“How squeamish are you about hovering above your own dead body?” The question was posed by the woman conducting the Regressive Hypnosis seminar I had signed up for. There were 10 women and just two men in the cozy room. Each was hoping to revisit lives and trod ground once familiar but now long gone. Regressive Hypnosis is a metaphysical way of inducing the soul and spirit to remember things each had been trying to forget by heaping decades and centuries upon fragments of days and years once lived. The process tricks consciousness into delving back into the past, the good impressions and far less pleasant ones. I was excited to experience my past. Over the decades I had received ‘butt dials’ of memories not in any logical way associated with me. Quick out of place and totally unexpected life experiences floating around in my cosmic karma like lose bits of code in an otherwise functioning program. The odor of sweaty leather from a camera shoulder brace I had been wearing immediately brought back memories of hand to hand combat. You know the kind, heavy swords and spears being swung and thrust in some hot dusty field. I was a Roman soldier and exhausted but alive. Another time I was lying in an unfamiliar bed reading. When I put the Henry Miller book down the consciousness of an elderly dying woman settled over me. I could see young couples seated around the foot of the bed. I recognized them as the children of my siblings who themselves were all dead. These children were keeping a death vigil out of respect. Then the image and awareness vanished. Henry Miller never concerned himself with elderly women. The memory was like a wind blown seed snagging on my brain.
Our hypnotist did not use the pendulum sway of a stop watch or some other repetitive gimmick to gain access to our subconscious. She talked her way into her process gently and always emotionally supportive. None of us would leave our bodies. She asked each of us to try and determine the year we were in. What we were wearing, eating or seeing. Who was with us and most importantly how we died in each of the two or three past lives she thought we might be able to access. She talked her way in, gently and always emotionally supportive. Our journey began with feet flat to the floor, legs uncrossed and deep breaths. She asked us to imagine a bright white light settling itself on our head. To follow the slow progress of this intense illumination as it worked its way down through our bodies. When she felt the light had moved sufficiently she told us to imagine a flight of stone stairs leading us down into a deep place. It was not a scary location but welcoming. Once at the bottom we would enter a beautiful garden, a secret garden all our own where guides would meet and accompany us through our past lives. My feet were flat to the floor, arms uncrossed and eyes squeezed shut till I felt uncomfortable but I encountered no steps, saw no garden. I sincerely wanted to go somewhere and re-experience however briefly someone I had been. What had I learned? Had there been wives and children? No matter how hard I concentrated there was no breakthrough, not even a hint of a glimpse of a snatch of a memory. When I opened my eyes to peek around the room everyone was lost in the past. One young woman began to sob. The hypnotist had already warned not to touch anyone around us during the process. No one paid attention to the distraught woman. The hypnotist continued to speak in an attempt to allow we cosmic voyagers to enter ever deeper into the soul’s memory bank. This went on for roughly forty minutes which is difficult if the activity seems pointless and you have your eyes closed awaiting a surprise.
At last our guide released everyone from their past lives excursion. Nearly everyone had experienced some interesting period from their personal past. There were some similarities. Most of the remembered dates were clustered in the mid 1800’s. One woman recited dates from the 1300’s and 1600’s including the weather, her family, current events, what she was wearing and similar trivia which would be pointless if it wasn’t harvested from an actual life. Similar to when archaeologists examine pottery shards and fossilized poop to bring the past to life. De-coding the important from the trivial. I was very impressed with what I heard. Two of the group had been tonsured monks, one in France and one on an island in Ireland. Most had died of natural causes, primarily age, after living normal lives. One more somber woman said she had had two marriages and had neither done nor experienced anything eventful. She said she was neither intelligent nor creative and after she died, missed no one. In her actual life the woman had recently lost a daughter so perhaps her nihilism could be explained that way. Only two had been well off financially and none of them revealed any special belief in God. There was no mention of Satan nor anything overtly religious. Despite the large number of lives revisited no one had been famous. I fully expected a few Joan d’Arcs and other notable personages but there were none. Most had changed genders repeatedly. A couple had died in various battles. The young woman who had been crying so early in the process recalled she had been kept prisoner and abused in a barn before escaping and throwing herself off a cliff to escape her torturer. She described seeing her body floating in the sea. Nearly everyone but me had experienced hovering above their bodies at death, being aware of everything going on, who was there. I heard memories of sights, smells and sounds. Church bells, the stench of death and fire, feel of coarse cloth on the skin, birth and death of children. Everyone seemed satisfied with their astral outings but I felt like I did every time I lost a contest or discarded lottery tickets that hadn’t won. I really wanted this to work this time. I guess that for the immediate future I will have to hope for one of those fleeting glimpses of my personal past that arrive when I least expect it. Who am ‘I,’ who was ‘me’ and how far back does it go remain questions without answers. Remember that every atom of our bodies was formed at the big bang and has been many things living and probably even inanimate. Everything has been re-cycled and awaits its turn to begin the long journey again.