I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of Past Lives. The thought we might reincarnate over and again and have unexplained memories and experiences sparked intrigue for me.
The stories of instant bonds with strangers, and a feeling of safety and connection with some places and a disconnect in others resonated with me.
I was desperate to learn about my own past lives.
And also, to learn how to use hypnosis or journeying to take others into their own past life exploration.
Whilst I dabbled a little in both things throughout the years, it was only when I trained as a hypnotherapist that I had the confidence to make it part of my practise.
Where does the concept of Past Lives come from?
Whilst author Brian Weiss is usually credited with the explosion of Past Life belief back in the late 20th century, people have believed the soul moves between lifetimes as far back as Plato. We find the concept of reincarnation within Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism. There are also groups within Catholicism and Islam who believe in reincarnation.
Whilst reincarnation exists in many mythologies and cultures throughout history, it’s focus was around learning and karma. The soul was believed to inhabit different kinds of body, not just human, and the experiences you have in this life helped shape the body your soul would take in the next.
Brian Weiss, through hypnosis, identified individuals who had many human lives.
He helped these individuals access memories of their past lives through hypnotic trance and has written many books on the subject.
But belief in multiple human lives didn’t start with him. Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente, and the Bricketts Wood Wiccans spoke of being witches within their previous lives. They were simply re-finding each other and their spiritual path to continue as witches within this life.
Today there are lots of hypnotherapists offering past life regressions.
Many people believe the recollection of these different lives is proof of reincarnation. As a witch, I recognise that feeling of connection and belonging the original Bricketts Wood witches experienced so strongly. But as a social scientist, I also want to understand what is happening in the brain when we experience past life regression.
In psychology, we’re still figuring out how the brain works. Whilst we don’t even need to take it apart to look at the pieces anymore, consciousness and the human experience of existence is much harder to pin down. We simply don’t know enough about pre and post death consciousness to explain what religion teaches us.
Every now and again science catches up with religion and mythology.
For example, polyvagal theory’s understanding of the nervous system, or our understanding now of emotions being linked to the stomach (which the Egyptians considered more important than the brain)
There’s a belief in hypnotherapy that the subconscious will only do what it feels comfortable with, which explains why asking people to do ridiculous things on stage is not against their will.
Anyone who has ever tried to change a phobia, or a habit will know the subconscious is very good at blocking things it doesn’t want to do outside of hypnosis too!
This belief means we often see things we access in hypnosis as having to be true.
Our current understanding of how memory works is more complex than this, however.
Every time we access a memory, we inadvertently add to it. Memories aren’t static. When we reminisce with others and they remember something we don’t, that gets added to our version of the memory too.
Which is why it’s so easy for police to accidentally lead a witness statement. When you ask, “What did the man in the green jacket look like?” you run the risk of the brain superimposing a green jacket onto the person.
When we’re told the story of someone else’s experience at the same time and place, we may fuse parts of their memory with our own.
Memories are fluid and when we think about two memories together, we can create a link between them. This may lead us to remember a person from the second memory was in the first. Or it can lead us to take emotions from one memory and put them onto another.
Regression is a very important tool within hypnosis.
And we use regression to access present life memories too. Although memories can shift, direct conversation with the subconscious is still the most effective way to look at a memory in detail and without current bias.
Our subconscious remembers everything that’s happened in our lives.
It remembers books, articles, films, television programs. Accessing the subconscious via hypnosis gives us a much clearer, more accurate version of that memory. But those memories still may be jumbled or changed by previous recollections.
More worryingly, it’s much easier to change a memory within hypnosis, so we can inadvertently create new versions of the past through clumsy attempts to reclaim or re-find memories.
Around 30 years ago there were huge scandals where people remembered abusive events from childhood which were later suggested to be fabricated.
How can this happen?
Whilst it’s true the subconscious is very set on doing what it wants to do and is hard to change, we need to be aware it’s goals may not be what we expect them to be.
Hypnosis is an intimate experience, the rapport with the hypnotherapist is essential therefore a person will feel a sense of connection and trust within the practitioner. For some people this leads to a desire to please the hypnotherapist. This can come from people pleasing, from wanting to perform, or it can come from a fear of not following instructions from a person in authority.
In this instance, if the hypnotherapist leads the client by asking “tell me about your past life” or “tell me about the abuse you suffered as a child”, the subconscious is more focused on making the hypnotherapist happy than searching for a memory (especially if that doesn’t exist) and therefore might decide to make up a story instead.
This is especially true of people with a trauma history – their subconscious’ main aim is to keep them safe. If making up something it believes the hypnotherapist wants to hear feels like it’s the safest thing to do, this is the route the subconscious will take.
This does not mean that Past Life memories are fabricated or that they aren’t useful, however.
It simply means, we need to use caution and recognise the importance of not leading the subconscious to look for specific information.
It also means when our conscious mind “couldn’t possibly know this fact” it may well be happily lodged in the subconscious. We can recollect memories earlier than we began to use speech. The subconscious is always listening, even if our conscious mind is not. We don’t lose a memory; we simply judge it to be not important and file it away.
And because memories are fluid, this works the other way too.
We can fuse memories we gained in this life to memories from the past.
Which complicates past life memories the other way and makes us think “but this is a film I saw once” and disregard the rest of the information.
The subconscious sometimes works in metaphor and storytelling.
Many pathworkings and spells involve metaphor and creating scenarios which allows the conscious mind to follow along without getting in the way whilst the subconscious does the work.
Some people believe this is what’s happening when we work with Past Life Regression, that we’re not so much “regressing” someone as helping them to process what’s happening in their life now through story and metaphor. The subconscious and conscious minds can communicate more effectively through creating a scenario to work within.
We can also inherit ancestral memories.
This isn’t as much of a faith-based belief as you may think. Whilst we don’t understand consciousness and memory enough to know if some of our memories originated in our ancestors, we do know the experiences of our ancestors shape our present.
Fears and phobias can be inherited not just through watching our caregivers experience fear, but through the trauma response our ancestor had within their body. Evolutionarily this makes perfect sense. We inherit nervous system responses to things that might harm us.
This can be seen in other mammals too – think about the way horses are terrified of sticks or the way we can scare a cat with a courgette. Those animals are hard wired instinctively to avoid snakes which explains these behaviours.
If we have access to our ancestor’s emotion, can we also through the subconscious have access to their memories?
Do we also inherit cultural trauma?
And if so, how does that manifest? The stories of our ancestors live within us, we keep them alive. We also, every time we tell their stories help to process the energy of their experiences.
Can we then also have cultural memories? Does this help to explain why so many people claim to be Cleopatra or Elizabeth I in a past life?
Gerald Gardner believed he reincarnated with the same witches he’d circled with before.
This suggests the notion of a soul group. A collection of people who are linked and return to each other again and again.
If we look at Eastern belief, we see the concept of the creator as building the universe as an expression of self. Each particle and piece, each soul, each person, each flower, each animal being made from the same piece of clay.
Are we all part of the same spiritual energy? Is this why we can draw on soul memories during past life regression?
And if so, is it due to the collective unconscious identified by Jung or because the energy which makes “us” goes back into that big old lump of clay and comes back out in a slightly different chunk therefore inheriting slightly different memories?
If the Bricketts Wood witches are correct and we have a group we reincarnate within, could it be that instead of one block of clay-energy there are infinite blocks, and we hold the memories of our own soul group?
Attachment theory suggests we’re attracted to what we know.
We may subconsciously seek to repeat patterns from childhood, or from previous adult attachments. We’re attracted to things that seem familiar to us, even if consciously we were hoping to look for the opposite.
This may explain why we feel drawn to certain people and feel like “we knew them before” or to places that remind us of childhood.
Equally though, it may back up the theory of us already knowing a place or a person and therefore being drawn to them. Or it may suggest the patterns we are falling into in life are deeper than simply this life. They may be ancestral patterns or behaviour we’ve repeated life after life.
Hypnotherapists conducting past life regressions need to be careful not to “lead”
By this I mean feeding information to the subject which may encourage them to visualise things they might not have.
If you’ve watched demonstrations of past life regressions on television, you might have seen this happening very obviously – for example asking what a person’s dress looks like suggests they are in a dress. Asking what their house looks like suggests a house.
When we lead a subject either their subconscious creates the things we’re asking them to, or their critical factor (the part that accepts or refuses a belief) throws the whole session into the “I don’t believe” pile.
If you’re used to conducting or attending pathworkings, you may be aware there is more leading within these.
We create more imagery and suggestion because we want to follow a specific journey.
Guided self-hypnosis recordings and hypnosis sessions have less leading because we want to rely on the subconscious taking us where it needs to.
It’s almost impossible to avoid any leading, however. Just by reading this blog post you’ve been introduced to ideas about past lives you may not have before. If you decide to book a past life exploration with me in the future, you’ll already have all this information in your subconscious, and it might shape the way you experience the session.
Similarly, when you come to a past life session, you’re more likely to believe in past lives and understand that’s what you’re here for.
I may choose to not give any cues for previous lives but the memories I’m asking you to explore may already be programmed to be older than this lifetime.
Asking someone to go back to a historical memory “which lives within you” can help to remove this bias towards belief in a previous life. But it doesn’t necessarily mean the subject hasn’t led themselves by already having an idea of what past lives they may have had.
Which is why some hypnotherapists will refuse to work with people who have a strong belief in a specific past life.
I personally see the value in all exploration of the mind. If a person has a strong narrative around a particular set of emotions, I think it’s always worth exploring if they choose to do so. As a hypnotherapist, I’m not trying to prove or disprove anything, I’m simply facilitating where the mind wishes to go.
Whilst I take care not to lead my client, I do ask if they have a specific subject area, they’d like to explore which they can take into the session as a goal. This can be exploring a life pattern, a person, or even exploring a memory they have.
So, what do you believe?
And more importantly, does it matter?
Past Life sessions can be incredibly inspirational and transformative. I can’t tell you what I believe when it comes to reincarnation, or even what consciousness truly is. But I can tell you, the information gained through past life workings can help people to understand their current needs and life patterns.
And if we feel we’re gaining from a process, it’s worth doing.
Want to find out more about more about past life work in hypnosis? I’m hosting an online past life demonstration in October 2023.
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