable and relaxed as it rises higher and higher. You notice that once it is a couple of hundred feet up in the air it gives a slight jolt and then moves back through time and space, finally landing and letting you out into another lifetime.
Some people prefer to head downward to the past. To do this, all you need to do is imagine a large chute, like a water slide. There is a handle at the top. By turning this handle you choose the past life that you will emerge into. When you feel that you have turned the handle in the right direction sit down on the chute and enjoy sliding back into a past life.
Another method is to imagine yourself on a small boat making its way down to the river of life. You can steer the boat to shore whenever you wish. Whenever you choose to stop will be an important occasion in one of your past lives.
A method that many people enjoy is to simply imagine themselves drifting back through time until something causes you to stop. This will be the first faint stirring of a past-life recall, and you can stop moving back whenever you wish to see what is going on.
Some people like to imagine themselves in a beautiful elevator. They push the bottom for any floor. When the elevator stops they walk out and into one of their past lives.
A friend of mine wanted to return to a past life in a time capsule. He had a vivid impression of what this looked like in his mind. So once he was fully relaxed, the hypnotherapist had him imagine that he was climbing into his time capsule, fastening the seat belts, and closing the door. The hypnotherapist then counted from ten down to one, which is when the time capsule took off. He then imagined himself inside the capsule as it hurtled back through time to one of his past lives. Once it landed, he opened the door and stepped out into a past life. When he had satisfied the curiosity with his past life he returned to the present by returning to his time capsule and hurtling back to hypnotherapist’s office. This method works so well with many people. Some people like to imagine going through time tunnel.
One method that work particularly well for some people is to imagine a beautiful rainbow. It is not an ordinary rainbow as it is possible to walk over it and into a past life.
In the end, the method that you use to go back to a past life does not matter. All you need to do is imagine yourself going back through time until you are there.
Imaginary and symbolism are the language of your subconscious mind. You subconscious mind translates your words and feelings into images, and communicates with you through the pictures it creates from words. Your subconscious responds to your feelings and to the words and thoughts that create the most vivid and descriptive images.
You can see the images of your past life by looking at them through your mind’s eye. Words automatically form images and create feelings. Your subconscious mind understands your words, thoughts, and feelings perfectly, and reflects them in mirror images in your mind. The images and symbol are complete with attached feelings and associated memories. As you translate and interpret your inner images, you learn to speak the language of your mind by listening to your feelings and paying attention to the pictures you see.
Step Three – Explore Your Past Life
The past life you have just returned to will be faint and hard to decipher at first. The image and the associated feelings may be a bit difficult to interpret and understand. The image usually represents the opening key into a past-life memory. Simply pause and take a few deep breaths and allow it to come into better focus.
Look down at your feet and see what footwear, if any, you are wearing. Then look at your clothing. See, if you are male or female. You may not get an answer to this immediately, especially if you are a young child. Sense how your body feels. Does it feel young and full of life? Tired or weary? Warm or cold? This will give you some indication as to your age and state of health. Do you feel happy and contented with life?
Now look around and see if you are indoors or outdoors. Notice if anyone else is with you. See what you are doing.
Now that you are becoming familiar with your new environment, you can move back and forth in time within this past life. Decide what it is you want to experience, count one, two, and three to yourself, and you’ll instantly be transported to a new scene. When you hear a word or a phrase that connects with a past-lie memory, you subconscious mind opens that particular image and feeling and brings the memory up to the surface. You can also explore any aspect of your life by thinking about it and counting up to three.
As you look at something, really see it. Notice all the colors of details associated with your visual observations. When you hear something, really listen to it. Become in tune with the sounds you hear. Allow the sounds to form images and to inspire feelings, when you taste something, really savor it. When you smell something, breathe it in. Allow the aroma and scent to surround you as you become even more aware of it. As you touch something really feel it. Be aware of the sensations you feel with your hands, as well as with your emotions.
To become more aware of your inner images, use your five physical senses simultaneously and in connection with one another. As you see, touch, listen, taste, or smell something, allow your mind to form images relating to each of your senses. Then pull all the pieces of the pictures together into one picture that tells the complete story in great detail, in vivid and descriptive images and emotions. By doing this, you’ll see the images clearly with your mind’s eye, and you’ll also sense them within your mind. Don’t try to analyze it or associate it with anything. Just let it flow.
If you feel like you’re making up imaginary stories about your past life, it could be due to not yet fully trusting yourself. If you feel like you are creating made-up memories, then discover where your memories originated and what inspired them. As you acquire this understanding, you may find that their basis is firmly rooted in what really happened in your past lives. By allowing your imagination to open up the real world for you, you’ll find that what you originally thought of as fantasy is, in truth, the fact.
Trust in the cornerstone in building the foundation for your past-life memories to surface. Belief in your ability to open up and recognize your past-life memories, acceptance of your memories as they surface, are integral and inseparable parts of trust. Past-life memories thrive on your positive belief in yourself, and on your acceptance of the truth within your images and feelings. By trusting your inner knowledge, you always find the truth.
If you experience doubt at first, accept this as normal. It’s just your conscious mind trying to give a hard time. You can win the battle, armed with trust in yourself and a positive feeling that you are going to remember your past lives. Just push gently your analytical mind out of your way. As you become aware of your past-life memories, trust yourself and your feelings. Trust your own perceptions of what you believe to be true. As you trust yourself and you follow your feelings, it becomes easier to recognize the true images and scenes from your past lives and to interpret them accurately.
Your feelings about your past lives and the insights you gain into your present life will verify and validate your memories. The best way to verify a past-life memory is by trusting your feelings, and by understanding how your past life relates to your present life.
Your current experiences and feelings often have their origins in past lives. Many present questions and problems have their answers and origins in past lives. Reflections of your past lives are all around you, and are mirrored in your present experiences and feelings. Your current lifestyle will show you how the past is continually influencing you, and the framework of your life in general will reveal many clues by giving you an overall in-depth pictures. This helps you understand your present experience, and helps you connect them to their past-life origins. By looking at the present to uncover clues, you can see into the past. Each life span is connected to a few past lives, usually three to six.
There are number of experiences that are useful to explore:
- See what you did for living.
- Recall at least one incident with the person whom you most loved in that lifetime.
- Participate in a family scene.
- Picture a relaxed scene with friends.
- See yourself doing something that made you feel proud.
Together these incidents help build up a picture of that particular’s life.
Most people want to know what they looked like in a past life. Take yourself to a room that contains mirrors. Of course, you may be experiencing a lifetime in which mirrors did not exist. In this case take yourself to a pond or river and see if you can see your reflection in the water.
The same thing applies if you do not know your name in that lifetime. Take yourself to a scene where someone was calling you and you will immediately know your name. Take as long as you wish to explore this past life. Before you return to the present, visualize yourself on the last day of the lifetime you are exploring. See what you are doing and who is with you. Find out if you have any regrets. Then see yourself pass over into spirit.
Move back and witness your death in a detached way if it is likely to cause pain or emotion. Look down on the physical body you have just left. This will give you some idea as to how old you were and what your state of health was when you died. You will probably experience the sense of release as you do this. You will find that your body is just your soul’s shield. Your spirit will be happy to have finally shed this physical body and be able to move on.
Ask yourself what lessons you had to learn in that particular lifetime. Find out if there is any karma or traumatic experiences from that past life that is affecting your current life.
Step Four – Return to the Present
Once you have explored previous life for as long as you wish, it is time to return to the present. Tell yourself that you will recall everything that occurred during your regression, and that new memories will come into your conscious awareness in the next few days. Then bring yourself back slowly to your current life. Sit quietly for a few minutes and think about your past life.
Now that you have uncovered one of your past lives, you will be able to return to it as often as you wish. All you need to do at the start of step two is to request that you return to this particular lifetime, and you will immediately go back and be able to explore it further.
Naturally, you will be able to use the same technique to explore other incarnations. At the start of step two tell yourself that you will return to a past life that you have not explore before, and you will go back to a different lifetime.
Helpful Hints
Most people go straight back to a past life with little difficulty. This is because they have come to see hypnotherapist with a specific goal in mind, and all the hypnotherapist need to do is direct them back to a past life and guide them through it.
However, it is not always as easy as that when you do it on your own. Outside distractions may be a nuisance, particularly if they are created by members of your own family. You may feel guilty about leaving task undone. People might come into the room to see what you are doing. If these problems persist, it is better to abort the past-life regression and attend to them first. You are likely to relax more easily if the washing up has been done, for instance. You might have to choose another time when outside distractions are less likely. You may find that late at night or early in the morning is the best time to experiment.
Many people worry about reliving painful incidents during a regression. Life was certainly much more violent and dangerous in the past than it is for most of us nowadays. If a particularly traumatic or difficult situation arises, you can always take a step back and observe it impartially. However, for therapeutic purpose it is necessary go through the experience.
Some people handle the regression in a detached manner, but then cry afterward. This is an emotional release. Allow this release to take place if it occurs. It can sometimes be painful to release traumas from the past. We all carry a great deal of past around with us, and it can be emotional when we let it go. Simply cry for as long as necessary. It is an emotional experience to find out who you were and what you were doing in a past life, and it is understandable that these feelings need to be released. Do not try to control or repressed them. By bringing the traumatic experiences into the awareness it can be dealt with and let go, is the first step toward solving present day problem.
Like all other methods, practice is required. Some people experience a past-life regression on their first attempt, but other people need to repeat the exercise again and again before they finally succeed.
In a past life you will learn only what the person used to be knew. So you may not discover the year you were born in, the name of the country you lived in, or the name of the ruling monarch. You may not even know the name of the village you lived in, as you might call it ‘home.’ Sometimes you can gain additional knowledge by looking up details in encyclopedias and history books. Illustrations in these books can be extremely useful as they often depict objects that you saw in your past life.
You may identify people in your past life who are important to you in this lifetime. Someone who was your wife in a past life might be your son or mother in this lifetime. The relationships and sexes change, but the person will be instantly recognizable. If this happen, you will notice a subtle change in your relationship with these people in the future. You will become more accepting and understanding of them.
C. G. Jung spoke about the combination of masculine and feminine in all of us; the soul is androgynous. The psyche is the human soul. Past-life exploration is in-depth soul study. Deep within each of us is a timeless, sensitive soul seeking to unfold and open into the light. Life is therefore a series of adventures rather than a single episode. Different lifetime bring different experience: one life as a man, the next a woman; one life active, the next reflective; one life poor, the next rich; one life meek, the next assertive. We learn to see things in perspective. It makes us less dogmatic, less complacent, less nationalist, less racist, less sexist. Reincarnation means an ever-growing wealth of experience.
Learning and development never end. Living again and again means experiencing and doing new things and looking back on them. ‘Up there’ we evaluate, think and plan. ‘Down here’ we put ourselves and our ideas to the test and we may consolidate our gains.
The more potential a person has, the more impossible it is for that individual to reach his or her potentials in a single given lifetime. There is too little time on earth to manifest it all. You would realize that life in your physical body, relatively speaking, reflects just a brief moment in time. At the moment of realization, I gave up trying to “reach all my potentials.” I decided that it was more reasonable to make choices in life and to focus on the interests that are most precious and prized. We do not need to worry about cramming every bit of experience into our current physical life. Through future reincarnation we wouldn’t be wasting the talents and abilities we have been blessed with. Every life has a main theme, a main direction.
Insight and self-knowledge of our past can bring benefit, can help us change and grow. But the past is past. The purpose of past-life work is to understand, to learn and to grow – to heal the past – to make us whole. My own voyages into the past were sources of enormous personal growth and lead me to a fuller understanding of the continuity of lives. The goal is to learn, to improve, to expand and to unfold into a more whole, healthy and happy person. With the greater self-knowledge the past can be used to relieve present day problems and to build a brighter and more rewarding future. We can’t change the world but we can change ourselves and our worlds.
The concept reincarnation is almost always paired with a concept of cause and effect that orchestrates our many lives into a meaningful sequence. Karma and reincarnation are principles governing the evolution of human consciousness in the Earth school. In Karma and rebirth, suffering found meaning and mercy. It founds purpose and goal.
We incarnate on Earth in order to develop ourselves through specific challenges. We do choose our lives on the earth, not so much by what we would like but rather what lessons we can learn. The choice is therefore based on what we need, not on what we want. The soul may be returning to a life in which it will suffer great trials, but ingredient in the life plan is carefully selected to create conditions that will help it grow beyond its current limitations. We have to be given obstacles in order to overcome those obstacles – to become stronger, more aware, and more responsible. The great difficulties we incorporated into our lives sometimes represent great challenges designed to promote great inner growth. To advance we must be challenged, and these karmic challenges come in the form of every anxiety, confrontation, disorder, and frustration known to humankind.
We’ve created the karmic momentum in our lives and we have chosen how this momentum is even now moving toward resolution. No matter how difficult or seemingly inexplicable our lives may be, everything in them is there for our own benefit.
Human neurosis and character disorders are usually rooted in the soil of the past. In pat-life regression, we may experience once again the terrible hurts, the loss, death, and pain of the past. The work is not always easy and tears flow in abundance. But these are the tears that wash and cleanse the soul; therapy without tears is like bathing without water.
When problematic memories that surface in the regression are from a former life, they behave in essentially the same manner as memories in the present life. Apparently it matters little to the psyche whether the forces causing conflict in our lives are rooted in our childhood or in a life from the sixteenth century. In general, working in this lifetime is emotionally more taxing. Working with past lifetimes is usually mentally more taxing.
Not only are the therapeutic dynamics of engaging former-life memories identical to engaging present-life memories, but it also turns out that former-life memories often have greater therapeutic value than the present-life memories. The evidence coming in from past-life therapies is that engaging unresolved issues from former lives - desires that were not fulfilled, conflicts that were not resolved, traumas, ambition not realized - appears to heal the deeper wounds of life.
Problems tend to move whole from life to life. Accordingly, these seeds of incompleteness often constitute the core themes of our present life. They determine our mission – the issues, the relationships, the ailments, and the conditions that will haunt us all our lives until we solve them. Thus a therapy that focuses on these seeds will address the true roots of our present conflicts. Chronic hunger in one life may result in compulsive eating in a later life. Death by a fall may lead to a phobia of heights. Years of practice at the piano may emerge as ‘natural aptitude’ for the instrument in different centuries. In fact, everything that we commonly take to be innately “us” has roots somewhere in our history.
Morris Netherton’s groundbreaking book “Past Life Therapy” is remarkable. The majority of the cases he describes involved serious physical complaints: ulcers, epilepsy, migraine, and incipient cancer.
- A young woman who had suffered from ulcerative colitis relived the life of an eight-year-old Dutch girl rounded up and shot at a mass grave by Nazi soldiers. The colitis was an expression of the residual terror during the girl’s last moments awaiting execution.
- A man with chronic back pain relived an agonizing death pinned under a wagon with a broken back; the pain substantially lessened after the session.
- A woman’s chronic migraine disappeared after reliving the agony of a young girl of seven whose father beat her over the head with an iron bar until she died.
- A woman with eye problems and asthma remembered the life of a medieval monk accused of leading a whole village into heretical beliefs. The monk’s punishment was to watch the whole village be burned alive before him, his eyes watering and his lungs heaving at the smoke from the burning flesh.
- A man with epilepsy relived a terrible battlefield death in which he was painfully dismembered; some of his death agonies appeared to be mirrored in the pattern of his epileptic seizures.
Every part of the body, it would seem, has in one person or another revealed some old accident or wound. But the past-life traumas always have a specific and not general relationship to the current physical problem. Not all migraines derive from head wounds or all throat problems from strangling. A similar throat complaint in several people may carry quite different stories from those people. So much unconscious past-life materials lies below the surface in certain regions of the body. When those serious physical complaints re-enacted cathartically, can lead to substantial relief and often to quite rapid recovery.
Dr. Morris Netherton:
A renowned psychologist shows how your present problems and anxieties are the result of what has happened to you in your past incarnations, stretching back centuries. Dr. Morris Netherton has over thirty years of clinical practice in Alternative Treatment Modalities. His book Past-Lives Therapy was published in 1978; it was the first in the field of regression therapy. He has since written two other books and numerous articles for college textbooks, magazines, and newspapers.
http://www.aaple.com/therapy/
http://www.spinninglobe.net/morrisn.htm
Milton Erickson, M.D.
The Milton H. Erickson Foundation, Inc. is dedicated to promoting and advancingthe contributions made to the health sciences by the late Milton H. Erickson, M.D. through training mental health professionals and health professions worldwide
http://www.erickson-foundation.org/
Life is a series of adventures rather than a single episode.
Most people think of being regressed back to past life, they think of hypnosis. Unfortunately, the word hypnosis scares many people. They have a mental picture of being brainwashed or losing control. Some people think that the hypnotist will ask them to do something embarrassing. None of these things are possible. When you are hypnotized, you are more aware than you are normally. You know exactly what is going on. If, for instance, you go back to a lifetime at the court of Henry VIII, you would be aware that you were in the hypnotherapist’s office. If phone rang or a car honked its horn, it would not disturb or bother you as you are in both places at the same time.
People get hypnotized by television and movie screens all the time. We drift in and out of hypnosis all the time. If the film is exciting, we’ll become engrossed and absorbed in it. If the film goes on and on with very little happening in it. We’ll probably come out of hypnosis and become aware of the chair we’re sitting. We’re different. You might be engrossed in a particular film, but the other person sitting next to you may not. Consequently, you’re in a state of hypnosis, but she or he is not.
Hypnosis is not something to fear. When you visit a hypnotherapist, he or she is simply guiding you into a hypnotic state so that the right messages can be placed into your subconscious mind.
Many hypnotherapists also conduct past life regression. If you decide to go to a hypnotherapist to experience a regression, choose the person carefully. Not every hypnotherapist is interested in this subject. Also you do not want to waste your time having a session with someone who has no interest in anything other than your money. Find a hypnotherapist or physician who specialized in past-life regressions. This person will be interested in the subject and able to guide you through a regression smoothly and safely.
These are comments about hypnosis from Brian L. Weiss, M.D:
(Brian L. Weiss, M.D., a physician and psychiatrist, lives and practices in Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Yale Medical School, and is the former Chairman of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, Florida.)
“Hypnosis is the main technique I use to help patients access past life memories. Many have questions about what hypnosis is and about what happens when a person is in a hypnotic state, but there is really no mystery. Hypnosis is a state of focused relaxation and concentration. When you are relaxed and your concentration is so intense that you are not distracted by outside noises or other stimuli, you are in a light state of hypnosis. All hypnosis is really self-hypnosis in that you, the patient, control the process. The therapist is merely a guide. One goal of hypnosis is to access the subconscious. Within your subconscious mind are all the memories of your soul. This is the part of our mind that lies beneath ordinary consciousness, beneath the constant bombardment of thoughts, feelings, outside stimuli, and other assaults on our awareness. Hypnosis makes past-life recall easier by bypassing the critical conscious mind to give access to the subconscious memory banks. It is not the only tool used to reclaim memories of past lives but hypnosis is the quickest and most direct one.
The way to begin to open up to your past-life memories is to relax completely. This allows you to tune into your subconscious mind, and in turn allows your subconscious mind to tune into the memories. Relaxation is the art of allowing your physical body to completely let go of all tension, while allowing your conscious mind to free itself from all cares and worries. As you allow the feeling of relaxation to replace tension, all the muscles in your body begin to relax. As your conscious mind becomes calm and quiet, your subconscious mind becomes more aware and your brain enters an alpha level, where you’re open and receptive to your past-life memories.”
It is a good idea to visit a hypnotherapist or physician for your fist hypnotic regression. This enables you to experience a past life in a safe environment. Your hypnotherapist is likely to be a sympathetic person who will be prepared to discuss the past life with you afterward.
However, it may not be possible for you to do this. There may not be any hypnotherapist in your area, or you may not able to find one with an interest in past-life regression. You might prefer to do it on your own. Fortunately, it is a simple matter to use hypnotic techniques to experience your past lives on your own.
Four Stages to Hypnotic Regression
There are four stages to hypnotic regression. The first and most important part of the process is to be able to relax completely. Once you are completely relaxed, the second step is to go back through time to one of your many past lives. The third step is to explore that past lifetime. Finally, you return to the present with all the memories of everything you did in that past life intact.
Step One – Relaxation
Sit or lie down comfortably. Make sure that you are wearing loose-fitting clothes and that the room is reasonably warm. You lose about one degree of body heat during hypnosis. You might like to cover yourself with blanket.
Some people like to have gentle mood music playing. Music can help to eliminate outside distractions. If you have music playing, choose something that has no recognizable tunes as you may find yourself humming with the music instead of returning to a past life.
It is important to become as relax as possible. The more relaxed you are, the more able you will be to open to those deeper levels of the subconscious mind. There are a number of ways of doing this. Taking deep breathes and exhilarating slowly is a good method, particularly if you silently tell yourself to relax each time you exhale.
The method I prefer is to slowly work my way through my body, relaxing every area in turn. I start with my toes and by the time I reach the top of my head I am totally relaxed. I do this by first becoming aware of my toes, and then relaxing them. I then become aware of my feet and relax them as much as possible. I then do the same thing with my ankles, calves, knees, thighs, abdomen, chest, and shoulders, before moving down first one arm and then the other. I then relax the muscles in my neck and face. Finally, I scan my entire body to see if any area is still tense. I then focus on relaxing that area. I usually spend a few moments enjoying the feeling of complete and total relaxation in every parts of my body.
We live in a highly stressful world and often we do not achieve this state of complete and total relaxation even in our sleep. This is why we sometimes wake up in the morning still feeling tired. This exercise is extremely beneficial and is worth practicing, even if you have no desire to use it for exploring your past lives. If we can relax our body completely six hours sleep a night is sufficient.
White Light Protection
You can protect yourself with the pure and positive energy of white light. The white-light protection is a universal and a powerful source you can draw from at any time you may need it and for any reason. By surrounding yourself with a white-light protection, you keep yourself safe on a physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual level from feeling any negative past-life energy and from bringing them into your present life. It keeps the energy and your awareness of past-life and emotions on a positive level. You can remember and re-experience everything in your past lives and learn from them without being affected by any negativity.
Imagine the white light mist above the rainbow. The mist is a universal white light that is very powerful and very pure and positive in its energy vibration. See and sense and feel yourself in the mist above the rainbow. It feels peaceful, comforting, and warm. Immerse yourself in it completely. Breathe it inside you. It feels like a breath of pure, fresh air that revitalizes and replenishes your energy on every level of your body, your mind, and your soul. Feel the warmth that flows through your body like a heartbeat, pulsating in a rhythm of protection and safety that feels natural and comfortable as it rejuvenates you with pure and positive energy.
Feel the energy inside of you as it surrounds every muscle, every bone, every tissue, and every organ in your physical body. As the warmth begins to flow through you, you may feel yourself vibrating with the pure and positive energy. As the white light enters your mind, and you accept it and absorb it within yourself, you feel your level of awareness expanding.
Feel the vibrations of energy as you surround your body with the white-light protection. Wrap the white-light energy around you like a warm and safe cocoon of very pure and powerful energy and keeps you safe on all levels. Feel your increased energy and your expanded awareness as you completely encircle yourself with the white light.
You have access to the white light any time you may need it, just by thinking about it. The white light will cleanse and purify your emotions and will shield you from any and all negative energy vibrations and feelings you may encounter. It is of utmost important that you protect yourself from past-life pain or trauma. By completely encircling yourself with white light, both inside and outside your physical body and your mind, you’re protected from re-experiencing any negative energy vibrations and from bringing their influence into your present time. If you’re not protected with the white light, you can bring past-life energies into your present where they may adversely affect you. This is similar to when you have a bad experience in your present life. The energies cling to you for a while, before they gradually wear off. The past can seem very real in the present. If past life emotions are a bit overwhelming, you can rid yourself of any negativity by completely immersing yourself in the very pure and powerful white light. This will cleanse and purify the past-life energies, and return you to your present.
Step Two – Back Through Time
There are many ways to move back through time and space to unlock the doors of a past life. The most common method is to imagine yourself walking along hallway with doors on both sides. Behind each of these doors is one of your past lives, and you can stop at any one of them, open the door, and move immediately into a past life.
Another method is to imagine yourself leaving your physical body and floating several hundred feet up into the air. When you are ready, slowly descend and you’ll find yourself in another time and place.
Another method similar to this is to imagine yourself sitting in the basket of a helium balloon as it takes off. You feel very comfortable and relaxed as it rises higher and higher. You notice that once it is a couple of hundred feet up in the air it gives a slight jolt and then moves back through time and space, finally landing and letting you out into another lifetime.
Some people prefer to head downward to the past. To do this, all you need to do is imagine a large chute, like a water slide. There is a handle at the top. By turning this handle you choose the past life that you will emerge into. When you feel that you have turned the handle in the right direction sit down on the chute and enjoy sliding back into a past life.
Another method is to imagine yourself on a small boat making its way down to the river of life. You can steer the boat to shore whenever you wish. Whenever you choose to stop will be an important occasion in one of your past lives.
A method that many people enjoy is to simply imagine themselves drifting back through time until something causes you to stop. This will be the first faint stirring of a past-life recall, and you can stop moving back whenever you wish to see what is going on.
Some people like to imagine themselves in a beautiful elevator. They push the bottom for any floor. When the elevator stops they walk out and into one of their past lives.
A friend of mine wanted to return to a past life in a time capsule. He had a vivid impression of what this looked like in his mind. So once he was fully relaxed, the hypnotherapist had him imagine that he was climbing into his time capsule, fastening the seat belts, and closing the door. The hypnotherapist then counted from ten down to one, which is when the time capsule took off. He then imagined himself inside the capsule as it hurtled back through time to one of his past lives. Once it landed, he opened the door and stepped out into a past life. When he had satisfied the curiosity with his past life he returned to the present by returning to his time capsule and hurtling back to hypnotherapist’s office. This method works so well with many people. Some people like to imagine going through time tunnel.
One method that work particularly well for some people is to imagine a beautiful rainbow. It is not an ordinary rainbow as it is possible to walk over it and into a past life.
In the end, the method that you use to go back to a past life does not matter. All you need to do is imagine yourself going back through time until you are there.
Imaginary and symbolism are the language of your subconscious mind. You subconscious mind translates your words and feelings into images, and communicates with you through the pictures it creates from words. Your subconscious responds to your feelings and to the words and thoughts that create the most vivid and descriptive images.
You can see the images of your past life by looking at them through your mind’s eye. Words automatically form images and create feelings. Your subconscious mind understands your words, thoughts, and feelings perfectly, and reflects them in mirror images in your mind. The images and symbol are complete with attached feelings and associated memories. As you translate and interpret your inner images, you learn to speak the language of your mind by listening to your feelings and paying attention to the pictures you see.
Step Three – Explore Your Past Life
The past life you have just returned to will be faint and hard to decipher at first. The image and the associated feelings may be a bit difficult to interpret and understand. The image usually represents the opening key into a past-life memory. Simply pause and take a few deep breaths and allow it to come into better focus.
Look down at your feet and see what footwear, if any, you are wearing. Then look at your clothing. See, if you are male or female. You may not get an answer to this immediately, especially if you are a young child. Sense how your body feels. Does it feel young and full of life? Tired or weary? Warm or cold? This will give you some indication as to your age and state of health. Do you feel happy and contented with life?
Now look around and see if you are indoors or outdoors. Notice if anyone else is with you. See what you are doing.
Now that you are becoming familiar with your new environment, you can move back and forth in time within this past life. Decide what it is you want to experience, count one, two, and three to yourself, and you’ll instantly be transported to a new scene. When you hear a word or a phrase that connects with a past-lie memory, you subconscious mind opens that particular image and feeling and brings the memory up to the surface. You can also explore any aspect of your life by thinking about it and counting up to three.
As you look at something, really see it. Notice all the colors of details associated with your visual observations. When you hear something, really listen to it. Become in tune with the sounds you hear. Allow the sounds to form images and to inspire feelings, when you taste something, really savor it. When you smell something, breathe it in. Allow the aroma and scent to surround you as you become even more aware of it. As you touch something really feel it. Be aware of the sensations you feel with your hands, as well as with your emotions.
To become more aware of your inner images, use your five physical senses simultaneously and in connection with one another. As you see, touch, listen, taste, or smell something, allow your mind to form images relating to each of your senses. Then pull all the pieces of the pictures together into one picture that tells the complete story in great detail, in vivid and descriptive images and emotions. By doing this, you’ll see the images clearly with your mind’s eye, and you’ll also sense them within your mind. Don’t try to analyze it or associate it with anything. Just let it flow.
If you feel like you’re making up imaginary stories about your past life, it could be due to not yet fully trusting yourself. If you feel like you are creating made-up memories, then discover where your memories originated and what inspired them. As you acquire this understanding, you may find that their basis is firmly rooted in what really happened in your past lives. By allowing your imagination to open up the real world for you, you’ll find that what you originally thought of as fantasy is, in truth, the fact.
Trust in the cornerstone in building the foundation for your past-life memories to surface. Belief in your ability to open up and recognize your past-life memories, acceptance of your memories as they surface, are integral and inseparable parts of trust. Past-life memories thrive on your positive belief in yourself, and on your acceptance of the truth within your images and feelings. By trusting your inner knowledge, you always find the truth.
If you experience doubt at first, accept this as normal. It’s just your conscious mind trying to give a hard time. You can win the battle, armed with trust in yourself and a positive feeling that you are going to remember your past lives. Just push gently your analytical mind out of your way. As you become aware of your past-life memories, trust yourself and your feelings. Trust your own perceptions of what you believe to be true. As you trust yourself and you follow your feelings, it becomes easier to recognize the true images and scenes from your past lives and to interpret them accurately.
Your feelings about your past lives and the insights you gain into your present life will verify and validate your memories. The best way to verify a past-life memory is by trusting your feelings, and by understanding how your past life relates to your present life.
Your current experiences and feelings often have their origins in past lives. Many present questions and problems have their answers and origins in past lives. Reflections of your past lives are all around you, and are mirrored in your present experiences and feelings. Your current lifestyle will show you how the past is continually influencing you, and the framework of your life in general will reveal many clues by giving you an overall in-depth pictures. This helps you understand your present experience, and helps you connect them to their past-life origins. By looking at the present to uncover clues, you can see into the past. Each life span is connected to a few past lives, usually three to six.
There are number of experiences that are useful to explore:
- See what you did for living.
- Recall at least one incident with the person whom you most loved in that lifetime.
- Participate in a family scene.
- Picture a relaxed scene with friends.
- See yourself doing something that made you feel proud.
Together these incidents help build up a picture of that particular’s life.
Most people want to know what they looked like in a past life. Take yourself to a room that contains mirrors. Of course, you may be experiencing a lifetime in which mirrors did not exist. In this case take yourself to a pond or river and see if you can see your reflection in the water.
The same thing applies if you do not know your name in that lifetime. Take yourself to a scene where someone was calling you and you will immediately know your name. Take as long as you wish to explore this past life. Before you return to the present, visualize yourself on the last day of the lifetime you are exploring. See what you are doing and who is with you. Find out if you have any regrets. Then see yourself pass over into spirit.
Move back and witness your death in a detached way if it is likely to cause pain or emotion. Look down on the physical body you have just left. This will give you some idea as to how old you were and what your state of health was when you died. You will probably experience the sense of release as you do this. You will find that your body is just your soul’s shield. Your spirit will be happy to have finally shed this physical body and be able to move on.
Ask yourself what lessons you had to learn in that particular lifetime. Find out if there is any karma or traumatic experiences from that past life that is affecting your current life.
Step Four – Return to the Present
Once you have explored previous life for as long as you wish, it is time to return to the present. Tell yourself that you will recall everything that occurred during your regression, and that new memories will come into your conscious awareness in the next few days. Then bring yourself back slowly to your current life. Sit quietly for a few minutes and think about your past life.
Now that you have uncovered one of your past lives, you will be able to return to it as often as you wish. All you need to do at the start of step two is to request that you return to this particular lifetime, and you will immediately go back and be able to explore it further.
Naturally, you will be able to use the same technique to explore other incarnations. At the start of step two tell yourself that you will return to a past life that you have not explore before, and you will go back to a different lifetime.
Helpful Hints
Most people go straight back to a past life with little difficulty. This is because they have come to see hypnotherapist with a specific goal in mind, and all the hypnotherapist need to do is direct them back to a past life and guide them through it.
However, it is not always as easy as that when you do it on your own. Outside distractions may be a nuisance, particularly if they are created by members of your own family. You may feel guilty about leaving task undone. People might come into the room to see what you are doing. If these problems persist, it is better to abort the past-life regression and attend to them first. You are likely to relax more easily if the washing up has been done, for instance. You might have to choose another time when outside distractions are less likely. You may find that late at night or early in the morning is the best time to experiment.
Many people worry about reliving painful incidents during a regression. Life was certainly much more violent and dangerous in the past than it is for most of us nowadays. If a particularly traumatic or difficult situation arises, you can always take a step back and observe it impartially. However, for therapeutic purpose it is necessary go through the experience.
Some people handle the regression in a detached manner, but then cry afterward. This is an emotional release. Allow this release to take place if it occurs. It can sometimes be painful to release traumas from the past. We all carry a great deal of past around with us, and it can be emotional when we let it go. Simply cry for as long as necessary. It is an emotional experience to find out who you were and what you were doing in a past life, and it is understandable that these feelings need to be released. Do not try to control or repressed them. By bringing the traumatic experiences into the awareness it can be dealt with and let go, is the first step toward solving present day problem.
Like all other methods, practice is required. Some people experience a past-life regression on their first attempt, but other people need to repeat the exercise again and again before they finally succeed.
In a past life you will learn only what the person used to be knew. So you may not discover the year you were born in, the name of the country you lived in, or the name of the ruling monarch. You may not even know the name of the village you lived in, as you might call it ‘home.’ Sometimes you can gain additional knowledge by looking up details in encyclopedias and history books. Illustrations in these books can be extremely useful as they often depict objects that you saw in your past life.
You may identify people in your past life who are important to you in this lifetime. Someone who was your wife in a past life might be your son or mother in this lifetime. The relationships and sexes change, but the person will be instantly recognizable. If this happen, you will notice a subtle change in your relationship with these people in the future. You will become more accepting and understanding of them.
C. G. Jung spoke about the combination of masculine and feminine in all of us; the soul is androgynous. The psyche is the human soul. Past-life exploration is in-depth soul study. Deep within each of us is a timeless, sensitive soul seeking to unfold and open into the light. Life is therefore a series of adventures rather than a single episode. Different lifetime bring different experience: one life as a man, the next a woman; one life active, the next reflective; one life poor, the next rich; one life meek, the next assertive. We learn to see things in perspective. It makes us less dogmatic, less complacent, less nationalist, less racist, less sexist. Reincarnation means an ever-growing wealth of experience.
Learning and development never end. Living again and again means experiencing and doing new things and looking back on them. ‘Up there’ we evaluate, think and plan. ‘Down here’ we put ourselves and our ideas to the test and we may consolidate our gains.
The more potential a person has, the more impossible it is for that individual to reach his or her potentials in a single given lifetime. There is too little time on earth to manifest it all. You would realize that life in your physical body, relatively speaking, reflects just a brief moment in time. At the moment of realization, I gave up trying to “reach all my potentials.” I decided that it was more reasonable to make choices in life and to focus on the interests that are most precious and prized. We do not need to worry about cramming every bit of experience into our current physical life. Through future reincarnation we wouldn’t be wasting the talents and abilities we have been blessed with. Every life has a main theme, a main direction.
Insight and self-knowledge of our past can bring benefit, can help us change and grow. But the past is past. The purpose of past-life work is to understand, to learn and to grow – to heal the past – to make us whole. My own voyages into the past were sources of enormous personal growth and lead me to a fuller understanding of the continuity of lives. The goal is to learn, to improve, to expand and to unfold into a more whole, healthy and happy person. With the greater self-knowledge the past can be used to relieve present day problems and to build a brighter and more rewarding future. We can’t change the world but we can change ourselves and our worlds.
The concept reincarnation is almost always paired with a concept of cause and effect that orchestrates our many lives into a meaningful sequence. Karma and reincarnation are principles governing the evolution of human consciousness in the Earth school. In Karma and rebirth, suffering found meaning and mercy. It founds purpose and goal.
We incarnate on Earth in order to develop ourselves through specific challenges. We do choose our lives on the earth, not so much by what we would like but rather what lessons we can learn. The choice is therefore based on what we need, not on what we want. The soul may be returning to a life in which it will suffer great trials, but ingredient in the life plan is carefully selected to create conditions that will help it grow beyond its current limitations. We have to be given obstacles in order to overcome those obstacles – to become stronger, more aware, and more responsible. The great difficulties we incorporated into our lives sometimes represent great challenges designed to promote great inner growth. To advance we must be challenged, and these karmic challenges come in the form of every anxiety, confrontation, disorder, and frustration known to humankind.
We’ve created the karmic momentum in our lives and we have chosen how this momentum is even now moving toward resolution. No matter how difficult or seemingly inexplicable our lives may be, everything in them is there for our own benefit.
Human neurosis and character disorders are usually rooted in the soil of the past. In pat-life regression, we may experience once again the terrible hurts, the loss, death, and pain of the past. The work is not always easy and tears flow in abundance. But these are the tears that wash and cleanse the soul; therapy without tears is like bathing without water.
When problematic memories that surface in the regression are from a former life, they behave in essentially the same manner as memories in the present life. Apparently it matters little to the psyche whether the forces causing conflict in our lives are rooted in our childhood or in a life from the sixteenth century. In general, working in this lifetime is emotionally more taxing. Working with past lifetimes is usually mentally more taxing.
Not only are the therapeutic dynamics of engaging former-life memories identical to engaging present-life memories, but it also turns out that former-life memories often have greater therapeutic value than the present-life memories. The evidence coming in from past-life therapies is that engaging unresolved issues from former lives - desires that were not fulfilled, conflicts that were not resolved, traumas, ambition not realized - appears to heal the deeper wounds of life.
Problems tend to move whole from life to life. Accordingly, these seeds of incompleteness often constitute the core themes of our present life. They determine our mission – the issues, the relationships, the ailments, and the conditions that will haunt us all our lives until we solve them. Thus a therapy that focuses on these seeds will address the true roots of our present conflicts. Chronic hunger in one life may result in compulsive eating in a later life. Death by a fall may lead to a phobia of heights. Years of practice at the piano may emerge as ‘natural aptitude’ for the instrument in different centuries. In fact, everything that we commonly take to be innately “us” has roots somewhere in our history.
Morris Netherton’s groundbreaking book “Past Life Therapy” is remarkable. The majority of the cases he describes involved serious physical complaints: ulcers, epilepsy, migraine, and incipient cancer.
- A young woman who had suffered from ulcerative colitis relived the life of an eight-year-old Dutch girl rounded up and shot at a mass grave by Nazi soldiers. The colitis was an expression of the residual terror during the girl’s last moments awaiting execution.
- A man with chronic back pain relived an agonizing death pinned under a wagon with a broken back; the pain substantially lessened after the session.
- A woman’s chronic migraine disappeared after reliving the agony of a young girl of seven whose father beat her over the head with an iron bar until she died.
- A woman with eye problems and asthma remembered the life of a medieval monk accused of leading a whole village into heretical beliefs. The monk’s punishment was to watch the whole village be burned alive before him, his eyes watering and his lungs heaving at the smoke from the burning flesh.
- A man with epilepsy relived a terrible battlefield death in which he was painfully dismembered; some of his death agonies appeared to be mirrored in the pattern of his epileptic seizures.
Every part of the body, it would seem, has in one person or another revealed some old accident or wound. But the past-life traumas always have a specific and not general relationship to the current physical problem. Not all migraines derive from head wounds or all throat problems from strangling. A similar throat complaint in several people may carry quite different stories from those people. So much unconscious past-life materials lies below the surface in certain regions of the body. When those serious physical complaints re-enacted cathartically, can lead to substantial relief and often to quite rapid recovery.
Dr. Morris Netherton:
A renowned psychologist shows how your present problems and anxieties are the result of what has happened to you in your past incarnations, stretching back centuries. Dr. Morris Netherton has over thirty years of clinical practice in Alternative Treatment Modalities. His book Past-Lives Therapy was published in 1978; it was the first in the field of regression therapy. He has since written two other books and numerous articles for college textbooks, magazines, and newspapers.
http://www.aaple.com/therapy/
http://www.spinninglobe.net/morrisn.htm
Milton Erickson, M.D.
The Milton H. Erickson Foundation, Inc. is dedicated to promoting and advancingthe contributions made to the health sciences by the late Milton H. Erickson, M.D. through training mental health professionals and health professions worldwide
http://www.erickson-foundation.org/
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