“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. There’s no need to memorize the following instructions: either have someone read them to you (you indicate to the reader when you have accomplished each task by saying “okay”); or else tape record the instructions for your own use, leaving a little time for yourself to complete each task.
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, arms, hands, fingers and so on up to your head.
Take a deep breath and imagine that you are extending your height by stretching your legs until you are about a yard longer than your usual height. Then return to normal size. Take another deep breath and imagine that you are extending your height by stretching your neck until you are a yard taller than your usual height. Then return. With another breath imagine that you are extending your height by stretching your legs until they touch the wall. Then return. Take another breath and imagine you are stretching your neck until your head touches the wall behind you. Then return.
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 inflating yourself until you engulf 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. Allow yourself to float freely up, up, until you are in the clouds far above the earth.
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? Inside, outside? If inside, what is the building like? If outside, what are the surroundings like? 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. If someone has been helping you, you can describe the scene to them as it unfolds; if you are alone you can take notes (dividing your attention between the scene and the note-taking).
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: when you’re up in the clouds 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.” – W.B. Yeats, A Vision
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