Tag Archive for: anxiety

What is a Past Life Regression?

Our Answers Lie Within Us

Reading Time: 3 minutes

We are on the threshold of a new paradigm. More and more people are beginning to understand and identify ourselves as multi-dimensional beings. I was recently invited to speak at my alma mater, Saint Olaf College, by some students who were interested in the work I do. I spoke for an hour about past life regression. Ten years ago, I was also invited to speak there about my work, but past life regression was never mentioned because it was too  “outside the box.” I was delighted to witness the expansion of people’s beliefs systems. I explained that although we are human beings, but we are also spiritual beings using a body. This means that as we go deep within, we can gain a respite from the busy world of our lives and of our minds. As we go deeper, we tune into a built-in inner guidance system that is invested in our growth and evolution. Deep peace and clarity can be experienced, as well as answers and solutions to long standing problems. Here’s a case example that demonstrates this:

One of my clients (I’ll call her Shelly) was curious about experiencing a past life regression and decided to focus on a feeling of anxiety that was always beneath the surface, particularly in large crowds. She had a vague fear of not trusting people and was often on edge, even at home, as though an intruder might break in. She also had a phobia of having anything around her neck.

As she allowed her consciousness to go deep within, she became aware of a life of an African male slave brought to America on a ship, feeling confused, scared and angry. Here are a few descriptive excerpts from the session: “Fields… cotton…I bond with others, but feel alone. We don’t laugh…always a sadness…I run away…there’s overwhelming fear, I’m going to be caught. I’m running as fast as I can go…starting to hear dogs…run through a stream…feet cut…they’re closer…caught me…whip me…going to hang me. I leave the body just before they hang me…I watch it from above…I’m free…”

In traumatic deaths, the soul often leaves before the body is actually dead. As we progressed further into the freedom of the soul realm, we released the fear and confusion that was left over from that life and replaced it with energy of the soul — happiness, playfulness and joy — the part that was lost when the fear energy covered it up. Because we are all energy beings, dense, fear-based energy can become like a sticky residue on our physical, mental and emotional energy bodies, particularly after traumatic deaths, and thus affect the current incarnation. During a session, a person’s inner guidance will typically show them a life that is most impacting this life. Several weeks after the session, Shelly emailed this message:

“It wasn’t until after the session that I really realized how anxious I was. Immediately after the session I felt different, lighter, like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I couldn’t believe how great and relaxed I felt! I was curious to see if the change was permanent or if my anxiety would slowly creep back, but it never did. After a week or two, I realized looking back that I had been anxious all the time, not just in ‘certain situations’. I had never felt as relaxed as I did after the session, nor for that long a period of time. What turned out being something I wanted to do out of curiosity and for fun, ended up being the most positive life changing experience and the best money I’d ever spent!”

The healing part of the session occurs in the peace and clarity of the soul realm. But it is important to realize that this is actually a higher dimension of ourselves. We are multi-dimensional beings, so an aspect of us is already steeping in what we are looking for at a conscious and subconscious level, namely deep peace, love and clarity. Within ourselves lie tremendous resources for insights, releasing of limiting feelings and beliefs, and discovering the truth of our being. Once we have experienced it, we know it. But it’s easy to forget in this dense physical reality…the veil is strong, but certainly is getting thinner. We all need gentle reminders of our inner resources.

Uncovering and Healing the Roots of Anxiety and Depression

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I recently wrote an article for the Edge Magazine. It’s relevant these days as many people’s subconscious issues are coming to the surface while the consciousness of the planet shifts and raises. This happens for the purpose of releasing what no longer serves you from your body/mind system and integrating the learning of it into the fullness of your being. Freedom calls anything to the surface that is not free. Please enjoy these words:

Anxiety and depression can be physiologically, spiritually and/or mental/emotionally based. But since the body, mind and soul are all interconnected, they overlap. Often anxiety or depression has to do with the past affecting you, and this can be uncovered and healed because you are far more than your past. If we put anxiety and depression under a microscope, we see that it is typically made up of a myriad of negative thoughts, feelings and beliefs that began somewhere in the past, occasionally even a past life. The good news is that although the past can have a strong grip on you, it no longer exists except as a memory, which is a combination of thoughts, feelings and corresponding beliefs that get formed, otherwise known as “thought-form energy”. Yet there is a larger, higher, “more real” part of you that transcends the thought-form energy from the past. When you connect to that part, you can uncover and release the roots of the past that limit you.

Einstein said that you can’t solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that created the problem, but you can at a higher level. Your soul isn’t anxious or depressed — and you are that soul more than you are the ego personality that is anxious and depressed — because one part of you lives on, the other doesn’t. In fact, you couldn’t escape that whole, complete part of you if you tried, it just gets covered up with false beliefs from the human experience. Using hypnotherapy, you can connect to and identify with your wiser soul self that is forever anchored in the here and now, and that part of you can help heal your ego-based body/mind self. You then experience what the Buddha meant when he said the thinking mind is the source of all suffering.

Here are some examples: A woman (I’ll call her Linda) came to me recently feeling very depressed. Underneath her depression were feelings and beliefs of shame, unworthiness, and “not good enough” due to growing up with abuse and neglect. These heavy feelings made life feel as if she was trying to run a marathon with armor on. Using hypnotherapy, she envisioned her consciousness moving up above her body, above and beyond the earth, and into Source energy where she melted into it and felt and compared various qualities of Source such as peace, joy, love and security. This can only be done if you’re not in your thinking mind. From this highest dimension of your being, there is a knowing that nothing in the Universe can harm you, and it is a perfect place to heal the ego part of you that feels stuck.

From this high vantage point, feeling connected to Source, Linda looked down at a timeline of her life — specifically above the 2-month old version of herself. I asked, “Should your infant self, like all infants, ideally be made to feel loved, wanted, valued, safe and secure?” “Is your infant self worthy of love?” The truth is yes, all infants are worthy of love, so it became evident to Linda that unworthiness is not inherent to her being. Shame and unworthiness are messages that feel true, but are not, and Linda could see that she picked up these perspectives early on from her parents. Since it didn’t belong to her, she envisioned and actually felt that heavy thought form energy going back to her parents, who in turn passed it down to where they got it from, their parents, and then down through the generations and into a fire pit to be incinerated into Source energy. She then got back the part of her that was lost when took on the feelings of “not good enough”, feeling the sensations of love, empowerment and joy come back to her. She then sent this energy down to her 5-year old self, Jr. High self, and all the other times that she needed it in her life. Four weeks later, Linda emailed me to say that she felt as if a huge weight had been lifted since the session, and that she had propelled far onto her path of growth and healing.

In another example, a man with high anxiety did a past life regression and saw himself as a young Viking whose beloved grandfather was murdered by a group of three men. He was consumed with anger, hatred and revenge, and he died with this rage. These heavy feelings kept a sliver of his soul consciousness stuck around the earth plane, unable to move up into the higher realms after death. We did a soul retrieval and thus healed and re-integrated this lost soul aspect of himself. Six weeks later he reported that since the session he felt much less anxious, and things which would previously cause him much stress and worry no longer affected him.

It is indeed profound and helpful to connect to a higher part of yourself that already is whole and complete, that you can never really escape from, in order to heal the part of you that feels stuck. Then it becomes clear that happiness is actually a perception shift away.

A New Paradigm in Emotional Healing

Reading Time: 3 minutes

For awhile now, the approach to emotional healing has been to notice what the problem issue is, such as anxiety or depression, and then manage the symptoms the best you can with medications or coping skills. There is certainly a time and place for symptom management. However, as consciousness rises, a new perspective in healing is emerging which is to view the emotional symptoms as not something to fight against, but instead as something that is yearning for your full attention, because it is ready to be released from your body/mind system. And in so doing, you will also understand why it has been there, like a puzzle to solve.

A natural response to a triggered feeling, such as anger or fear, is to avoid it. However, when you give it your full presence, a type of alchemical reaction takes place. The feeling becomes reduced to a sensation in the body. As you become fully present with this sensation and allow your awareness to sink deeper into the heart of it, you shift from thinking mode to feeling mode. This means two things: 1) you no longer suffer because suffering is generated by the thinking mind, and 2) you become present-moment focused and able to access the subconscious mind. As a result, images or pictures can emerge that give clues as to what the triggered emotion relates to. And as you dive still further into the sensation, other feelings may emerge that underlie the triggered emotion. These are the layers of thoughts, feelings and beliefs that hold the triggered emotion in place. Ultimately, as you allow your consciousness to drop through the physical sensations of all the layers of emotion, you may eventually find your consciousness immersed in a vast nothingness. This usually marks the nearing of the end of the journey, because as you continue to focus intently on this nothingness and notice what’s deeper still, you begin to feel a very light, vast, expansive presence that you are not separate from. This is who you are at your core self…a boundless, infinite presence of oneness which is your deepest essence. In this bottom foundational layer, the words commonly used to describe it are “love, freedom, peace, joy, light, and expansiveness.” There is no longer emotion, but pure awareness, and you know and experience your true self to be this presence which underlies all feelings and limiting thoughts…exactly which people like Eckhart Tolle have been writing about! It’s also known as Source energy.

The result of steeping in this core Self is ultimate clarity. You fully see through all of the deep-seated negative, limiting feelings and beliefs that you have been operating from. An example might be “undeserving and unworthy of success and love”. These limiting feelings/beliefs are easily seen through as not having anything to do who you are, but rather they are seen for what they actually are…an untrue mind program that got passed down, usually through the generations like an unconscious virus. In that moment you know without a doubt that who and what you actually are goes far beyond any limiting thought or belief, thus these limiting beliefs begin to release their grip on your subconscious mind and your identity. Thus you awaken to your true self.

Lately I’ve been guiding many of these healing inner journeys to freedom as part of the Emotional Healing Session that I use. I first read about the process years ago in a book by Brandon Bays titled The Journey, a book well worth the read. I’ve since observed a number of practitioners who use variations of this healing process which essentially utilizes negative feelings as a portal to the profound peace that we all possess within ourselves. It’s been my experience that healing happens in layers, and each journey inward allows you to feel more peace, joy, clarity and freedom as the negative mind programs lose their grip on your subconscious mind and identity. Guiding people to fully experience their true, authentic Self is absolutely part of the new paradigm in emotional healing.

An Eloquent Description of Experiences with Past Life

An Eloquent Description of Past Life Regression

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Recently a client shared with me her narrative of her past life regression experience. I am sharing it with you because it such an articulate description of how past life regression can work. Describing your experience can be quite a challenge. One of the first things people notice after a session is the lack of words there are to describe the experience. There is a reason for this…words and language belong to the thinking mind in this physical dimension, and the entire past life regression experience can only be done when this conscious thinking mind is a silent, uninvolved witness. Therefore, information drops into you as a “download” of intuitive inner knowings and feelings along with some visual impressions, like a strong intuitive hunch. Words can only describe the tip of the iceberg of your experience. In fact, describing what is happening during your regression can feel a lot like multi-tasking. But the most important part is that as the conscious thinking mind gives up control of the process, an entirely new information flow is accessible….the same information flow that might give you a strong intuitive knowing about something. And it gives you precisely what will be of most benefit to you, even if you cannot fully articulate beforehand what that is. This narrative provides an example of this. Enjoy!

Past Life Regression

As a preacher’s kid, and pretty mainstream thinker all my life, I was surprised at 49 to discover a new fascination with the concept of reincarnation and past-lives. I was experiencing some pretty major changes in my life and was not handling them gracefully, so I decided to see if a past life regression would help.  I seriously didn’t expect it to be life changing, and before the appointment, prepared myself to walk away believing that in fact it was a hoax.  I could not have been more wrong.

I did three regressions and a life between lives session over the course of a year, and as time went on, I began to see patterns.  While I generally had specific things I wanted to know, the most valuable insights I received had nothing to do with my questions, but everything to do with what was deep in my heart.  The questions I didn’t know how to ask became the topic of the story.

There were many similarities between the different lives that I found are also themes in my current life.  In three of the four lives, there was a big kitchen table that kept showing up, and significant things kept happening around it.  Even today, I love to cook and feed people. That same big table sits in the center of our home, and life still happens around it.  My current husband was also my husband in two of my lives, and my current sister was my wife in one.  In all the lives, I lived in rural areas, and spent a lot of time outdoors, often gardening, which is also true in this life.

I expected that if this whole past lives thing turned out to be legit, I would find some kind of dramatic wisdom, but in fact, most of the wisdom had an elegant simplicity to it.  In one life, there was an epidemic of some kind in our village, and we had to move.  The major scene in that life was the conflict between my husband and me as we dealt with my fear of change.  By the end of the life, we had happily settled in a new place and raised our family, and I died very happy.  The lesson?  Change is ok.  Relax and go with it.  That lesson is not an earthshaking revelation, but at that moment in time, in this life, accepting change was exactly what I was struggling with, and had been unable to see clearly through my fear.  Experiencing the regression and seeing myself successfully navigate a similar situation allowed me to handle the changes that were occurring in this life.  I found a peace that had been out of my reach before the regression.

The regression that had the greatest impact on me was a life where I was a man who was unable to connect with people.  Because of my self-imposed isolation, when I needed my community to help me save my land, they were not there for me. I lost everything, became a bitter mean man, and finally died alone and depressed. To those around me, I looked like a cranky old man, but inside, I was lonely and in pain, with no clue what was causing it or how to ease the pain.  The heaviness of the depression I felt in the latter part of that life was something I will never forget.

Initially I thought the lesson was about the value of connecting with people and learning to work in teams, which I still believe it was, but there was more.  In the weeks following the regression, another theme also began to emerge.  Visiting that life enlarged my understanding of what compassion really is, beyond sympathy for the poor and downtrodden.  Since the regression, when negative behavior is directed at me, instead of feeling attacked, I see pain and fear.  Having lived that pain, I have a different perspective, and tend to feel compassion rather than anger and resentment.  I can’t change people’s behavior, but I can change my own, and find a healthier and more compassionate way to respond.  It has made a huge difference in how I work with people!

By far the most comforting result of these regressions is that I have lost my fear of dying.  Do I want to die now?  No.  But I have experienced death four times, and I can confidently say that it is not the end; it is just the beginning of another season in the eternal life of my soul.  Death, from the soul’s perspective, is neither difficult nor the end, and the place we return to, whatever you choose to call it, is a place of love.

A Fascinating Past Life Account

A Fascinating Past Life Account

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Recently a client sent me a narrative of her past life regression that she wrote as part of a collection of past life experiences that I’m gathering for a book. It was a fascinating session on many levels, so with her permission I’m sharing it here. Since her soul had been an American soldier fighting in Vietnam prior to this life, the information that she obtained in the regression experience was recent enough that it could be verified through research. The session demonstrates many things besides the authenticity of past life memories and our transcendent soul nature: (1) very young children can often be aware of the spiritual realm until they learn to shut it down later in life; (2) souls can travel across the world after death to be with loved ones, and then later be aware of how their loved ones are getting along; (3) souls often incarnate in groups; (4) love transcends time and space; (5) the subtle feelings you receive from your soul are worth listening to; (6) although this physical life may seem like it’s all there is, the lives behind the forms here are involved in another experience in the spiritual dimension, and they can intersect with ours. I’m sure there are others that you may pick up on. I’ll add on a side note that, interestingly, this is one of several cases recently in which a client has reported a huge spike in intuitive abilities that somehow got kicked off after their session. The veil between this physical realm and the spiritual is getting thinner.

Enjoy this fascinating account. It could have been much longer, but has been written in a condensed version.

 

“Throughout high school I had a persistent urging to do a past life regression.  I had read books on the subject but had no idea where to go about finding someone who would be able to do something like this.  I often thought about my career goals and had an inner knowing that I wanted to work in a Medical Examiner’s Office and specifically helping families find answers to why their loved ones had died.  Although I had not personally experienced death, I often dreamed that I was a man floating above my body as it was leaving this earth.  I would wake up crying because I missed my former family so much.  It felt strange but at the same time so real.  It was almost immediate upon enrolling in college with Mortuary Science as my major, that these dreams subsided.  Upon graduating from college, I landed my first job as a funeral director.  Although I wanted to work in a Medical Examiner’s office, at the time it wasn’t something readily available and I had this nagging feeling I wasn’t qualified or skilled enough to meet the requirements.  I worked as a funeral director for approximately one year.  In hindsight I realize that the hostile work environment, while extremely challenging at the time, was in many ways a mixed blessing.  Feeling somewhat downtrodden and dissatisfied, I resigned from that place of employment and which literally empowered me and gave me the necessary time to set about doing a few things on my “bucket list.”

The internet was very resourceful to learn more about past life regression and how to go about making an appointment.  When Eric’s name came up, I had a strong intuitive response and immediately knew he was the person I needed to go visit.  I wasted no time scheduling my appointment.  In a way, I felt like this was just a way to entertain my long-standing curiosity and I would go with an open mind and see where it would take me.  I honestly wondered if perhaps this might be a little over the top but there was no way I was going to miss this opportunity.

On the day of my session, Eric and I discussed my purpose for coming and I expressed that I wanted clarification as to what I should be doing in regard to my career.  We also talked about what a normal session would be like and that if at any time I did not feel comfortable enough to continue he would bring me back to a safe place and I was free to express my concerns.  I quickly settled into a state of relaxation and Eric asked me questions about what was coming to me.  I began seeing static, sort of like that of when you push your fingers into your eyes.  While I was present with that I observed it turning into black and white rushes and forming plant-like shapes.  After what seemed like seconds of this, I began to see green jungle-type trees and a lush array of green plants that appeared to be everywhere.  Suddenly, I sensed myself in chaos, in a jungle, there was fighting.  Eric asked me to look down.  I noticed that I was wearing black combat-type boots, green itchy clothes, and could feel a helmet on my head, and my hand and arm clinging onto a rifle.  I kept turning, watching my back, knowing there was an enemy closing in on me.  My comrades were beside me.  Panic was overtaking me and just then I saw bright flashes of white light from bombing and fire.  Eric sensed my anxiety and gently asked me to let go of that realm and back into a gentler and earlier time in my life.

Before me was a red barn, tall green fields of corn, and a white-washed fence.  Tears flowed down my cheeks and I began crying.  There was a consuming feeling that I did not want to leave my family behind; I did not want to go to war.  As my sobbing increased, I could sense Eric’s concern as he asked me what was my name and about my hometown.  I actually gave him a person’s name and the state I was living in at that time.  He asked me to go back in time even further.  I breathed a sigh of relief and there I was a young boy, perhaps about 10 years old.  I was sitting on a bar stool in what appeared to be an old soda shop from the 1950’s.  My parents were behind me and my three siblings were off to the side playing.  Gazing out the window, I was observing cars from the 1950’s era driving down the street.  This was my childhood and it felt so familiar.

Again, Eric asked me to go forward in time.  I am seeing a pregnant young woman and a 2- or 3-year old boy next to her holding her hand.  I recognized her immediately as my wife, and coincidentally enough, she looks exactly like I do now.  I am feeling an excitement as our second child is soon to be born.  A sadness and tears flow again.  I have a consuming feeling that I don’t want to leave them behind.  Eric senses this and again took me forward in time.

I am at base camp.  I see a large green truck with what looks like a white star on the side.  There are endless small buildings every direction, planes overhead, a landing strip in the middle of the camp, and a tall sniper tower.  I turn around and see men in white jackets behind me and feel surrounded by troops at the camp.  I am walking into a building and there dead bodies scattered endlessly.  Oddly enough, I am not scared.  Eric asked me at this point if I see any combat and then the scene changes.

My vision turns black.  I cannot feel my lower legs, and a prickly sensation vibrates up through my upper legs.  I am walking in something deep like thick mud or quick sand.  My gun is heavy above my head; it is night-time and I am in a heavy swamp.  There’s a comrade on each side of me and we move together as a unit.  We make out a vision of a small boat in the far distance; there are men on it, and they are wearing pointy hats.  I struggled to site in my rifle and was aiming when suddenly I am blacking out.

I have no idea how much time has passed but I am waking up in what seems like a prison.  My hands are tied above my head in a dimly lit room.  There is a man in some sort of cage to my left.  There is also something very significant about him, but I cannot comprehend what it is.   There are many fellow comrades and they are caged and tied up as well.  I see a man in a chair that is tilted back being water boarded and it is by Viet Cong.  A dense and overwhelming sense of doom comes over me and I desperately need to get out of here.  At that point, Eric again sensing my anxiety, suggested moving forward in time.

I am lying on the ground in some sort of field, on my belly, my face sweats of blood and there’s a sensation that my face is smashing in on me.  I feel the uniform that I am wearing.  My strength is draining and I am so weak.  Seconds later my spirit is rising and it is leaving my body.  However, there is still a perpetual sadness.  I am missing my family; I want to be at home.  I resist rising with my spirit and hang on with all the resilience I can muster.  I need to see my family.  I get a vision of me beside our toddler.  He is in a highchair.  He sees me.  He is giggling and waving at me.  My wife and other son are with him.  I am here; how can they not see me.  This contributes to my intense grief.  The baby continues to realize my presence and we have this almost telepathic way of communicating.

My wife goes through a dark period of time after my passing.  Eventually she remarries.  I do not like her new husband.  I see a dark shadow around him as if he were wearing a dark suit and hat all the time.  He seems like some sort of a salesman.  Again, I am pulled into the moment realizing I am crying and that all encompassing sense of missing my family is filling my heart.  I have a knowing that they feel like I ran away and deserted them.  My body has not been found.  At that point, Eric gently guides me to my afterlife and asks me to describe my experience.  I experience a huge shift into the most beautiful, peaceful, and loving place and feel like I am a part of it.  It is beyond words as if being part of a heaven beyond what we are capable of even imagining.

At this point in time, Eric asks me about my family from that lifetime.  I know my sons are still alive and living in the state that I was able to pinpoint earlier.  He asks me about my wife and I see a rural cemetery where she is buried.  The date on the tombstone is 1989, which is after I was born in this current lifetime.  I begin to feel her spirit and a heartfelt elation comes over me.  It almost feels like I am having some sort of outer space experience.  I see her outline as a female with a glowing pure white star where her heart should be.  It feels like we are locked in hug that should go on for eternity.  We belong together in this realm and are reunited at such a soulful level.

Eric asks how she died and she points to her heart.  I have a knowing that she is still in the spirit world and she tells me that she is going to come back to me in another form.  She will be incarnated and born to me as my daughter one day.  She assures me we will be together again.  I feel another male spirit kind of “butting in” and Eric wants me to talk to him.  This spirit looks the same as my wife except for a male outline to his spirit.  He takes me back to the torture scene and shows me that he was the man next to me in the cage.  We had so often talked about going back to Nashville where he was from and that we were going to make it out of this prison together.  Eric asks me if this person had reincarnated and he responded to me that he was for a while but died as a baby.  Eric asks me if I knew him and I answer, “of course, he was our neighbor’s baby that died a month before I was born!”  Our mothers were pregnant together much of the same time.  Eric asks me if he knew he was going to die and he replied “I died of SIDS and I did not necessarily know that was going to happen.  It is okay though because we will meet again in this lifetime when I am born as your son.”

Needless to say, this experience with Eric was deeply profound.  I found so many answers to questions that I earlier could not even be prolific in identifying.  What was deeply moving was the emotional breakthrough into feelings I had never come close to touching.  They were so real and so intense.  My heart experienced a thawing and for the first time ever, I was in touch with who I really am on a deeper level.

I went into this session with Eric wondering about my career goals and came out knowing my life purpose.  I was put on this earth to be the voice of the deceased and give families answers that they need to know or hear in order to begin healing and finding peace in the passing of their loved ones.  I know this especially because of the pain I felt in my family by what they went through not knowing.  I realized that my vision of working in a Medical Examiner’s office is exactly what I needed to pursue.

Not only do I know why I was put on this earth, but I know that I will get to be with my soul mate (my wife from the past life who will be in a precious form which I can love and nourish) as well as my future son and that death is never the end and love really does have an eternal realm.  I have learned how to love and appreciate the people important to me in this life and also how to empathize and have compassion for people in a variety of life circumstances.

I want to end this on a note where I am proud to say that a few months after my session with Eric, I was offered and secured a position at a Medical Examiner’s Office.  I absolutely LOVE my job!  I also have realized my life partner in this realm and we are engaged.  Had I not done a past life regression, I shudder to think that I might still be stuck in a same old previous pattern and going through life half-heartedly coherent enough to know something significant was just under the surface but clueless as to what that might be.  Most importantly is that I have learned what it means to love another person in a spiritually unconditional way regardless of gender, circumstances, and have experienced  how that eternal love transcends time and space.  In miraculous ways this regression session with Eric integrated an unconscious past into a current consciousness where I am much more aware of life on many levels and with this special knowing the past integrates and guides me as I move forward.  With this known confidence, I am able to deal with challenges from a much higher state of consciousness and assist others as circumstances present, not only in everyday life but in my career with the Medical Examiner’s Office.”

Eric-J-Christopher Home3-Present Life Emotional Healing 166 700x400

What is Hypnosis?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

‘Hypnosis’ is perhaps one the most misunderstood words that exists. It is actually the opposite of what most people think, which is often derived from stage hypnotists and movies. The two main myths are: 1) you are not in control; 2) you are not awake and aware. No matter how deep you go in hypnosis, you will be in control and you will always be wide awake and aware. For example, when you are swept up in the drama of a film in a movie theater, you are actually in a fairly deep state of hypnosis. In an engaging movie, you are very focused on the story that is unfolding on the screen to the point that you barely notice the people eating popcorn near you. But of course you’re not asleep…you know that if you wanted, you could get up at anytime and buy popcorn or use the bathroom. The same is true with any form of hypnotherapy – even at the deepest point of the session — if you wanted to, you could open your eyes and declare that you want to use the bathroom, or write something down, etc. It’s just a different level of consciousness that you’re accessing.

Hypnosis is a relaxation of the body and mind, together with a focusing of the mind. A definition of hypnosis is “a bypass of the analytical and critical thinking factor of our minds.” To apply this to the movie example, it’s when we don’t continually tell ourselves during the film: “what’s happening on that screen is not real, it’s only light images from a projection booth, and besides, those people on the screen are only acting, none of this is real, etc…”. If we continually focused on those facts, we could not let go and enjoy the movie. We go into varying states of hypnosis every day, such as when you are driving down a road while being lost in a daydream. Therefore, anyone can and has been hypnotized.

It’s important to know that all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. I don’t actually hypnotize you – you hypnotize yourself using my suggestions and your imagination. Therefore, you can allow yourself to go into as deep of a hypnotic experience as you want to be, and you’ll always be awake and aware, knowing that you’re in the chair. During the experience, you may hear a car going by, or a dog barking outside, but none of that disturbs you as you continually focus inward.

The power of hypnotherapy is that we can use it to access and change the subconscious thought patterns that govern our lives. When we dream at night, sometimes those dreams are filled with metaphors that mirror the issues that are going on with us, whether we are aware of them or not. Who gives us these dreams? No one else does, yet we don’t consciously give it to ourselves. It comes from an unconscious, very wise part of us. Using hypnotherapy, we can easily access the same part of us that gives us our dreams, yet the difference is that we are awake and aware during the process. It is a very effective tool in healing because we can access and heal the emotional core of our anxieties or any stuck, limiting pattern where the root of the problem lies – the subconscious mind.

With spiritual hypnotherapy we can also access information from other lives that our eternal soul has lived, simply because we cannot separate ourselves from our indestructible soul self which exists outside of time and space. As we quiet our thinking mind and go deep within, we can tune into our “more permanent”, eternal aspect of ourselves.

A Sure Antidote for Depression and Anxiety

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There is a reliable antidote for depression and anxiety, and that is wisdom, which is to understand a “truer” version of yourself, which is to spiritually wake up, which means beginning to identify more with the life energy behind the body and less with the mental and emotional programming of the body form. The biggest value of past life regression is that it essentially helps in this process of spiritually waking up because you can directly feel and experience yourself as the life that animates the form. It can’t be known by thought, but from a higher dimension of consciousness beyond thought, whereby which you experience yourself as vast eternal stillness and presence.

From the perspective on earth, the sun appears to rise each morning and set each evening. But this is only relatively true. From space, it’s known that the sun never actually rises or sets, but shines continuously. Similarly, the identification of being the human is only “relatively true”, and according to the Buddha, is the root of suffering. As you become more aware of the one sustaining life behind not only your body, but all other forms, and you identify with it more and more, the subtle beliefs behind depression and anxiety begin to fall away. You identify more as a being of pure creative potential, which in actuality is a “truer, more absolute” version of yourself. This is a truth that can be known by experience, and not merely as an intellectual concept.

Eckhart Tolle writes that the most significant thing that can ever happen to a human being is the process of becoming aware of your thoughts. As this happens, you eventually begin to identify less with the incessant mind stream of negative chatter that holds you back in life, and more with the awareness that notices a thought or a subtle unconscious, limiting belief. This is the beginning of the “waking up” process, where you see an out-dated thought or belief for what it is…just faulty mental conditioning that you believe in less and less. Again, the biggest value of past life regression is that you fully experience the separation between you and the incessant thought stream. You instead experience yourself as vast stillness, awareness, and enormous potential. From that vantage point, all negative beliefs about yourself seem erroneous and silly. In this manner, it serves to help you in the “waking up” process.