Past Caring

Is regression therapy history in the making – or merely another addition to the long list of life’s mysteries?

We all have questions about our lives – so many questions.
Back in April, at the fabulous Sydney Convention Centre, famous American psychotherapist and author Brian Weiss held a one-day workshop on past lives and attempted to answer some of those questions. The workshop was a great deal at A$195, so I went along.
Weiss presented the entire day alone, a big ask of a man who is nearly 80, to a packed audience of about 900. He has a dry sense of humour and made quite a few jokes during his discourses on past lives and the nature of the soul, including one about a koala regressing to a kangaroo in a past life. He then added wryly that he hoped he wouldn’t see any headlines saying, ‘Brian Weiss claims to have regressed koala’. I suspect he is no stranger to reporters sensationalising his words.
There were four activities during the course of the day: a 40-min relaxation/guided visualisation exercise to take us back to a past life, a psychometric exercise, where we held a personal item of the person next to us and reported what impressions or images we received, another guided visualisation to take us back to a past life and, finally, a healing visualisation based on Gestalt therapy, where you imagine you are the symptom of your ailment and ask it questions – what is it trying to teach you? What has it enabled you to avoid? The premise being that often the understanding of the cause or value of the illness will enable the sufferer to release it.
Weiss books (most notably, Many Lives, Many Masters which celebrated its 20th anniversary on Oprah) have recorded numerous cases where clients have recognised the past-life root of an illness or problem and it vanished immediately or began to heal. He told us of a client who had come to one of his workshops barely able to eat without choking. During a regression, she discovered that she had eaten something poisonous as a child and remembered herself choking and dying on her mother’s lap. This revelation started the healing process and at her last communication with Weiss, she was able to eat 75 different foods comfortably.
There was a question and answer segment where the usual questions were asked, including one about animals (which Weiss answered by saying he thought they had a group soul rather than individual souls, and that he thought their purpose might be to teach us about unconditional love, as animals love us no matter what we do or have done).
Weiss made frequent mention of the fact that we are all connected, which was reflected in the title of his most recent book, Same Soul Many Bodies. There is one universal soul that expresses itself in many bodies. Each of us is a part of this universal soul and, as individuals, we get to experience many bodies over the course of many lifetimes. The purpose of these lifetimes is to learn lessons in compassion, love, tolerance etc. Success, wealth, power and fame were not mentioned and clearly not valued as goals in the universal plan. They are temporal and have no lasting reality for the soul. In fact, the ‘currency’ of human spiritual evolution, as mentioned by one of his clients quoting a ‘master’ during a regression, is love. Weiss uses the quote in his book title, Only Love is Real (an intriguing story of soul mates meeting).
We learned that the soul isn’t just confined to the body. Your soul, essence, what makes you ‘you’ is so magnificent that only a small part of it is present in this body. Here, Weiss held up his little finger to represent metaphorically the amount that is inhabiting the body, while the rest of his body would represent the proportion of soul that remains in the invisible, so to speak, available to be contacted, available to guide you (your ‘higher self’) and available to greet loved ones when they ‘die’ – even though you may have reincarnated again. It’s all very mysterious and it was clear that from his many experiences with clients, Weiss knew much more than he had time to tell us in one day.
He covered most of the topics that you might expect to hear about in a workshop like this: past lives, afterlife experiences, the nature of the soul, love, death and ‘the light’. Not unexpectedly, many of Weiss’s clients report moving towards a bright light when they die: a powerful, multi-coloured light of love and healing. People with illnesses are healed after death by this light and then go on to review their lives.
The life reviews as described by his clients were fascinating. Experiences where they had expressed love and compassion were reviewed and re-experienced in terms of the (positive) effects they had on others. They were shown how our every action affects the actions of others, like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. Random acts of kindness are especially powerful.
Experiences in which the person had harmed another or expressed anger or aggression were also re-experienced – and magnified – from the point of view of the hurt they inflicted on the soul of another. Clients reporting on these were deeply affected by the pain and its consequences, caused intentionally or unintentionally. Both positive and negative actions are re-experienced, it seems, with the aim of deciding on future life lessons.
People who commit suicide still go to the light, not to purgatory or elsewhere. However, their life review might include other ways they can learn the lesson they chose to bypass in this lifetime. It was all very hopeful and uplifting.
Weiss mentioned a funny story of a woman from China who came for a regression because she remembered a past life in America. Her interpreter translated when Weiss spoke his relaxation instructions and then, when the client spoke, the interpreter translated back the other way. Confusion arose when the Chinese woman regressed to her past life as a pioneer and started speaking English. The interpreter, who was on a roll, did not notice the switch and continued translating her comments for Weiss, but from English into Chinese. It all got sorted, but the amazing thing, of course, was the Chinese woman who had never spoken English speaking it fluently. 
He mentioned that quite a number of the thousands of people he had regressed over the last 30 or so years had done their own research into the past lives they’d remembered under hypnosis and discovered that the people they remembered themselves to be were in fact real people, who lived in the times and places that they’ve recalled.
Tragically, I didn’t experience a past life of my own – on this occasion – and I’d had such high hopes! I’d read a number of his books, unlike about 30 percent of the audience who, during a brief poll at the start of the day, admitted to having read none. However, during a poll at the end of the day when Weiss asked how many had remembered a past life, about 60 percent of the audience raised their hands.
A buzz of interest went through the auditorium when Weiss informed us that he was planning a three-day workshop/retreat, in which participants will go deeper, practise the techniques with each other and share past-life experiences and lessons – all with the aim, of course, of living a better, more meaningful life this time around – and perhaps getting answers to a few of those eternal questions.

Carla Heslop
www.eliteenglishcoaching.co.nz

Psychometry Exercise

While I personally didn’t experience any telling impressions during the psychometry exercise at the workshop – unlike some people, who picked up on their partner’s physical symptoms or who were able to give accurate descriptions of partners’ loved ones who had recently passed away – my first-ever psychometry experience was quite mind-blowing so I will tell you about that.
It happened when I was invited to an evening with a group of people interested in the spiritual side of things. I’d never heard of psychometry, which is basically receiving impressions or information from an inanimate object, but I was willing to give it a go.
Firstly, like Dr Weiss, the group leader took us through a guided relaxation visualisation, where we relaxed all the muscles in our bodies from our head down to our toes; then we imagined a sunny beach, rippling waves etc. Then, with our eyes closed, one partner gave the other an object. When I received mine, I felt a plastic card, palm-sized, with embossed print on it. “It’s a credit card!” I exclaimed.  “There’s no point in giving me this because all I will imagine is you going shopping with it and buying things.”
My partner, a patient chap, said, “Just see what impressions you get.” I imagined I could see him driving into a petrol station and paying for petrol with it. “Very good,” he said encouragingly. “Anything else?”
“No,” I said, feeling like a bit of a chump. What a dumb exercise. Why weren’t we talking about auras, telekinesis, Russian mind experiments?
“Keep trying,” he said. So, I tried to look like I was trying. I could see some bookshelves, but they weren’t in a shop, and no one was buying any of the books. Obviously, the exercise was a dud. I opened my eyes. My partner looked at me hopefully.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just rows and rows of bookshelves. No one using any credit cards. Didn’t make any sense whatsoever.” There may have been the slightest hint of reproach in my tone. (If only he’d given me a better object, a person such as I – intelligent, talented, simply brimming with spirituality – would have had a much better chance of psychometrising something.)
As I returned his credit card, I happened to glance at it. It wasn’t a credit card at all. It was a library card.