Why Past Life Therapy Works

By Matthew Joyce

James coughed and choked on the dust from the grain raining down on him in the grain elevator. He tried to climb above the growing pile but it was coming too fast. Already buried up to his waist, he couldn’t free his legs enough to reach the door.

“Help!” he cried, gasping for air.

But no one came.

Still the grain poured down, burying him deeper and deeper until the door disappeared from view. When the grain reached his neck, James knew all hope was lost. A short time later he sucked in a last desperate breath of dust as he was smothered in a suffocating world of darkness.

Reliving the panic and trauma of this tragic death during a past-life session, James realized this was actually good news. Far from feeling trapped, James felt liberated. The therapeutic experience freed him from the years of chronic, debilitating asthma that he had experienced in this lifetime. Not for a day or a week. It was simply gone. Something his medical doctors had been unable to achieve in years of trying, and had told him was impossible.

Success stories like this are increasingly common among past life therapists, who have clinically demonstrated that the process of past-life regression therapy is very effective with certain patients. This type of therapy has been most helpful for individuals who suffer from a range of ailments such as phobias, anxiety, and even physical illnesses that have no known cause in this lifetime. But what isn’t as common is an explanation of why it works.

I have my own theory about this based upon my direct experiences and I thought you’d be interested in learning about it.

Enter the Wave Tank

To understand my theory it helps to know about wave tanks, which are used by physicists and engineers to study the properties of waves. If you’ve never seen one, they vary in size from immense pools to table top tanks. The table top variety often has a glass bottom so that it can be placed above an overhead projector. The tank is then illuminated from above so the light shines on the water and the waves cast shadows which can then be displayed via the projector (See Figure 1).

Depending on what is being studied, the waves can be generated by a board at one end of the tank or by setting up drips of water that fall from above. Both methods can be used to create various patterns of ripples that expand across the surface of the water.

One of the more common wave properties studied is called interference. Interference is when two sets of waves overlap one another, such as when you toss two pebbles into a pond at the same time. The waves move through each other and in some places the crests and troughs of the opposing waves interfere with each other and cancel each other out (See Figure 2). It’s not so different with past lives.

Past Lives vs. Concurrent Lives

Of course, the phrase “past lives” is something of a misnomer. If you access a lifetime that happened hundreds of years ago, you naturally assume it happened in the past and that lifetime is all over now. After all, it was hundreds of years ago, right?

Not necessarily. If that was the case then it would be impossible to explore future lives since they have not happened yet. Yet, some consciousness explorers and some “past life” therapists do that as well. I have.

As I have explored past and future lives I’ve theorized that all of these lives are happening concurrently. In fact, every moment of your current life is happening at the same time too, from birth to death. We are living in a single moment called now, but our lives seem to stretch out into sequential before-and-after events because that is the nature of linear space-time as we experience it in human form. It’s heady stuff I know, but I ask you to consider the idea of concurrent lives since the perspective helps to understand why past life therapies work.

Every Lifetime Has Its Own Set of Ripples

From this perspective it’s possible to see each lifetime as a set of ripples radiating out from a central point of awareness. Your awareness in this lifetime is one point. Your awareness in the other lifetime as that other person is another point.

In the wave tank, when two sets of ripples have a similar frequency the crests and troughs of the overlapping waves cancel each other out in what is called destructive interference. You can see the destructive interference in Figure 2 as the oblong grey shape between the two radiating centers.

Interestingly, you can significantly decrease this destructive interference by changing the frequency of one of the wave patterns. If you change the difference between the two frequencies enough, the crests and troughs of the opposing waves pass through one another largely unaffected and you can virtually eliminate the interference pattern. (See Figure 3).

Past Life Therapy Eliminates Interference

I see past life issues that are impacting this current lifetime as interference patterns. The frequencies of a particular issue in another lifetime are so similar to issues in this lifetime that the interference causes difficulty in this life.

Traditional psychotherapy and other therapeutic methods work to change the frequencies in this lifetime. Past life therapy changes the frequencies in the other lifetime. Both are valid methods and which is most appropriate depends upon the client, the therapist, and the particular issue at hand.

I’ve found that past life therapy is particularly effective when improvement efforts in this lifetime have already been attempted or when no source for the issue in this lifetime is readily apparent.

How It Works (in Brief)

Past life therapy is essentially a method of transferring your awareness from one wave emitting point to another. As the process takes you into the alternative lifetime it provides you with an opportunity to either observe events in that life as you would if you were watching someone else in a room with you, or to live those events as if they were actually happening to you personally. I find actually reliving the events to be much more powerful and ultimately more effective, but different people use different methods.

However you do it, when you visit another lifetime and directly experience the event and the mental, physical, and/or emotional trauma associated with it, you experience that event as being real for you—within your current awareness, where you can now processes it and deal with it in a conscious way.

When that happens you essentially transfer the problematic energy frequency being emitted from the other lifetime to your point of view in this one. This is what eliminates the interference and promotes healing.

How Many Visits Are Necessary?

Occasionally a single visit to another lifetime is all that is needed to identify and process the issue. Other times multiple visits to that lifetime are necessary, sometimes to continue processing the same issue and sometimes to work through other related issues.

But sometimes revisiting just one other lifetime is not enough because interference is actually coming from recurring issues from multiple lifetimes, which creates more complex interference patterns (See Figure 4). In those situations, visits to each lifetime are necessary to process the issues and eliminate the sources of interference.

Multiple Points of Healing

Of course, James didn’t need to know this stuff to benefit from his session. But when you adopt a mental framework for how past life therapy works you not only gain an understanding of the process you are undertaking, you also come to recognize that your efforts are helping to bring healing to other lifetimes as well.

(To explore these wave interactions in real time you can play with a virtual ripple tank online at http://www.falstad.com/ripple/. Select the 2D Waves Applet. Then start with two sources and a single frequency. Then change to two sources with two frequencies and adjust the frequencies. It also works if you switch to 3D view.)

Next Step

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