Remembering the Past, Reclaiming the Future
by Ruth-Helen Camden
This article was published in Living NOW! magazine, Nov-Dec 2000
Who were you in a past life? A street urchin in the gutters of London? Medieval knight? Prophet of Ancient Greece? Bandit of the Arabian desert? Does it really matter?
Pragmatically-minded people will point out that anyway, you can’t change the past. The present and the future are what matter. Why regress when what you want is to progress?
To the mildly curious, PLT (past life therapy) seems an indulgence, a kind of bizarre past-life tourism. But for those with a burning desire to know themselves, it is a powerful technique of self-discovery, opening inner worlds and inviting an exploration of consciousness far beyond the limits of the ordinary mind. When applied to deep personal issues and limitations, PLT goes directly to the source of problems. They are resolved at their very roots.
The fact that past-life therapy has increased in popularity over the last decade bears testimony to the growing numbers of people whose lives have been changed by it. Through engaging in a course of PLT, many have found their inner blockages swept away, emotional issues resolved, and self-imposed limits exploded. The resulting self-empowerment has brought them more fulfilling jobs, better personal relationships and improved health. And more importantly,an inner knowing of their own being and spiritual roots – subtle and powerful realisations that external life circumstances can never measure. But when your fourth marriage falls apart amidst vicious arguments and intense
emotional pain, what do you care whether you were once an African nomad or a Russian monk? How does knowing this change anything? Well precisely, it doesn’t. Knowing what your past lives were about makes no difference at all.
This is where the kind of psychic readings that tell you stories about your past lives are useless. Mentally understanding the source of the issue doesn’t bring you any closer to freedom. You remain the same person with the same problem, but with an added bit of mental information to justify it. “My lover abandoned me in a past life, that’s why I can’t trust anyone now,” sort of story.
But if the samskara of the event is resolved, then everything can change.
Samskara, an ancient Sanskrit word, means imprint or scar left in the psyche by an emotional trauma. The conscious mind may forget the event, but the imprint remains. And it continues to condition your reactions and view of the world from a deep and unseen level of the consciousness.
Imagine you were seven years old when your favourite uncle made sexual advances towards you. What might that do to your future sexual relationships?
To your working relationships with older men? Suppose your uncle was tall and thin with a bushy beard, and smelt faintly of whisky. How would you feel about men of similar appearance? And what reaction is a whiff of scotch on the rocks likely to provoke in you? Now imagine this happened to you in a previous life. The same samskara, creating the same conditioning, but operating from beyond your conscious memory. You would suffer all the same effects, but you would have no idea
where they came from. This is what PLT is for. Regressing to the incident – no matter which life, means you reach the source of the problem. You see things as they really happened. You re-experience all the sensations and emotions, but in a safe environment, seen from the standpoint of your present adult self. The emotional charge associated with the event is released. You are freed from the behaviour patterns conditioned by that traumatic incident.
Jane’s story
Jane was a 32-year-old film editor. She suffered from periodic bouts of depression, when she felt hardly able to face the world. She described the depression as, “A black space of emptiness.” When the depression descended onto her, all she longed for was to spend a week sleeping and hiding in bed.
In her first session of PLT, Jane regressed to an experience of giving birth:
Jane: “My belly is huge… there are pains… I feel the baby is about to come, but it’s not safe.”
Therapist: “What is not safe?”
Jane: “There are people coming… soldiers… I can hear them outside.”
Therapist: “Where are you?”
Jane: “In a tent… a teepee… it’s a village of teepees and there are soldiers
with guns outside… people screaming.”
Therapist: “Are you alone or with someone?”
Jane: “There are women with me, they are there to help me with the labour…” (beginning to cry) “I want to stop the baby coming but I can’t… it’s coming out. And at the same time three men are coming into the teepee. It’s not right. This is women’s business, it is not the place for men… Oh my God, they are waiting to take my baby! I can’t do anything to stop them… my baby!”
Therapist: “See what happens next.”
Jane: “One of the men grabs my baby boy from the women and wraps him up. Then they go, and they just leave me there… (crying) Then they take the other women outside. I hear more screams… then nothing. I’m left alone. I didn’t even get to hold my baby. I feel very weak, I know without help I’m going to die.”
Therapist: “How does it feel inside you?”
Jane: “A terrible emptiness, I feel it in my belly and in my heart. It’s exactly the same feeling of black emptiness I get when I am depressed. So big it could engulf me. All I want is to escape the pain, vanish into darkness and not feel.”
Therapist: “Move forwards a bit.”
Jane: “Hours pass… it seems like a long time… I’m so thirsty and weak… there
is blood all around me. I feel myself dying, but there is no sense of relief at all. I’m going into the blackness… the emptiness inside me is taking me there.”
After this session, Jane could see how her bouts of depression had been coming straight from the woman in the teepee. After a course of sessions over the next weeks, the depression began to lift.
“It’s as if that woman whose baby was taken has been inside me ever since, crying out to be heard,” she said. “And now something in her is being healed.”
Finding the samskara behind the black emptinesss meant the depression had been addressed at its source. In a few weeks Jane had achieved more for her emotional wellbeing than she had managed to do in several years of intermittent counselling and antidepressants.
Power of the source
What is it that makes sourcing so powerful?
Suppose you want to change the course of a mighty river – it would take millions of dollars and teams of experts to construct a dam large enough to alter the flow of the river. But if you were to divert the same stream at its source, just position a rock in the right place, and the stream will flow down the mountain on a totally different course.
This is an analogy taken by Dr Samuel Sagan, founder of the Clairvision School in Sydney. Dr Sagan says, “…in the psyche, many forces are permanently recreated from their source. Eliminate the source, and the force cannot maintain itself. The force falls flat and disappears, like a river whose source has run dry.” (Sagan, 1999.)
Dr Sagan has trained hundreds in his technique of ISIS past-life therapy. In his book, Regression, Past-life Therapy for Here and Now Freedom, he takes another analogy to illustrate the place of PLT in spiritual work. Trying to reach enlightened states of consciousness through meditation alone is like trying to row a boat held by heavy anchors. You can row with all your might, but until you get rid of the samskaras that anchor you, you remain firmly stuck right where you are (Sagan, 1996).
Not just for fixing problems
While PLT is a highly efficient method to sort out life problems, its real power goes beyond the resolution of samskaras. Through an activation of the third eye an awakening of vision takes place. And through this a new view on yourself and the world around you begins to open. No particular talent is needed, just a sincere desire to see. PLT can be successfully done by anyone with sufficient motivation and psychological stamina to face what is hidden inside.
But PLT is not designed for people suffering from psychological instability or psychiatric illnesses. Neither is it for those who want to be healed with white light without seeing the source of the darkness.
Belief versus experience
And what about those who are not sure whether they believe in past lives? When a therapy is based on experience, belief is irrelevant. Samskaras are revealed and emotional charges released, and as a result, something changes inside yourself. You have gone beyond a mental understanding of the cause of your problem, you have seen it for what it really is, and emptied it of its emotional
charge. And that makes you a different person. For those who have undergone a course of PLT, the results speak for themselves.
Ruth Helen Camden is a qualified psychologist and past-life therapist practising in Sydney, Australia.
References
Camden, Ruth Helen, Past Lives, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2009.
Sagan, Samuel, ISIS Manual, Clairvision, Sydney, 1999.
Sagan, Samuel, Regression, Past-life Therapy for Here and Now Freedom, Clairvision, Sydney, 1996.