How to run Past Life Regressions

“We manufacture whatever immortal souls we have out of the bits of

difference we make by living in this world.” - Sue Hubbell, The Sweet Bees

Running past life regressions is a good way to introduce yourself to the

practice of magic. It’s so simple to learn that you can easily master the basic
method in less than an hour’s time; yet it is so far-reaching in its
ramifications that a few months of playing around with it for an hour or so
every night can completely transform your life.
Most of us New Agers believe in the reality of past lives, even though we
can’t actually remember them. We embrace this doctrine because it seems
logical: it explains the vicissitudes of our present existence as the patterns
and choices we ourselves made in other lives. The ability to actually remember
past lives seems to be the possession of a fortunate few, like Edgar Cayce, who
are born with mysterious psychic powers far beyond our reach. But in fact, the
ability to recall past lives can be easily learned by anybody – all that is
required is an open mind. And there are incalculable insights (and surprises!)
that await the adventurer willing to explore these byways of his or her own
subconscious.
The entry technique here is adapted from William Swygard’s excellent
booklets on Awareness Techniques. Choose a time when you are calm, alert, and
will not be disturbed. If you are an astrologer, you can use a lunar planetary
hour; however this is merely a help, not a necessity. Have a notebook and pen
(or tape recorder) at hand. Remove your shoes, loosen any restrictive clothing,
and lie down on your bed. Take some deep breaths, and then put your attention
on your toes and relax them with a deep breath. Move up to your feet and relax
them with a breath; then relax your ankles, calves, knees, thighs, and so on up
to your head.
Then take a deep breath and imagine yourself swelling up like a balloon to
twice your volume; then release the breath and imagine returning to normal size.
After you’ve succeeded at this, take a breath and imagine yourself inflating and
filling the entire room; then return. When you can do this, take a deep breath
and imagine yourself engulfing the entire house; then return. Next, take a
breath and swell up until you are bigger than the house and float upwards into
the sky. Look down as you rise and imagine you are seeing the house, the
neighborhood, the surrounding countryside, as if from an ascending balloon.
Then command yourself to descend lightly back to earth in another
lifetime. Look down at your feet; how are you shod? Look at your clothes;
what are you wearing? Look around you; what kind of place are you in? Are
there any other people around you? Who are they? What are they doing? What
time or country does it seem to be? What are you doing in the scene? Why are
you there? You concern yourself with these sorts of questions until you feel
you’re plugged into the past life; then you just let the thing flow and take you
where it will.
When you first come down the scene will be fuzzy at first. You look at
your feet, then your clothing, then your environment, to put the pieces of the
picture into place. You ask questions of the regression to connect yourself to
it – to make that life vivid and bring it into focus. For me (who is not
especially psychic) regressions are rather murky; I can’t usually make out
faces clearly, nor colors unless they’re very bright. You see the regression
with your mind’s eye, but it’s more felt than seen – more like a series of
emotional tableaux than a movie. You usually only hit the high points of a
given life; you don’t see all the day-to-day routine. It’s not unlike a
daydream or fantasy, except you soon realize that something other than your
conscious mind is running it, and that something is your feelings. The
experience will be more or less vivid depending on how much you block it. Don’t
judge the experience (by thinking, for example, “This isn’t real – this is just
my imagination!”). Just let it happen; if you want to evaluate it, wait until
it’s over. This is not an exercise for your conscious mind, so tell your
conscious mind to butt out and keep its judgments to itself.
When you first start to use this sort of technique you don’t know how it’s
supposed to feel (you can’t believe it could be this easy!), so you may have
doubts about whether you are doing it correctly. Don’t worry – if anything at
all is unfolding before your mind’s eye, you’re doing it right. If there is no
flow or direction (you’re stopped in one scene), it means you are purposely
blocking it. You’ll know quite well if you’re doing this. To unblock yourself
at any point, just ask more questions: What time of day or season is it? What
kind of building / vegetation is around you? And so on.
In running past life regressions it is useful to have a notebook or tape
recorder in hand to jot down the past life as it occurs. Since the content of a
regression is largely emotional, it tends to fade quickly from conscious memory,
and it’s often useful to have a record of it for future reference. It’s a
simple matter to divide your attention between the past life and the notebook.
Once you get the hang of the entry technique, you can dispense with the going up
in the sky and coming down each time.
You might want to experiment with running past lives involving people you
know from this life. Try this: ask to see a past life involving someone you
love in this life. Then ask to see a past life with someone you dislike in this
life. Simply give the command: “I’d like to see a past life with so-and-so” at
the time you command to view a past life. The powers that be will steer you to
the right place.
Also, you can ask questions during the regression, such as: “Do I know
that past-life person in this lifetime?” and you’ll usually get an answer,
which will come as either a conscious thought or a feeling. The theory is that
you have an infinite number of lives with every being on earth, not to mention
other places, but some are closer to your present life than others – more
connected to it in terms of lessons to be learned in this life – and these are
the lives that usually pop up in regressions.

“We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in
some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come
together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child
of one life the husband, wife, brother, sister of the next. Sometimes, however,
a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and
again.” - William Butler Yeats, A Vision

The question naturally arise as to whether these past life regressions

actually are past lives, or whether the whole thing is just an exercise in
imagination. These regressions are not always factually accurate portrayals of
other times and places (unless you’re very psychic); you can interpolate
anachronisms into them if you want to; moreover a life supposedly taking place
in ancient Rome often looks suspiciously like something out of Cecil B. DeMille.
In other words, we obviously filter these regressions through our present-day
concepts.
Also it is often difficult to relate to the “you” in a regression. He or
she doesn’t act and react the way you would, and so it’s hard to accept or
understand in what sense that person is you; much less that you are personally
responsible for all the mischief that person is doing.
Nonetheless there is an emotional truth in regressions that argues for
their being taken seriously, no matter whether they are “real” (whatever that
means) or merely figments. The real touch in a past life regression is with the
feelings that the “you” in the regression is experiencing. There are emotional
echoes – little pings of recognition – that you will know mean something to you
personally, even if you are at a loss to put them into words. For example, you
often recognize the people you know from this lifetime when you encounter them
in regressions by the feeling you have for them. I first learned to feel the
people around me (instead of merely react to them on a thought form level) by
doing past life regressions: understanding how I felt about them in past lives
helped me to get a grip on how I really feel about them in this life.
It is the emotional content of these regressions which is of primary
importance, not whether they are conceptually real (although my spirit guides
assure me that they are no more nor less real than the life we are living now).
Nor is it important that you intellectually resolve the “meaning” of this or
that life. You just try to be aware that such-and-such a person is hurting you
in this lifetime because you asked him to, to atone for what you did to him in
another life; or that your stirrings towards music, say, or agriculture reflect
a valid part of your being – another life in which you were a musician or a
farmer; or that your irrational anger, joy, fears, and hopes are often quite
rational and logical after all.
The emotional recognition in a regression is due to an actual line which
connects you to the “you” in the regression. Clairvoyants see these connections
as fibers of living light, but most people sense them as feelings, emotional
connections. The theory is that these fibers from other lives bind us to
neurotic patterns of behavior in this one – we feel a need to keep reliving our
mistakes until we get them right. By running past lives it becomes possible to
recognize these patterns, which immediately releases a lot of the energy that’s
tied up in them; i.e., it loosens the fibers between that life and this one,
allowing the conscious mind to decide if it wants to do something about the
patterns (instead of being dominated by them unawares).
After running a life, it often helps to jot down the impressions you have of it.
What was the main thrust or purpose of that life? What lessons did you learn?
How did you feel about it after you died? There’s no need to become morbid or
obsessed about past lives – just draw your conclusions and move on. After you
have run a great many past lives, you will begin to notice certain trends or
feelings that keep recurring over and over. For example, during a difficult
time in my marriage my guides directed me and my wife to run scores of past
lives that we had together, so that we would understand how it was that we were
at the place we had gotten to. It turned out that in most of our past lives
together one of us had murdered the other one. Beyond that there were many
other recurrent themes throughout our lives together that were repeated in this
one.

“The victim must, in the Shiftings, live the act of cruelty, not as victim but
as tyrant; whereas the tyrant must by a necessity of his or her nature become
the victim. …The souls of victim and tyrant are bound together and, unless there
is a redemption through the intercommunication of the living and the dead, that
bond may continue life after life.” - A Vision

For most people the vast majority of past lives consist either of
unremitting hardship and suffering, or else of selfishness and chicanery. I,
personally, have had lots of lives as a scoundrel, and it’s interesting how many
bells these ring for me in my present life. It can humble you a little, or at
least make you realize that in your own heart there is a killer, a drunkard, or
a psychopath, no matter how pious and privileged you think you are; and they’re
not that far beneath the surface, either.
On the other hand, you’ll find lives in which you were quite admirable –
courageous, loving, and wise. These lives will also directly connect to your
better side in this life, and confirm your sense of purpose and direction.
It’s this emotional recognition which is the gist of the thing. This is
your own heart speaking to you, giving you messages of truth which you usually
ignore or take for granted until they’re somehow pointed out to you. Past life
regressions bring a lot of subconscious flotsam and jetsam up to the conscious
mind, which is necessary because everything originates in the conscious mind,
and can only be controlled or dispelled by the conscious mind; but first the
conscious mind has to be made aware of it. Running past life regressions
loosens our light fibers by tuning us into other moods (“life purposes”) from
other lives and realities.
In past life regressions we have a safe and powerful technique for bringing
useful information up from the subconscious, to help us get to our true purpose
in incarnating, and to understand and accept who we really are.

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