Hi Anna,
I am very interested in exploring my past lives. I planned to book a past life regression session, but then I came across a guided meditation which involves hypnosis, designed to take you back to a past life (“self past life regression.”) I am wondering whether it is actually possible to regress yourself using a guided meditation? Or is a past life regression with a specialist in hypnotherapy a better option for exploring past lives?
~ Lisa
Hi Lisa,
Thanks for sending in your question. I love writing about past lives. I have trained as a past life regressionist (although I do not currently practise as one) and as a client I’ve done over a dozen past life regressions. And I strongly believe that we are the product of our past lives, both here on Earth and in other places, in a similar way that we are shaped by our childhood and upbringing.
Anyway, the short answer is yes: in my experience, self past life regression is possible using a guided meditation.
(One such guided meditation I know of is on the CD that comes with Roger Woolger’s book Healing Your Past Lives: Exploring the Many Lives of the Soul.)
If you use an audio like this to regress yourself, generally one of two things will happen:
1. You’ll go back to a traumatic or unpleasant event in a past life (e.g. an unresolved, painful loss or a sudden death to give two common examples) so that you can heal it.
2. You’ll go back to a positive moment or situation in a previous life, so that you can anchor the positive energies of that situation into THIS lifetime.
I’ll give you an example of the latter scenario:
In one of my regressions (as a client), I was taken back to a lifetime in Patara, Turkey during ancient times. It was an uneventful life, lived in the bosom of a loving, warm family.
When I experienced that previous life, I felt like I was soaking up all of those warm ‘family’ energies, because in this life, my experience of family has been rather different.
And so that regression was about anchoring the energy of that reality into my subconscious mind in the here and now, so that I could believe that it would be possible for me to experience something along those lines in this lifetime.
So, Something To Be Aware Of…
When you use a guided audio meditation to explore a past life, you only want to experience a positive lifetime — not a traumatic one. And so if you choose to use this method, set an intention with your guides for you to only go back to a positive lifetime, which features energies that you need in the here and now, to be anchored into your current experience.
You don’t want to go back to a traumatic lifetime using a guided meditation, because when you’re on your own while exploring a past life, you have to be both client and regressionist simultaneously (which even experienced regressionists will struggle to do.) And if you don’t have the skills to bring about a healing for the past life trauma, you could instead end up opening a portalway in your subconscious mind to an unhappy lifetime, which can cause unhappy energies to leak into this present life. Not quite what you were looking for!
So do set a clear intention to go back to a positive life — not a negative one.
But all in all, guided meditations like the one I linked to above can simply be interesting exploration exercises, provided you set the right intention. Not everyone can be regressed to a past life, and so doing a guided meditation like this is an easy and cost-effective way to find out if you are a good candidate for past life regression (instead of investing in a past life regression session, only to find out you cannot be regressed!)
Some Links for Further Exploration:
★ Roger Woolger’s book & CD: Healing Your Past Lives: Exploring the Many Lives of the Soul
★ Directory for finding a past life regressionist (using DMP – the particular method of regression that I personally have found most helpful)
Hi Anna,
Do you think setting a positive intention will be enough for everybody?
My experience as a trauma therapist is that depending on how stressed someone’s nervous system is, there can be quite an attraction to painful stuff, if only out of the deep longing to heal it.
So I’d say: If you are doing really well in your life and are simply curious (“interesting exploration”), you could give it a try. Should life already feel pretty chaotic and difficult in the here and now, and you somehow hope that past life regression will be *the* missing link/magic pill to be happier in this life, don’t do it, because the implicit urgency can make it pretty difficult to approach it with an attitude of relaxed curiosity, without desperately wanting or needing anything from it.
Hi Joy,
This is very good advice:
“If you are doing really well in your life and are simply curious (“interesting exploration”), you could give it a try.”
Either way, if a person uses an audio meditation like this, they would be taking a risk that it could take them back to a challenging past life, and they should know that there is the chance they would need to make an appointment afterwards with a past life regressionist to close any portalways they may open and heal anything unresolved.
I agree that if you are already in a place of dealing with trauma or having a very challenging time in your life, it’s not a good idea.
You’re more likely to have a good experience if things are going well and you’re just curious.
Thanks for adding your thoughts.