Author: rh

“And now my friend, the first rule of Italian driving: what’s behind me, it’s not important!”
(Gumball Rally, 1976).

“What’s the point of digging up the past?” someone once said to me. “Why would I want to regress when I could progress!”

Good question. Isn’t the past better left behind? Especially when it’s full of things you’d rather not remember?

It’s a great idea in theory – except that it doesn’t work! Because the baggage of the past doesn’t stay in the past. It’s sticky stuff. You carry it with you wherever you go.

When Dominic was a kid his father would often come home drunk and aggressive. Some days it wasn’t safe to speak to him. Little Dom had the bruises to prove it. He tiptoed around his father with fear and caution. He learned to make himself scarce as soon as he heard the front door open at the end of the day. In his teens, Dom’s fear turned to hate. As soon as he was old enough he moved out, vowing never to look back.

Except that leaving the bad memories behind wasn’t as easy as he thought. Even now, as an adult in his 30s, Dominic avoids confrontation and feels nervous around aggressive people. Dominic doesn’t like anger. It scares him. He’s a nice person. The last thing he wants is to become like his father.

But deep inside Dominic is angry. Angry that his childhood was shadowed by fear. Angry that other people still get their way at his expense. Angry at himself for always being Mister Nice Guy.

Dominic’s abusive childhood happened in this lifetime, but if it had been in a previous life, the end effect is the same. The emotional imprints stick. The main difference is that past lives aren’t as easy to remember as this current one. But the scars are just as easy to see, even if you don’t remember how they go there.

If Dominic wants to be truly free he’s going to have to do something about that baggage. Ignoring it doesn’t work. He needs to dig that old garbage up, see it in the daylight and let it go.

That’s what past life therapy does. It shows you where the garbage comes from. And it does it in a way that brings deep healing.

Short answer: you don’t.
Long answer: well sometimes you do but it’s not what you think.
The more you feel, the more you know a past-life experience is real. It just feels real.
The more you think or imagine, the easier it is to doubt what you’re seeing.
More importantly, feeling bring healing and transformative into the past-life therapy session.

I’m always saying to clients, “What does that feel like?” or, “Feel that a bit more,” or, “How does that make you feel?”. Because the more there is feeling, the more meaningful an experience can be.

Experiences of other lives can be incredibly vivid. You feel yourself in another body, in another time and place. Your body feels large and muscular. Or maybe it’s weak and misshapen. But you’re not just seeing or imagining it, you are feeling it superimposed on your own body. You know that if you open your eyes you will see yourself lying comfortably in the therapy room, in the body you know. And yet… here you are, huge and strong. Or dying, helplessly feeling your life force ebb away. Or you’re a different gender to now. Or a small baby. You are here and now and at the same time you can clearly feel this other body that feels like it’s yours from another time.

If you extend your awareness you sense a landscape around you. You might not see it so much as feel it. You just know. There is a forest and rocky hills. Or maybe a town. There is someone you are furious at. Or you are lonely and sad. The less you try the more easily the impressions come to you. You notice a certain warmth in the air, or a different quality of light. And with this comes emotion: fear, sadness, joy, love. In IST (the method of past life therapy I use) there are no mental questions like, “What’s your name?” or, “What’s the date?”. The experience comes to you through your senses and inner feelings.

This means that a past-life therapy session is very subjective. Because it’s all about you and your experience, who cares if things happened exactly like that? What matters is what happened for you and how it affected you.

The power of personal transformation is to be found in the realm of feeling. Change happens through direct experience.