Episode 72: Past Life Regression Therapy and Other Curiosities

Continuing our search for answering the question of What is Possible and how to live limitless. I was going to do the next episodes on “Think and Live Longer.” But there was a different plan…

·        Personal story of Other Lives, Other Selves

·        As a therapist, I am always looking for new ways to help people. This is quite unconventional and controversial…here is how I see it: aim is healing. “as a therapist and not a philosopher I am perhaps fortunate in that I am not shackled by the problem of belief of disbelief…for the therapist there is another kind of truth…that which is real for the patient.”

·        Dr. Woolger is an Oxford University graduate from the mid-60s that would eventually immerse himself in Zurich, Switzerland in Jungian Psychology…

·        4 ways to look at past life regression therapy:

o   Psychic: past life readings and mediumship

o   Parapsychological: favors scientific and experimental investigation of past life claims

o   Religious: looking at past lives as an article of faith

o   Psychotherapeutic: using past life regression in the service of therapeutic change

·        “It doesn’t matter whether you believe in reincarnation or not for past life therapy to be effective….it is about the healing power of the unconscious mind.” 95% of daily functioning, according to Dr Lipton. 

·        “It is just a means that may help further emotional catharsis, self-understanding, and healing” = therapy 

·        “The focus is on the person, not the events.” “The healing power of story.” 

·        “The hypnotherapist actively directs and helps rework the stories, images, and fixed ideas that arise from the unconscious in trance states.” Trance – extremely relaxed state that allows access to the unconscious mind. 

·        ”We do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the dark conscious.” Unfinished dramas of the soul…Insecurity and fear of abandonment, depression and low energy, phobias and irrational fears, sadomasochistic behavioral problems, guilt and martyr complexes, material insecurity and eating disorders, accidents/violence/physical brutality, family struggles, sexual difficulties and abuse, marital difficulties, chronic physical ailments….

·        Practically: focus on the body’s pain (emotional/physical), follow the story that emerges, ask questions AS IF it were a memory, listen for the stories behind or beneath the story (meaning or the “deeper, archaic, lurking fear or trauma”), experience it fully in the body, and then do the work to heal the underlying wound. 

·        No matter what this is an emotional recounting from one’s personal perspective…the pain is real regardless of memory or fantasy. Emotional pain manifests in the physical body if not addressed. 

·        We’ve all had memories of things that didn’t happen the way we remember…but our emotional connection to that memory is real. Could it be a past life? I don’t know. Could it be your body/mind/emotional complex trying to act out the pain in someone else’s story to make it more palatable to address? I don’t know.

·        “For the therapist, what is important is not the literal truth of a story but its psychological truth.” 

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·        2007 research article from the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences University of Virginia Health System identified 2500 cases of children claiming to remember past lives. 

o   Most are 2-4 years old and stopping around 6-7 years old. Some of th