Journey of Souls

involves short-term cognitive restructuring with clients by helping them connect thoughts and emotions to promote healthy behavior. Together, we elicit the meaning, function, and consequences of their beliefs, because I take the premise that no mental problem is imaginary. In the early days of my practice, I resisted past-life requests from people because of my orientation toward traditional therapy. While I used hypnosis and age regression techniques to determine the origins of disturbing memories and childhood trauma, I felt any attempt to reach a former life was unorthodox and non-clinical. My interest in reincarnation and metaphysics was only intellectual curiosity, until I worked with a young man on pain management. This client complained of a lifetime of chronic pain on his right side. One of the tools of hypnotherapy to manage pain is directing the subject to make the pain worse so he or she can also learn to lessen the aching and thus acquire control. In one of our sessions involving pain intensification, this man used the imagery of being stabbed to recreate his torment. Searching for the origins of this image, I eventually uncovered his former life as a World War I soldier who was killed by a bayonet in France, and we were able to eliminate the pain altogether. With encouragement from some of my clients, I began to experiment with moving some of them further back in time, before their last birth on Earth. Initially, I was concerned that a subject's integration of current needs, beliefs, and fears would create fantasies of recollection. However, it didn't take long before I realized our deep-seated memories offer a set of past experiences which are too real and connected to be ignored. I came to appreciate just how therapeutically important the link is between the bodies and events of our former lives and who we are today. Then I stumbled onto a discovery of enormous proportions. I found it was possible to see into the spirit world through the mind's eye of a hypnotized subject who could report back to me of life between lives on Earth. The case that opened the door to the spirit world for me was a middle-aged woman who was an especially receptive hypnosis subject. She had been talking to me about her feelings of loneliness and isolation in that delicate stage when a subject has finished recalling their most recent past life. This unusual individual slipped into the highest state of altered consciousness almost by herself. Without realizing I had initiated an overly short command for this action, I suggested she go to the source of her loss of companionship. At the same moment, I inadvertently used one of the trigger words to spiritual recall. I also asked if she had a specific group of friends whom she missed. Suddenly, my client started to cry. When I directed her to tell me what was wrong, she blurted out, ''I miss some friends in my group and that's why I get so lonely on Earth.'' I was confused and questioned her further about where this group of friends was actually located. ''Here in my permanent home,'' she answered simply, ''and I'm looking at all of them right now.'' After finishing with this client and reviewing her tape recordings, I recognized that finding the spirit world involves an extension of past life regression. There are many books about past lives, but none I could find which told about our lives as souls or how to properly access the spiritual recollections of people. I decided to do the research myself, and with practice, I acquired greater skill in entering the spirit world through my subjects. I also learned that finding their place in the spirit world was far more meaningful to people than recounting their former lives on Earth. How is it possible to reach the soul through hypnosis? Visualize the mind as having three concentric circles, each smaller than the last and within the other, separated only by layers of connected mind consciousness. The first, outer layer, is represented by the conscious mind, which is our critical analytic reasoning source. The second layer is the subconscious, where we initially go in hypnosis to tap into the storage area for all the memories that ever happened to us in this life and former lives. The third, the innermost core, is what we are now calling the superconscious mind.