Morris Netherton, Ph.D.

One of past-life therapy’s “old hands” shares with the Journal’s readers his latest thoughts about reaching the deepest levels of healing. Drawing upon his experience with clients, he especially stresses the effects of past physical traumas on the well-being of the body, mind, and spirit today.

As a client-centered process, a past-life session is determined by the unique needs and abilities of the client. In my own sessions, I use techniques which most efficiently access unconscious trauma and eliminate it from present-day living. A session starts by locating trauma using either body sensations, strong emotions, or words and phrases that are impactful. The process finds words and gives them emotions or finds emotions and gives words to them. Impact of these words and emotions is then found in the physical body. Greater spiritual awareness is always experienced as a result of the change from fear and confusion to clarity and self-understanding.

A past-life session recognizes the pre-existence of an altered state induced at the time of the original past trauma and kept active by the mind’s inability to complete these experiences. The language and emotions of these earlier incidents serve as post-hypnotic commands imbedded in current conversations and acted out in current behavior. Once recognized in present life, they are used to locate the trauma or origin and will be noticeably absent when their control is gone.

For me, a session begins with a brief discussion of the presenting problem as a way of reaching the point where the client is asked to “close your eyes because you’re already in the experience where we will work.” No attempt is made to induce a state of relaxation as this is counter-productive to fully realizing a state of trauma. Relaxation and fear can not co-exist in the body. The following is an example of the kind of language used to further the session:

“The scene you’re now in holds the answers you need in this session… 1) say the first words you think of coming from where you are… 2) feel the physical stress in your body and tell me the first physical position that co-exists with the stress – sitting, walking, lying down… 3) recognize where you are as you become conscious of your position… 4) tell me the strongest emotion of which you’re consciously aware.”

The primary mode of perception is of importance here only as a means of determining the strengths and weaknesses of the client. The weaknesses in perception will be addressed as part of the therapy, thus developing for the client a feeling, thinking, sensate balance.

Once the client responds, focus is deepened and maintained by a repetition of phrases and sentences that lead through the experience. Repeated phrases will lead to accessing other emotions or physical affect. A cathartic release is the goal of this procedure and will be experienced if continued long enough.

There is a structure of past-life incidents that the therapist should know and use to assure completion of the issues uncovered. Presentation of this structure and techniques for its use require greater detail than I can provide here. The therapist uses this structure and composition to establish experiential boundaries that provide the grounding needed to clear confusion and uncertainty.

The content of past-life experience is important only in how it relates to present time and how it reveals the reason why the trauma is still unconsciously alive. Once the script is revealed, a process is directed to locate and erase trauma from various points of the experience. The final trauma to be cleared is that occurring at the time of death. After all emotions, words, pain, and confusion are cleared from the complete experience, including death, the soul is easily and freely released from the body. Resistance to this separation indicates some emotional attachment still exists somewhere in the experience. The mind will easily find this and release it.

Once free of the past trauma, the client recognizes a greater truth about the experience and is guided to “say and do now what you couldn’t say and do then. Finish it!”

A point of identification carried from the past-life death is located during present life conception and the process of resolution is put in place for continuation. Further reinforcements are found when the mother first consciously recognizes her pregnancy. This usually occurs in the second or third month of pregnancy and her reaction is unconsciously recorded by the fetus. Another vulnerable point for the fetus comes in the seventh or eighth month when the physical and emotional pressures on the mother are reaching a peak of intensity.

During the birth experience, the body experientially survives that which caused death in the past life. Because of this survival, a negative survival pattern is created as part of the life script. The client is encouraged to change this script by consciously resolving these experiences much as the past-life experience was changed.

My earliest sessions revealed clients’ confusion as the greatest block to the completion of unconscious experiences. The client becomes lost in words and emotions which lead to an escalating swirl of images and the repeated answer “I don’t know…”

Once I began using the physical body’s reality as an anchor, confusion no longer controlled the session. The body memory is not subject to the confusion of the mind. The body’s experience remains literal regardless of the illusions and “tricks” of the mind.

I suspect that the physical symptoms that are part of a past-life death are carried to the next conception and reintroduced as part of the new DNA code. In any case, during the first six to eight weeks of pregnancy the mother’s experience will provide the verbal and emotional components of the physical development of the glands, organs, nervous system, and, indeed, the entire body. Thus, the mother’s statement “My back is killing me” will define the physical formation of the fetus’ spine and connect to a past-life death involving a trauma to the back. Sessions uncovering this early period of pregnancy reveal the process by which physical memory is carried into this life.

The body is important. It always carries the memory of past-life events. For example, the diabetic body may remember starving to death, a migraine headache may be a physical memory of hanging or blows to the head, Multiple Sclerosis may be the memory of a lingering battlefield death with injuries that paralyze the body. These are only a few of the body memories that are carried from the past life to the next incarnation.

The most recent findings in body memory come from the research findings of Dr. Candace Pert (1987). Her important discovery of emotional receptor centers and neuropeptides link the mind and body as one entity. These receptors are found throughout the body, encrusted in locations ranging from the brain to the bone marrow of the entire skeletal system. They are ordered by the DNA, thus placing the receptors present at conception. The receptors serve as the mechanism that sorts out the emotional information exchange in the body. About this discovery, Dr. Ernest Rossi says:

“This messenger molecule (neuropeptide) and cell receptor communication system is the psychobiological basis of mind-body healing, therapeutic hypnosis, and holistic medicine in general” (Rossi, 1987).

The findings of Pert and Rossi may lead to a reevaluation of some practices that have previously been dismissed as quackery by many practitioners of modern medicine. Their findings indicate that any emotions can be centered and felt in any part of the body. Says Pert:

“This system is the backbone of body memory as there is no longer a strong distinction to be made between the brain, the mind, and the body” (Pert, 1987).

Yet if therapy is focused only on physical symptoms, it will find an unending number of past and present life experiences which reveal horror stories of rape, injury, and mutilation as reasons and explanations for problems in the current life. Positive response to a client’s past lives may be limited to a “better understanding” and a willingness to “accept the things that can’t be changed.” Real change occurs only when the therapy encourages the client to confront the victim within which controls the way of life.

The victim as survivor is part of the life script present at birth. Its foundation is complex and resistant to change. If this resistance is confronted too soon or with too much intensity, clients may leave therapy because they feel that you, the therapist, are abusing them.

During the intake session, I question clients about any possible uncompleted pregnancies of the mother prior to the client’s birth. A prior abortion or miscarriage may be an embedded source of identity as a victim. Many times the client is also the soul of an aborted fetus which returned to the same mother for a completed pregnancy and birth. If this was true, the aborted fetus was a helpless victim. When conceived the second time, the soul promises the mother to “be a good girl/boy this time if only you will let me live. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll make everybody happy if you let me live this time.”

After the birth, when the doctor declares the baby to be alive and well, the earlier promise becomes a way of life. This “good” girl or boy is now an inadvertent victim of their own promises, and must keep everybody happy.

Therapy will often change the core identity from victim to victimizer. At this point, friends and family of the client will declare the therapy a failure: “It’s not working, things are getting worse.” The therapist must anticipate this change and discuss it with the client before its onset. Sessions must continue to resolve this opposite positioning in the client’s behavior.

Both victim and victimizer must be addressed in sessions until neither can control the client. A new position will emerge as these two fade away. The client increasingly experiences the role of the “benign observer” present in making daily decisions and interactions with friends and family. Once the client is free of reactive impulses, choices are made that reflect consideration for the optimum good of all. This is the true goal of all therapy.

During the prenatal period of transition from past to present life the fetal unconscious mind is developing with the mother’s experiences, words, feelings, and physical sensations, providing the second level of conscious functioning. Because of this attachment to the mother, a process of separation will begin at birth, when the umbilical cord is cut. At this point, the baby’s conscious mind begins its own functioning with the unconscious mind formed by the entire nine months’ prenatal experience. The unresolved issues from past lives as reinforced by the mother’s and the fetus’ prenatal experiences through birth now form the basis for unconscious beliefs and feelings. The process of separation from the mother also continues the process of past-life separation.

I am often challenged as to the baby’s ability to “think” and “know” in utero. The point is made that if a developing fetus had a conscious mind, it could self-identify and think for itself. It would consciously problem-solve throughout the nine months and be born free of unresolved fears and confusion.

The unconscious mind must be formed during a time when conscious memory of experiences is not possible. The unconscious mind’s content must be accepted without being subjected to the logic, analysis, and choices of the conscious process. This begins at birth when life experiences will be motivated by the unconscious script which will be evaluated and changed by the conscious mind. This process of interaction between the two levels of the mind will determine the soul’s progress toward resolution.

There are also vital points of contact with the baby’s physical body as it passes through the birth canal. A client’s low functioning thyroid gland may have been caused by being stuck during delivery when the throat was in the birth canal (“slow down, stop pushing for a moment”). Dyslexia may be caused by the baby’s body being rotated during delivery (“that’s right, that’s right,” as the baby is rotated to the left). Birth-related problems are especially common if forceps are used or the birth is by Caesarian section. Migraine headaches can be caused when the mother has not dilated enough to allow the baby’s head an easy passage into the birth canal. Any physical problems can be caused by the pain and stress of the birthing process. The manner in which a client experiences birth will determine how they cope with stress for the rest of their life.

In past-life therapy, it is vital to explore not only the past-life events, including the death experience, but the prenatal and birth experience as well. Only by resolving all the underlying problems can a client be truly free of self-defeating and negative patterns on the deepest levels of mind, spirit, and body.

References

Pert, C. Massage Therapy Journal, Fall, 1987.

Rossi, E The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, 1987.