Past Life Regression Therapy: What It’s For, and What It Can’t Do

What people bring, what happens to it, and who I’d tell to wait

Past life regression therapy is what most people call this work, so it’s the phrase I’ll use. I should say plainly what I am first.

I’m not a therapist, and a session with me isn’t psychotherapy or medical treatment. I’m a hypnotherapist and a somatic practitioner. If you’re working with a doctor or a counselor, keep working with them; nothing here replaces that.

What a session is, is a way of going and looking at something with a wider view than you can reach on an ordinary Tuesday.

What people bring

Almost everyone arrives with questions about their own life. The ones I hear most:

Why do I struggle so much in relationships, or with this one person in particular?

What am I here for? What am I supposed to be doing?

Why is this pattern of thought or behavior so hard for me to break?

Does this physical complaint have a root deeper than the body, and what is it trying to show me?

Then there are the others, which are no less real. My mother died; is she all right? I keep getting signs and I don’t know what they mean. I had a dream that won’t leave me. I’m drawn to a particular place, or era, or idea, and I’ve never understood why.

Underneath nearly all of it sits the same thing: I want clearer guidance. A clearer picture of what’s happening around me and where I’m meant to be going.

You bring your questions written down, and we go through them together beforehand. They’re asked inside the session, once you’re in the deeper state, which is where the answers come from.

What it’s aimed at

Here’s a distinction worth making, because it explains a lot of disappointment.

Dolores Cannon’s books came from research sessions. She worked with people who could reach the deepest trance states, and the purpose was to gather information. The person on the table wasn’t there to sort out their own life.

A session with me is aimed at the life you’re living. Your questions, your patterns, the thing you can’t get past. That means the material tends to be plainer than the books, and more use to you.

Going exploring with no tie back to your own life is a different piece of work with a different purpose. Both are legitimate. They aren’t the same thing, and expecting one while booking the other is where people come away flat.

Can you help me quit smoking, or lose weight?

This is the question I get most often from people who know hypnotherapy from somewhere else, and the honest answer is that it doesn’t work the way films suggest.

In Office Space a man is hypnotized, comes out a different person, and stays in the trance because the hypnotist has a heart attack mid-session. Neither half of that is possible. You can’t be left in a trance state. We move in and out of these states all day and all night, the same way we fall asleep and wake up, and you would come out of it on your own.

What I can do is help you see the shape of the thing. Why it’s there. What it’s protecting. What it has been doing for you, because a habit that has held on that long is doing something.

We can ask, inside the session, for it to be released completely, and sometimes the answer is yes. Even then, there is usually something left that you have to claim and work with deliberately in your life.

Here’s the clearest example I have.

A client asked for her womb area to be released. We were told that it had been. She came back for another session and said: you told me my womb was released last time, so why haven’t I seen any improvement?

The answer came back. Your womb has been released. You don’t see improvement because you are still holding the pattern in your relationship. Once you address that, you’ll see the improvement in the womb.

That’s the shape of this work in one story. The session does its part, and it hands you back the part that’s yours.

Will I have to relive something painful?

This is the fear that stops people booking, and it deserves a straight answer.

No, and there are two reasons.

The first is that I’m watching for it. I don’t say it up front, because putting the idea in the room at the start wakes the very part of you that’s trying to settle. The body tells me before the person does, and when I see it respond in a particular way, that’s when I say it: you can watch this as an observer, without feeling it in your body. If a little more is needed, we breathe into the belly, slow and soft, and I say it again. That’s almost always all it takes.

The second is that difficult scenes are rarer than people expect, and they almost never arrive at the beginning. A session doesn’t open in the worst moment of a life. If something hard does come, it tends to come later, once you’re settled, and rarely with much physical intensity.

In QHHT we do move through the death of the past life deliberately, because of what people understand from it. Even then, the instruction is the same: you can watch it as an observer, without any physical sensations.

And scenes from this life?

That’s a different fear, and it’s worth separating out.

Some people worry they’ll be walked back into something that happened to them in this life. Others arrive wanting the opposite: they hope a blocked memory will be handed back, so they can finally understand what happened to them.

I’ve seen memories return in sessions. I have never had a client reach a memory that was attached to trauma.

My read is that it’s blocked for a reason, and whatever we’re speaking with understands that better than we do. It won’t give the memory back. It will often answer questions about it, what it meant, what you’ve been carrying because of it, what it’s still doing in your life, without putting you back inside the event.

Everything I’ve seen points the same way. A session is aimed at what helps and supports. Never at harm.

Am I being led?

A fair question, and the honest answer is that I steer, and I do it carefully.

I have to. I move people forward in time, or to another place, so we can see more of a life. I ask the Higher Self whether it’s willing to do a body scan. That’s steering.

What I don’t do is put things in your mouth.

Your own questions get asked as close to the way you wrote them as I can manage. When I ask something of my own, to go further into what’s surfaced, I keep it open wherever possible, so the answer isn’t nudged in any direction.

Small example. When we arrive in another life, I won’t ask you about your body until you’ve told me you have one. I’ll ask whether you have a form, and let you describe whatever is there.

That isn’t fussiness. People have turned up without a body at all, and others without a human one. If I ask a rock about its feet, the rock says what? And then we’ve lost the thread, because the question didn’t fit the experience.

The questions are kept open on purpose, so that what fills them comes from what’s actually happening to you.

And you keep your autonomy the whole way through. If you don’t want to answer something, you don’t. If you don’t want to go somewhere, we don’t go there. Nothing about this state takes away your ability to say no.

What it can do

Most of what I see is a change of perspective, and I don’t want to undersell that, because a change of perspective is what makes a pattern moveable.

Things release. People describe something lifting that they’d carried for years. Sometimes a physical complaint eases, and I make no promises there.

Cannon wrote about spontaneous healings and I don’t doubt she saw them. In my experience they’re rarer now. What I see more often is a session that helps something release and then expects the person to do their part. Whatever is happening at the root in your actual life still has to be addressed.

I think that’s the time we’re in. It’s about agency, and ownership, and doing our own work with support rather than having it done for us.

And there’s one more thing people walk out with, which they often name as the biggest. They leave knowing they aren’t doing it alone. That there are others they can’t see who are watching and helping from that side. For a lot of people that changes more than any single answer does.

Is one session enough?

Most people come once and that’s the whole of it. A QHHT session runs four to five hours and is the only one I book that day; the Higher Self Journey runs two to three. Either way you leave with a recording, so you can go back to what was actually said rather than to your memory of it.

Some people come back later, usually when life has moved and there are new questions. That’s a different session rather than a continuation.

What decides whether anything holds isn’t the number of sessions. It’s what you do in the weeks after.

Who I’d tell to wait

There are conditions where this isn’t appropriate, and bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are the clearest of them. If either is part of your history, this isn’t the right room.

I’d also say wait if you’re in acute crisis and you’re looking at this as the remedy. What a session opens needs space to open into, and somewhere to land afterward. In the middle of a crisis there usually isn’t either. It isn’t a fix, and it can help a great deal when the other pieces that hold you are already in place.

If you’re not sure which side of that line you’re on, write to me and say so. I’d rather talk it through than have you book something that isn’t going to serve you.

What to do in the weeks after

This is the part that decides whether anything changes, and it’s the part almost nobody is told about in advance.

Write it down. The questions you asked and the answers you were given. You’ll have the recording, and notes do something the recording doesn’t, because putting it in your own words makes you decide what it meant.

Take an answer back into an experience. Bring to mind a specific thing that happened, something the answer bears on, and notice how that memory feels while you’re holding the answer alongside it. Often the feel of the old experience changes.

Then turn the answer into something you do. Start small, and make it a focal point rather than a resolution you forget by Thursday. Sessions frequently hand over specific instructions; if you were given one, do it. Sometimes an instruction needs adjusting to fit your actual life, and that’s fine, as long as the adjusting doesn’t quietly become avoiding.

Receiving an answer is rarely enough on its own. There’s action behind it, and the action is yours.

I’ve written more about what people see and feel while they’re in a session in what actually happens in one.