On a recent Oprah show, she had a world-renowned hypnotist as her featured guest who seemed to “stumble” onto a phenomena that changed his world. Originally the man was a respected psychotherapist who utilized hypnotism as a tool to help his clients stop smoking, stop overeating…things like that. During one session with a woman who wanted to stop smoking, the hypnotist regressed her in age to try and discover the source of her need to smoke. Instead, what they discovered is that the woman regressed into becoming a young boy in 1700 Yugoslavia.

The hypnotist then worked with a man (on-camera) who was troubled by his very rough relationship with his sister. The man also complained about a deadly fear of anything pressing against his chest, to the point of outright terror for he felt he was being suffocated.

During the age-regression portion of the session, it was discovered that the man had been a fighter pilot in one of the Great Wars, and had died as a result of his conflicted feelings about shooting the gun mounted on his fighter plane, and was in turn gunned down by the enemy. When his plane crashed to the ground, the crushed metal of the aircraft impaled his chest and he died from those injuries. Further age-regression…

The subject reverted to boyhood in some unnamed city. Most likely he was a street urchin, living in alleys and on food found on the street. It was here that he witnessed the brutal rape and murder of a woman who he immediately recognized as his sister in his current life.

All very intriguing.

I’m not set on my belief of the methods of hypnotism, for I feel that the cellular memories we carry cannot be so easily accessed, only those that were the most forcefully imprinted. I do believe that some day in the future, we will learn how to access those deep memories in ways other than hypnotism. There are far too many reports of supernatural or other-natural events for such things not to exist. And anyone who knows me also knows that I don’t believe in coincidence.

Many years ago, I underwent a “past life regression” through a spiritual teacher here in Colorado, at her behest, as at that time I truly didn’t believe that we could travel so far back into our memory so as to be able to access anything that happened before our current existence. Linda, the guide for my “journey,” knew about my troubles with my family and especially my mother. She asked me to focus on that relationship as she took me through a series of visualizations.

After what could have been a minute or two hours, I suddenly found myself in a deep woods. The trees were old-growth, tall, both deciduous and pine. I was very aware of myself standing there, as well. But it wasn’t the me I know now, but a very tall, strapping man with pale skin and black hair. Lots of it. A great bushy beard hung halfway down my barrel chest. (I can’t even grow decent chin pubes currently!) I lived in a cabin I had hand-built in the woods, and I lived there with my wife and daughter.

At least I did at one time.

As Linda guided me along the path of that real or imagined lifetime, I knew that I lived in colonial America, eastern seaboard in a small town reminiscent of the set used in the film Witches of Eastwick. The men all wore odd black suits, and the women black dresses with bonnets. The church was also the town hall, and many decisions were made there by those in power. However, there was a particular stoic woman who everyone in the town deferred to. She was shorter than me, round, apple-cheeked, with half-moon glasses that rested perpetually at the end of her nose. It was her eyes that I immediately recognized: cold, slate-gray, hardened by a lifetime of bitterness and hate.

In this lifetime I knew her as my mother. In that lifetime, she was the unofficial leader of the town, and I had married her daughter, and borne her granddaughter…both of whom died shortly after childbirth. The woman blamed me for their deaths in spite of the fact that it was illness that had taken them both. Regardless, she had me ostracized from the town, just as she did a century later by banishing me from her house.

That vivid scene has stayed with me, still as potent as the day I experienced it. I remember seeing the lineage of our relationship and gaining a deep understanding of our love/hate relationship throughout my entire life.

It didn’t help mend any broken fences, but understanding can go a long way to easing the pain of any bitter relationship that had no obvious source of discontent.

And oh yeah, during another regression we learned that I was also a Mayan priest…but that’s a blog post for some other time and place.