In the Elevated Existence September 2012 issue cover story interview, best-selling author Dr. Brian Weiss, along with his daughter Amy Weiss, MSW, explain past life regression therapy, what the benefits are, and what they have learned from working with it over the years.
Weiss also explains how he discovered it – as he was once a skeptic about past lives and reincarnation – and they both discuss the new book they co-wrote, “Miracles Happen: The Transformational Healing Power of Past-Life Memories.”
Below is an excerpt from the interview. For the full cover story, see the September 2012 issue.
“Past life regression therapy is a very powerful and very potent type of therapy where you can heal symptoms such as phobias, emotional problems, physical ailments and more, just by remembering your past lives,” Dr. Brian Weiss tells Elevated Existence. “Whether you believed in past lifetimes or not, the symptoms went away.”
In traditional psychotherapy, when someone recalls an event, trauma or other experience from the past – usually from childhood – it causes a resolution and healing of symptoms. Past life therapy just expands the arena, he says.
“I think the mechanisms are very similar, but now the arena doesn’t stop at adolescence, infancy or even in utero. It’s expanded into many lifetimes. The pattern or model is very much like the psycho-analytical model except the arena is much larger.”
Weiss has seen healing at the physical, emotional and psychological level. For example, if someone has a neck pain and discovers he or she was hanged in the 12th century, this pain tends to go away, he says. Recalling a true story of a radiologist patient he worked with, who had undergone several unsuccessful attempts to treat his back pain, including orthopedic surgeons, Weiss used past life regression therapy and he remembered being lanced in the back during the Middle Ages. After this, his pain disappeared.
“Emotional disorders, phobias and psychological disorders can also be treated this way. We have seen people get rid of anxieties and fears, and we also see the fear of death diminishing because people are finding out they don’t die,” Weiss says. “They realize they go on after the death of their physical bodies and reunite with loved ones, and then they begin to approach their present life differently.”
During a past life regression, the client is taken through past lives, and then to the end of each life, where many report floating above their bodies and seeing a bright light, loved ones who have passed or a “transformation figure at the light,” Weiss notes. They also have a chance to review the life they just left.
“We often ask, ‘What did you learn? What were the lessons? How does it connect to your present life?’ Making those connections increases understanding, and the more people understand, the better they feel, and the more symptoms resolve,” he says.
People also begin to live with more joy and happiness, and less fear. They start to see their current relationships differently, as many discover they are reunited with a soul mate from a previous life and continue to do so over the centuries, and spiritually they open up to a new understanding.
“We see values changing and things that seemed important before – like accumulating things, competition and winning – evolve into sharing, kindness and compassion. Those are the things you really take with you, and not your things,” Weiss explains. “As you remove fears and obstacles to inner peace and joy, then you see life just flowering and flourishing. This offers tremendous advantages for life in the present moment.”
I have read some of his books and I love the message. Which is, everything can be changed.
As a clinical psychologist who has been helping clients explore issues like these for the past quarter century, I want to echo Dr. Weiss’ observations. Whether the client or the therapist believes the experience to be a true past life memory or a fictional waking dream created by the client’s own imagination, the therapeutic usefulness is the same.
I’m not quite clear on how knowing that you do not ‘die’ but go on to live further lives can fill one with joy and reformed conduct etc. Nor am I convinced that you meet up with ‘loved ones’ who have passed on. Surely these ‘loved ones’ do not hang around waiting for those who are still living in the earthly plane to come and be with them for eternity – how boring would that be? Often I’ve read in books dealing with the subject of what happens to us once we ‘die’ – according to these tomes, we go on to assess the life we’ve just lived and then forget all about it in order to resume the next incarnation. How then, can we possibly recall these lives under hypnosis? Since the business of choosing a new incarnation, if that indeed happens, is a creative process, we would logically be permitted to design a completely new life, choosing totally different companions for that new journey. What about those who had hateful parents or relatives in the life they’ve just departed from? Why would we want to meet up with those people again at ther ‘Pearly Gates’ or in a new life? I can hear the chorus, “Becasue we have lessons to learn!” If that were indeed the case, we would remember the past life anyway, and be able to recall what got us into the difficulty in the first place to avoid repeating it ad infinitum – people have great difficulty in learning from their mistakes in their current lives, where they are in a position to remember, so how can they possibly learn from a forgotten memory, I fail to see. I also cannot accept that we keep choosing some pretty awful experiences for the new life in order to pay for ‘debts’ incurred in the past life. Or maybe we do and that is why the planes is in such a mess today and will be forever more. No, we don’t really know what goes on, if anything, after we die and for all we know, the state of being we experience under hypnosis, could be just our imaginations working overtime. No-one really knows what is going on and are simply hazarding guesses to write some pretty fancifuland expensive books on a subject in a country that seems to have a lot of money to support some weird thinking in an obscure university somewhere.You are also selling hope to a million (and making a million and more) insecure and frightened people in the same way that the Church sold forgiveness for the commission of sins during the Middle Ages.
I don’t know if Dr. Weiss is a believer in the existence of reincarnation or not. People can argue that just as they might any religious/spiritual concept. One issue, that i think is at least open for discussion is whether or not this approach works with clients. Perhaps it is just a metaphor, guided imagery piece, fantasy, or past life- related, but if it helps, wouldn’t that be enough? And of course, it won’t work with everyone, nothing does.