Many of the problems that we take to our therapists can readily be traced to childhood - events such as losses, abuse, tragedy, and so on - but there are many issues that years of therapy never seem to touch. So many of my clients arrive with deep feelings of grief or with totally inexplicable phobias - a fear of drowning in a boat, when they have never been to sea, for instance - that are totally unaccountable in terms of their present life experience. Over and over again, they will remark that they have had such and such a feeling ever since they could remember, or that they have always had fantasies about particular countries, or thoughts about certain unpleasant ways of dying, or else strong convictions of having been a different kind of human being in another era.
Such thoughts are by no means to be dismissed. Indeed, the many accumulated cases of past-life remembering from both therapy and research make an almost indisputable case for discarding the scientific dogma (for dogma it is) of the tabula rasa - the idea that the mind is a ‘blank slate’ at birth. It is slowly dawning on more and more unprejudiced investigators and common readers that most of our troubles arise from issues we were born with, that the soul has its own history. From this perspective, ‘past-life therapy,’ as it has been called for some years, is very much a deep psychology, a psychology of the soul and the deeper tribulations it inherits from the greater history of humanity. As the great French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote in his Essays: ‘Each man bears the stamp of the whole human condition.’
So when conventional therapy, with its emphasis on our experiences in this life, does not work, the reason may be simple: the therapist is looking for the trauma, the event that caused the psychological disturbance, in the wrong place.
Seeking the story behind the story
We know that many people carry patterns of fear, guilt, and obsessive worry. Clinically, these patterns are labelled ‘phobias’ or ‘anxiety disorders’, yet the psychiatric literature can rarely pinpoint how they arise. What is most puzzling about such feelings is simply that they are irrational; their content does not make sense in and of itself, and there is nothing to connect the fear to our actual life experience. A man who has never been stabbed or badly cut may have a deep fear of knives; a woman who has never sustained a serious burn may have a terrible fear of fire. Casting about in childhood for explanations of such fears does not seem to dislodge them. Often, the problem is already present in childhood, fully formed.
From the perspective of past-life therapy, none of this is surprising: the things we fear - fire, drowning, guns, explosions, savage animals, enclosed spaces, crowds, plane trips - are not childhood traumas at all, but psychically inherited fears, residues of previous lives still carried deeply in the psychic system we call the unconscious or the soul. The horrors we most fear really happened to someone else, but that ‘someone else’ is still in us today, an imprinted memory from a lifetime that is over, even if the past-life personality does not know it.
When we recognize that irrational fear may come from the experience of another lifetime, then we can search for what I call the ‘story behind the story’ - the old tape playing in the background of consciousness. One of Freud’s concepts can help us in this regard: the notion of repetition compulsion, which he defined as an uncontrollable urge to replay old behaviours or stories we are no longer conscious of. When we expand this theory beyond a single lifetime, we can quickly see that a person’s neurotic behaviour, though irrational in the present, may make perfect sense in the context of a story from a past life. The woman with the fear of fire may have been burned at the stake; the man terrified of crowds may have been trampled in a riot; the child frightened of loud noises may remember dying on a battlefield; the adult afraid of flying may have been shot down in a past life as a fighter pilot. Every one of these stories has been recorded in many variations in the annals of past-life regression. They show us that every complaint - however irrational it seems when isolated as a symptom - can be a clue to a buried story, the soul’s way of revealing its most deeply held pain.
Deep Memory Process(TM)
If you imagine your psyche as a computer, you can think of past life memories as old, corrupted programs that interfere with its running. Like unwanted files you cannot delete, they run over and over in the deepest recesses of your psyche, depleting its resources and making it operate ever more slowly, even to the point of shutdown. I have devised some simple meditation practices that work like disk scans to find and repair those malfunctioning past-life ‘programs’ so you can restore your psychic computer to top performance.
These meditation practices form part of a path which I call Deep Memory Process(TM), a practice I’ve developed over the past twenty years by blending past-life regression therapy with the active imagination techniques of Jungian psychotherapy. This process also has roots in a much more ancient tradition of remembering ‘who we were’ and understanding ‘what we have become’. It offers a set of tools for delving into the deep recesses of your unconscious mind - what we call the soul - to discover where memories of past existence are stored, and bring them to light. These exercises and practices are surprisingly simple and easy to learn, but they can open you to a profound new self-awareness, help you heal old wounds, and show you your precise place in the scheme of the universe. They can open to you, in short, the transcendent reality of the soul.
From Healing Your Past Lives, © 2004 by Roger Woolger, published by Sounds True Inc.
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