Adventures in Past-Life Regression
by David Aronson, certified hypnotherapist and holistic healer

My first experience with past-life regression occurred many years before I became a professional hypnotherapist.
One morning, at the age of 25, I awoke to find myself overwhelmed with anxiety for no apparent reason. The anxiety was so powerful that I was unable to get myself out of bed. I couldn't function at all. It was like having a panic attack that never ended. Along with this panic, my mind was also filled with uncontrollable thoughts of death and dying. Years later, I would discover that the anxiety and obsessive thoughts were caused by an infestation of toxic black mold in the room where I was sleeping.
At the time, however, I had no awareness of the mold and made a futile mental search for the origins of the anxiety. The only thing I could come up with was the notion that it was a delayed reaction to an experience I had had a few days earlier. The experience was this: I was leaving a subway station late at night on my way home from center city Philadelphia. Two teenage boys ran past me. One of them said, "Look out--he's got a gun." I walked the two blocks to the bus stop in a state of alarm. As I stood waiting for the bus, several gunshots were fired. Now in a definite state of fear, I ran and hid behind a dumpster along with some other commuters. Just then the bus pulled up and we got on in a hurry. Other people boarded the bus breathless and scared and somebody said, "Let's get out of here--there's someone shooting a gun out there!" The bus driver took off with tires squealing. Everyone seemed relieved; we had literally dodged a bullet.
The bus stop shooting was frightening to be sure, but no one had been killed or harmed as far as I knew, and it just did not seem to be an adequate explanation for the crippling anxiety I was experiencing. After a couple of days with no let-up, I decided to go to the hospital. A psychiatrist prescribed some sort of drug. I went home and took the drug and the anxiety got worse. I called the hospital and the psychiatrist told me to take more of the drug, and I foolishly followed his instructions, and, of course, my condition became even worse. There was so much tension in my body I felt as if my chest was going to explode. Eventually, I returned to the hospital, and saw another psychiatrist. The new psychiatrist took one look at my chart and said, "Why did he give you this? He shouldn't have given you this." Mercifully, a shot of some other drug took away the acute tension and pressure, but the next day, I was back to my original state of anxiety and uncontrollable thoughts of death. Clearly, psychiatry was not the answer.
It seemed to me that some sort of alternative medicine was required, and so I sought out a rebirther. To back up a bit, rebirthing, a healing technique involving a particular form of circular breathing which allows the body to release old traumas on a cellular level, was something I had had a lot of positive experience with. Rebirthing was the first holistic, body-oriented therapy I had ever been exposed to. After several years of standard talk-based psychotherapy, I had reached a point where I understood the origins of my problems and issues very clearly on an intellectual level, but still found myself caught up in destructive and self-defeating patterns of thought, emotion and behavior. Twenty-plus sessions of rebirthing had gone quite far in releasing me, to one degree or another, from many of those patterns. And so, I quite naturally felt that rebirthing might help me change the situation I presently found myself in.
In my search, I came across the business card of Kathy, a hypnotherapist, energy healer and trance channel, on a bulletin board in a health food store. I spoke to her on the phone and she assured me that what she did could help me just as much as rebirthing, so I made an appointment.
"The first thing I'm going to do," Kathy told me as I lay on her couch during our first session, "is hypnotize you and take you back to any past lives that may have a bearing on your current problem." Hypnosis and past-life regression were both new to me, but I kept an open mind and, quite frankly, was willing to try anything at that point for relief.
I went into a trance very quickly and Kathy instructed me to go back in my memory past my birth and into any other lifetime whose events were affecting my current life. What happened next was unique and remarkable. I had a memory, but it was not like a typical memory. It was not a picture in my head but rather occupied the physical space around me, as if I was sitting in the middle of a three-dimensional hologram. What I "saw" was the shadowy figure of a man leaning over me as I lay in a bed, and then the man's hand holding a knife and stabbing me in the chest over and over. I had the curious awareness that I was a woman, the person being murdered in the bed, and also myself, both at the same time. I knew that the woman was terrified but it was an intellectual knowing. I did not experience her emotions myself; I was a detached observer. But yet, at the same time, there was the distinct sensation that I was indeed the one being murdered.
The scene changed and again I experienced myself as two people at once: myself, and a young child, maybe three or four. As the child, I was blind and had some sort of physical disability which made me unable to walk. I was being carried by somebody and the sound of shoes clicking on linoleum made me think I was in a hospital or similar institution. Again, I observed the child's emotions from a distance even though I somehow knew that I was also "feeling" them. There was a sense of bewilderment and frustration at not being able to move freely, along with a feeling of being loved and protected by the person carrying me.
Kathy brought me out of my hypnotic trance and went into a trance of her own in order to channel information about what I had just experienced. The first lifetime had been as a prostitute in 16th century England who was in the habit of picking up sailors on the docks and who had made the mistake of bringing home a psychopath who murdered her by repeatedly stabbing her in the chest. The second lifetime was as a child born with a congenital birth defect which rendered him blind and unable to walk. He lived in a hospital where an orderly who loved him carried him about, and he died very young.
Kathy and I went on to do more healing work and hypnotherapy which did not involve past lives. A lot of it was very helpful and took me a long way out of my anxious state, although the anxiety did not truly abate until I went to live with a friend and his family and got away from the mold completely.
For a long time after that, I doubted the validity of my past-life experiences. They were unusual and helpful to be sure, but were they really past lives? I was skeptical. Then I read a book about psychics who help police find the bodies of murder victims and archaeologists to locate buried structures. There was no ambiguity in what these people did. Dead bodies and ancient buildings were found where the psychics said they would be found. And when they described how they "saw" the past, it was in exactly the same way I described my past-life regression: as if sitting in the middle of a hologram. The memory or impression of the past was somehow in the space around you and "felt" three dimensional.
Reading this book led to me exploring past-life regression and hypnosis with a new sense of assurance that my experiences were valid and that perhaps I had some natural inclination in this direction.
In retrospect, I came to see the connection between the shooting incident and the past-life memories. From the lifetime where I was murdered there was an obvious fear of being killed in a random and unexpected way, which may very well have been the outcome at the bus stop if things had turned out differently. The toxic mold wasn't necessarily the primary cause of my mental state, but served to distort and intensify the fear from the past life that was brought to the surface by the shooting incident. Because I couldn't see the source of the fear and the experience of being murdered directly, my mind was stuck in a loop of death-obsession. When the past life was revealed, my mind was able to release the past-life murder experience. Larger issues in my life around victimization and helplessness, which were also contained in the lifetime as the blind crippled child, also began to shift, enabling me to move towards a more realistic, present-focused, and self-empowered position.
Eventually, I became a certified professional hypnotherapist and an integrated energy therapy master-instructor. Along the way, I uncovered many more of my past lives. Most came directly from hypnotic trance, but some also came from energy work and some arose spontaneously.
One particular past life was revealed to me when I was sick with a high fever. In this lifetime I was a young woman who was apprenticed to an older woman as an herbalist and healer. The time and place were not clear but it was apparently somewhere in Europe during the time of the witch-hunts, because in my past-life memory I had been accused of witchcraft and was standing on a scaffold waiting to be hung. The woman I was apprenticed to I "knew" to be my daughter in my current life. I made an angry and impassioned speech as I stood with the noose around my neck, denouncing the church and the clergy, shouting "You are the ones doing the devil's work, not I!" As my spirit left my body, there was a profound sadness and regret at leaving my children without a mother.
So what is past-life regression really? From a western scientific standpoint, it's a very difficult thing to prove or disprove. Reincarnation is not a widely-held belief in the West and little research has gone into it. The idea of past lives is poo-pooed or ridiculed right from the start, making any serious inquiry difficult. When you add to this all the new age twaddle about people having been Aztec princesses and Atlantean wizards and the like, it seems that past-life exploration will never be regarded as a legitimate field of research in the western world.
In eastern countries like India where reincarnation IS a widely-held belief, there have been many fully-documented cases of children remembering their past lives and identifying places and people and revealing information from those lives that they couldn't have possibly known otherwise in startling detail. One could speculate that many children in the West also likely have such experiences but are dismissed or shamed into silence. We are told it's not real and so the awareness of past lives is pushed out of consciousness.
Regardless of the "reality" of past lives, it has been documented time and again that past-life regression, as a healing tool, can be very effective. There are many cases on record of phobias and other psychological problems, and even mysterious physical pains, disappearing after their "sources" are identified in a past-life regression. For example, as a child I refused to let go of the side of the swimming pool for fear the current would suck me into the deep end and drown me. Being reassured that there was no current in a swimming pool didn't help one bit. As an adult, I learned to let go of the side of the pool but there was always an irrational fear of drowning, no matter how unlikely, whenever I got into water. This fear remained stubbornly in place until I saw a past life where, as a Pacific Islander, I was indeed sucked out into deep water by a strong current and drowned.
The bottom line then, for me, is does past-life regression help people to heal and move past limitations in their lives? The answer seems to be yes. Therefore, the question of whether or not it can be "proven" is moot. As an energy healer, I see past lives as patterns that are stuck in the energy field and are carried by the soul from life to life until they are resolved. This is why the past-life scenario bears such a strong resemblance to current-life situations. It is due to these patterns, like blueprints, repeating themselves with different details, but still the same in essence. These repeating patterns lend themselves to a purely psychological explanation of past-life experiences. Because of the similarities between the past life and the present, it's easy to see them as fantasies constructed by the mind in order to cope with or process the current-life problems. Even if this were all there was to it, which I don't believe to be the case, the fact remains that the regression experience has a therapeutic effect and is therefore, once again, valid and useful.
My experience with my own past-life memories and the numerous regressions that I have done with clients is that the overwhelming majority of past life memories are traumatic. That is why they are stuck in the energy field in the first place. Just as in the psychological model where traumatic experiences that are too overwhelming to be processed are repressed and pushed into the subconscious only to emerge later as psychological dysfunction, the traumas of other lifetimes which are never fully resolved are woven into the energetic pattern of the soul and carried forward into new incarnations. When I hear about people claiming to have been Cleopatra or some other famous, powerful figure, it seems to me that these people are deluding themselves in order to compensate for feelings of inferiority or the like. Past life experiences that are primarily positive in nature really have no reason to be held on to and rarely come up in regressions.
Just as current-life repressed trauma can emerge into consciousness through strange fears and obsessions, so can past-life memories. As a pre-adolescent, I found myself morbidly fascinated by the witch hunts of the middle ages. It became an obsession which stirred up a great deal of irrational fear and feelings of victimization within myself. Even so, I read every book I could find on the subject. As an adult, I've seen three different lifetimes where I was executed for the crime of witchcraft. The first I've already described. In the second lifetime, I was once again an herbalist and healer, this time a middle-aged man who lived in a cottage in the woods. I was accused of witchcraft, specifically the poisoning of children, and killed by being crushed between heavy slabs of rock. In the third lifetime I was actually a member of the Inquisition who came to believe that the persecution and murder of innocents accused of witchcraft was wrong. I spoke out against the Inquisition and was tortured and killed. The tortures that I "remembered" the most vividly involved having my arms and legs crushed. I was never burned as a heretic because I died from the torture. I was not given a proper burial, but simply tossed into a ditch for animals to tear apart. I "remembered" being outraged by this disrespectful treatment of my corpse almost more than by the torture. These experiences were not the most pleasant things to look at, but ultimately led to a greater inner freedom from fears of speaking out against wrongdoing and from letting people see who I really am.
In all of these experiences, things like names and dates are rarely clear if they even present themselves at all. This tendency towards fuzziness in such details has been used to discredit the validity of past-life experiences, but it seems to me that this lack of specifics is prevalent because past-life memories are first and foremost emotional experiences, and are organized by emotional impact or importance. Information like names and dates are intellectual and are no more important to the soul than the knowledge of what you ate for breakfast on March 25th of last year is to you. You don't remember because it simply doesn't matter. This is not to say that those sorts of details never come up. Sometimes they do, but you can't count on them as repeatable phenomena. For me, specific details of clothing or costume are sometimes revealed, and occasionally the contours of a name, but more often it's just a general sense of time and place.
When my daughter was fifteen, she met a boy at a rave and wanted to take a bus to New Jersey to visit him. Her mother was against the idea, but my daughter decided to go anyway, and I agreed to keep it a secret as the boy and his parents were going to be meeting her at the bus station. The night of her trip, as I lay in bed, I was overcome with the horrible feeling that something terrible was going to happen to my daughter and that I was responsible. Despite the fact that I had the boy's phone number and address and the fact that I myself had been taking public transportation alone since age twelve, I could not quell the overwhelming sense of dread. I rebirthed myself, as rebirthing is an excellent tool for pulling oneself out of negative mental states, and, after an hour of breathing, a past-life memory presented itself. I saw an eighteenth century horse-drawn carriage. There had been an accident and the carriage was overturned. A woman's arm was sticking out from under the carriage. I knew that the woman was dead and that she was my current-life daughter. In this past lifetime we were brother and sister--aristocrats on the way to some sort of social event. My sister/daughter was killed in the accident and I felt responsible. There was an overwhelming feeling of guilt and regret. As the scene faded, so did my fear. In the morning I called my daughter in New Jersey and of course she was fine.
In another lifetime I was a retarded social outcast living on the streets in Victorian England. My level of awareness was almost sub-human and I survived by robbing graves. Another lifetime saw me as a woman who was gang-raped. In another I was a light-skinned black man jailed in the southern United States for having an affair with a white woman at a time when this was not acceptable. In another I was an angry man with a lot of money, used to getting my own way, who beat one of his servants to death. All of these lifetimes--these people I once was--seemed very familiar. It was as if they lived inside of me. Psychologically, one could see them as sub-personalities, and perhaps that's what sub-personalities are: fragments of the psyche that develop autonomy to one degree or another, and which constellate around the energetic "seed" of the past life held in the energy field, much like a pearl forming around a grain of sand. Each past-life personality seems to carry a set of issues around a particular theme: victimization, entitlement, misdirected anger, discrimination, naivete, alienation. The "remembering" of the lifetime helps the sub-personality to re-integrate into the larger personality and to put it's particular traumatic fixation into a larger context in which it can be accepted and healed.
Past-life regression can be approached from many points of view: the spiritual, the psychological, the energetic, the therapeutic. All of these viewpoints overlap and perhaps they are all valid ways of looking at the phenomenon. As I said earlier, past-life regression seems to help people to heal and change and, as fascinating as it is to contemplate it's true nature, ultimately that is all that matters to me.