Past Life Healing and Spirit Releasement
Please note: I do not offer past life therapy. I feel it needs a special attunement which I don’t possess. I do work with past lives if they come up spontaneously during therapy.
If you explore far enough, life contains strange and wonderful experiences. Past lives are among a whole range of experiences which meditators, shamans, and other inner explorers may encounter. They are not just dream-like images, but real and vivid experiences in the inner world. The impact on everyday life can be dramatic and uplifting. As with experiences such as meeting angels, I don’t worry whether they are “real” or not or whether historical evidence can be found. The healing is real and that is all that counts.
(1) Past Life healing
Past live beliefs and past life memories are different. Past live belief is the meditative self-enquiry of whether some subtle aspect of our individuality is after death re-born in a new womb. My personal conviction is that this is so, but past life therapy is valid independent of whether this is the case or not. In therapy, a past life memory is a fundamental attitude, a ruling thought, which shapes our lives and makes no sense at all in terms of either our adult lives or babyhood trauma. Memories with this strange status are common, and wherever you think they come from, can be deeply healing to become conscious of.
These past life memories have a clear, distinctive quality and are often spine-tingling to encounter. The feeling is “I did or experienced this, and I am paying the price or still carrying it.” These are typically powerful life situations such as being a prisoner or killer, or a government official struggling to hold a crisis together, or a mother in famine deciding which child to feed and which to let die. These leave an overwhelming imprint on the mind which continues to be active after death. They include what you could call contractions of the mind such as “I will NEVER leave you” and situations where someone made an adult choice to kill or betray or sacrifice their lives and as such are “karmic” – consequences in this life following from actions in the last.
It is indeed difficult to see how a baby born today could receive an imprint from any current source of such a extraordinary strong emotional crisis. So no matter whether historical or not, something strange is going on.
Other candidate memories, while also profoundly healing to work with, could well be family memories from the first months of life, before the brain is fully developed. While not “before birth,” they are in the realest sense, “before everything – before ‘I’ came into existence.” Others are generational memories which happened to grandparents or great-grandparents.
Of course there are past life memories which are pure imagination. Memories of being a specific person or a grand or important person mostly strike me as being this. I once had two friends who both thought they were St Peter!
If you are sceptical about past lives or spirit releasement, I offer a quotation from someone who we think of as a scientist, but who was also a great modern mystic, Albert Einstein. He’s referring to the time when radio waves were first discovered, and were laughed at as self-evidently ridiculous:
Do you remember how electrical currents and “unseen waves” [ie radio waves] were laughed at? Our knowledge about man is still in its infancy.
Albert Einstein
(2) Spirit Releasement
If you thought past lives were strange … meet spirit releasement. Some people have the experience of thoughts with a subjective quality of “not my thought – belongs to someone else.” One can ask the thoughtforms to leave, which they always do, and the person commonly feels a clarity for life to move forward. In California these thoughtforms are regarded as being ghosts and “entities.” For me it’s like asking if past lives are real; who knows? who cares? – the healing is real. Wherever these experiences come from has to be so close to the edge of reality as we understand it, or so close to the boundary of the mind’s functioning as we know it that either way something of great value is accessed.
I am not talking about psychotic episodes. Plainly there are extremely serious mental states with a verbal similarity. If you feel distressed in this way consult your GP at once.
However spirit releasement experiences of different kinds are not and not in any way a sign of madness. After all, if you really look, a whole bunch of the thoughts which feel like “my thoughts” aren’t really ours at all, but come from the culture of the age we live in or from what our parents thought. So it is normal to harbour thoughts which are in truth not our own.
I first came across this work on a training course in California, and assumed that this was one of those things that only happen in America. (For example, psychiatrically, multiple personality disorder is overwhelmingly a US phenomenon.) I was therefore surprised to find it happening with a tiny handful of my own clients.
This situation is commonest in emergency workers such as police, firemen and paramedics who start to get dragged down by painful situations they have witnessed. And it features in addictions, sometimes even ones as commonplace as smoking. It can happen (rarely) that someone in trance experiences they smoke because “someone else is smoking through me” and when we ask that other “someone” to leave, the person can finally quit smoking through normal methods. Yes, it is strange. But pragmatically, it works.
“Whatever harm an enemy may do to an enemy, or a hater to a hater, an ill-directed mind inflicts on oneself a greater harm. Neither mother, father, nor any other relative can do one greater good than one’s own well-directed mind. ”
– Gautam Buddha, Dhammapada 42-43