Regressing: Pleasant Way to Past the Time

The truth is, I don’t know whether I actually got run through by a Spanish sword on a Samoan beach at age 15. It’s quite possible that I never worked as a manservant on a naval vessel in the 1830s. And I may just have been fantasizing when I remembered being a Dutch aviator in 1935.

Whether any of these things really happened might never be known. This much I do know, however: “Remembering” them during a past-life regression therapy session recently felt strangely gratifying. And it provided enough conversational material to last several lifetimes.

“The jury is out for me as far as whether it’s really reincarnation,” Donna Kannard, my past-life regression hypnotherapist, said before introducing me to the misty nether world of my own subconscious. “Probably won’t know until I’m dead. It may be just a metaphor; I know it works as a therapeutic tool.”

Actually, it wasn’t to deal with some pressing psychological problem that I decided to submit to the vagaries of hypnotherapy. Rather, it was for what Kannard described as a bit of “recreational” regression.

The experience began with me sitting on a couch in her Santa Ana office. “You are totally and completely relaxed,” she told me in a gentle yet convincing voice. “Oh, it feels so wonderful to release all that tension and care. . . .”

In fact, I’d been hypnotized before. Years ago, I’d dabbled extensively in what later came to be known as the human potential movement. Among other things, I’d experienced hypnosis and discovered that I made an excellent subject, as does almost any fool with a good imagination and weak will. So when Kannard suggested that we enter a tunnel, I was ready.

“We are going to begin to move backward in time,” she instructed, “backward in time to one of your previous lifetimes. I want you to step into a tunnel to your own past. Create a vivid mental impression of a tunnel.”

There it was, a sort of brown and earthy pathway through a mountainside. As she counted backward from 15 to one, I felt myself slowly, inexorably, drawn into it as Indiana Jones is into quicksand; if he knew what was good for him, he wouldn’t be there in the first place. At the end of the tunnel, she told me, would be a past life. Suddenly it was there, that infernal island dotted with coconut trees.

“I’m on a beach,” I told Kannard. “I’m about 15. A bunch of men on boats are rowing ashore. They have swords.”

It didn’t feel like I was making it up. It was as if the images were just popping into my head; as if they were happening in a movie, coming from somewhere outside myself. The best way I can describe the experience is to say that it felt like a dream, yet one happening while I was fully awake and able to provide an ongoing narrative.

After that first life, the one in which the soldiers killed me on the beach, it was fairly easy to flit back and forth in time.

Once, it seems, I had been a servant aboard a ship in the 1800s. My master was a handsome young naval officer wearing a black uniform with plumes on its shoulders. Later I had visions of having been an astronomer living alone in a book-lined house in some quaint European town. And, finally, I got images of a pilot in the 1930s walking around in baggy pants somewhere in Holland. That life sprang to mind complete with a touching picnic scene in which I said goodby to a sad-eyed girlfriend.

There didn’t seem to be any connecting theme to the images; if there was some karmic message in all of it, it went over my head.

Yet there did seem to be an odd sense of relief in the experience, a sort of unburdening as if the very act of “remembering” had a liberating effect.

Therein, Kannard explained later, lies the therapeutic value of past-life regression; its apparent ability to give rest to otherwise restless souls and, in some cases--especially when directed at particular questions or issues--provide insight into unresolved problems of the present. “Most people feel better walking out than walking in,” she said of the 90-minute sessions, for which she charges $60 to $75.

Next time, I decided, I’ll try to enter the fray with a specific issue in mind.

Like why is it that I hate tuna so much? Or why do I have such a hard time getting up in the morning? Or, most important, why oh why do I keep coming up with such wacky self-deprecating ideas for stories?

Could it be that I am a former sadist working out his karma from a past life by being masochistic? Perhaps a one-time convict inflicting penance on himself?

If I go back far enough, I figure, I’ll probably discover some horrible truth. Like maybe I once was an editor.