soul\u2019s history<\/a> can help you challenge your fears and phobias, explore unresolved emotions and better understand your relationships with people in your current life (because, hey, they might have shot you with an arrow in a past life and you\u2019re still feeling salty about it).<\/p>\nFor those who think exploring past lives is all a bit woo-woo, it\u2019s worth noting that many practitioners and advocates of the process hold some pretty legitimate credentials. In fact, the practice gained popularity in the 1980s under the influence of psychiatrist Dr. Brian Weiss. After accidentally regressing one of his psychiatry patients to a past life from the year 1863 BC, the former sceptic went on to pursue further research and became one of the leading voices in the field.<\/p>\n
Of course, past life regression isn\u2019t evidence-based, so there\u2019s no way to know if you really are delving into previous incarnations or simply taking a dreamy stroll through your imagination. But whether you\u2019re a true believer or not, there\u2019s certainly something fascinating in discovering where a session takes you.<\/p>\n
What to expect<\/h2>\n
According to Karen Joy, a hypnosis practitioner and former psychologist who has facilitated over a thousand past life regressions, every experience is unique. \u201cSome people get it vividly \u2014 I\u2019ve noticed artists and creative people often get it very vividly,\u201d says Karen. But it won\u2019t always be so obvious, she explains, and you need to have an open mind to how the memories may reveal themselves: \u201cIt can come across as thoughts, ideas, images, feelings and impressions,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Karen begins her sessions with a chat about what issue or theme her clients want to dig through. Setting your intent for the process is important so your \u201chigher self\u201d or \u201cguides\u201d know which life to go back to. Once you\u2019re in a relaxed state, Karen tells her clients to \u201cgo to the origin of the issue\u201d, and the journey begins.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s best to go with your first impression and let the information flow through, Karen explains, even if it doesn\u2019t make sense straight away; \u201cIt\u2019s not a thinking process, but more about what comes to you first.\u201d Karen describes it like a puzzle that comes together over the course of the session. \u201cI never know where it\u2019s going or what they\u2019re going to get,\u201d she says. \u201cThen it comes together and starts making sense, and you can see how it has affected your current life, or how a certain attitude or traumatic experience has carried over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unpacking past life trauma<\/h2>\n
Many people seek out past life regression because they suspect they\u2019re carrying some kind of trauma from a previous life. This might present as a mysterious phobia, an unexplainable health problem or just a strange emotional reaction.<\/p>\n
Karen remembers one of her clients, a young man, who had an inexplicable fear of falling. Over the course of his session, the root of the fear was identified as belonging to a past life. \u201cIt seems he had fallen from a plane in a war situation,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
According to Karen, bringing the root of the problem from the subconscious to the conscious can help you to move on. \u201cOnce you bring it into the light, that\u2019s when you can deal with it. When it\u2019s buried, you\u2019re just reacting to it and you don\u2019t know why. So if you\u2019re reacting very strongly to situations and you don\u2019t know why, that could be a past life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Drawing on 20 years of experience as a psychologist, Karen thinks of past life trauma as a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). \u201cAs a psychologist, I helped people with PTSD. To do this, I\u2019d take them back through the experience very gently, to get the emotional release, which would come from seeing it from a new perspective.\u201d She says the healing process for past life trauma is very similar: \u201cJust like you do with PTSD, you revisit it, grieve it, work through the emotions and explore a new perspective.\u201d The key is the \u201cnew perspective\u201d, which allows sufferers to move forward in a healthy, positive way.<\/p>\n
Karmic connections<\/h2>\n
We are familiar with Hollywood\u2019s representations of soul mates \u2014 star-crossed lovers bound by an age-old romance \u2014 but have you ever wondered if your past lives played out with the same people in your life now? Perhaps your boss was once a mean overlord or your current partner a forbidden lover.<\/p>\n
Recounted stories of past lives suggest we regularly incarnate with the same people over and over again. These people might be your current-day family, friends or even an ex-lover. We fulfill different roles and play out different life lessons each time, sometimes repeating patterns over and over until we \u201cget them\u201d.<\/p>\n
In her book Other Lives, Other Realms<\/em>, Karen reflects on a client, Adrianne, who came to her hoping to understand the emotional love triangle she was caught in with her partner, Erin, and a colleague called Cassandra. Through regression, Adrianne discovered a previous life in the 1890s, in which Cassandra was her younger sister, but had died young and Adrianne had never recovered from the loss. This strong emotion had continued into her current life, causing turmoil in her present-day relationships. Understanding its origin helped Adrianne realise she truly loved Erin, and needed to release her feelings and connection to Cassandra.<\/p>\nStories like Adrianne\u2019s are a potent reminder of the power of our emotions, and their unwelcome ability to stick around if left unacknowledged. If not for the sake of your current state of mind, past life stories encourage us to resolve difficult feelings for the sake of our future incarnations. So you\u2019d better work on forgiving that tricky friend or she might come back as an impossible colleague next time around.<\/p>\n
Signs you might be carrying past life \u201cbaggage\u201d fears or phobias with no obvious origin<\/h2>\n\n- An intense, unexplainable reaction to a person, place or thing<\/li>\n
- Feeling \u201cstuck\u201d in life, as if you can\u2019t move forward<\/li>\n
- Recurring dreams or nightmares<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Lauren Furey is a freelance writer with a fascination for all things spiritual. She prefers chats about ghosts, dreams and the meaning of life over small talk any day.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Intrigued by the concept of reincarnation? We chat to a hypnosis practitioner and former psychologist about past lives, karmic connections and healing trauma of the soul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":2027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145],"tags":[228,436,129,514],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2031"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2032,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031\/revisions\/2032"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellbeing.com.au\/curious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}