We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Teilhard de Chardin
Some people live several times similar experiences, sometimes painful and destructive, without understanding the reason and despite the fact that they do every effort to avoid them. It can happen, for example, that they attract always the same type of partner or fall in the same dynamics with their head or colleagues, even if they change repeatedly their work environment. Why does this happen? And above all, is it possible to interrupt this repetition of unwanted situations?
Photo by Guy72125. Creative Commons license
“Repetition compulsion” is the name given by Freud to describe the reiteration of emotional, typically dramatic and painful experiences, that occurred in one’s past. His work showed that bringing the initial trauma to consciousness, accepting it and integrating what has been felt and learned, can have positive effects on someone’s present life.
A person who experiences past life regression is guided in a state of relaxation and concentration that favors memories to emerge from the past. It is not one’s rational and logic mind to choose what to remember, but the deep and innate intelligence of his/her life, that knows what the person needs in that moment of his/her life and which difficulty he/she is ready to overcome and release. This same intelligence will not bring to awareness a traumatic and grievous event if the person hasn’t developed yet the necessary tools to manage it.
Memories often go back to childhood or adolescence, but other times they refer to events happened in a time a lot more distant, even in past lives. This is an experience that many patients of Dr. Brian L. Weiss had. Dr. Weiss is a scientist, researcher and medical doctor whose courageous and precious contribution to this field has been recognized and appreciated worldwide. Graduated at the Columbia University and to the Yale Medical School, Brian L. Weiss directed for years the department of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center of Miami
At a certain point of his career he met a special patient, Catherine, who would have deeply influenced the rest of his life. During a hypnosis session she remembered with precision events of her past lives, spanning from the second millennium b. C. to the half of the twentieth century. This happened in numerous other sessions and provoked a radical change in Dr. Weiss. Its initial reaction was understandably of large amazement, incredulity and skepticism. Nevertheless, the reports of Catherine were so precise that they could not be invented. Together with other scientists, Dr. Weiss was able to recognize their authenticity.
Despite the fear to be struck off from the psychiatric community, Dr. Weiss had the courage to write a book about Catherine’s journeys, followed by others describing the experiences of several other patients. His texts are full of authentic wisdom, deep humanity and the sincere desire to help people to open themselves to dimensions that go far beyond the physical world to which we are used. They are precious gifts that changed the life of many people. Reading these texts and meeting Dr. Weiss contributed to a fundamental turn in my life.
Is it necessary to believe in the existence of past lives to benefit from regressive hypnosis?
No, it is not. Dr. Weiss found in numerous occasions that whoever can benefit from the therapeutic power of this technique, irrespectively of the religious faith and the fact to believe or not in the existence of past lives.
Somebody who chooses to experience hypnosis may be interested to verify whether the remembered events really happened or were imagined, but this is not necessary for the therapeutic success of regressive hypnosis and depends only on the curiosity of the person.
Is it necessary to remember past experiences to resolve them?
It is not necessarily so. When the subconscious needs to have access to a memory or an emotion to change a belief, it will do it. However, this is not indispensable.
Everyone is different, special and unique. The inner wisdom and the innate intelligence will guide the person to remember and feel all that is appropriate and needed to move forward. Sometimes a clear and precise memory arises. Other times the person feels an emotion, has an intuition or simply lives a moment of great wellbeing and harmony. All senses are involved.
The best attitude is to have no expectations on the “result” of the session. Curiosity, simplicity and an open mind help to embrace the experience without judging it and improve its effectiveness.
Can we get other benefits from past life regression?
Sometimes remembering the past helps to accept, release and definitely resolve more or less painful experiences that may still influence our present life. But there is more than that. During this or previous lifetimes we have developed talents, creativity, intuition, wisdom and learned important lessons of love, compassion and gratitude. We may have forgot them, but they still exist in the subconscious mind. Through past life regression a person may become aware of these talents and realize that they are still available, waiting to be reactivated. Past experiences can then become a source of wisdom, strength and knowingness to improve our present life.
We are far greater than we think we are. If we allow ourselves to go beyond the filters and limitations of the logic, rational mind, we discover the richness that is in life.
Past, present and future
Human mind conceives time as a linear succession of present, past and future events. From this perspective, things that have already happened cannot be modified. However, Einstein’s relativity theory suggests that time does not exist in itself, but only as our subjective perception.
Time is equal to eternity. This has been the teaching of many enlightened spiritual masters, of different ages and cultures. Present, past and future are fused together in an eternal Now. We use to think our life as a line segment that goes from birth to death. The present moment is a point on that line, the past a point before and the future a point ahead. In fact, there is no line segment. The point is all there is. It is the Here and Now. The past and the future exist only to the degree we put our attention on them.
What does this practically mean? It means that the only power we have to create or change anything is here in the present. If it does not exist in some form right now, it will never exist. The change begins inside us, with the pure intention to want it.