What Is Past Life Regression?

What actually happens in a session, and what the other life is for

Past life regression is a guided session in which you drop into a relaxed, inward state and go and look at another life.

That’s the mechanical answer. The rest of it takes a while longer.

What a session is actually like

Almost all of it is conversation.

For QHHT, which runs four to five hours, we talk for the first two or three. For the Higher Self Journey, which is online and runs two to three hours, it’s about an hour. I want to know the life you’re living and what’s underneath the questions you’ve brought. We go through your questions, take a short break, and only then move into the hypnosis.

Before any of that, we ground. A short meditation to settle the system, longer if you’ve just driven a distance to get here.

The session itself is easy, and very relaxed. You lie down comfortably and I ask you questions, and you answer them. My voice guides you into different places and asks you to look at different things.

Most people worry that talking will pull them out of the trance state. It’s the opposite. The more you see, the more you describe, the more you say out loud, the more completely you come into the experience.

A lot of people picture arriving, being put under, and having it done to them. It’s easy, but it isn’t passive.

The other life is a step, not the destination

Going into another life does something beyond showing you that life.

Think of it as steps. Where you start is ordinary waking awareness. The other life is a few steps up from there. The conversation with the Higher Self is several more steps up again. Each part of the session takes you a little deeper than the one before, and by the time we reach the Higher Self you’re deep enough for the answers to come clearly.

So the life you visit is worth having for its own sake, and it’s also doing structural work. It’s the bridge between the self sitting in the chair and the part of you that has the wider view.

What people actually experience

Two words come up a lot with this work, and they’re worth knowing. Alpha and Theta are names for patterns of brain activity. Alpha is the relaxed, inward state you’re in when you daydream, or in the few minutes before sleep takes you, where you’re still aware of the room. Theta is deeper, closer to sleep itself, and awareness thins out there.

Most people in a session reach Alpha rather than Theta. Alpha is more work, because you’re awake inside it. It’s also, in my experience, more useful. The answers still come, and you keep the memory of the whole thing. That’s worth a great deal more than surfacing out of Theta asking what just happened and what did I say.

People tend to receive in whatever way they naturally receive. That doesn’t mean it has to be trained or developed first, and plenty of people arrive with no idea how information comes to them.

Most often it’s visual, though not the way people imagine. It isn’t a film. It’s more like a scene that fills in as you look at it. That’s why I ask about clothing, and shoes, and what the house looks like. The questions give the image somewhere to form.

After that it’s usually hearing, or simply knowing, or feeling it in the body. Images tend to be strongest inside the life itself. When we connect higher, to the Higher Self or to guides, it often turns to language, with sensations or pictures arriving to underline a point.

There’s no wrong way for it to come. Occasionally someone can’t visualize at all, and then we work with the other senses instead, and the session still goes where it needs to.

Sometimes someone says they can’t see anything. If they’re deeply relaxed, I carry on, because darkness is sometimes exactly where they are. People have gone back to the state before anything, the void, and that is the experience. So we work the other senses. Do you hear anything? Feel anything? Where do you think you are? How do you feel here? When we’ve looked at it properly, I might move them along. You’re going to move forward in time until you come to something.

If they aren’t relaxed, we go back to the breath, back to the body on the bed, back to safe, and start again from there.

Trance is ordinary, and it’s old

You pass through these states every day without naming them. The few minutes before sleep takes you. The first minutes after waking. Driving a familiar road and arriving with no memory of the last two miles. Looking up from a book an hour later than you meant to.

Hypnosis is a deliberate use of a doorway you already walk through. It’s also why nobody gets left in one. You come out the way you come out of sleep.

Researchers have put people into scanners while they were hypnotized, and three things shift. The part of the brain that keeps watch on your surroundings, deciding what deserves your attention, quiets down, so you stop tracking the time and the noise outside and the thing you forgot to do. The link between the thinking part of the brain and the part that reads the body gets stronger, so you have more access to what’s happening in you. And the part that narrates you to yourself, the running commentary on how you’re doing and how you’re coming across, steps back.

Taken together: deep focus, an open line to the body, and no self-consciousness. That’s a fair description of what people tell me a session feels like, arrived at from the other direction entirely.

None of this is new. One survey of 488 societies found that nine in ten had a deliberate, culturally established way of entering an altered state, and they used it mostly in a sacred context: for healing, and for guidance on decisions. The doorways were drumming, dancing, chanting, fasting, and sometimes plants.

Which turns the usual question around. Living entirely in one state of consciousness, and treating every other one as suspect, is the unusual arrangement. It’s recent, and it’s local to us.

Past lives, or other lives

I use both, and mostly I use them interchangeably.

From inside the work it genuinely feels past. You can walk through a whole life from near its beginning to its end, in order, the way you’d walk through a memory. That’s what the experience is like, so that’s the word that fits.

People hold different views about whether these lives are behind us, alongside us, or something harder to describe, and I don’t think you need to settle that to get something out of a session. Whatever the arrangement turns out to be, you can still go and look.

Why the lives are usually ordinary

Dolores Cannon called them digging potatoes lives. Plain, simple, unremarkable.

I carried the same expectation everyone does before I started. I thought it would reveal some great, amazing life, wildly different from mine. Most of the time, for me and for my clients, it isn’t very different at all. And that turns out to be why it’s shown.

A life that isn’t yours can be looked at without the attachment. You’re not defending it. You’re not inside the story of it the way you’re inside the story of this one. That distance is what lets you see the shape of something.

What did I miss in that life that I might be missing in this one? What did I do well there, which tells me I have the capacity for it here? What did I feel there that I’m struggling to acknowledge now?

An ordinary life answers those. A spectacular one usually can’t, because you’re too busy looking at it.

None of which means the awe isn’t real. Sitting inside another life is genuinely extraordinary, and people walk out changed by having done it. Most people do come away with something remarkable, and it’s usually not the thing the ego went in hoping for.

I once had a client who wanted something extraordinary. She got a life as a rock, on another planet with a purple sky. She could see the sky and the stars moving and she couldn’t move at all. The lesson she came away with was to slow down and find stillness. It refused to give her anything exciting to look at, because exciting was all she wanted.

Is any of it real?

This is the most common worry, and people ask it almost every time. Was I making it up?

The honest answer is that yes, the imagination is likely involved. I can’t tell you how much of it is imagination and how much isn’t, and I’m not sure anyone can say with confidence what imagination even is. That’s not the problem people think it is. We’ve vilified the imagination, and it’s the thing that has driven the whole of human development. It also belongs to the receptive, non-linear part of the mind, and that is the part we journey with.

Our brains communicate in images. Sometimes that’s how the deepest part of us speaks. A thing doesn’t have to be true in a tangible, documentary sense to show you something that matters.

I call it the sacred imagination. It feels like daydreaming. Both are enormously informative once you drop the fear that made-up means worthless and start treating what arrives as information.

I do think past lives are true in some sense, but it’s likely that our definition of true would have to widen a little. What’s certainly true is what you see and learn through the experience. That’s why I always ask afterward what was learned in that life, and how it relates to this one.

Things do check out, too. Clients see clothing and buildings and go looking afterward and find the period matches. One woman saw herself as an English queen, went searching, and found a portrait of a queen wearing the dress she’d been wearing. I’ve had names given to me by guides, names I’d never heard, that turned out to belong to someone real.

What tells me it isn’t just the person talking

I’ve spent two or three hours listening to how someone describes their own circumstances. Their language, their explanations, the way they account for themselves.

Then they go under, and they start speaking from an entirely different perspective.

It’s comforting and loving, and at times very direct. You do this thing, and I understand why, and it’s blocking the thing you actually want. It doesn’t coddle and it doesn’t blame. It states the thing, with compassion. That is not how a person describes their own life.

There’s a consistency to it across clients, too. A similar cadence and feel. It isn’t the vocabulary, which stays theirs. It’s the widened perspective, the one that doesn’t blame or ridicule the way our egos do.

And there’s the body. The relaxation, the eye movement, the voice, which often changes a great deal. Sometimes people start speaking about themselves in the third person, which tells me they’ve stepped back from their human life far enough to look at it from outside.

Curiosity opens the door that wanting closes

There’s a real difference between someone arriving from curiosity and someone arriving from pain, and most people are somewhere between the two.

When we’re carrying desperation, the channel narrows. The thinking, analytical part of the mind stays very active, and the body follows it with tension and alertness. That isn’t the part of the mind we use to reach this state. The ego stays loud. Is this what we’re after? Is this going to help, or make it worse? Sometimes it’s so present, so unwilling to give way, that there’s no room for the non-linear part to come online and speak.

Which is why I build regulation into the session. My own steadiness holds some of the room, and the exercises do the rest. But it’s work to let the ego move aside, and that part is yours to do. I have clients say it to the ego, the survival self, directly: you can stay in the room, and you can listen, and you don’t get to talk.

So the best thing you can do for yourself when you arrive is to let go of your attachment to the answers. You won’t hear anything cruel; what comes is consistently loving. The more someone can hold it as interesting, as fun, as I’m curious what’s in there, the better it works. Curiosity settles the ego and gives the other part the space it needs.

The question I’m asked most often before a session is whether it will work for them. It depends. Everyone has the capacity, because we all dream and we all pass through these states every night. Whether it works on the day has to do with how far you can move your attention off expectation and onto openness.

If you found this through the books

Many of the people who book with me have read Dolores Cannon, or Michael Newton, or Brian Weiss, or Sarah Breskman Cosme. Those books are how most people discover that any of this exists, and they’re worth reading.

A session is a different thing from a book, and aimed at something different: the life you’re living now, and the questions you brought with you.

Afterward

In the days after, people tell me they’re sitting with it. Some research. Some make art out of what they glimpsed. Nearly everyone has an ah-ha somewhere in the following week, when something that made no sense in the room suddenly connects to something else in their life.

What do I tell people to do with what they found? Sit with it in curiosity.