The Benefits Of Past Life Regression therapy
Regression can help you resolve emotional and physical issues. It is helpful for understanding and releasing phobias and traumas. Through regression, we can learn about our relationships with others, and what roles those people have played in the lifetimes that we’ve shared. Seeing the threads between us, the connections created across time, gives us an understanding about our present-day circumstances; we can start to see with more compassion, forgiveness, and love.
To the mind, the process is almost seamless. It requires only a subtle change in brain-wave activity. During a regression, we shift from a beta brain-wave state—the state characteristic of normal waking consciousness—to the alpha state, the state of relaxation. From there, and with my guidance, my clients move into either a theta or gamma state. Theta is the state of being aware but drowsy; it’s most often experienced just before falling asleep and again just before waking. Theta is the border state between conscious and unconscious. When used with intent, it is a state where profound learning, healing, and growth can take place. In the gamma state, one experiences a heightened sense of perception and consciousness, resulting in a feeling of oneness with all—bliss and an innate understanding of the nature of existence. It is in the theta and gamma states where the powerful work of regression takes place.
Indications and Contraindications for Use of Past life Regression
In considering the suitability of past-life therapy for different patients, I have come to regard it as a short-term intensive therapy that is best reserved for patients who have already made considerable headway in conventional psychotherapy. It is particularly helpful for someone who feels blocked in certain areas in ongoing therapy to have a new modality to help finish fragments of unfinished stories where the psyche seems, as it were, to be stuck in a groove. Many issues of abandonment and separation, for example, even though they have resisted conventional therapies at the infantile, primal, or birth trauma level, are seen to open up dramatically as soon as scenarios of infant death and abandonment from other lives re-lived.
Often a deep-seated phobia or a sexual blockage can be released cathartically and psychosomatically when scenarios of of rape, torture, and violent death are re-lived by the secondary ego. Parental complexes reveal themselves in a different light within the power dynamics of entirely different family constellations in another age. Complexes surrounding issues of power or money take on another dimension when memories of famine, oppression, slavery, etc., come to consciousness.
Another group of subjects who respond well to past life therapy are therapists of many orientations who wish to deepen their own process and to become more able to recognize fragments of past-Life memories that may
surface in their patients. Many therapists, body workers, and healers frequently observe material from their patients that seems to be connected to past lives, perhaps a function of the strong stresses that are being borne by the collective unconscious at this very difficult period of humanity’s growth. Past-life therapy can be considered a “therapist’s therapy,” since it requires openness and commitment of persons who are very advanced in their own psycho-spiritual development. Jung recognized that only the wounded heal, and the therapist needs constantly to work upon himself. Whether the person is trying to move from a stuck position or trying to deepen generally, the work is best done within the context of some broader frame of ongoing therapy or spiritual discipline. Much of the material that emerges may take many months to integrate fully, and some of it may require a Lifetime of meditation and reflection.
My regression work consists of a series of two-hour sessions. Most patients complete their work in from five to ten of these intensive experiences. The longer sessions give adequate time for various stages of the process, and so integration is actually a part of each session rather than being a separate process following regression experiences. Problems responsive to past-life therapy include most of those commonly brought into psychotherapy:
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Anxieties, fears, phobias, and depression.
Insecurity and general fear of abandonment are often related to past-life memories of literal abandonment as a child, separation during a crisis or a war, being orphaned, sold into slavery, being left out to die in times of famine, etc. Phobias and irrational fears stem from every kind of trauma in a past life: death by fire, water, suffocation, animals, knives, insects, natural disasters. Depression and general low energy can result from past-life memories of loss of a loved one or parent, unfinished grieving, suicide memories, despair and rage as a result of war, massacre, deportation, etc.
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General behavior problems.
These include sado-masochism, a pattern of accidents, violence, and physical brutality, guilt and martyr complexes, eating disorders. Sadomasochistic problems are usually related to a past-life memory of torture, often with loss of consciousness, usually with sexual overtones. The pain and rage seem to perpetuate hatred and a desire to revenge oneself in the same way. Guilt and martyr complexes may stem from past-life memories of having directly killed loved ones or from feeling responsible for the deaths of others, as in a fire, human sacrifice of one’s child, having ordered the deaths of others, etc. The entrenched thought is most often, “It’s all my fault. I deserve this.”
Accidents and violence are often a repetition of old battlefield memories from warriors’ lives or from unfulfilled quests for power. These can re-emerge as an adolescent neurosis in the current lifetime because this age period is historically where many soldiers met deaths during other lifetimes. Eating disorders are often the repot of past-life memories of starvation, economic collapse, or inescapable poverty.
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Relationship difficulties.
Frequently problems of frigidity, impotence, and genital infections have past -life stories of rape, abuse, or torture behind them. Many incest and child abuse stories turn out to be reruns of old patterns where emotional release was blocked. Marital difficulties in general derive from past lives with the same mate in a different power class or sexual constellation: e.g., mistress, slave, prostitute, concubine relationship, often where the sex roles were reversed. Family struggles occur where there are old past -life scores to settle with parents, children, or siblings: betrayal, abuse of power, inheritance injustices, rivalry, etc. Most of the Freudian dynamics emerge here.
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Chronic physical ailments.
These often stem from the re-living of traumatic injuries or deaths incurred in past lives, especially trauma to the head, the limbs, and the back. Headaches may also relate to intolerable mental choices in other lives. Throat ailments, in addition to being caused by physical injury, may stem from verbal denunciations or unspoken thoughts. Neck aches commonly stem from hanging, strangling, or beheading. Re-living the past life often relieves the pain in these areas.
Past-life therapy does not work for everyone. To some the very idea of past lives is either intellectually bothersome or simply too alien, culturally speaking. But in addition to these cases in which the general attitude is the inhibiting factor, there are several categories of patients with whom I am wary about working at the past-life level.
- I feel that regression therapy is contraindicated for patients with no therapeutic background because the material too easily feeds into a false literalism that upsets their ability to integrate the past lives as personified complexes, the ego becomes inflated or overcome with the glamor of the memories.
- Not some patients past -life work is too intensive, too overwhelming. They do not need to have the raw areas of their psyche exposed yet again. Instead, for them it is the personal factor in the therapeutic relationship that helps them rebuild their trust and confidence in life.
- Others find imaging and working inwardly either too difficult or too dissociating. Even if they can remember past lives with ease, some patients do better to reinforce their connections with this life rather than to wander further off into another world.
- Past-life therapy is not recommended for anyone seeking to confirm some prior metaphysical belief system. Usually it will provide experiences that are distressingly incompatible with fixed beliefs.
- Past-life work is a moral problem that involves work with the entire ego-personality and requires a strong ego. Therefore, it is not indicated for anyone with psychiatric symptoms. In those with schizophrenic tendencies there is already a tendency for the psyche to become enamored, if not totally seduced, by the many sub- personalities within. It seems highly possible that many of the visions and voices that flood into the psyche of many a schizophrenic are indeed past-life fragments, but such a sufferer will be tempted to over-identify with such fragments and fall into a state of inflation. Such patients also attempt to turn readily available theories of reincarnation and metaphysics into grist for their own personal philosophical mills. Their wonderfully appealing theories often end up being nothing more than a huge and elaborate defense against the simple fact of being alive and present on this earth.