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 12^th 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.”