I have always been fascinated by past lives and keen to explore my own.

In fact, I’d say my interest in past lives was the driving force that led to me becoming an Akashic Record reader.

About 20 years ago, I set up an appointment with my local hypnotherapist who specialised in taking people back to their past lives. Unfortunately, she was not able to regress me because the photocopying machine was malfunctioning outside her office door, emitting a loud “BEEP!” every several seconds. In retrospect, it probably was not the right time for me to get a past life regression, but my fascination with past lives persisted.

A couple of years later, I got a psychic reading with a lady in a new-age shop in New Zealand, and when I asked about my past lives, she said, “the only thing I can tell you is Tuscany”. I was intrigued!

In 2007, I got another reading, this time an Akashic Record Reading, with the aim of finding out more about my past lives. Without me telling the intuitive anything about the last past life reading I had, she told me that I had had an incarnation in Tuscany working as a governess to a wealthy family. During that lifetime, I briefly had an affair with the man of the house, turned down a marriage proposal from his brother, and in the end, left the position and returned home to England.

I remember telling the Akashic Record reader about my interest in past lives. She said to me:

“We are usually interested in our past lives when there is something for us to heal there.”

In my experience as a past life regressionist and an Akashic Record reader, this is true — we are curious for a reason!

How Past Lives Affect Us

People often wonder how our past lives can actually impact on us — after all, when we get to the other side, doesn’t all the bad stuff fall away?

Yes, it does, up to a point.

Planet Earth is, of course, a place of both light and darkness, and so while we can have beautiful experiences here, we can also experience traumas, wounds and all sorts of challenges while incarnated.

And when we get back to the other side after a lifetime is over, this heavy negative energy fades away, but our past life traumas can be re-triggered when we incarnate again into the dense physical plane and come across similar situations. We can be haunted by the echoes of past events, and these echoes can affect us in all kinds of ways. They can give us fears that we might not otherwise have. They can impact on our self-worth and they can also limit our sense of what is possible.

For this reason, some of us can benefit from past life healing. And in this article, I am going to talk about the various ways we can heal past lives.

How to Heal Past Lives

Let’s have a look at the common ways to clear and heal past lives:

Past Life Readings & Clearings

Some intuitives offer a reading where you can clear the negative resonances of a past life from your Akashic Record, reducing its effect on you. I used to work in this way. I saw that it can work well for some lifetimes – and they are usually the ones that are difficult but not overly traumatic.

To clear and heal the most impactful past life traumas, I instead recommend a past life regression session, (and preferably one that involves an element of psychodrama, which involves ‘acting out’ the past situations.)  In order to understand why psychodrama can be helpful, we need to consider how trauma occurs in the first place.

Past Lives & Trauma

Dr. Peter Levine is a renowned trauma and stress researcher who has studied the effects of stress on animals and it is his research that has shed a lot of light on why certain methods of healing traumas are so effective.

In his studies, he found that animals that exist their whole lives surrounded by predators show no signs of being traumatized (and this is thought to be because the fear produced by being under threat by a predator is expended during the ‘fight or flight’ process.) If the animal instead freezes (by playing dead) and subsequently survives, the stored fear energy is then used up after the event through shaking and trembling movements.

In this way, the fear energy is free to run through the animal and gets discharged.

Dr. Levine’s theory is that for humans who go through traumatic events (and especially those who freeze) the fear energy is not always discharged in the instinctive way that animals release their fear. Instead, it can get stored in the body and often creates havoc for the human nervous system, manifesting as PTSD.

Essentially, the body still remembers what the mind may have forgotten – and this does not just apply to traumas that have occurred in this lifetime – many believe that these traumatic memories can be carried over from one lifetime to the next.

Past life regressionist & astrologer Patricia Walsh, in her book Understanding Karmic Complexes, writes:

“Eastern traditions that have reincarnation and karma central to their belief system teach about an aspect of karma called ‘Samskara’. 

Karma literally means actions, and many of those actions come from the deep impressions of habit that are called samskaras. Samskara then is intrinsically tied into the laws of karma that govern the cycle of rebirth. Keeping in mind the nature of traumatic imprints and how they cause continual recreation of the original traumatic event, one can also look at samskaras as trauma imprints re-manifested from life to life. It is the essence of karma to bring forth the actions of the past to the present.

The inability to complete even the simple action of ‘fight or flight’ as a result of trauma in past lives is also carried into the present as the soul continues to create from its own wounded place in an ongoing effort to heal. Because of this, the reality is that most of us are born already with some degree of PTSD. 

Sri Swami Chidananda states that “Each samskara has inherent in it the capacity to once again recreate that very experience which originally caused it.” Our past life physical, emotional and mental bodies are not wiped clean in-between lives, but continue to recreate themselves in each incarnation through the subtle bodies. This transmission of past physical, emotional and mental wounds constitute a large part of what we are meant to heal in our present lives.”

Thus, a large part of past life trauma healing is about releasing that stored energy from the body and because of this, working with the physical body (through methods such as psychodrama) is an effective gateway to healing.

To give an example, if you were attacked and murdered in a past life, in a past life regression session, you may get to defend yourself and fight back. This can be an effective catalyst for releasing that repressed past life energy. And this is why I recommend past life regressions for the more traumatic lifetimes.

My lifetime in Tuscany was cleared for me through a past life reading & clearing (rather than in a past life regression), but I don’t believe the traumatic lifetimes would have come up in such a reading. These are much better suited to a past life regression, and I believe the right lifetime will surface at the right time, based on the healing capacity of the method you are using at the time.

I like the type of regression therapy that is practised by students of the late Dr. Roger Woolger (You can find a directory of Dr Woolger’s graduates here.) It’s called Deep Memory Process and it’s the most cathartic form of past life regression I’ve ever tried.

I have worked with Patricia Walsh, who is a Deep Memory Process trainer and practitioner, and can recommend her past life regression sessions.

Exploratory Past Life Regressions

Be aware that some practitioners of past life regression will take you back to a lifetime but without an opportunity to heal it.

This method may be a good one for exploring positive lifetimes (where we can connect with our good memories and anchor those in our current experience.) But I don’t like this method much for going into the difficult lifetimes, as in some cases it may open portal ways in the unconscious mind to past life traumas, which can heighten their negative impact. So, it is best not to go back to a difficult lifetime unless you also have a chance to heal it.

I learned this first hand, when during my past life regression training I went back to a very traumatic lifetime which involved being raped and killing myself. We ran out of time during the training and stopped for the day without clearing it (it was cleared the next morning). I suffered a lot that night.

So if you book a session with a past life regressionist, I do recommend that you enquire as to whether clearing and healing past lives will be a feature of the session.

Finding out more general info on past lives

If you’re interested in gaining more information about your past lives, my Akashic Record Reading Program also teaches people to gain basic past life information, for themselves and for others.