Introduction to Past life Regression

By Dr. Edith Fiore

The confidence that I could help a person to help himself or herself, the confidence, that using regression therapy/past life regression, the problem could be solved and the symptoms removed motivated me to train myself to become a professional.

Using regression therapy/past life regression I asked my clients to comb back through the years, revealing events in their growing up that caused present symptoms – resulting in the removal of the symptoms. Startlingly, a problem – for example, one of forty years’ duration – could sometimes be traced back to the first months, event to the birth experience itself, which in many instances was found to be the trigger – often leaving the person feeling guilty, unwanted, and sometimes with such lifelong physical symptoms as recurring headaches. Gradually, I went back even further, discovering emotional problems arising from those supposedly cloistered months in the womb.

Many problems have their roots earlier – in former lives. My clients and I have found that previous lifetimes can have a profound impact on current lives in terms of an individual’s abilities, symptoms, relationships, character traits, and indeed, in a myriad other ways.

I want to share with you some human dramas of those people whose current lives were crippled because of tragic events that happened in their former lives. The growth they have made and the freedom they have found grew out of their indomitable courage in facing, once gain, those traumas of previous lives.

I have seen time and time again how a person’s present problems stem from subconscious factors - hidden in the recesses of their minds – many times from events that are totally forgotten. Often the causative factor is deeply buried in their mind.

I have found that past life regression consistently helpful, often resulting in immediate remission of chronic symptoms that do not return, even after months and years.

Symptoms and problems whose roots were traced to past lives cover a broad spectrum. Almost all clients with chronic weight excess of ten pounds or more have had a lifetime in which they either starved to death or suffered food deprivation for long periods. Starvation in past lives continues to affect the person in the present one, resulting in a compulsion to overeat.

One woman who had a persistent fluid retention problem – one that had defied medical treatment – found himself, several lifetimes ago, dying from dehydration and starvation, as well as smallpox.

Craving for particular foods have also been traced back to past lives. One client had severe hypertension and was approximately a hundred pounds overweight. Time after time she - against her will – devoured bags of potato chips and other salty junk foods. This compulsion played havoc with her futile attempts to lose weight and to lower her dangerous high blood pressure. During one regression she went back to a lifetime as a young American Indian boy who was desperately hungry because his tribe no longer had the salt to cure their dwindling game supply. Since that regression, she has not had the slightest compulsion to eat salty foods and is losing weight at a healthy rate.

Many clients have discovered that the causes of their phobias, fears, and aversions were rooted in some traumatic event of previous lifetimes. They have found that their irrational fears of snake, of fire, of being alone, of flying, of crowds, of natural cataclysms, such as earthquakes and storms, derive from some misfortune in a past life.

One client asked me to help her to overcome her phobia of snakes. After regressing back through her lifetime and finding nothing to explain her fears, I tried a hunch, I asked her, while she was in an altered (Alpha) state, if she had had an encounter with snakes before she was born. She saw herself as a fifteen-years-old Aztec girl in front of a pyramid, watching priests dancing with poisonous snakes in their mouths. She trembled with emotion and reported the bizarre rites in vivid detail. Returned to the present, but still deeply in Alpha state, she puzzled about what she had just experienced. She was quite distressed and stated vehemently, “I don’t believe all that stuff!” Here was a person who definitely rejected reincarnation, but who had just relived a lifetime that took place six hundred years ago.

Insomnia and other sleep disorder also stemmed, in many cases, from horrifying things that happened during sleep in past lives. For example, clients had relived being sexually molested or murdered while sleeping. One teenage boy who could only sleep if alone and in total silence traced his problem back to being bayoneted to death by a Japanese soldier while asleep on the sand on a Pacific island during World War II.

Headaches, pains, disorder or weaknesses of certain areas of the body were often related to events in former lifetimes, too. We have found chronic headaches, including migraines, to be the result of the clients’ having been guillotined, clubbed, stoned, shot, hanged, scalped, or in one way or the other, severely injured on the head or neck. Several people with chronic, intractable abdominal pains relived having their bellies run through with swords, bayonets or knives. Even the origin of menstrual problems has been traced to trauma, usually sexual, in a previous life.

While doing hypnotic regression with a male client who suffered a crippling sexual problem inhibitions, we found the origin of his problems when I asked him, while under hypnosis to go back to the origin of his problems, he said, “I was a Chatolic priest.” We traced through this seventeenth century lifetime, looking at his sexual attitudes as an Italian priest, and found the source of his sexual difficulties. The next time I saw him, he told me he was not only free of his sexual problems, but also felt better about himself in general.

Several months later I met a client who worked as a social director on a cruise liner. She was very eager to solve two problems she had for years. The first was the dangerously strong impulse she would experience to jump over board, and the other, paradoxically, was an irrational fear of getting lost at sea. I regressed her to the root cause of her problems. She found herself as a small Norwegian boy, Sven, on his father’s boat, being urged to jump as the boat crashed onto rocks. He disobeyed his father and drowned. During the same session she found herself in two other lifetimes, one as a fisherman, the other as a sailor – both lost at sea, both eventually drowning. When she came out of regression, she exclaimed that she understood both her fascination with the sea and the origin of her symptoms. Six weeks later, back from a trip across the Pacific, she was exuberant when she told me she no longer had either of the two problems. She had felt comfortable and free of anxiety during the entire trip.

Some clients have been amazed to find that some recurring nightmares are actually flashbacks to experiences lived in previous lives.

Actually, whether the former lifetimes that are relived are fantasies or actual experiences lived in a bygone era does not matter to me – getting results is important.

I have been fascinated by the revelation in past life regressions that the people we are relating to in our present lifetime we have been with before – often many times and in different roles. Instant attractions, dislikes, feelings of familiarity or distrust have been explained by events in former lives.

I found that there is no one aspect of character or human behavior that cannot be better understood through an examination of past life events. My clients have gone into previous existences to find the source of their talents, skills, interests, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as of specific symptoms and problems.

I have listened to and watched hundreds of people in past life regressions. I am convinced there is no deliberate, nor conscious attempt to deceive. The tears, shaking, flinching, smiling, gasping for breath, groaning, sweating and other physical manifestations are all too real. I feel that the end result, in term of remission of symptoms, is almost conclusive proof.

Clients most often experience very prosaic, humdrum, dreary past lives, totally lacking in glamour. Prior to industrial revolution and the birth of capitalism, poverty was the natural condition of almost the entire human race. It was not perceived as an aberration but as the norm. Ninety-eight percent of the world’s population lived in conditions unimaginable to a twentieth-century citizen. That was poverty of a kind that makes what we call poverty today look like luxury.

One question that arises if we do live again and again, what is the purpose of reincarnation? A woman who came for a past life regression is the source for an answer. She recounted a peak experience she had:

“At the moment of my son’s birth, a natural child bird, a voice spoke to me. It explains why we’re here – the reason why we’re here, what life is all about, the truth. The truth is that we’re all on a path back to God and we live may lifetimes. We live by the Law of Karma that dictates, in effect, that we have to pay off the debts from our past lives. Once we die, we look back on how we lived that life. We are the judges of how we lived that life. We look to see where we failed. It’s like a stylus constantly recording. Our soul is constantly having the stylus going, recording our deeds, our thoughts, our actions, whether or not we’re hurting anybody – and that’s what is all about. Love is how we treat others by words and by deeds. After we cross over, we examine how we lived our last lives. We see where we failed and where we maybe made some gains. Then our souls chose our next life. Our souls choose our next life, how we are going to make up for where we didn’t quite make it in our last lives.”

The purpose of reincarnation is therefore the perfecting of one’s soul. My clients’ descriptions of the knowledge and training they experience during the interim between lifetimes confirm the explanation that was given to the woman above at her son’s birth. Interestingly, she had not read or heard anything about Karma. It was totally new to her then.

The next question that might occur is, “Why do we keep coming back with the same people?” Eastern philosophers and metaphysicians would suggest – and I, too, find it true in my work with clients – that sometimes we have problems from past lifetimes to workout with those people.

One woman wanted to explore a previous lifetime with her daughter with whom she has had a fine, close relationship. In a recent past life they were loving sisters. Looking back over the regressions I have witnessed, the general rule seems to be when there is a good relationship now, there usually has been a positive relationship in previous lives. This is particularly true for fairly recent past lifetimes because problems from earlier lives together have been worked out. There is an obverse side to this coin. If there is disharmony now, a poor relationship is generally discovered in the past.

The ultimate question is, who we are? We are the sum total of all that we have been before.