Abstract
In the course of past-life regressions the question of authenticity often arises. The question “Was this a real lifetime?” often overshadows the client’s experience even when that experience was very profound. Presented here are three cases in which one person’s experience in a past-life regression is validated by another person’s past-life regression experience; a person with no knowledge of the experience of the other.
Introduction
There is a tendency for the majority of professionals in regression therapy to overlook the importance of the association between revealed and relived experiences and real events. There are two major reasons for this.
First, pioneers of our profession argue that what is essential and vital for our clients is to achieve emotional relief and catharsis and to alleviate the presenting problem. If this goal is accomplished it should be of no interest to the therapist whether the client is imagining things or truly reliving a past life experience.
Second, there are difficulties associated with the verification of the reviewed experiences compared to those of historical reality. How can one trace down events if the story is rooted far in the past when no proper records were kept? We all know that most of our clients reveal emotional material, not names, dates, or historical details. This argument is sound and reasonable and, by leaving verification aside, the therapist is thus dispensed from credibility concerns and this makes his work easier.
However, a further issue complicates things a little more: our clients’ personal views about their regressions. We all know that our clients have doubt about their own experiences. They question themselves about the reality of what they see or feel. The idea of reincarnation is foreign to them. They were never taught about it. “Is this all in my mind?” or “Did I make all this up?” are prevailing thoughts, especially for those who have two or three regressions (the average number of sessions for our clients). The natural tendency of an inquisitive human mind is to doubt the reality of these experiences (even for believers in reincarnation). We, as therapists, sometimes pose such questions as “Why did you imagine such a horrible story, where you were a slave with a degraded life?” or “Why did you imagine you were condemned as a witch by the Inquisition and burned at the stake?” The answer is usually “hmm.”
“Hmm” may be interpreted in a number of ways, but it seems to me that it symbolizes a wondering puzzlement.
How can one validate a story without names, dates, and places? Is there a way out of this? For me there is. Let me first share with you a few cases before I expand theoretically. I use pseudonyms in this article to protect the privacy of my clients and for clarity.
Case I
Four years ago a forty-one year old mother of two named Artemis, came in for therapy for weight reduction. However, during the intake procedure other problems surfaced such as allergies, migraines, depression, intense stress, cervical syndrome, significant loss of hearing, etc. She also had a very tense and imbalanced relationship with her brutal and authoritative father. This is by far not a typical case in which I would proceed by inducing trance followed by reading weight reduction scripts to produce changes in their behavior. That is not my style. Instead, upon discussion we agreed that we should try to focus on the root of the problem. In the healing process I discovered and released attached entities and when we came to genuine regressions, a lot of tension was resolved. Simultaneously, Artemis achieved a significant loss of weight over two months.
When her sister Dionne saw her sibling’s improvement, she decided to try hypnotherapy as well since she was similarly overweight. Thirty-eight years old, unemployed for more than eight years, and with one daughter, she had insomnia, headaches, nightmares, allergies, phobias, gastritis, a lack of “psychological balance,” and smoked and drank heavily. While probing I found two invading spirits: George, a young man who died of tuberculosis and, after his release, a very old lady, disabled and in utter terror, who died of hunger all alone. She was one of the most difficult releasement cases I have had up to that point. After a few more sessions with Dionne another challenging issue came up; her stormy relationship with her abusive father. The session transcribed as follows:
In the first regression, Dionne, at a younger age, is in her bedroom where her father is harassing her. He grabs her by her skirt and abuses her. She cries a lot and then I ask her to “go back to the time it all started.” She finds herself as a young woman in a British port (she said Southampton) where she is to be married to a brutal selfish sailor.
All this man wants is her family’s money. He could not care less about her and demands something from her. When she does not obey him he attacks her. She manages to escape out of the house and runs towards the port. He chases her and throws her in the choppy sea. She does not know how to swim, but she drags herself back to the dock via some rocks. He beats her again, leaves her there, and goes after the mother. After locating her, he sexually assaults her by raping and beating her violently. Then he returns back to his fiancée and in the midst of the quay he stabs her with a knife until she is dead. Her psyche dissociates and views the scene from above. She also sees what happens after she is dead. She sees that she is over a cemetery and senses that not only her body, but her mother’s as well, has been buried there.
In the life between lives stage I let her assess her life and then we explore what she has planned for her current life. Her assigned task is to forgive this man who killed her then and is now her father.
The next experience is even more interesting. Immediately after Dionne’s session ended her sister Artemis arrived for her scheduled appointment. They just said hello to each other and I proceeded with Artemis’ session. It should be clear that there was no way that Dionne could have communicated the above experience to Artemis in their brief encounter in my presence. As I hypnotized Artemis I asked her to “go to a specific event that is directly relevant to the problematic nature of her relationship with her father.”
In a past life she finds herself looking at two women from a third person perspective. She identifies herself as the eldest of the two. She is not in Corfu where she currently lives but it seems to her that it could be England. She sees that she is not happy and worries about many things. Their clothes are old and odd. The younger woman is her daughter, whose eyes remind her of somebody but she is not sure whom. Her daughter is very slim and beautiful. Somebody, a man, has hit her and she is very sad. He is not a good man and he hits her all the time. The mother advises her to leave him and go away. She cannot tell if this man reminds her of someone in this life. After some time the mother cries in horror “I lost my child!” Some people gather around her body, she must be senseless at the port’s jetty. She cries in agony “My daughter is dead!” She does not want to face it, or believe it. I ask her to move to the moment of her own death. She finds herself to be calm.
I asked her to regress back to the way she died. “I’m glad that he killed me,” she said. I then asked her, “Who killed you?” He was younger than her; her daughter’s fiancé. I asked, “Do you know this person in this life; have you ever met him?” She had a hard time accepting the fact that her current father is the murderer.
When I asked who was her daughter of that time she realized that it was her younger sister Dionne. At that life between lives stage they decided to be together in this life. When I asked her, “Why is the man, who killed both of you, your father in this life?” her answer was, “I do not blame him; I only want him to leave us alone and stop messing our lives.” She also added that she wanted to be with her child (sister) and stick together.
Then she found herself in the light. Someone in the light leads them to their choices. In the next scene she is at the elementary school with her sister/daughter. She cries deeply when she exclaims that her father never wanted her to be friends with her sister. He thought that everyone was against him.[1]
These regressions and subsequent realizations brought forth radical behavioral changes for both sisters. The young one decided to abandon her lazy lifestyle and find work after eight years of unemployment. She moved out of her father’s house where she lived, playing the role of his housemaid. She lost a lot of weight, quit drinking alcohol, and decided to start her life from scratch.
Changes for her older sister were not as radical. She had improvements in her life, but not as spectacular. But that is not our point here. We will come back to it later.
Case II
This case involved two sisters: Leto, age twenty-three, and Danae, age nineteen. Upon regressing the younger sister, Danae, she finds herself living on an island in Greece, but she cannot name it.[2] She lives in the town close to the port and her life is quite smooth and comfortable without responsibilities and burdens. Her parents are both alive.
As a teenager she falls in love with a young man who works for the grocery store at the port. He is very handsome, they start flirting, and one day he asks her to marry him. Everything is arranged for the wedding. Danae moves forward to midday on her wedding day. All the female relatives work feverishly to prepare the banquet and place all the goodies in the public square, as is the tradition in many Greek villages. But bad news arrives. The bride’s father took his small boat out fishing early in the morning. Fishermen found his boat floating ungoverned in the open sea. They rushed there and found him dead, most probably of a heart attack. The bad news hit everybody like lightning. Silence ensues. Danae is devastated.
In the next scene it is a few days later and Danae walks with her fiancé on one of the island’s beaches. They see a woman’s body floating in the water. She had drowned. For a moment Danae thought that this lady could have been her mother, but the corpse is too young and slim, and is a beautiful brunette a little older than herself. At this point Danae asked me to terminate the session and bring her back to full consciousness.
After that session Danae entered a hypnogogic state while at home. She had visions of this wet dead woman being very upset – almost mad – with her, but she could not hear what the dead woman was saying. It was as if someone was blocking the sound of the narrative. Danae communicated with me and told me about these recurring and sometimes frightening visions, so I asked her to come in once again.
As I induced trance I asked her to bring that vision of the dead woman to her visual field. She found herself at exactly the same haunting frame, without sound again. I asked her to talk to this troubled woman, but there was still no sound even though the woman was talking. I deepened the trance and, as a result, Danae was able to listen to this entrapped persona.
This woman is upset because she “did not receive what she deserved” and she “is mad at her own father who deserted her.” As I continued the dialogue with that persona I tried to relieve her tension and release her emotional burden. We tried to make her understand that she cannot be trapped within her anger because in that way she would not be in a position to evolve. After a long and exhausting conversation the trapped persona realized her position and shifted her attitude, which eventually liberated her. Her release was concluded when she thanked us for making her understand. But who was this woman? What was this persona from the past demanding from Danae? Was there a relationship between them?
The answers came slowly. The woman who committed suicide used to be protected by Danae’s past-life father. For some reason, her father was giving money and supporting the drowned woman, but Danae could not recall why. However, she could recall that the woman is somehow isolated, living alone in a mansion on the outskirts of town. Villagers look at her scornfully and she has no friends. Danae could not tell me why this was so.
At the drowned woman’s funeral only a handful of people gather. Since the incident was considered a suicide, the priest of the town did not attend to conduct the funeral and bless the dead woman. What a sad story for a young woman of 25! Had Danae met this woman in this life? She could not tell. No matter how hard I tried she could not tell. When the session was over, and since I was regressing her sister, I explicitly asked her not to disclose any part of the session to any member of her family. I illustrated to her the importance of letting the process reveal itself in its own time.
The answer came when her older sister Leto came in for regression. Leto was very different from Danae. Even though she is a beauty, she has some problems that are causing trouble in her life. She is slightly maladaptive, insecure, has a high temperament, and is unstable in relationships. She gets easily bored and sometimes turns into herself. Even during regressions she sometimes becomes rather aggressive towards me. I asked her to tune in to what her “soul is ready to witness as of today.”
She sees herself on a cliff contemplating throwing herself off. She leaps off the cliff into the sea below. Why? Her father, her only support in her miserable life, has just died in his little boat in the middle of the sea. The town is preparing for a feast and she is not invited. But her father’s death stops everything. I asked her to tune in even better with each breath she took. She sees herself as a young girl, playing on the beach with another even younger girl. She is like a sister to her, but not quite. When I asked her what she meant she was not able to answer.
I asked her to describe her mother. After a while she starts crying that she doesn’t have a mother. She lost her when she was five. Her father married again and the girl she is playing with is her half-sister.
I asked her to tell me anything significant that happens next. She finds herself feeling embarrassed. She is about sixteen years old and pregnant. Her lover is traveling on a ship as a captain. But they are not married. Disgraced and isolated by her relatives and the other villagers, she has a miscarriage. Her lover comes back after a few months to discover what she had been through all this time. He tries to change people’s attitude by marrying her, but to no avail. No one in the village but her father and her half-sister come to the wedding. She is stigmatized as if she had committed the worst of all sins. When her husband travels, she is all alone in the village.
Then bad fortune strikes again. Her husband comes back from his voyage with tuberculosis. No long after that, he dies. How many losses can a person withstand? She commits suicide when her father, her last piece of security and support, dies of a heart attack in his little boat. Leto did not see much in the afterlife, and comes out of trance sad and a little disoriented.
The next day I asked both sisters to come to my office and asked them if it was okay to talk openly about their sessions. They were literally astonished and overwhelmed by the strength of the experience. Now they have no doubt whatsoever of the reality of reincarnation even though they could care less about it. They said that with a little luck, they might find the island in the Aegean Sea in which they lived in their past lives. They only want to do that to confirm and validate the story even more and make it stronger. A lot of things have changed since that time, which we cannot date, but it seems to be somewhere in the twentieth century either in the thirties or early fifties.
Case III
This case study concerns acquaintances of mine; a mother and her daughter. The mother had her first regression about six years ago when she was forty-three. She finds herself as a young girl of seven living in a mountain village in rural Greece. In school she is not as attentive as other children. She can get out of class anytime she wants because she is sick.
Her father is very loving to her even though he has an air of sadness about him, but not her “mother” who is looking after her younger brothers and sisters. The young girl’s name as she can recall is Ariadne. Ariadne becomes really sick. She is put on a horse in order to be carried to the city hospital, which is miles away, but she never makes it. She dies on the road from tuberculosis. In the client’s current life she has always looked pale as if she were sick.
Ariadne does not understand why her “mother” is not as worried about her health as her father until she is further regressed. Ariadne finds herself at an even younger age of about two or less when she is forcefully taken from her natural mother and given over to the other “mother.” Afterwards, she forgets about being taken away from her natural mother.
But, what is wrong with her natural mother? The woman lives alone in a house outside the village and she behaves as if she is depressed or mentally ill. She is young, slim, and attractive, but is always troubled and sad. She sneaks every now and then and brings nuts, fruit, and other treats to Ariadne. Ariadne looks at her with sympathy, but is not consciously aware that the woman is her natural mother.
After her death Ariadne remains earthbound for a while and sees her funeral. Her natural mother approaches the grave, but her father’s workers throw stones at her to keep her away. Their lord, Ariadne’s father, stops them and lets her approach the grave. They all leave the cemetery except her. Ariadne is sad for her mother and she cannot move on to the other spheres of existence because her mother drags her down with her immense pain. She is emotionally stuck. Ariadne wrongly believes that she can help her mother by staying around for awhile but she does not succeed on this.
About a year later I hypnotized the nineteen year old daughter. She wanted to know why she had such a passion for classical ballet. In the beginning I had some trouble to get imagery initiated but she soon finds herself as a young girl aged seven or eight years within a wooden box. The box is actually the house where she lives and she is hiding there.
She belongs to a kids’ gang and they live by stealing. It seems to be the beginning of the twentieth century, situated in a city in today’s Bulgaria. The kids enter a shop; some of them start fussing around to divert the attention of the shopkeeper while others take advantage of the situation and steal food to eat.
But what has all that to do with ballet? She finds herself at the much younger age of three wearing a gorgeous dress and is taken by her beautiful mother to the theatre-ballet. She loves the costumes, the good looking people, the decoration of the theatre, and, above all, the play. She is in deep ecstasy; overwhelmed by the beauty that surrounds her.
When we moved to the next significant event, she sees her beautiful two-storey mansion burned to the ground. We do not know what caused this tragedy but from here on she never sees her parents again. It is probably after this tragic loss that she is “adopted” by the gang.
Moving to the next scene she finds herself in prison. She and her step-parents are arrested by the police. We do not know why they are all imprisoned. Balkan countries were in a constant turmoil and wars at the turn of the 20th century. What we know is that the particular childless couple adopts her off the streets and keeps her as a maid and housekeeper rather than as a daughter with rights. When her stepmother is out of the house, her husband rapes the young girl. At some point in her imprisonment a young officer walks into the prison and releases her. He takes her with him to Greece but it was somewhere here that this session came to an end.
More than a year passed before I had another session with her. She came in to me extremely upset following a big fight with her mother. After hypnotizing her I asked her “to move to a significant event that would be illuminating as far as their stormy relationship is concerned.” She finds herself in a cemetery. She has lost her seven year old child. She is lying over the grave but also sees her daughter next to her (an apparition that is).
Hearing this, I could feel the hair tingle all over my body. I was literally chilled to the bone. It was the first time that I personally witnessed a cross-verification. Do you recall the incident with the mother who lost her daughter in the mountain village? Do you remember the young girl, Ariadne, whose spirit was lingering over her own grave and her funeral? The woman who was her natural mother was full of sorrow, grief, and despair; she could not get away from her feelings. Her heart was torn apart. The roles in this current life have been reversed. The mother today was the daughter who died prematurely in that life and vice versa. The past-life story reported by one is verified when that same story is reported by the other.
I tried to regress her further back to see what happened. When the officer who rescued her from prison brings her back to Greece, a landlord of the area recognizes her beauty and falls in love with her. She is still in her teens. With no hesitation he turns her into his mistress and offers her a house where she lives on her own at the outskirts of the village. The next thing we know is that she is in her house and very upset. I asked her why she is upset. She said that there is a feast at the village. I asked her what for. She was still very upset. I asked her to tell me why. She said that “he” is getting married. “Who is getting married?” “The landlord,” she said (her lover that is).
At least she has a daughter by him and devotes her time to her. But even that does not last for long. The young officer, whom she admired so much and who in a way saved her life from prison, walks into her house and takes her baby away. She cries and gasps but he does not change his mind. He takes the child away, and gives it to the landlord’s wife to raise.
I want to add that the mother in this case study discovered by “chance” or synchronicity the location of the particular village. She also located with accuracy where the school was at that time, her house, and the cemetery where she was buried (both the school and the cemetery have changed place since then). Also, there was a big sanatorium at the outskirts of the village, an indicator of the fact that a lot of carriers of TB were brought there to extend their life expectancy. Furthermore, she accurately described the physical surroundings and named the village correctly. She also correctly named the Church of the village and its location. It would be interesting if she goes to the village again with her daughter.
Discussion
What is the common denominator of these case studies? If one chooses to say that in all three stories someone died of tuberculosis then I did not make my case clear.
Someone could also say that all these stories were very moving and dramatic; almost tragic. That is certainly true, but is this the reason that I wrote this article? What is our common denominator then? In the cases I mentioned here, there were no names of people or places or dates available to us with the exception of the third case. Historical facts were so vague that an interested researcher would have difficulty discovering the truth of what was revealed. However, it is more than clear that the stories were cross-verified by the participants. The main players re-lived the scenes from their own perspective and by doing so they validated the testimonies of their counterparts. There is both coherence and consistency in the stories revealed. This is more than spectacular; it is life changing for those who witness and share such an experience.
What is happening here? Are we (as regression therapists) witnesses of stories, deeply embedded in the past, coming forth as haunting tales? Do these memories have power over us? Do they shape our present or our future? For those who have undergone such experiences there is an automatic shift in the frame of reference that was upheld until that moment. Old values are overthrown, new dimensions are introduced, and new parameters are added.
In my office hundreds of stories are spread in front of me by wonderful everyday people who relate their battles for survival. Many of them are cross-verified in the manner presented here. This is consistent with the hypothesis that we have been here before with the people who play crucial and nourishing roles in our current lives. These people, who are important in our lives, have been around us before in changing roles. We all work to one end: to further develop, enhance, enrich our experiential deposits, and work on our karma and dharma.
I can list other cases of cross-verification. There have been other authors who have come to the same conclusions. Since this keeps on happening, I cannot go on pretending that this may be a fallacy, because it does not fit with the current prevalent paradigm. Nor do I accept the logic of some of the pioneers of our profession that we should disregard the historical validity part of our clients’ experiences. We are part of the process and we are not isolated in some laboratory, examining events as detached observers. No matter how objective some wish to be, they have a stance in life, a set of values and postulates, and those shape them. So let us start calling things by their name and not pretend that we simply relieve people of their symptoms.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Louis Siron, Janet Cunningham, and Belinda Tanner for the time and effort they took in editing my English.
[1] Here one could ask why I did not work over the rape incident and why I did not release the tension there. I thought that since she had witnessed the experience in the light I should let it dissolve on its own. If there was an emotional residue then I would work on it another time. That opportunity never presented itself.
[2] Not an easy task to do in Greece. There are hundreds of islands. She currently lives in Corfu in the Ionian Sea, which is in the western part of Greece adjacent to Italy. She can locate with relative certainty that the island she is talking about lays in the Aegean Sea, which is in the eastern part of Greece towards Turkey.