1. Are Past Life Memories as vivid as a movie scene?
They can be, but different clients experience Past Life memories in different ways. Some clients are more orientated towards sensations, feelings or instinctively knowing. Some get a combination of visuals and knowing. You don’t need to have a vivid visual image to take a powerful learning from the session. And sometimes there is a good reason why your client can’t see anything.
For example, one of my first sessions was with a client who reported feeling increasingly burdened and weighed down with life but had been unable to pin-point a specific reason. The session started very memorably for me because my client complained of being unable to see anything. All she could see was darkness. It was the first time this had happened to me. Without being aware of it, I had also fallen into the trap of expecting her experiences to be visual. So I was a little flummoxed. What was going on here? But as we worked with the situation, it began to dawn on my client (and me) that she was finding herself pinned down by a huge, heavy, object that had fallen on her. She was in darkness because no natural light was reaching her.
We worked out later in the session that we had entered her past life at the death scene – something had just fallen on her and crushed her. Although she went on to experience other scenes from that life visually, it was the darkness section of the PLR that had the most powerful and positive impact. I told her to experience herself floating free of her trapped body and to go back to wherever she felt was “home”. She came out of trance no longer trapped with that trauma, and understanding that she didn’t have to expect a similar fate in this life.
2. Is It Possible to Have Past Life Memories Without Regression?
To the best of my observation it is not especially common, but it is certainly possible.
I can recall a friend of mine, who was the inventor of a light and sound meditation machine, telling me that he went to a craniosacral conference in the USA in the 1990s given by the Upledger Institute. He was chosen to go on stage as a volunteer for a demonstration. As he laid on a couch on the stage, his forehead being massaged, he suddenly recalled a life from 2000 years previously, when he was a Buddhist monk in Tibet. And in that life, he had also worked with light and sound – in those days he used a candle and a spinning wheel to send his students into a hypnogogic state to accelerate their learning of Buddhist scriptures.
Some people also access Past Life Memories through dreams. The dreams feel so vivid they just know they were of past experiences. I have also heard cases of adults and children spontaneously remembering past lives.
But for most people, having a PLR is the best way to access these memories because they can allow themselves to enter the necessary levels of deep relaxation and the therapist can assist them in that process.
3. Why Do a Past Life Regression?
This should usually be the first question! But most people are so intrigued by the process that they only stop to ask themselves the purpose of a Past Life Regression a bit later. But it is a good question.
For some a PLR is about exploration. Exploration leads to new information, to insight, maybe wisdom. For others, a PLR is driven by more urgent concerns – they want to heal some part of themselves.
Many people consciously or unconsciously fear death and ceasing to exist. A lot of the healing of a PLR session comes from a deep-felt, emotional realisation that we are actually immortal. Never underestimate how good it feels to KNOW with absolute certainty that we carry on and that we can never cease to exist.
But we may be suffering from many other mental problems which started before our current life. We can come from a loving family, and yet still have “unexplainable” sexual traumas and nightmares that predate this life. We can have “unexplainable” feelings of hostility or anger towards certain people, or be the recipients of such hostility. We can have a terror of drowning when we have never had any unpleasant experiences on water in this life.
A PLR takes us back to the true cause of the fear or the phobia. It takes us back to the soul contracts which explain why we decide to take certain relationships or career paths, or to experience a challenging event in this life. “Every healing,” says Past Life Regressionist Hans TenDam, “starts with facing and understanding the facts”.
4. Are Past Lives Real?
Most are. Some might not be. Ultimately what matters most is whether the process is healing. Does the image or feeling you took from the session feel good? Does it offer you some insight into your condition? If it does, then (rather like a message from a dream), the process has served you.
But I would argue that more often than not, they are real, and that there is plenty of good evidence for that assertion. There are a number of very good books on reincarnation, but for the sceptic or doubter I would encourage them to read Ian Stevenson’s Children Who Remember Previous Lives. Stevenson’s studied over 3000 children from all around the world who claimed to remember past lives or were suspected by their parents of remembering past lives. In the book, child after child offers verifiable and often idiosyncratic details about people, some still living, others deceased, who they had never met in their current life. They talked about towns or cities which they had never visited and experiences they had never had in their current life. The sheer weight of the evidence is telling.
A friend’s Reincarnation Story
I want to finish on a quick final reincarnation story that might just inspire those who are sitting on the fence. The story involves the light and sound practitioner who I mentioned above. In the 1970s, prior to the Upledger experience, he had been learning Aikido in a grand Edwardian house in Hampstead with the top Japanese instructor in the world at that time. During a break, they had both gone out onto the balcony, and my friend turned to his instructor and asked him to define Aikido verbally. “I could” said the instructor “but it wouldn’t make much sense to you yet. Look at how you are standing – if the railing under our hands disappeared, you would fall and die. I would still be stood where I am. That is Aikido.” This puzzled my friend.
“It only took me twenty bloody years”, he said, “to finally understand the information he was accessing from my energy field.”
Fast forward to the 1990s and my friend was lying on stage at the Upledger conference, suddenly recalling he was a Tibetan monk: his second past life memory was of the same monk leaning on a temple balcony, overlooking a deep gorge. Suddenly the balcony give way beneath his arms and he fell into the gorge and died.
The memory was so vivid, that from that day onwards my friend became convinced that past lives were, in his words, “absolutely real.”
“Was the memory scary?” I asked.
A little, he said. But, it was scarier to live in ignorance. He had re-learned a valuable lesson: be present, at all times. “And if we learn the lessons, we don’t have to go through it all again.”