Tag Archive for: freedom

Past Life Regression’s Greatest Attribute

Reading Time: 4 minutes

One of the most important insights that past life regression offers is the realization that you are an immortal being. This truth more deeply sinks into the subconscious mind as a result of connecting to the soul part of you that already knows this truth, and the trickle-down benefits are subtle, yet profound. You are a soul here and now, which means that you never die. Something that would significantly help the planet would be for individuals to wake up to their immortality. Evidence of our immortality is reflected in the thousands of cases of accurate past life recall.

As we deepen in the awareness of our immortality, it slowly dawns on us that we are merely role-playing here. The goal of this game of human life is to find lasting happiness. We search outside of ourselves for awhile until a turning point in the soul’s evolution steers our focus inward. As we deepen our search, we can experience peace, lightness and love, until one day we realize that these states are not states at all, but characteristics of the deepest part of our being, available when we’re free of the mind’s buzzing turmoil. Eckhart Tolle points out that the key to this freedom is to take the focus off of the content of our minds and place it on the eternal ‘beingness’ or pure, unfiltered conscious-awareness that provides the backdrop of all of our mind’s content…the part of you that can be aware of a passing mood or thought. Yet forgetfulness happens repeatedly, and again we identify with the human part of us that is burdened with our opinions and worries until we once again remember the truth of our being.

The human experience is one of forgetfulness, and also of getting lost…lost in the world of the mind and all of our beliefs about what’s true, about who we are, and things on the ‘to-do’ list. This is my challenge, as well as most of us.

A natural quality of waking up to the most permanent part of you is acceptance. As we live from surrendered acceptance, we can fully participate in the ups and downs that life offers without wanting to escape or be fearful. There is a natural acceptance of ‘what is’, even if it brings unwanted emotions, because it becomes safe to fully feel emotions. When you know you’re role-playing, any emotion can be a rich, textured experience, even the grief from loss. I know people who won’t allow themselves to love again because of the pain of loss. Past life regression usually unveils the illusion of loss, making it safe to love, and feel hurt, and then deeply love again. It also cuts through the illusion of fear, allowing you to know what it would feel like to securely live from your full potential, free of any limiting beliefs and subtle anxieties that hold you back.

A natural acceptance of other’s beliefs is an important, key by-product of identifying with our true immortal selves, given the diversity on our planet. Nobody’s beliefs or dogmas, including our own, need to be taken personally. It’s recognized that all beliefs are products of the human conditioning process, and who and what we ultimately are transcends all beliefs. Then we can accept one another. We don’t have to agree with or even like each other’s limiting beliefs, but there can be a recognition that beneath all beliefs there is something in common….we are immortal, we come from the same energy source, and we have each blindly forgotten this truth. Yet that’s not a problem, because it’s that way by design. It’s the play of the divine Oneness, also known as God’s “Lila” in the Hindu tradition, that we’re all a part of. The goal of this play is to awaken to who we really are, and therefore out of our judgments of ourselves and others. Adyashanti, an awakened teacher, says the best indicator of our spiritual growth is how accepting and tolerant we are with those of opposing belief systems. From the vantage point of the highest dimension of yourself, there is no effort to accept, you are acceptance itself because everyone and everything else is a part of you, whether they’re conscious of that fact or not. Furthermore, it’s impossible to be separated from this part of you, as it’s the backdrop of your beingness. It merely gets overlooked during the human hypnotic experience. A deep inner journey, whether self-guided or guided, can make this evident.

It has been said by many these days that it is imperative that we wake up to our immortality which transcends all of our worries and judgments about ourselves and others. When we can sense and know the sameness beneath our differences, then we can realize that we are all one consciousness, albeit lost and operating through seven billion unique filters of programming and conditioning, resulting in various degrees of suffering. The natural emotion that arises from this realization is compassion. The differences that divide can be washed away by a mere perception shift towards truth and away from the illusion that is mind-created. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” That which divides is illusion. In fact, the only thing that separates anyone from all of their divine qualities is an illusory thought and perspective. This is not a philosophy, but a truth that can be known only in one’s own direct, immediate experience. Deep inner journeys such as past life regression can help you remember not only the truth of yourself, but also offer a glimpse of the reality behind the trials of human life. What is the next level of evolution that your soul is nudging your personality to experience? Go within and find out.

How to Love Yourself

How to Love Yourself

Reading Time: 3 minutes

One day when I was leading a group, someone shared that their goal was to learn to love themselves, but felt it was an impossible task. Others agreed with this statement. Most of them were either bombarded with an endless barrage of negative self-talk, or they felt strong guilt from some past actions. I offered that the easiest way to love yourself is to really know your yourself…to realize that you aren’t who you think you are. The ‘you’ that you have a hard time loving isn’t really ‘you’. You are not your programming and conditioning. Negative thoughts about self come from somewhere, they all have a beginning point in an event or circumstance – you’re not born with these thoughts, unless there’s a past life influence, but even then they began at some point in that past life or the one before, etc. Sometimes the programming can be subtly and unconsciously passed down through the generations, with parents influencing their children based on how they were raised, how love or anger was communicated or not communicated.

Just like you can open the hood of a car to explore how it’s wired and how it works, you can engage in deep self-reflection to see how your programming and conditioning began. An effective way to do this exploration is to go within to access a higher state of awareness. For example, if you have a strong feeling of guilt because of a past action, you could imagine floating above that scene and investigate what was going through your mind at the time. Perhaps you did something regretful because at the time you thought you were gaining or getting something from it, given the mindset that you had of yourself and the world at that time. The only purpose of guilt is to point to what you could do differently next time, and in that moment of awareness you are doing precisely what your highest purpose in life is…to learn, grow, evolve and awaken. The primary way humans learn is by making mistakes. So from the viewpoint of your soul, mistakes are only seen as an opportunity to grow, and in that moment of seeing, your soul is happy. The highest part of you is timeless and guiltless; it doesn’t care how long it takes to get a lesson. Just as you can tinker with a machine to make it run more smoothly, we can be aware of the amazing impact we would have on ourselves and the world if we released the negative thought programs that govern our life and replace them with clarity, confidence, creative potential and freedom – all qualities of our truest self. We’re not here to berate ourselves, or remain stuck and recoiled in fear and guilt, living from a false sense of self. We’re here to challenge ourselves to shine and thrive, to learn to live from our potential, and to experience that the joy of doing so feels better, freer and “more real”.

You are the infinite being that can be aware of a passing mood or thought, and investigate where beliefs originated. There’s a part of you that can be aware of your thoughts. Who or what is this ‘I’ that can say ‘I’ feel happy, and then can notice ‘I’ feel sad 10 minutes later? Thoughts, moods and beliefs can come and go, but the more permanent ‘real’ you is the constant, unchanging awareness, forever anchored in the here and now, that can notice the mind’s ever-changing moods and thought patterns, like watching sticks or debris washing down a stream. The awakened sage, Eckhart Tolle, says the next step in human evolution is to become aware of our thoughts, thus creating a gulf between ‘us’ and our thought patterns. Therein lies the difference between suffering and liberation. It depends on where we place our identity…the ever-changing mind or the mysterious, expansive, boundless awareness that can witness it.

 

What is a Past Life Regression?

What Past Life Regression Really Is

Reading Time: 8 minutes

To many people in our western culture, past life regression can seem far-fetched. I understand this. Growing up as a pastor’s son, we didn’t talk much about reincarnation, much less about past life regression. The purpose of this article is to explain the process in a way that makes more sense, not only for those whom the concept of reincarnation is new, but also for those who are considering doing a past life regression someday. This article is even for those who have already experienced it, because anyone who has ever gone deep into a past life regression knows that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to fully describe it in words…and there’s a good reason for that. After 23 years of guiding over 4,000 clients through past life regression, I want to articulate how the process unfolds.

We are multi-dimensional. In western culture, our primary identity is a body that has a soul. Yet it would be far more accurate to think of you as a soul who is using a body. If you’ve ever witnessed a dead body that had his or her eyes open, you’d notice that something seems obviously different than when they were alive. The life, energy and consciousness is missing, the animating light called the soul is gone from their eyes. The body then appears like a shell and who and what they really are is no longer attached to their body. The part of you that lives on after you leave the body is pure energy. You can’t harm or destroy a soul because it is outside of this physical dimension. The energy particles are vibrating at a much higher frequency and consequently no longer visible to our sight, similar to a fast-moving fan blade.

So this is what you are now as you read this – a soul using a body. The ‘relatively real you’ never dies. The body is released and you transition to a higher vibrational state, and then eventually return to a different body to continue your soul’s mission (usually). Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is the multitude of cases in which people remember intricate, personal details of past lives and then later verify them. I won’t go into that here, but for those who are interested, there’s a website dedicated to many of these cases…reincarnationresearch.com, especially note Ian Stevenson’s research. Or visit victorzammit.com. Or go to youtube and type in “Children Who Remember Past Lives.” Anyway, the point is that as a soul, you are eternal, indestructible and transcendent of this dimension of time and space, and these days there’s enough evidence of that that even a logical minded skeptic can believe in reincarnation just on the sheer evidence.

What keeps you anchored in this realm of time and space? Your identification with the body, along with your full focus and attention being placed on all of the objects in this physical dimension, such as another person, a tree, a cat, etc., rather than on the life energy behind these forms or even between the space of objects. Not only that, but at a young age you begin to subtly identify with all the mind programming and conditioning from each life experience that goes along with the growing up of this body. So we take the body and the conditioning of the mind to be who and what we are, rather than the life energy force that animates the body and transcends this existence. It is why awakened sages have compared the human experience to “the greatest slight of hand card trick.”

So if you’re already this eternal being, you should be able to tune into what you already are, the part that lies beyond this realm of time and space. How? You begin by withdrawing your focus and attention from this outside, material world and turn it inward. Hypnosis is a great tool to do this, quickly creating the effect of an extremely deep meditation. To the degree that you ignore your left-brain or analytical mind, and instead focus entirely on the right-brain’s intuitive flow of information in the present moment, is to the degree you begin to tune into and resonate with this eternal part of yourself. The logical left-brain is an important tool to navigate and live in this physical dimension, but it certainly blocks you if you want to experience the higher vibrational dimension, and the soul aspect of yourself.

Past life regression is an efficient means to ‘tune into what you already are’ because it offers a slow, steady, systematic method: You first allow yourself to ‘un-identify’ with the dominant thoughts surrounding your current body. Then allow yourself to identify with a different body/mind personality that begins to form in your awareness. It is important to focus your full attention on the intuitive information that drops into your consciousness regarding this different body/mind, while simultaneously letting go of your left-brain’s analytical tendency to comment on that information. Another way to say this is to experience the information that comes to you by sensing and feeling it with your body wisdom. As you do so, a slow unraveling of information regarding that life will drop into awareness piece by piece in the form of mental pictures, emotions or intuitive insights as the journey of that life becomes increasingly clearer. The information may alternately come to you from the 3rd person or 1st person point of view. The life may take unexpected turns, but eventually you’ll get an impression of the end of that past life. This is the point where you begin to slowly identify with the lighter dimension of your soul-being that experiences a variety of lives for its own journey of growth, evolution and awakening.

As you continue to focus your full attention on the experience of tuning into and moving deeper into soul identification, you’ll notice the following: A deep sense of well-being; the continual mind chatter in the back of your mind completely stops and is replaced with a vast, expansive, calm awareness that feels like a higher version of ‘you’; information ‘drops into’ you in a very different manner than usual….the reason that words cannot describe it is because words belong to the realm of our mind, and now information comes from beyond the mind in what can best be described as a ‘telepathic download’ of simultaneously occurring pictures, sense impressions, insights and/or instantaneous intuitive ‘inner knowings’. Clients notice that words feel inadequate to describe what they’re experiencing, as if words capture merely the tip of an iceberg. As you continue to tune into and resonate increasingly more with the soul aspect of self, the above characteristics become more pronounced, and insights that drop into you are permeated with love, clarity, wisdom and selflessness because there is no more sense of self that is lacking anything. From this higher state of vibration, you have access to all the love, joy, peace, security and creativity that was ever lacking in the human experience, should you choose to place focus and attention on it. At this point, there’s a deep sense that your ‘real’ self is actually never separate from these qualities. Most clients will feel this higher dimensional aspect of themselves towards the later part of the session. And if they go even deeper during a Life-Between-Lives session, they may notice that there is very little information that they do not have access to.

Keep in mind that we are multi-dimensional beings. So past life regression is ultimately an exercise in tuning into the spiritual aspect of self that is vibrating at a faster rate, a rate that allows you to move closer in resonance with the spiritual dimension of guides and departed loved ones, as well as accessing information that will enable you to grow, evolve and awaken. From the soul’s higher vantage point, it becomes clearly evident which subconscious thoughts and beliefs are holding you back and limiting you, as well as who gave them to you and which life experiences caused them to take hold. Most importantly, you know beyond words that they don’t belong to the ‘real’ you, so they can be released. It’s an exercise in awakening to a more conscious aspect of self. Carl Jung once wrote, “Healing is about becoming conscious of that which is unconscious.” Past life regression is certainly an excellent means of shining a spotlight on any unconscious, limiting beliefs or perspectives that are holding us back in life, in addition to experiencing the freedom of what it would feel like to let them go.

When you come to the session with an intent to gain a sense of another existence that you’ve had as an eternal soul being, especially with the intent to gain insight, clarity and resolution with any sort of problematic issue, your inner guidance system will show you a life that will be precisely for your benefit to see, and it will contain one or more soul lessons that will perfectly pertain to your present life situation. However, the process will be blocked if you try to consciously direct or analyze the session, because the information can only be accessed by tuning into a different, more subtle, intuitive stream of information.

The mystic Edgar Cayce once declared, “Imagination is the gateway to the soul.” This is true for past life regression. Your imagination launches this inner journey. The past life information then starts coming to you slowly and feels like you’re making it up. However, research shows that it may be an actual past life, a metaphor, or a mixture of both. To the degree that you focus on whatever impressions your intuitive guidance shows you without analytical mind commentary, is to the degree that you’ll move deeper into the experience. Roughly 10 minutes after the first past life images begin to come, the session kicks into a ‘higher gear’ and information begins to drop into your awareness in that ‘telepathic download’ of images coupled with ‘intuitive knowing’ described above. It later begins to feel ‘more real’ as emotions may suddenly emerge out of nowhere, followed by the reasons behind the emotions 5-30 seconds later.

Paradoxically, even though the session begins by feeling like you’re making it up, it always ends at a level of consciousness that feels much more ‘awake’ and ‘aware’ than your ordinary, everyday level of consciousness. Trying to describe this state creates a conundrum. How do you describe a state of awareness that makes your normal, everyday level of waking consciousness feel like it’s asleep? As we tune more deeply into our soul self, we become increasingly anchored in the present moment. As this happens, it becomes more apparent that our ordinary states of waking consciousness rarely consist of being completely present…we’re usually lost in the world of our minds, subtly pulled into the future or past, along with the mind’s endless commentary, which according to sages is exactly where all of the suffering resides. So when you are free and separate from all of the mind’s negative self talk, limiting beliefs, continual chatter, etc., a vast, calm clarity replaces it, along with a ‘knowing’ beyond words that you are never separate from this clear, awake, peaceful awareness. This cannot be comprehended by the mind, because it’s a state of consciousness that is best described by Eckhart Tolle as “above thought”.

Thus, past life regression ultimately brings you to the truth of your being, the truth of who and what you really are, which can only be experienced when limiting thoughts and beliefs from the past are no longer part of the equation and your mind is silent. This truth can only be felt, sensed and known as a direct, immediate experience in the ‘eternal’ here and now moment, as it is unknowable by the mind…words can only point to it. Past life regression is an exercise that connects and anchors you in this higher level of consciousness. The vast majority of clients experience this understanding by the end of the session.

After the client emerges, I often hear: “Wow! That wasn’t what I expected.” Indeed, it is an experience that is literally beyond words. There are few experiences as sacred, profound and holy as tuning into your own wholeness and completeness.

Approximately 95% of the time, clients emerge from a past life regression with a greater understanding of themselves, their soul, and their present life experiences. The degree of positive impact ranges from subtle to profoundly life changing, depending on the essence of the person, and the ripeness and readiness for change. There is a theme to this work: As you go within, your inner guidance gives you precisely what you need, usually to the degree that you are urgently seeking answers or resolution. The reason for this was simply put by one of my client’s spirit guides: “Just as the body’s instinct is to breathe, the soul’s instinct is to grow and evolve.” Thus, you tend to see what will be most beneficial for your growth as a person and as a soul, and problems tend to dissolve into solutions when viewed from the vantage point of our higher spiritual Self.

Raising Your Consciousness

Reading Time: < 1 minute

One thing that may help to reduce stress is to try being the witness of your mind. Be the one to use your thoughts, rather than allowing your thoughts to subtly use you and well as dictate your mood. Eckhart Tolle writes, “The moment you start watching your thoughts, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.” Here is a quote from his book “Practicing the Power of Now”:

“The single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: Learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head (from past conditioning) as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.”

Imagine yourself to be the sun, unaffected by the racing clouds of thoughts that come and go passing beneath it. Or think of yourself as the screen upon which all thoughts and opinions, etc. come and go. Throughout our life there has a continual stream of ever-changing thoughts and moods. But what is the one thing that remains the same in this world of impermanence? The part of you that can observe a passing feeling or thought. The “I” that can say, “I’m feeling sad,” while the next day say, “I’m now feeling happy.”

It’s a very subtle yet profound process, which can help one move toward a sense of freedom.