PLR involves exploring memories from the past. Some experience memories from early childhood, infancy, a life different from the one they’re living now, or the space between lives. Clients can “relive” or observe these memories using any or all of their senses. The memories often contain an emotional wound or mental health issue that has never healed or been resolved, or a lesson that can help alleviate emotionally, and sometimes physical symptoms.
If my client chooses this method in our therapy session, I use gentle relaxation and guided imagery techniques to help tap into the subconscious mind where these memories reside. The person going through the process remains in control of themselves at all times. They cannot be made to do or say anything and can end the session whenever they want. Clients do not need to believe in reincarnation to be regressed. Most people describe the process as a very positive experience; relaxing, peaceful, and like a weight is lifted from them.
Philosophical Assumptions to Consider
The physical, spiritual, and emotional levels are not often in harmony or aligned with each other, and states of dis-equilibrium or dis-ease are created.
We are multi-leveled conscious beings with many levels of awareness, ego states, and past life scenarios, actively at play at any given moment in time.
We have an innate drive or instinct toward wholeness, integration, and equilibrium.
Past life therapy enables a therapist to move a client to explore deeper parts of the psyche. The process allows a client to understand his/her inner, emotional, and attitudinal matrix that unconsciously influences his/her physical and motivational system.
Because these life scripts, problems, and lifestyle patterns are replicated on many developmental levels, we can approach the resolution of these patterns in many ways and at different levels, such as in the current life patterns, or the peri- or pre-natal experience, or past life experiences.
Past life therapy’s primary concern is not only in the alleviation of symptoms, but also focuses on the dynamics and attitudes that support the systems. The mental, emotional, and physical levels often need to be examined for symptom relief.
The primary aim of past life therapy is to help the individual to live a more integrated lifestyle, to live in the here and now, to realize his/her connectedness to the universe, and to participate in the creative process that gives meaning to each moment of awareness.
Therapeutic Assumptions to Consider
Presenting problems, symptoms, and situations are not what they appear.
Insight does not necessarily bring change.
Past life patterns are utilized to understand and to retrieve unconscious motivational factors.
Resistances are reactive patterns that need to be examined in the therapeutic process and may indicate important episodes to be explored.
Physical, emotional, and mental patterns, whether pathological or healthy, are functions for the development of the individual.
There is a transcendent function within the psychological make-up of the individual that knows the origin of the problems and the resolution of those problems.
