The Past Life Perspective: Discovering Your True Nature Across Multiple Lifetimes - Hardcover

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The Past Life Perspective

CHAPTER 1

Out of the New Age and into the Mainstream

MY COUNSELING career started out fairly conventionally. I earned my master’s degree in counseling psychology from Santa Clara University—a Jesuit university, no less—in the world-famous Silicon Valley of California. And I became licensed as a marriage and family therapist by the state of California in due course. In the midst of my studies, I took a course entitled Therapeutic Imagery. My professor, the late Dr. William Yabroff, was highly regarded but seen as just slightly eccentric within the very conventional Santa Clara faculty; his specialty was the use of guided imagery to deal with psychological and physical symptoms. To my surprise and curiosity, toward the end of the course he introduced the idea that at times clients experience imagery that could be interpreted as past life memory. He claimed he wanted us to be familiar with what this might look like, just in case we encountered it. I learned later that he was very much involved with the regression community at large; this was his way of quietly introducing his passion into the straitlaced Santa Clara program.

My professor described the issues that might be related to a past lifetime—some recurring physical ailment, an unresolved relationship dynamic—and asked for volunteers, as he was going to demonstrate a past life regression right there in class. I immediately raised my hand.

I recently had undergone surgery on both of my pinky toes due to a condition known as rotated hammer toe, which means the toe lies a bit on its side and slips partway under the neighboring toe, causing the joint to point sideways and rub painfully against the sides of one’s shoes. This had given me some trouble for a few years, but despite surgery and ultrasound treatments afterwards, I was still experiencing pain that interfered with many of my favorite athletic activities.

I lay down on the carpet in the front of a class of about a dozen people. My professor used a gentle hypnotic induction to put me in a relaxed state, then directed me to the time and place where the problem with my feet originated. I was startled to find myself seeing/sensing an adolescent girl with Asian features and identifying with her. Then the story just began to roll out from there: she/I was extremely upset because my family had insisted on binding my feet. Not only was it painful, it limited my ability to move about and do things!

Unusual for that culture and time period, I was a rather strong-willed young girl, and I decided to defy authority and tradition. With the help of a household servant, I made a plan to run away, but I was caught in the act. This defiant action was considered a terrible disgrace for my family and particularly for my father, who had some position of note in the community. He eventually disowned me and sold me into servitude. I saw images of me walking barefoot and in rags over rough and rocky terrain to a place far from my home. I knew that I was in eternal shame for dishonoring my father. I worked for some time as a kitchen servant, and eventually I used one of the kitchen knives to take my own life because I could no longer bear the disgrace of my position.

Dr. Yabroff moved me through the death experience and into a brief life review, looking at the key lessons, decisions, and attitudes carried forward from that lifetime. Some of these focused on the conflict between loyalty to the family versus following my own path—playing it safe versus rocking the boat. Challenging paternal authority seemed to be a pattern that I had carried forward and continued in my current life, along with the belief that I really had to fight for what I believed. The most amazing part of the experience, however, was the fact that my legs quivered uncontrollably as I lay in front of the classroom. It wasn’t painful, however. It was as if my legs were releasing some sort of energy that had been stored in them since that prior lifetime. (I can’t totally explain how this works, but I’ve also had clients shake during sessions as energy is being released. It seems that the physical body can hold on to trauma in some representative manner, a little like birthmarks that we sometimes see that are related to injuries in prior lifetimes.) To my astonishment and that of my classmates, I was back on the tennis court the following day with no foot distress, and those toes have never bothered me again in the twenty-plus years since then.

I am in no way claiming that past life work will cure a myriad of physical complaints in one fell swoop, but from this personal experience and from my own private practice, I have seen that it can sometimes make a real difference when modern medicine has hit a block. And as you can imagine, after this first experience with regression in front of the class, my interest to learn more about past life therapy was sparked.

The next occasion I had to delve deeper into this unconventional therapeutic approach came after I had started my private practice. Two of the world’s renowned past life experts of the time, Dr. Brian Weiss and the late British Jungian therapist Dr. Roger Woolger, came for weeklong training workshops at a retreat center near my home. Each workshop was uniquely different from the other, and each was a truly marvelous experience. As participants in the workshops, we watched demonstrations given by true masters in the art of past life regression, each with his own distinctive style.

I was fortunate enough to have Dr. Woolger work directly with me on a theme I described as “being intolerant of ignorant men,” which the rest of the training group voted as the issue they found most enticing. Dr. Woolger regressed me first to a lifetime as a natural healer in the early American colonies, accused of witchcraft by the doctors and community leaders (“those ignorant men”). I was eventually shipped back to France, where I’d come from. The issue linked back further to a lifetime as a Viking raider who died from an axe through the skull in a skirmish over a woman. (I had been quite a thickheaded and ignorant man myself, it appears!)

Of course, as workshop participants, we also had many opportunities to practice leading regressions on each other. Afterwards, I began to experiment with friends and open-minded clients in my practice, continuing to gather techniques and knowledge from other past life therapists as I went along, eventually building my own distinct style. A hallmark of my approach to past life work is the amount of time I spend processing prior life experience and lessons with the client so that he/she can integrate these realizations into daily life. I found the work exciting and rewarding, and the lack of dependence that traditional clients sometimes develop in conventional therapy was quite refreshing to me. Gradually my practice has evolved to the point where I focus almost entirely on past life work.

Demystifying Past Life Therapy

Although the public perception of reincarnation or past lives used to evoke jokes about Shirley MacLaine “hanging” Out on a Limb (well, at least for those of us over a certain age), millions have read books on the subject. Its public image doesn’t accurately reflect what people believe in private: a Gallup Poll taken in 2001 showed that 25 percent of adult Americans admitted anonymously that they believed in reincarnation.1 An online Harris Poll in November 2013 similarly put the overall number of believers at 24 percent, an increase from 20 percent in 2009.2 In both polls, an additional 27 percent of Americans admitted that they didn’t...