What Past Life Regression Really Is
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. I personally believe that most of the lives that clients perceive are actual lives their soul has lived, especially if you ask for it. Yet whatever life images you see or perceive is precisely what will help you move forward in some way in your life. 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 helps you connect 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. Most clients experience this sense of expansion 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.
