As we’ve already mentioned, you can use hypnotherapy to make positive suggestions to your subconscious mind, as well as to recall deeply-buried subconscious memories. Hypnotherapists have historically had success with simple tasks like helping clients remember where they may have misplaced particular valuables, or with the careful and sensitive process of recalling repressed childhood memories that may be at the root of emotional issues a client is facing. It is this ability to delve into the subconscious memory that links hypnotherapy with reincarnation by posing this question: if past lives exist, and we have a soul that retains the memories and experiences from those past lives, and hypnosis enables us to remember things we thought we’d forgotten, is there a way to somehow access our past life memories through hypnosis?

Since at least 1950, past life regression hypnotherapists have attempted to do just that. Through a careful “induction” process (that’s the method used to facilitate a hypnotic state, or “trance”) a hypnotherapist helps her client relax the body and mind completely in order to create a strong rapport with the subconscious mind. The hypnotherapist then invites the client to explore memories of a past life, using open-ended, non-leading questions to help the client sense and describe his surroundings as accurately and with as little influence from the hypnotherapist as possible. The process may take thirty minutes or several hours, and a client most often leaves a successful session with a large volume of knowledge stemming from the scenes and events he has witnessed. In many reported cases, these scenes and events are later verified as historically accurate, and in many more cases the client is able to address and resolve issues in the past life that positively affect his behavior and well-being in his current life.

Despite the volume of cases in which clients have reported positive past life regression experiences, past life regression hypnotherapy is still a subject of great contention. In the scientific community it is generally viewed with skepticism for several reasons. The foremost scientific objection to past life regression is a general objection to reincarnation, stemming from the fact that thus far it has been scientifically impossible to prove the existence of the soul. Despite various tests, scientists have found no conclusive evidence to support the existence of any entity that moves from one body to another from life to life, carrying memories and experiences with it. Additionally, many skeptics believe that the memories a subject unearths in a past life regression hypnotherapy session are faulty. It is a fact that the human mind is perfectly capable of distorting real memories or conjuring completely unreal ones. It is therefore possible that past life memories are merely constructions, stemming from a combination of imagination and previous experiences.

For example, let’s imagine you had a regression session in which you recounted in great detail a life you led as a fisherman on a Scandinavian whaling vessel at the beginning of the 20th century. The skeptic would refute this memory, simply attributing it to an article you may have read about whaling in a magazine, an old history lesson, or your long-standing interest in Norwegian culture. Such a criticism is not without merit; there has been at least one famous case of past life regression in which a subject claimed to have lived a previous life, cited many specific facts and details concerning the particulars of that life, but later was found to have already had previous knowledge of most of her supposedly newly-recovered memories. If we take this a step further, there have been thousands of cases in which subjects seek past life regression hypnotherapy to alleviate various problems in their current lives--physical pain, irrational fears, or anxiety about an upcoming event to name a few. These subjects are regressed into the past, and during their hypnotherapy session they determine that their problems in their current lives are rooted in traumatic events that occurred in a previous life. Once these problems are understood and put to rest in the hypnotic state, many subjects report a significant decrease in their initial symptoms. Psychotherapists who do not trust the legitimacy of past life memories obviously disapprove of such a treatment regimen, which, in their opinion, is based on fallacy and therefore potentially harmful.

Despite these concerns, one of the most inherently intriguing aspects of the past life regression process is that you, the subject, can work with a hypnotherapist or with audio files like those offered here at Past Life Answers, and decide for yourself what to believe, without any doctrine or dogma influencing your decision. You can work through the process, and as long as you are open-minded and willing to practice and follow instructions, you are at the very least guaranteed a brief glimpse into a possible past life experience. The images in that past life may be so extensive and vivid, and you may come away with knowledge so compelling that you may decide that the memories are real, and that you have just discovered a new and fascinating spirit world. Or you may come away from your work with little more than a thorough understanding of the hypnotic induction process and a few scattered images of memories you decide came straight out of your imagination. Whatever the case, the process is consistently safe, relaxing, and fun, and both believers and non-believers almost always take positive life lessons from their experiences.