What’s happening during a past life regression therapy?

Let’s be honest: we can’t have so many Jesus, Judas and Cleopatra.

Past life regression is a kind of hypnotherapy which leads clients into a deep trance state, allowing them to unlock long hidden or suppressed memories.

Not all suppressed or hidden memories are ‘bad’ or ‘traumatic’ experiences. Our brain and memory networks are a lot more complicated than a computer:

• Sensory memory: These are very short term, usually only a few seconds, used to process sensory inputs.
• Short-term/working memory: This type of memory has a short duration and limited capacity, capable of storing approximately 7 ± 2 units of information (e.g., the sequence ‘321 333 345’ has 9 digits, so it’s at the cap of working memory, unless the person has an efficient way to organize the numbers into something more meaningful — a common technique for mnemonics).
• Long-term memory: These are the long duration memories. Theoretically, there is no limitation on long-term memory. Anything that we’ve ever learned, acquired through short-term memory, should be stored here. But having them deep inside your neural network doesn’t mean you can ‘retrieve’ them.

The subjective conscious memory mainly involves explicit memory within long-term memory, including episodic memory (personal experiences) and semantic memory (facts and knowledge).

Issues with ‘Accessing’ and ‘Retrieving’ Memories

As mentioned previously, theoretically, there is no limit to your long-term memory. However, the retrieval process of ‘unarchiving something from the long-term memory storage’ to the ‘working memory’ depends on how strong the association is.

Let’s try to think of your last experience going to a big bookstore or a library. What are the books you will easily find? The bestselling books, the newly released books, or certain books picked by staff with a special tag or notes on them. These resemble memories that have a stronger association with your conscious mind, either through repetition of practices or because they are novel. However, if you have enough time and patience, theoretically, you can go through the entire library and find any book inside — except we don’t have the patience and time to find everything all the time.

Associations of memories can gradually weaken as well. For example, when you were 6 years old, remembering something that happened when you were 4 might be easy, but when you are 40 years old, it might be almost impossible to remember events from when you were little. Or you might remember the semantic meaning, but they no longer appear as vivid memories with colors and details.

Why Do We Forget Things?

The brain is a very efficient organism, designed to process information in the most efficient way. Imagine if you had a computer that always accessed all files every time you opened an app or tried to complete a task. It would slow down the processing speed, and you could even feel the ‘heat’ from the CPU.

Our brain evolves to be extremely efficient in storing, retrieving, and accessing information. Most of the time, we aren’t even conscious about the retrieving or processing of information; our reactions are ‘intuitive’ before we realize it. For example, when you read this article, have you even thought about how to read the English alphabets, then combine them into words, then try to analyze each word and sentence to make meaning from it? You don’t. This entire process when you read this article is not happening on the conscious level — your unconscious mind does the heavy lifting for you, so your conscious mind only needs to decide whether you understand my points, or whether you agree or disagree with me.

Childhood memories, especially memories from very early stages, might be harder to access or retrieve once we grow up, due to multiple reasons:

• Associations of these memories might either be inefficient when we formed the memory, or the associations simply become weaker over time.
• We learn many new things in childhood and teenage years, which might cause some memories acquired before then to be pushed deeper (just like how our bookshelves go — the books that we purchased 20 years ago tend to either be pushed to the corner or be put in a box stored in the attic). But they are there, just relatively harder to access.

Why You Can Access Them in a Hypnotic State

You don’t need a hypnotherapist to enter a hypnotic state. Many of us experience the hypnotic state through various ways: meditation, group prayers in church, tripping from psychedelics, or any drugs that might alter your perception. It is a state where you are deeply relaxed from the day-to-day activities which usually occupy your mind, and also extremely focused on the current experience.

A trained hypnotherapist can help you enter a similar deep trance mode where your conscious mind is less controlled by the working model, so you can be guided to follow prompts. In layman’s terms, when you lower your guard on consciousness, the door leading to your deeper mind opens. Hypnotherapists can use different prompts to help you retrieve memories that are usually difficult to access because they’re buried deep — in your unconscious mind.

How Does the Unconscious Mind Communicate With Us?

Before I discuss what we actually experience in an early life or past life regression, I want to explain how the unconscious mind communicates with us.

The unconscious mind, as described earlier, works automatically in ways most of us don’t even notice. It tends to send simplified and efficient messages to the conscious mind to ensure the conscious mind isn’t overloaded.

For example, imagine a cat bit you when you were two years old because you grabbed its fur. You were very young, so this memory got washed away as you grew up. However, every time you see a cat, you get this weird feeling of “let’s not get too close to cats because cats are evil.” How did you reach this conclusion? Did any cat ever do any evil deed? Probably not. But your unconscious mind transformed your experience (a cat bit me, it hurt!) into a more easily comprehensible message to make sure you don’t get bitten by a cat again (cats are nasty, dirty, and evil! Let’s get away from them!).

If your unconscious mind sent the message of what actually happened every time (‘remember when you were two years old? You tried to grab Toby, the neighborhood’s cat, and it bit your hand. That hurt. So maybe it’s not a good idea to touch any cat?’), it would be very inefficient. Also, it might not be as strong and convincing as simply transforming it into almost a ‘belief’ or ‘mythical explanation’ for why not to get too close to any cat (‘Cats are evil!’ is much shorter compared to the previous sentence).

In other words, the unconscious mind often speaks in metaphors, with enhanced emotions or feelings, and less focus on factual, logical content. Information from the unconscious mind is subjective. It could only represent what the subject is subjectively experiencing or has experienced, and it cannot be used as an objective fact. This is extremely important to understand and keep in mind.

Often, you can glimpse your unconscious mind through dreams, or when you are disproportionately triggered or excited about something or someone. Strong emotional responses are usually a sign that your unconscious mind is trying to take control in your conscious mind.

Are These Memories in Regression Real?

They are real. At least, they are real to the person who was hypnotized. These are their subjective truth and experience, retrieved from their deep unconscious mind. Because they come from the unconscious mind, they might be transformed into versions slightly different from the objective truth; our unconscious mind cares more about the experience and strong emotional feelings we had at that moment, instead of remembering all the factual details. These ‘memories’ are extremely helpful for individuals to understand what might be the experience stuck in their mind which causes trauma or issues in their current timeline.

For example, whenever I am stressed in real life, I often have zombie apocalypse dreams. Usually, there’s not even one zombie in my dream, just the idea and the setting tells me that this is a zombie apocalypse dream. Have I ever experienced any doomsday or zombie apocalypse? Never. But what is my unconscious mind trying to tell me through this metaphor? I am in a state of high stress, coming from some external and uncontrollable factor.

Similarly, when an individual regresses to a memory, potentially from a very early stage in life, it can be somewhat based on real memories, but always remember, the experienced emotion and feeling always distort the proportion of the real memory. What matters more is understanding what this means. What does your unconscious mind want to communicate with you?

Have You Hypnotized Any Clients Who Turned Out to Be Historical Figures?

The short answer is YES; but the long answer is I DON’T KNOW. Multiple people have claimed their past lives were the same historical figures. Among our therapist group, we’ve all seen clients who had a past life as Jesus, Judas, Mary, Cleopatra, some kings and queens… But we all know there was only one Jesus and one Mary. I cannot tell which of them truly had a past life and are the reincarnation of different historical figures, but what I care more about is how this subjective experience that they described in their regression relates to their current life experiences and struggles.

For example, I had a female client with strong trust issues toward men, but she also loved being in love and was often in a disruptive mode because she switched between ‘I don’t trust this man’ and ‘I passionately love him.’ In one of our regression sessions, she saw one of her ‘past lives’ as a woman who fell in love with a guy from the same village, but the guy betrayed her and prostituted her out — he allowed other men to rape her every night, just to make money. Regardless of whether this ‘memory’ really happened in her past life or not, the information from her unconscious mind clearly indicated that she feels violated by men, and her trust issues toward men come from the irrational thought about the possibility that any man she loves might take advantage of her. After understanding this irrational thought so deep in her mind, she can ‘communicate’ with her unconscious mind with more rational thinking: not all men are bad and will take advantage of her. She just needs to choose wisely.

Similarly, when I face clients who see themselves as Judas, I usually focus more on the feelings my client experienced: regret? What kind of regret? What was the last message my client experienced? What does ‘Judas’ mean to my client? Very often it draws out deep, unconscious, and irrational thoughts that are tied to current struggles my clients are going through.

Concluding Thoughts

Hypnosis is a way to open the door for us to peek into our unconscious mind, similar to meditation and psychedelics, but in a controlled and guided way to ensure we focus on areas that might help clients solve specific struggles. The experiences an individual has during hypnotherapy are real — subjectively — and often tell us a rich story related to their current obstacles in life. We should focus on the feelings, emotions, and metaphors, instead of using them like an archaeologist or historian would.

Thank you for reading this long article. As a bonus for reading until the end, I’m sharing a short guided meditation (recorded hypnotic script) for you to experience. In this guided meditation, I’ll guide you to enter the ‘universal library’ to get the knowledge or information you need to resolve a deep, emotional experience that you are currently going through and unable to change or figure out on a conscious level. For example, I used this script to say sorry and goodbye to my childhood dog; I felt an unspeakable relief once I did that. Just relax, and let your unconscious mind guide you :)

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