I wanted to share with you some ponderings and reflections on some recent training I undertook into regression therapy. The concept of regression therapy is something that I worked with in my role within the NHS. Basically, we have myriad experiences throughout our life that shape us and mould our beliefs, and often our beliefs can be self-limiting. The point of regression therapy is that it allows us to go back to the events that have shaped our beliefs and re-examine them and process them in light of our more mature understanding of the world, and thus dissolve the negative impact that they may have had on our life.
In terms of hypnotherapy regression, we can work quickly to overcome blocks that are getting in our way in our current life, either by processing the events that have caused them, and/or by gaining new understanding of the cause or root of our blocks, releasing past traumas and negative energies that are holding us back, and sometimes by rescripting those events to provide a more helpful outcome.
However, my more recent training has introduced the concept of reincarnation – this is something that grabbed my attention as a child, but it has somewhat fallen off my radar as an adult. Working in psychology in the NHS within a schema therapy team, we would always try to take the client back in order to heal the wounds from the past and try to give them corrective experiences, and there is a body of evidence supporting this kind of work.
As a hypnotherapist, my work involves helping people to address and overcome problems in the here and now – mainly issues with weight, anxiety or smoking. However, my previous experience in mental health services means that I am aware that there is usually something in our underlying belief systems that drives these issue, and the concept of reincarnation opens this up immeasurably. What if my frequent migraines are caused not by stress but by the fact that I experienced head trauma in a past life?
I have undertaken some past life regression myself, and although the results were interesting, I couldn’t shake the belief that I might be just making it all up because I loved Game of Thrones, Gladiator and any book by Georgette Heyer! However, my interest prevailed, to the point that I undertook training myself so that I can offer this form of therapy (admittedly mainly for regression in current life).
These kinds of courses are highly experiential, as we all practice on each other. However, the first exercise involve the trainer taking the whole group back into past lives … the difference in everyone’s experience was startling! We all experienced past lives, but the range of past lives was so great that it was impossible that they had come from suggestions made to us – we had apothecaries, sailors, peasants, farmers, cowboys … you name it!
The idea behind past life regression as a form of therapy is that we re-experience the trauma(s) repeatedly until they have no emotional impact on us. As we progressed into the course, we all had very different experiences. Often, but not always, the trauma is related to the death process. From everyone’s account, we don’t feel the physical pain but the emotional pain (for instance if we have been betrayed or feel unjustly treated, or simply feel despair).
One lady who was looking for a reason behind feeling a lump in her throat experienced being burnt at the stake and struggling to breathe because of the smoke, and the man who lit the fire was her father in that life, leading to feelings of betrayal. Another man was being hanged in public but couldn’t find a reason why, and was filled with anger at the crowd and his executioner.
Regression can also help us to gain more understanding of our current lives. For instance, the lady who experienced being betrayed by a family member in a past life recognised them as a parent in their current life, and felt enlightened by this understanding as to why their relationship had always felt so problematic.
We can also use regression to take positives from a previous life or qualities that we need to help us in this life. For example, I regressed to being a Roman foot soldier. Although I complained that all we did was march all bloody day, I was amazed at the sense I had of my own physicality – a broad chest and bulging biceps – and my therapist could see a marked difference in how I held myself in trance, watching me sit up straighter and broaden out.
So, bottom line – do I believe in past life regression therapy? The answer is not straightforward. I retain a healthy degree of scepticism as to whether we truly experience past lives due to reincarnation. Our world today is filled with hundreds of thousands of images from TV, films, Instagram ,etc. that it is easy to think we could be influenced by these, and because our subconscious minds thrive on metaphor we could be creating a metaphorical explanation of our difficulties made up of images we have seen but long-since forgotten.
As a human I would love to believe in reincarnation; however, as a therapist I wonder whether if matters if it’s all in our imagination as long as it works and we can release some of our pain and suffering, because the bottom line is it’s all about healing.