Isa Gucciardi, M.A., C.Ht.

Isa Gucciardi describes combining hypnosis, past-life therapy, depossession/entity release, and soul retrieval in the treatment of a client. She suggests that combining these modalities as needed can get better results than using only one or two alone.

My work as a hypnotherapist takes me to many times and places in my clients’ psyches. I use many tools to help people discover the origin of the problems they come to me for help with. My work is inspired by some of the studies that Irene Hickman, Edith Fiore, William Baldwin and Michael Harner have presented on spirit depossession, past-life regressions and soul retrieval, but I have found that most sessions do not confine themselves into the neat patterns which these researchers have delineated. After listening to a client’s description of the problem, I never try to second-guess the cause of a particular presenting symptom, nor do I find that assigning a diagnosis to the problem is particularly helpful.

In fact, in my experience, a diagnosis tends only to muddy the waters of healing. I have had clients come to me with a diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Attention Deficit Disorder, assigned to them by medical doctors or psychiatrists, who needed two or three sessions just to disidentify themselves with the neat little label they had fit themselves into to please the medical establishment. They needed to move away from medical definitions of negative dysfunction in order to allow themselves to touch the reality of the origins of their symptoms.

Because I do not try to identify and arbitrarily categorize a client’s symptoms, I don’t have a set of clinical methods for each type of presenting symptom. Rather than function as an allopathic doctor might in always giving an aspirin for any kind of a headache, I function more as a homeopath does: I explore each presenting symptom and address each set of problems as it is – unique to that individual.

To be sure, there are general patterns which emerge which may give me a direction to head in as we go down into the client’s psyche. For example, it has been my experience that attention deficit type symptoms can be a “tip off” to an attached entity. I have had many clients with these symptoms who have experienced an alleviation of these problems, including an increased ability to tap into their will power, an increase in the ability to focus or concentrate, lessened distractibility and better follow-through, after a session in which an entity has revealed itself and moved on.

But even when I suspect the presence of what is often defined as an entity, I never make a suggestion that we are going to do a spirit depossession. If the session takes us to a place where this is appropriate, I follow it; if not, I don’t force the situation. Similarly, even if I suspect that a person has karmic ties with another who is causing her difficulty in the current life, I do not suggest that we go to any specific past life to encounter that person as part of the process of uncovering the origins of the client’s problem. In situations where the client’s journey has led to the revisiting of lives shared with the person with whom she is having difficulties in the current life, the individual’s past-life interactions have indeed shed tremendous understanding on the current-life situations. But in any case, all of these paths lead back to the self and the ways in which the individual has either wittingly or unwittingly allowed parts of her energy, or soul, to become wrapped up in a place away from her center. In a way, both past-life therapy and spirit depossession are paths to soul retrieval. When the journey is skillfully guided, both bring the individual back into an authentic interaction with the higher self.

The main reason I do not make any type of suggestion is that I never know where we are going as we embark onto the journey into the client’s psychic realms. I will go so far as to make the suggestion that we go to the time and place which will provide clarity on the symptoms and issues which the person is experiencing. But I never know if this will take us into the person’s childhood, into the womb, into the between-life state or to a future or past life. I never know if the actors in the situations which emerge will be the client’s inner child, a close relation, a friend, a spirit guide, an entity, or a representative of any one of the many dimensions of the client’s psychic world.

Fran came to find out what was keeping her from focusing on issues long enough to make wise decisions. Her sense of the problem centered in the statement, “My body and my spirit don’t match up.” Although she appeared calm and almost subdued in her demeanor, she avowed that she was always “wound very tight.”

During the initial interview, I try to determine the nature of my clients’ emotional environments over the course of their current lives. By discerning a pattern, I can identify the most important issues for the session. Generally, if a dominant affect can be traced throughout the person’s sense of self in childhood, grade school, high school, relationships, and marriage, this affect can be used as a bridge to a time and place in the individual’s past which will shed light on the presenting dysfunction.

This process was especially important for Fran, because she was so out of touch with her emotions and their effect on her and those around her. When I asked her to complete the sentence: “I often feel…” she completed it by answering “Alone.”

In our first session, we went to several different times in her childhood where she had felt uncomfortable being alone. Most of the time, however, she was happy to be alone. The most significant memory she had during this regression was in her mother’s womb. She felt very alone because her mother was not there for her emotionally and she could sense it. She remarked that it seemed like there was “something wrong with the body.” I asked her to try and locate what was wrong, but she just kept repeating, “something wrong with the body.” I was reluctant to end the session, but we had worked for a long time, and she was tiring.

In our next session, Fran reported that she had felt more scattered than usual during the week following the initial session. I asked her to go back to the time where the origin of the problem with the body could be found. She went back to a time where she found herself as an old woman lying on the floor of a cave, alone. She was sobbing.

The following dialogue is a reconstruction from notes taken during the session.

T:    Why are you crying?

C:    Everyone has gone.

T:    Where did they go?

C:    They are dead.

T:    How did they die?

C:    There was a sickness. Everyone died. I couldn’t stop it.

T:    Go forward to the time of your death in this life.

C:    I am in the cave. I am dying. I am alone.

T:    What are the last thoughts you have as you die?

C:    There is something wrong with the body. The body and the spirit don’t act together. I am alone. I am all alone.

I asked her to go to the time just after she had died, to see if she could learn anything in the between-life state. But the phrase, “There is something wrong with the body” just kept coming up again and again. I instructed her to return to an earlier point in time during the lifetime she had gone to which would provide further information.

She found herself running through the woods. She was barefoot and had an animal-skin shift on. Her name was Lan. Again, the following dialogue is a reconstruction from notes taken during the session.

T:     Why are you running?

C:     They saw me. They are chasing me.

T:     Who are they?

C:     They are another group of people.

T:     Why does it matter if they see you?

C:     I went down to the lake. I was hiding behind some rocks. They saw me. They live by the lake. They told us to stay away from the lake.

T:     Why did you go there?

C:     I wanted that plant.

T:     What plant?

C:     A plant which only grows there will help the people in my group. They are sick.

T:     What are they sick with?

C:     I don’t know. I want that plant.

T:    Do they catch you?

C:     I run back to the cave. Everyone is sick.

T:    What happens?

C:     There is a fight. There is blood. They tell us to stay away.

T:    Then what happens?

There was a long silence, and the energy of the session seemed to shift somewhat.

C:     There is someone here.

T:    Who is here?

C:    Hin.

T:    Who is Hin?

C:     He is the medicine man from the group of people by the lake.

T:    Why is he here?

C:    I am the medicine woman from my group.

T:    Why is he here?

C:     He says he is sorry.

T:    Why is he sorry?

C:     The spell he put on me. It was strong. It kept me from finding the cure for my people. It has been with me ever since. He has been with me ever since.

T:    Ask him if this is the source of that feeling that something is wrong with the body, that the body and the spirit do not work together.

C:     Yes.

T:    What else does he say?

C:     He says he wants to be free. (She starts to cry).

T:    How can he be free?

C:     He asked me to forgive him.

T:     Can you forgive him?

C:     Yes.

T:     Is there any part of you that does not want to forgive him?

C:     No. Go, Hin, Go. I forgive you.

After a long silence:

T:    What did you learn from this experience?

C:    I should not have tried to hurt him. But I was trying to help my people. Times were so hard. It was so hard to eat. Everything was a struggle. I was trying to help them. I didn’t realize I was hurting him. He didn’t realize he was hurting me. He was trying to help his people.

T:    Go back to that feeling of something being wrong with the body. What do you feel about that now?

C:    It’s gone.

T:    What’s gone?

C:    The body and the spirit seem closer together now.

When Fran came out of the hypnotic state, she felt slightly disoriented. She said she felt lighter and different. She even smiled. She marveled at how Hin’s curse or spell had bound him to her for so many hundreds of years.

A few weeks later, Fran came to my office to report that she had made a decision about her career which she was looking forward to implementing. I was impressed with the change in her. She said she felt she was able to focus on issues clearly and make decisions without losing her train of thought.

The use of the past-life paradigm for uncovering the origin of Fran’s symptoms was very helpful in these sessions. There are some significant parallels between Fran’s current life and the decisions she made about reality during the life of Lan. The fact that she died so alone imprinted itself on her psyche to the extent that in this life she chose to be alone in most situations in her current life. The “lone wolf” identity she formed in those dying moments stayed with her through time. Also, her choice of profession as a bodyworker is a natural choice for someone who is trying, however subconsciously, to understand the mechanics of how the body and spirit work together. And as a healer in that life, it was natural for her to choose the healing arts again in this life.

The use of entity depossession in freeing Hin and Lan from one another’s spells and the subsequent return of the energy, or soul fragments, was very significant in allowing Fran to tap into her life energy which had been removed from her by Lan’s and Hin’s attempts to depotentiate each other.

The mechanics and effects of possession have been variously described by many psychic investigators. Often these descriptions are more lively and the possessing entity interferes with the host in more flamboyant ways. Most depossessions or entity releasements are not as easy as Lan’s and Hin’s. There are many situations wherein an individual’s energy can be taken up or used by entities or other people. In this case, Fran’s energy had become lost to her because as Lan, she had tried to use it to entrap Hin’s energy. Energy taken up by entities who become attached to the host during purposely-inflicted trauma needs to be returned in a different way. Entities who become attached in this way have a much harder time leaving because of all the issues of guilt and shame which are involved – and because there can be more actors involved: the person inflicting trauma, the victim, and the entity or entities who are attracted to such situations.

However, in Fran’s case, both Lan and Hin realized the damage they had done to one another and both regretted it deeply. They only needed to be given the opportunity and the permission to release each other from a set of interactions that they both recognized as harmful. When I helped Fran to reach back through time and space and reconnect with Lan and Hin, she was able to release decisions she had made about herself (“I am alone”) and free herself from bonds on her life force (the set of spells Lan and Hin had exchanged) which had no apparent source in the lifetime of Fran.

The effect on Fran’s current life was immediate and far-reaching. Her major symptoms were almost immediately resolved. She was able to access her will power, her distractibility disappeared, and she found herself enjoying human interaction at a deeper level than she had ever remembered experiencing. The effect of the release of these energies was profoundly life-enhancing for Fran.

The combination of hypnosis, past-life regression, depossession/entity release, and soul retrieval is a powerful set of modalities which can be used to help people access their life energy and move into a stronger relationship with their higher selves. It is important, however, to remain open to the client’s process and allow it to take its own course – whether it be through the lands inhabited by one or none of these modalities.

In Fran’s case, the healing which occurred was on an energetic and emotional level. However, I have used these same techniques to improve the individual’s condition when the dysfunction of energy has already progressed into the symptoms of physical disease. By allowing clients access to their own source of power through the flexible use of hypnosis, past-life regression, depossession/entity release, and soul retrieval, they are able to find their own solutions and to improve the quality of their lives.