Tag Archive for: soul wisdom

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.

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Using Past Life Regression to Find Your True Self

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Past life regression is one of the most potent ways to connect to the higher, wiser part of yourself in order to resolve issues or move through stuck periods in your life. We become so focused on the worries and stress of life that we rarely connect with the quiet, still witness behind the worries. We become hypnotized into identifying with the continual swirl of thoughts in our mind, rather than on the deep presence that can observe those thoughts. During a past life regression, you become that presence. Then the Buddha’s words become clearer, “All suffering is due to wrong identification.”

It is natural to be skeptical about past life regression when viewed from an ordinary ego-identified level of consciousness. Yet what is often overlooked in nearly every moment of daily living is that ‘you’ are the energy and consciousness that animates the body, and as such, that ‘you’ is eternal and indestructible. For most people, that truth may remain only as an intellectual concept until they die. So if an aspect of yourself is infinite now, then it makes sense that you can begin to ‘tune into’ or resonate with that ‘truer’ self. It’s simply a matter of identifying more with the part of you which is the constant, non-fluctuating self. An effective way to access that ‘self’ is to go within, closing off the relative world of time and matter. This leads to becoming focused in the present moment.  Hypnosis provides a quick and powerful means to accomplish this because it deeply relaxes the body and quiets the mind the deeper you go into trance. A gulf begins to grow between the peaceful presence/awareness of ‘you’ and your thoughts. It becomes easier to identify yourself as the awake and aware ‘witness’ of your thoughts rather than being sucked into the mind’s incessant chatter. In this state of stillness, you can set the intention to see other lives you have experienced.

Past life regression sheds light on your soul’s intention of using your life for growth and evolution. Here’s how it works: As you surrender to whatever your unconscious mind reveals, an impression of another lifetime will emerge. It’s important to trust the process and permit the story to develop. It will ultimately reveal something profoundly beneficial for you. If you try in any way to consciously direct the images that come, it will block the process. Typically a previous life will mirror a deep issue that you’re dealing with in this life, even unconsciously. These mental impressions can be interpreted either as a past life or a symbolic metaphor, like a dream image. After the death scene, you can reflect on how you lived that life from the viewpoint of the eternal soul aspect of yourself. Often the strongest healing part of the session comes when you experience the deep peace, freedom and insights after the human drama. You gain a sense of how you wish you had gone through that life. Perhaps you lived it governed by small fears that held you back in various ways. From the perspective of ‘now time’, outside of time/space, you can ‘re-script’ that life by making different decisions about how you would have wanted to live that life, much like lucid dreaming. You can create a life where you consciously allow the freedom, appreciation, joy and love of your soul self to shine through, unimpeded by subtle, fear-based mind programs and conditioning that are common in the human experience. You not only create that empowered life but feel in your body and mind what it’s like to live in this awakened manner.

At times your higher mind may show you a past life in which you’ve known deep wisdom and strength if your current life lacks these qualities. You’ll be given that life to see so you can merge the powerful love-based qualities of that life with your current one. It all comes from an elevated level of consciousness that corresponds with ‘tuning into’ a higher dimension/vibration aspect of yourself, namely the part that is animating you right now.

A recent, typical example was a woman who struggled with anxiety. She experienced her past life as a woman of high status, forced to keep up appearances in an uptight, rigid society. She was afraid to express her true feelings while trying to please others. Her deep concern over other’s opinions held her back from fully living life, which caused her to feel alone. She was then shown a second life as a woman living in a poor village who was deeply connected to the entire community. During harvest time, everyone worked together, forming genuine bonds without any pretenses. She felt what it was like to be her true self without concern of appearances, and felt the exhilaration of experiencing authentic human relationships. In the time between lives, she could see how the first life mirrored her current life, while the second life revealed a way to live in which fears were replaced with the excitement and freedom of forming heartfelt connections with others. She saw that she had a choice about which way she was going to live this life, and how, up until now, she had been living a fear-based life, overly concerned with other’s opinions. Thus, at a subconscious level, she was able to shift the perspective that held her back in life. Past life regression not only revealed her soul lesson, but also allowed her to fully feel what it’s like to ‘get’ that lesson and live without the subtle fears that blocked and limited her. Because this all occurred at a deep subconscious level, it had a powerful and lasting effect. Over a year later she shared that the session had been quite impactful for her. It’s not uncommon to experience noticeable results in one session.

We are multi-dimensional beings. We have a body, yet at a deeper level of relative truth, we are also the soul essence that animates our body. At the deepest, ultimate level of truth, we all come from the one energy source that animates all life, and from which souls emerge. As humans, we live life as unique, individual ocean waves that forgot that our true essence is the ocean itself. Past life regression is an inward route to gain an experiential glimpse of these deeper levels of your being with heightened clarity. Life trials come and go, and so do lifetimes, but what remains? You do. Past life therapy tunes you into this constant aware presence of ‘you’ that transcends all earthly dramas.

Lessons Learned from 3,000 Regressions

Reading Time: 2 minutes

After guiding 3,000+ past life regressions over the past 15 years, I’ve noticed three common themes or soul lessons that often emerge during the latter part of the session when the earth life is over and is being reviewed from the vantage point of the soul. There is such wisdom in these lessons that I wanted to share them with you.

#1 Do not live from fears or guardedness. You will regret the times that you allowed fears to hold you back or limit your life expression in any way. A common example is withholding your expression of love by guarding your heart from emotional pain. Other regrets include choosing security over pursuing a passion, love or joy, whether it be marrying for status and money instead of love or holding back on following a dream. As Wayne Dyer once said, “Don’t die with your music still left in you.”

#2 Be more proactive in creating your life experience rather than simply reacting to what life gives you. I’ve heard many variations of this same missed opportunity. Unfortunately, we cannot get through life without loss or failure because they are built into the human experience as a means for us as souls to evaluate how the human part of us chooses to respond to challenges. Loss or failure can limit us or it can make us stronger and wiser with a richer life experience. When we glimpse behind the scenes and view life as a temporary role-play, however, losses and failure don’t paralyze us as much. In other words, as we become more awake to our permanent identity, we become freer.

#3 Be more fully and consciously present in each moment of life to experience more joy. It reminds me of Emily’s famous line in the play Our Town, “Is anyone really aware of life while they’re living it?” This is a theme that we all can relate to as we often go through life in our heads rather than appreciating the underlying love and beauty that is available in each instant, often only noticing it when it’s gone.

We can understand these lessons intellectually, but yet not fully feel and experience the truth of this wisdom. The value of past life regression is that it can allow us to integrate deeper soul truths at the level of the body and subconscious mind, thus helping us to more easily live from them in our daily lives. This is because towards the end of the session, the background noise of the thinking mind is silent and you are fully anchored in the here and now, which is actually a higher dimension of your being that is saturated in peace, love and clarity. You are more deeply connected to the soul part of you that is always ‘here’ and never goes away…not only throughout the years of your life as the body ages, but even long after the body is left behind.

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.”

What it means to awaken

What Does it Mean to “Awaken?”

Reading Time: 3 minutes

There are many ways to talk about awakening. In one sense, “awaken” means to shift from the identification with the ego self to identification with the spiritual self. The ego operates from all of the programming and conditioning learned through life experiences, while the spiritual self transcends the physical reality.

Keep in mind we are multi-dimensional beings…part of us grows and changes physically, mentally, emotionally and also as a soul. However, another part of us does not. What part of you doesn’t change? What part of you can say “I’m sad” when you’re five, and then 50 years later can say “I’m sad”? Who or what is this permanent “I” that can notice  feelings and beliefs that come and go? There’s a dimension of you that transcends your ego-based emotions and beliefs, as well as your body. As we awaken we begin to become aware of this permanent life within and yet beyond the form.

One result of awakening is freedom from the fear-based conditioning that the ego lives from and is governed by. Fear is a major component of the ego. Ego = Separation. It’s true that we have separate bodies, but it’s more true that we are souls using a body, and even truer that all souls come from the same one energy source. To fully awaken means to live from the One Self. Christ consciousness means oneness consciousness, and that is why Jesus was also known as Christ, and preached about treating others as yourself…because ultimately they are your Self.

Therefore, waking up is really a radical shift in identity, according to Adyashanti. To awaken is to begin to live from the vantage point of spirit, which is what you can never really separate yourself from because you ultimately are it. To fully awaken is to understand this first as an intellectual concept, then from the heart, and finally from the gut as an absolute inner knowing.

Another way of deciphering your ego self from your spiritual self is to view it through the frame that author Neile Walsch puts it. He suggests that all human thought and actions are based in either fear or love (ego or spirit). He articulates, “Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.” He says, fear judges, is intolerant, lies beneath anger and holds onto it, whereas love empathizes, is tolerant and seeks understanding. Fear feels lack. Love feels wholeness, completeness, that all needs are met. Fear separates, divides, and is based on conditional acceptance. Love sees and feels Oneness. Love unites, and is based on unconditional acceptance. The communication of fear is vague, indirect and withholding of truth, whereas the communication of love is clear, direct, honest and specific.

Where does the love in your heart come from? You are not separate from it. It is there at your core when you peel back the layers of the ego-self. You can fully experience this with any deep inner journey experience like past life regression or life-between-lives, because the ego-self is rendered silent during these inward sojourns.

In closing, here is some pertinent wisdom from Tarun Sardana: “We don’t need a reason to be happy. We need a reason to be unhappy. Happiness is our real nature. When a seeker reaches the Self, bliss is experienced, as that is the very nature of the Self. To make a river flow, we need not give any instructions or reasons. We just need to remove the barriers that we have put up and the river will start flowing on its own because flowing is its very nature. In the same way, bliss is the very nature of the Self, one needs no reason to welcome it; just remove the barriers of the ego-self and the Self shall show up as Sat-Chit-Anand (truth-consciousness-bliss).”

To wake up is to know who and what you really are, and then to live from this place. It’s what we are all trying to learn, whether we are conscious of it or not.

Jewish reincarnation story

If We Knew Who We Really Were…

Reading Time: 2 minutes

In 2003, I attended the first World Congress of Regression Therapy in Holland. Dr. Eli Lasch, a German-born Jewish medical doctor, healer and past life regression therapist from Israel, presented a fascinating paper. He detailed three verified accounts of clients who died in past lives near or in Germany around WWII, and within a few years reincarnated into different religions.

In one of these cases, a Jewish woman came to him from Jerusalem because of nightmares. She was American-born from the Boston area, but moved to Jerusalem to get closer to her Jewish heritage. In her nightmares, she was in a concentration camp, not as a Jew but as a German wearing a swastika on her arm. Dr. Lasch regressed her to a past life as a young German girl in a small town in southern Germany. (He later verified her name through birth records.) Her father had returned from WWI with an amputated leg. He was embittered, cruel and anti-Semitic. Around the age of 16, she ran away from the brutality of her father. Eventually, she worked as a guard in the Auschwitz concentration camp. She recalled how powerful it felt to finally hold the club rather than cowering from one. Through this seductive power she became a cruel guard. After Auschwitz was liberated in 1945, she was arrested and hung as a Nazi war criminal in 1946. Dr. Lasch again verified her name through death records. Even up until her execution, she felt little remorse. It was only in the soul realm when she felt regret over the harm she had caused others in her life. Her soul then decided to incarnate into the group of people she had abused and persecuted. She was born into an upper-middle class Jewish family in 1948, in a suburb of Boston. As she grew older, she felt compelled to move to Jerusalem to experience and immerse herself in her Jewish heritage.

What is the moral of this true story? Perhaps it is to be careful who you discriminate against because you, as a soul, may chose to incarnate into the very group of people that you judge most harshly. How would it affect the world if we all knew this as fact? How would it affect hate groups? How would it affect you? This is the direction we are moving towards as the veil becomes thinner regarding our permanent soul nature. As souls, we are interested in growing, awakening, evolving and also to learn balance. We’re trying to learn to love our neighbor as ourselves, not only because it’s the nice thing to do, but because our neighbor is ultimately our Self. We are here to see past our surface differences to our true Selves in each other.

Past Life Regression’s Greatest Attribute

Reading Time: 4 minutes

One of the most important insights that past life regression offers is the realization that you are an immortal being. This truth more deeply sinks into the subconscious mind as a result of connecting to the soul part of you that already knows this truth, and the trickle-down benefits are subtle, yet profound. You are a soul here and now, which means that you never die. Something that would significantly help the planet would be for individuals to wake up to their immortality. Evidence of our immortality is reflected in the thousands of cases of accurate past life recall.

As we deepen in the awareness of our immortality, it slowly dawns on us that we are merely role-playing here. The goal of this game of human life is to find lasting happiness. We search outside of ourselves for awhile until a turning point in the soul’s evolution steers our focus inward. As we deepen our search, we can experience peace, lightness and love, until one day we realize that these states are not states at all, but characteristics of the deepest part of our being, available when we’re free of the mind’s buzzing turmoil. Eckhart Tolle points out that the key to this freedom is to take the focus off of the content of our minds and place it on the eternal ‘beingness’ or pure, unfiltered conscious-awareness that provides the backdrop of all of our mind’s content…the part of you that can be aware of a passing mood or thought. Yet forgetfulness happens repeatedly, and again we identify with the human part of us that is burdened with our opinions and worries until we once again remember the truth of our being.

The human experience is one of forgetfulness, and also of getting lost…lost in the world of the mind and all of our beliefs about what’s true, about who we are, and things on the ‘to-do’ list. This is my challenge, as well as most of us.

A natural quality of waking up to the most permanent part of you is acceptance. As we live from surrendered acceptance, we can fully participate in the ups and downs that life offers without wanting to escape or be fearful. There is a natural acceptance of ‘what is’, even if it brings unwanted emotions, because it becomes safe to fully feel emotions. When you know you’re role-playing, any emotion can be a rich, textured experience, even the grief from loss. I know people who won’t allow themselves to love again because of the pain of loss. Past life regression usually unveils the illusion of loss, making it safe to love, and feel hurt, and then deeply love again. It also cuts through the illusion of fear, allowing you to know what it would feel like to securely live from your full potential, free of any limiting beliefs and subtle anxieties that hold you back.

A natural acceptance of other’s beliefs is an important, key by-product of identifying with our true immortal selves, given the diversity on our planet. Nobody’s beliefs or dogmas, including our own, need to be taken personally. It’s recognized that all beliefs are products of the human conditioning process, and who and what we ultimately are transcends all beliefs. Then we can accept one another. We don’t have to agree with or even like each other’s limiting beliefs, but there can be a recognition that beneath all beliefs there is something in common….we are immortal, we come from the same energy source, and we have each blindly forgotten this truth. Yet that’s not a problem, because it’s that way by design. It’s the play of the divine Oneness, also known as God’s “Lila” in the Hindu tradition, that we’re all a part of. The goal of this play is to awaken to who we really are, and therefore out of our judgments of ourselves and others. Adyashanti, an awakened teacher, says the best indicator of our spiritual growth is how accepting and tolerant we are with those of opposing belief systems. From the vantage point of the highest dimension of yourself, there is no effort to accept, you are acceptance itself because everyone and everything else is a part of you, whether they’re conscious of that fact or not. Furthermore, it’s impossible to be separated from this part of you, as it’s the backdrop of your beingness. It merely gets overlooked during the human hypnotic experience. A deep inner journey, whether self-guided or guided, can make this evident.

It has been said by many these days that it is imperative that we wake up to our immortality which transcends all of our worries and judgments about ourselves and others. When we can sense and know the sameness beneath our differences, then we can realize that we are all one consciousness, albeit lost and operating through seven billion unique filters of programming and conditioning, resulting in various degrees of suffering. The natural emotion that arises from this realization is compassion. The differences that divide can be washed away by a mere perception shift towards truth and away from the illusion that is mind-created. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” That which divides is illusion. In fact, the only thing that separates anyone from all of their divine qualities is an illusory thought and perspective. This is not a philosophy, but a truth that can be known only in one’s own direct, immediate experience. Deep inner journeys such as past life regression can help you remember not only the truth of yourself, but also offer a glimpse of the reality behind the trials of human life. What is the next level of evolution that your soul is nudging your personality to experience? Go within and find out.

How to Love Yourself

How to Love Yourself

Reading Time: 3 minutes

One day when I was leading a group, someone shared that their goal was to learn to love themselves, but felt it was an impossible task. Others agreed with this statement. Most of them were either bombarded with an endless barrage of negative self-talk, or they felt strong guilt from some past actions. I offered that the easiest way to love yourself is to really know your yourself…to realize that you aren’t who you think you are. The ‘you’ that you have a hard time loving isn’t really ‘you’. You are not your programming and conditioning. Negative thoughts about self come from somewhere, they all have a beginning point in an event or circumstance – you’re not born with these thoughts, unless there’s a past life influence, but even then they began at some point in that past life or the one before, etc. Sometimes the programming can be subtly and unconsciously passed down through the generations, with parents influencing their children based on how they were raised, how love or anger was communicated or not communicated.

Just like you can open the hood of a car to explore how it’s wired and how it works, you can engage in deep self-reflection to see how your programming and conditioning began. An effective way to do this exploration is to go within to access a higher state of awareness. For example, if you have a strong feeling of guilt because of a past action, you could imagine floating above that scene and investigate what was going through your mind at the time. Perhaps you did something regretful because at the time you thought you were gaining or getting something from it, given the mindset that you had of yourself and the world at that time. The only purpose of guilt is to point to what you could do differently next time, and in that moment of awareness you are doing precisely what your highest purpose in life is…to learn, grow, evolve and awaken. The primary way humans learn is by making mistakes. So from the viewpoint of your soul, mistakes are only seen as an opportunity to grow, and in that moment of seeing, your soul is happy. The highest part of you is timeless and guiltless; it doesn’t care how long it takes to get a lesson. Just as you can tinker with a machine to make it run more smoothly, we can be aware of the amazing impact we would have on ourselves and the world if we released the negative thought programs that govern our life and replace them with clarity, confidence, creative potential and freedom – all qualities of our truest self. We’re not here to berate ourselves, or remain stuck and recoiled in fear and guilt, living from a false sense of self. We’re here to challenge ourselves to shine and thrive, to learn to live from our potential, and to experience that the joy of doing so feels better, freer and “more real”.

You are the infinite being that can be aware of a passing mood or thought, and investigate where beliefs originated. There’s a part of you that can be aware of your thoughts. Who or what is this ‘I’ that can say ‘I’ feel happy, and then can notice ‘I’ feel sad 10 minutes later? Thoughts, moods and beliefs can come and go, but the more permanent ‘real’ you is the constant, unchanging awareness, forever anchored in the here and now, that can notice the mind’s ever-changing moods and thought patterns, like watching sticks or debris washing down a stream. The awakened sage, Eckhart Tolle, says the next step in human evolution is to become aware of our thoughts, thus creating a gulf between ‘us’ and our thought patterns. Therein lies the difference between suffering and liberation. It depends on where we place our identity…the ever-changing mind or the mysterious, expansive, boundless awareness that can witness it.

 

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.