“We can remember other lives”

A dim winter light breaks through the clouds and enters the hotel room where Brian Weiss welcomes us in Barcelona. The unexpected caress of the sun seems to accompany his voice and her soft ways, the same ones that induced a state of deep relaxation to nearly a thousand participants in the III Forum of Excellence.

Only a few later recounted having returned to “past lives”but most will have had an interesting experience of relaxed concentration, perhaps even with the surprise of recover a childhood memory.

Brian Weiss has spent a lifetime listening to what his patients tell him about these regressions. It all started with Catherine in her Miami office, when she was a Chief of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital. He told it in his best-seller many lives, many teachers (Editions B), the first of his nine books on the subject.

A doctor from Yale University (1970) and trained to think like a scientist, he overcame his initial reluctance to become a one of the most reputable popularizers of reincarnation.

an extraordinary awareness

–What was it that sparked your interest in past life regressions when you were a psychiatrist?
–My first experiences go back almost thirty years, although the book Many Lives, Many Teachers was published twenty years ago. The fact is important: if I took so long to tell my experiences with Catherine, it was because as head of Psychiatry at the hospital and a recognized doctor in my specialty I was concerned about my reputation and my career. In the beginning, moreover, I was a complete skeptic.

What happened with Catherine, after a year and a half of therapy in which we were hardly making any progress, is that I resorted to hypnosis to try to make her remember childhood episodes that could be at the origin of her anxieties and phobias. One day I asked her to go back to where her symptoms started, thinking it would go back to some event that happened when she was 5 or 6 years old perhaps.

But he went back 4,000 years ago. In that life that she remembered, she was drowning. Her daughter was torn from her arms in a kind of flood. Hence her fear of her water and of suffocating, two of the symptoms that had brought her to my office. Her phobia reached such an extreme that she could not swallow pills. And these symptoms disappeared when remembering those events. At first I didn’t believe in it but I had to accept that she was helping him anyway. So I kept taking her to that state of deep relaxation and she was remembering different lives. She was completely cured in a few months. And then I started with another patient and another and another, until I reached four thousand.

–And what led you to finally believe in the veracity of those stories?
–As I say, I was very skeptical and rational. I thought that perhaps what Catherine was saying was the product of her imagination, or metaphors or symbolic images of her. But in one of her lives, she began to recount her death in the Middle Ages and how she floated above her body and she found a beautiful light. She was talking about “the Masters” and then she saw my father and my son there. My father had died a year ago and my son had died ten years ago, a few days after he was born. She knew it, she exposed me to the medical details. And she wasn’t an FBI agent or an investigative reporter. That was even before the computer age.

He knew very private and secret information: he mentioned names, details… And to me, as a doctor, this amazed me. How could I know? There wasn’t even one place he could have gotten that information from. There I understood that there was something more than ordinary consciousness. And then I remember thinking: if everything you know about my father and my son is true, couldn’t everything you say about their past lives be true as well? So even though she was cured of all her symptoms, I needed this other proof to believe that what she was saying was something more than pure fantasy.

How do doctors and the general public receive your theories?
-Acceptance is much higher now than it was years ago. Doctors, especially psychiatrists, are still the most reluctant, I guess because of the way they are used to thinking. They are even more skeptical than the religious, because, somehow, all religions have believed that a part of the human being does not become extinct at death. Even so, today doctors are more receptive, surely due to the influence of movies, magazines, newspapers, books… The other day on a television program in Miami, where I live, the presenter said: “I hope that in my next life …”. Now the concept is much more familiar than when I started in the eighties.

“Regressive therapy cures fears, phobias and disorders for which there is no apparent cause. It is what matters.”

A skeptic doubts, does not deny

–What would you say to a skeptic about reincarnation?
–I would tell him to try it, to experience it. Then she would see it. It is not very difficult to have a regression. Even if you don’t return to past lives, sometimes a spiritual experience, deep insight, or communication with a dead loved one is enough. Then you see something out of the ordinary happening. A skeptic, in the original Greek sense of the word, is someone who doubts, who investigates and tries to offer alternative explanations for a phenomenon. He is not someone who says: “this does not exist because I do not believe in it.” That is not a true skeptic, but a person with a closed mind.

–How does doubt about its validity influence regression?
–Anyone, regardless of the doubts they harbor, can experience a regression as long as they allow it, let go and deeply relax. If he sits with his eyes open and thinks, “I’m not going to regress,” then he won’t regress. But if he considers the possibility of that happening, closes his eyes, follows my instructions, breathes deeply, relaxing more and more, he will regress.

–Due to the effect of hypnosis? Wouldn’t suggestion then intervene?
“Hypnosis is completely safe. Nobody controls you or blocks you or anything happens to you, it’s just a state of relaxed concentration. When you’re engrossed in reading a book and you don’t hear any of the noises around you, that’s a form of hypnosis. As simple as that. And as safe as that, because you can open your eyes or return to a conscious thought at any time.

–How can you experience a regression following your specific method?
–I train therapists so that they know how to carry out regressions. There are many in Spain. And I also have several CDs in Spanish that guide the regression (it can be done alone at home, it is a safe method because you can open your eyes at any time). In addition, non-hypnotic techniques such as meditation, contemplation, or visualization are also helpful because they lead to a state of relaxed concentration. On the other hand, some people regress when they travel and experience a deja vuThey feel that a place is very familiar to them even though they have not been there before.

–And how can you know that what you experience is not the result of your imagination or the unconscious?
–It is difficult to determine at first, it is not always clear. But, for example, if I’m guiding someone in a regression and they suddenly start speaking in a language they haven’t learned, that can never be fantasy. The phenomenon is known as glossolalia. It doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s therapeutic and that’s the main goal: to cure people of fears, phobias, and psychological and physical disorders for which there are no apparent causes. The important thing is the cure more than the tests.

How does a regression work?

– How long does it take to produce this healing?
-Depends. It’s rare for it to happen the first time. And if so, it is usually a phobia. For example, if someone has a fear of heights because they were perhaps pushed off a high castle wall in the Middle Ages, the phobia will quickly be cured. Or if a woman cannot wear anything around her neck – not a button, not a chain, not a handkerchief – because she was strangled in another life, she simply remembering that event of hers will get rid of her phobia. If the problem has to do with relationships, it takes more than one session, because perhaps you coincided with a person in different lives: your father may be the reincarnation of your grandmother in another life or your daughter in a previous one. Traumas due to abuse are also more complicated.

In short, what heals faster are phobias and then physical pain: for example, back pain that is alleviated by remembering a blow received at that precise point during a medieval battle.

Why should a trauma from a past life be more important than one from the present life?
–It is not that it is more important, but that it is usually the first cause of the symptom. But anyway, it doesn’t matter which life you have to go back to, it can be a very recent one or even the present one. The essential thing is to bring awareness to where it is needed. I don’t ask anyone to necessarily go back to a past life. I only tell the person, when they are in a state of deep relaxation: “Go to where the symptoms started, for the first time.” And she in her unconscious knows it. It may go back to when you were 16 or 6, or to your intrauterine life—some people have memories of being in their mother’s womb—or to past lives if that’s where the problem originated.

–And can you return to both childhood and past lives at the same time?
-Sometimes. Especially in cases of abuse, because they are repeated, but it is easier to return to the abuse of a past life because it is less scary. Another common case is that of people who use their weight as a protection, perhaps because they suffered abuse in past lives. When they remember it, it is not dramatic because they see it from a distance, like watching a movie and, little by little, in successive sessions, they can get closer… They then realize that they no longer need that weight and they begin to lose weight. It’s so much better than a diet!

With asthma, it often happens that the person remembers having died of suffocation in a fire or from gas inhalation. And they improve a lot when that is remembered. The similarity with psychotherapy is that remembering the trauma produces a catharsis, a healing effect. The process is the same, whether the trauma is in childhood or in past lives.

regression as therapy

–What would be the difference between regressive therapy and psychoanalysis and other psychological therapies?
–The only difference is the setting, that the field of action is greater. Instead of stopping at childhood you can go back much further. It doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not. Still, it works.

– Part of the success of the technique consists, then, in looking at life from a much broader perspective?
Yes, and then the values ​​change. Things that could seem very important to you, such as money, fame or power, stop being so because you see that you are not going to take them with you. Instead, you realize that you take everything that is not material with you: it matters how you have treated other people and what you have learned about kindness,…