The 8 Elements of a Past-Life Regression

In his groundbreaking book on the subject of past-life regression, Coming Back: a Psychiatrist explores Past-life Journeys, Dr. Raymond Moody identifies several key traits that identify a past-life experience. These, together with several traits that I have noted from my own experiences as a facilitator – as well as through discussions with others who have experienced it – will help you gain a clearer picture of what past-life regression is and what it does.

The experience is usually visual.

Like a dream, a past-life regression usually manifests as a vision, often observed in the first person as you look out at the world from the eyes of a specific individual. Less often, you might find yourself observing the scene in third person; either way, you are usually aware not just of what is happening, but what your character is feeling and experiencing as well.

Often, you are also able to describe the circumstances that led to the specific vision you are experiencing. You intuitively feel the “back story” that led to this specific moment to occur, as if you have access to the memory, and not just of the body, of the person whose life you are experiencing.

It feels like fiction

The vision of past life regressions can be extremely vivid. But unlike a dream, you are awake, and usually describing what you are seeing to someone else. The experience is often very different as well – a dream usually feels like you are watching a movie unfold; whereas during a past-life regression, the sensation can often feel like the opposite, that it’s your words that are making the events happen.

There is a certain surreal quality to the experience of a past life regression, and it can often feel like you are making the whole thing up. Often, you can even identify an inner voice that says “this is ridiculous”, “this doesn’t make sense”, or “I feel like this is what happened but I have no evidence to prove it is true or explain why it is so”. This skeptical voice is very normal, but also unhelpful. As we will discuss soon, it really doesn’t matter whether your experience actually happened or not – the more you allow yourself to suspend your judgements until after the session (at which point you can analyze them all you want), the more vivid and beneficial the experience will be.

A different you

Very often, your vision of “yourself” in another life is very different than your current one. Social status, age, and even gender, all these may be different during the regression: a young man can experience himself as an old woman on her deathbed.

Interestingly, the experience of switching genders is often had by people with traits that are not stereotypical for their gender. For example, many women who are more cerebral and less effeminate than the average female have experienced themselves as men in previous lifetimes. I have spoken with women who experienced several different lifetimes – and this current one was their first as a woman. I was struck by the fact that these women were in fact more stereotypically masculine in both their careers and personal lives[1].

Challenging experiences

Past-life regressions are usually negative in nature. They often include the (sometimes gruesome) death of the person whose life is being lived. They may also include acts of betrayal, treachery, and immorality committed by – or to – the person whose life is being experienced.

This makes sense from both a spiritual and psychological perspective. As will be discussed later on, for many religions, reincarnation is a mechanism via which a soul is given another chance to correct wrong choices or an unfulfilled task from a previous life. Thus, it makes sense that if you were reincarnated it was to fix some past wrongdoing – or to complete a personal life mission.

On a psychological level, a past-life memory can be a method with which you make sense of challenges you have faced in your life – serving a similar function to that of dreams. Here too, experiencing a negative memory can be a way for your subconscious to come to terms with past traumas

Either way, it figures that the visual manifestation of these experiences will be a negative one. Moreover, an important aspect of these past-life memories is their remarkable vividness. These experiences are not just seen; they are often also felt, emotionally and physically. A person who sees themselves drowning can have difficulty breathing during their session. A person witnessing the sacking of her village can experience the anger, shock, and sadness that accompany it.

But as we will soon see, the negativity that is often part of the experience is actually a blessing in disguise, and can be a powerful force for positive change.

Past lives mirror current ones

Often, while regressing to a past-life, people identify others around them as individuals they are close to in their current life. From a religious perspective, this expresses an idea that souls travel through the world in groups, correcting flawed interactions they had with each other in previous lives. If I failed to care for as your older brother in a previous lifetime, I may be given you as a child in this one as a means of correcting our relationship.

Psychologically, this manifestation of recognizable individuals from our current lives may be understood as our mind making sense of our interpersonal relationships. I may imagine my domineering mother as an overbearing tribal leader, thus allowing my subconscious to express just how much of an emotional impact she has had in my life.

Either way, the experience can be extremely insightful: I spoke with a woman who always had an irrationally negative attitude towards another female family member – a mild-mannered, unoffending person. During a regression session, this woman saw both her and her relative as powerful men living thousands of years ago; in her vision she saw her relative committing terrible atrocities against her family. This gave her additional understanding into her current-life dynamic with this relative, and allowed her to put her relationship with her in perspective of some deep-seated emotional issue.

I recently had an experience where I saw myself stabbed in the stomach by someone who felt I had betrayed him. This mirrored a challenge I had been grappling with for several weeks where I felt that I was letting other people down. I had even been experiencing physical pain in my stomach that felt – I realized during the session – like a sword had been thrust through my stomach all the way to my spine.

This vision proved to most-likely have been a psychological fantasy: it ended with me removing the sword and walking away. But following that experience I felt a great psychological relief, which is ultimately the goal of these experiences, as we shall now see.

Improvement can be immediate

Experiencing a past-life memory can result in immediate emotional relief in your current life. If we understand that our past-life memories often mirror our current lives, and that we experience these memories on a very emotional level, the result can be a deep emotional catharsis.

Catharsis is a psychological term that signifies the release of emotion. If you have ever experienced the relief that comes after a good cry, you’ve experienced catharsis. We often “hold on” to negative emotions, which become part of the way we experience the world. We go through life holding on to fear, anger, and sadness, instead of expressing them and moving on. Past-life visions and the accompanying emotional significance we attribute to them allows us to put our pains in perspective, understand them on a deeper level, and finally, to let go of them.

It’s important to understand that catharsis can be achieved in any effective, emotional form of therapy. Just as it’s possible to regress to a different lifetime, it’s possible to an earlier memory from your current life, and explore, relieve, and redefine negative experiences from your past. In fact, regressing to our childhood is often a simpler process (not to mention a less controversial topic) and I usually recommend that people first deal with their issues from their current lives before they run to explore their other ones.

When I work with clients on the emotional challenges and negative memories that are preventing them from achieving their full potential, I find that we often progress backwards through time. First we address issues in the present moment, their “here and now”; we then move back to their teens, pre-teens, and childhood. At this point, what sometimes happens is that, despite having dealt with all the memories that they can recall from their lives, there seems to still remain some fundamental, unresolved issue.

It is these seemingly unexplained emotions (like the irrational dislike experienced by the woman in point #5) that often serve as clues to residual memories from previous lifetimes. It is at this point that past-life regression can be employed to achieve catharsis on a much deeper level.

In his bestselling book, Many Lives, Many Masters, Dr. Brian Weiss describes the story of Catherine, a down to earth patient who came to him for help with her frequent panic attacks, phobias, and anxiety. After working with her for 18 months using conventional psychological techniques that explored her past with little improvement, Dr. Weiss decided to try past life regression. Catherine regressed to a total of 86 different lives that spanned millennia (often experiencing several lives in a single therapy session), and quickly achieved relief from her presenting symptoms.

I had a personal experience that mirrors this phenomenon, on a smaller but more personal scale. As far back as I can remember I have struggled with social anxiety and not feeling part of the crowd. Through multiple “conventional” therapy sessions, I explored my various memories of challenging social interactions – feeling like an American outsider in an Israeli school, getting teased at camp, or being unable to communicate with my fellow Hebrew-speaking kindergartners.

Over time I came to terms with these memories, releasing the emotional weight they had carried beforehand; but I was unable to completely rid myself of the feeling that I was a social outcast. Finally, during one “conventional” regression session (regression to an earlier age can be done in exactly the same way as past-life regression) I was surprised to find myself in a “memory” from the middle ages, where I saw myself as an individual with a dysfunctional childhood and warped social skills. In my confusion, suspicion and anger, I committed a terrible act (which I later regretted), lived as an outlaw for years to escape the retribution of the citizens, and I was eventually caught executed for my crime[2].

The positive changes I gained from this undoubtedly unpleasant memory were immediate. Whether it was a glimpse into my past or a deeper psychological expression of my feelings didn’t matter. Things made sense. I had experienced catharsis on a much deeper level – the pain of being excommunicated by society, as opposed to being teased by a kindergartener. I understood more deeply what my issues were, I gained insight and clarity from the experience, and I experienced a desire to change my the patterns of my thoughts and behaviors from the dysfunctional ones of my past life character to more productive ones in my current life.

I was able to accept my challenges with a lot of compassion, which was crucial for my self-esteem and my ability to change. As a result, I experienced immediate emotional relief, and a much deeper acceptance of myself and my place in society. Moreover, every time I simply think about my experience, I immediately experience a wave of calm, which I find very helpful when stressful social circumstances inevitably arise in my life.

You may recall from the opening story of James Linegar that his nightmares subsided as soon as he started describing them to his parents. Another video documenting his story, shows him navigating in a boat with his parents to exact location where he remembered being shot down (he was able to guide them without the help of a map). When he reached a specific spot, James became very emotional, and threw a garland of flowers into the water in memory of James Huston Jr. The video concludes with the fact that his drawings of airplanes crashing amidst pillars of fire were replaced with peaceful imagery of Japanese ships.

Most people do not get to have the unique experience of visit their place of death and coming to terms with it in such a physical way. Yet all of us can benefit from the insights from a previous life, and the emotional catharsis that a strongly visualized memory can convey – your subconscious is unable to differentiate between a strongly imagined memory and actual reality[3].

Regression can have immediate medical benefits

We spoke about the emotional benefits that these past life experiences can provide. But they actually go a step further.

There is a powerful connection between your emotions and your physical health – your mind and your body are very much intertwined. Countless studies and psychological phenomena point to this, from the concept of placebo medicine to an entire category of mental disorders called somatoform disorders, where a personal displays physical conditions like pain or paralysis, but where no physical cause can be found for the symptom.

It stands to reason then, that powerful emotional changes that are achieved through past-life regressions can result in positive physical changes as well. Dr. Moody’s subject, Catherine, had suffered from frequent asthma attacks. Despite her explorations of a childhood experience where she had almost drowned in a pool, these asthma attacks only abated after she explored several past-life memories.

When I work with clients, the opposite is often true as well – by exploring their physical ailments and pains, there are able to uncover a deeper emotional pain that “lives” within it and is actually manifesting within their body. Once they reach an understanding of the source of this emotional pain – or even simply allow themselves to experience it – their symptoms often disappear completely or vastly improve. This phenomenon true with conventional, current-life therapy, and is often even more dramatic when vivid past-life memories are explored.

I’ll end this point with a fascinating anecdote that is only partially related. I met a woman who was born with a large birthmark on her abdomen. This birthmark was surgically removed, but later returned. Her brother related to me how, when she was young, her parents asked her what the birthmark represented and she stated matter-of-factly that this was “where she had been shot by the Nazis.”

There are two interesting points about this. First, it’s interesting to note that many Jews experience past-lives memories related to their death in the holocaust.  Second, similar to James’s story, we see that children are often capable of accessing their past-lives without a formal regression process. This is because they are naturally imaginative, expressive and connected to their subconscious.

This last point ties in well with the final principle:

Regression is a learned skill.

The natural state of the mind is constant chatter. We are beset by things to do, decisions to make, and worries to attend to. We are also taught to be weary of emotions, to always be “rational”, and we often have lost connection with our spontaneous, imaginative parts of ourselves.

This is a state that is diametrically opposed to meditation, from relaxing the mind, and therefore from regression that must come from that place. To successfully regress, you must suspend judgment, quiet your thoughts, and listen to your intuition.

The good news is this is a learned skill. You can learn to relax. You can learn to meditate. And you can learn to connect to your spontaneous, creative, and imaginative self. The more people are emotionally open to the experience of regression, the more successful they are at it. Having previous experience with meditation is very helpful. And exploring regressions from your current life serves as a natural stepping-stone to experiencing a past life regression.

Like we discussed in point #6, it is often the most beneficial to work backwards in time through your current issues. By the time you reach early childhood, you will have experienced enough relaxation and emotional insight where past-life regression becomes a natural next step.

Ultimately though, it’s important to remember that your mind knows what is good for you. Your subconscious and your intuition will bring the appropriate memory at the time that is best for you to experience it[4].