by Lorrie Kazan
I gave this talk at Henry Bolduc’s Past Life Regression Conference Advanced Training in June 2001. It’s a work in progress…
Reaching Through To The Spirit
“It is said in the healing field that just the act of acknowledging another’s soul begins the healing…it has been my experience that angry or badly hurt people can be transformed by this simple act of being present for them, simply because we are listening with all our heart.”
Journey to Alternity
Judith Simon Prager, Ph.D.
“Recently I heard an interview on National Public Radio’s program, Fresh Air, with the Dalai Lama’s official translator. The interviewer, Terry Gross, asked him if there were ever western concepts he had trouble translating into Tibetan. The translator said the hardest concept he had ever tried to convey emerged from a conference on Buddhism and psychology held in the United States. He had enormous difficulty trying to translate the words which described the concept of self-loathing. It took him almost half an hour to find the words to help the Dalai Lama understand this concept. The Dalai Lama was unable to believe that anyone could be so separated from the self that he could loathe it. In his mind, this was utterly unthinkable. In his exploration of the human psyche through the context of Tibetan Buddhism, this was a concept utterly unknown and foreign to him.”
“This self-loathing, so foreign to a Tibetan living on the same planet at the same time as we do, is pandemic in the United States…I was shocked to hear a well-known, Harvard-trained psychiatrist mention that he had been in practice for twenty-five years before he realized that the lack of love could make someone crazy.”
Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D., “Opening the Doors to the Self: Relationships and Regression Therapy,” The Journal of Regression Therapy, Volume XIII (I), 1999
“In today’s culture, with its emphasis on striving for material wealth and overwhelming mental stimulation, there is little to nurture the spirit. This has led to the clinical finding that many individuals today have the origin of their health problems on the spirit level.
The Tao Te Ching discusses protecting the spirit through the state of desirelessness (called wu wei). The knowledge that addressing the spirit is critical is also found in the earliest writings in Chinese medicine…in which it is noted that the first method of acupuncture is to cure the spirit, the second was to give knowledge of how to restore the body. In order to make acupuncture effective one must first cure the spirit”
Charles A. Moss, M.D., “Five Element Acupuncture: Treating Body, Mind, and Spirit,” Altern Ther Health Med. 1999;(5):52-61
Thus, my premise is that one’s spiritual condition is essential to health and wellness and that we will be far more effective as healers (or simply as human beings) if we are in touch with our own spiritual natures. By spiritual nature, I am referring to the essence of who one is, i.e., without a name, clothes, illusions, i.e., pure beingness. I’m suggesting that we need to have a healthy relationship with our own souls, and in so doing, we become actively engaged with others on this core level where deep healing occurs.
Freud proposed the idea that what we don’t know can control us and that accessing the unconscious mind would ultimately allow someone a greater ability to choose their destiny, or at least know why they were making the choices they did. Therefore, long-forgotten memories, which are encoded within us, influence the lives we lead today, only quite often without our conscious awareness. If we decode these messages and make them conscious, we’ve opened the door for a realm of possibilities not previously available. In past life regression, we seek to heal and nurture this core self carried from lifetime to lifetime.
In attaching the above quotes, I am also suggesting that there is a wound in our society (and therefore in our selves) with regard to love and worthiness. I am also questioning the true nature of healing and wondering how one knows if they’ve attained it since it may arrive in a way that does not fit one’s pictures. In other words, it may not be a “cure,” for whatever ails me.
Scientist Lawrence LeShan, author of The Medium, The Mystic And the Physicist, had intended to disprove the idea of alternative healing and instead ended up creating scientific studies, which revealed the effectiveness of these alternative methods. He then went on to show that he could train average people to send out healing. What he couldn’t do (and this is what fascinates me) was predict who would be cured as a result of that connection. He could not predict who would take in the healing and who would not.
Thus, we don’t always know the higher purpose of a disease or a discomfort. In Healing Words, Larry Dossey, M.D., reminds us that “Thy will be done,” has been shown to be one of the most powerful prayers we can utter. That prayer seems to coincide with the highest transformation of an organism, which may not mean it’s coming back to life.
Dossey quotes the German poet Rilke, who tells us “…sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter.” What Dossey wants us to see is that we want formulas, easy answers to life’s questions. When we get sick we often look to some doctor or “health guru” to provide those answers. Yet it’s the struggle with these questions that sets us on our personal quest for our own revelations.
Speaking of his own illness he says, “I began to realize that this immensely trying experience had a hidden dimension that was not all bad.” He wonders whether his book would have remained unfinished had he kept accepting the stream of alternative treatments his renowned friends were offering. He had to pull back and feel the loneliness of his own pain. “I realized there were benefits to feeling bad—but I found it almost impossible to communicate this idea to others. It was invariably interpreted as a morbid focusing on pain. I was certain there was more involved.”
Regression allows us to probe behind the conscious mind and into the interior being. Through regression we can look at what soul contracts we made during the interlife (or bardo state) and perhaps gain a better understanding of what we set out to learn and even renegotiate those contracts if they’re no longer appropriate.
Regression allows us to look at the nature of being, and to question “What am I here to create/contribute/learn? How am I part of God,” whatever that God may be?
13th century mystic, Meister Eckhart said, “Some people want to recognize God only in some pleasant enlightenment—and then they get pleasure and enlightenment but not God.” Thus, the darkness, like our own shadow side, has gifts to present, and rather than fear it we can take the opportunity to explore it, assuming that wholeness contains a range between both light and dark. We can take a non-judgmental stance. As Dossey says, we don’t blame our rose bushes for contracting aphids, and yet we do tend to blame ourselves or others for contracting dis-ease.
As a psychic and a healer I have a constant opportunity to address my clients’ issues, and in order to be a good psychic, I need to have a working knowledge of my own issues so that I am not projecting them onto the client. My health concerns always call me back to myself. If I ignore myself and focus too much of my attention outward, I have inevitably gotten sick and then had to take time to nurture and heal myself. Sometimes my voice isn’t as demanding as clients,’ or I simply don’t hear it as demanding. I think I can wait until later and don’t necessarily specify when “later” is.
As practitioners, we do heal ourselves through healing others, addressing their pains and joys since we are not so different from them all being in the same species. They may well mirror our own issues, resolved or unresolved.
However, if past life regression and other new age modalities work, why am I still resorting to western medical remedies? Why haven’t those alternative modalities I practiced effectively with others and read so much about worked for me? Why aren’t my illnesses cured? This leads me again to ask what voice do the illnesses (which can be as simple as a headache) have in my life? What is their message or messages?
This paper grew out of a bad day. I felt lost and tired. Was I seriously ill? I placed my hands on my heart chakra, where I’d observed a sense of struggle and pain, and called the spirit forth. My spirit looked like a tattered coat, worn and thin. When I address my own failing spirit, it’s as if I’m addressing more than just myself, but all the other flailing spirits in the world.
I could witness this loss of energy in myself but I couldn’t immediately heal it. Witnessing is an important step, of course, allowing what is, to be, which ironically then gives it room to shift.
The highest healing frequency I know is love. Carl Rogers called it unconditional personal regard, (according to Winefred Lucas he termed it that because the word love would have been unacceptable in the 1950’s and 60’s). Sometimes I need to avail myself of love from the outside; I can’t be the only one sending that love/healing, yet I must be important in the process; if only by allowing the process, I’m acknowledging some sense of unconditional positive regard for myself.
We use forgiveness and release in past life regression in order to free the client from unwanted “baggage,” (such as phobias or illnesses) from the past, often a past the client might sense but of which the client has no real vision. We guide the client back through a previous incarnation, help them witness who they were, what they did and what happened to them, as well as leading them through the death process and the recollection of what that life was about. What was my purpose? Did I accomplish it? Who hurt me? Who did I hurt? Whom did I love?
The goal is to recognize old patterns (which may well be part of one’s life today) and release the past while integrating its lessons and knowledge into the fabric of who we are today. If we explore to find the source of a pain, then it’s been the pain’s job to pull us into the journey and ours to listen and be willing to take action, even if the subsequent action is inaction.
Can I do that for someone else if I do not know who I am, if I do not have a sense of the quality, pain and pleasure of being? Or will the soul within me, that has its own hurts and questions, feel cheated? What we can do is work with who and what we are (which implies a period of observation) in order to engage with the spirit and coax it forward. Why should it trust us? Why should we trust us? How many times have we betrayed ourselves and thought the betrayal was outside?
I struggle with hypersensitivity, asthma, allergies. An upset can send me into a physical illness. I often feel my client’s issues before I see the client and I have to separate what’s mine from what’s theirs. I love it that clients show a confidence and respect in me and my judgment and I can trust my skills, but those skills were born out of my own needs–to understand, to be loved and accepted and to bring something good into the world. In other words, I am reminded of the importance of opening my heart and mind to myself, as well as others, and of the power of listening from those deeper places.
Notes from Regression Therapy: A Handbook For Professionals
By Winafred Lucas
“We are trained scientists, but we know we are on a journey of the soul.”
…trips into the forbidden unconscious have replaced the dream schools.
Freud – grandfather of present-day regression work with his innovative idea that making the unconscious conscious would restore choice.
– Certainty that what we experienced earlier determines our current behavior.
1970’s – prenatal and past life recall seriously explored. Dianetics came to prominence with emotional bridge searching for engram. Engram=original traumatic situation still influencing behavior.
Altered State- became possible for one part of consciousness to retrieve memories while another part processed them.
1970’s Christos Technique (Windows of the Mind by Glaskin) – imaging and massage inducing out-of-body experience and return to other lifetimes.
Einstein began talking about consciousness as a fundamental aspect of existence – joined by other physicists – Eddington, Max Planck, David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake – talking about energy as constituting the nature of existence.
LSD showed other realms of consciousness were available than currently thought – (See the work of Stanislav Grof)
Andrew Weil – need for altered states as alternative to drugs
Psychologist Lawrence LeShan (1956) The Medium, The Mystic and the Physicist – designed careful research to show paranormal couldn’t stand up to scientific investigation, and proved the opposite.
1978 – Beyond Biofeedback (Elmer and Alyce Green) – Their hypothesis is – body is a lab in which we learn to handle energies of life.
Dr. Larry Dossey – Non-local mind is contemporary equivalent of the soul.
Physical body is an energy field.
The journey of the self is a drive toward wholeness and completion. Pain and disharmony focus attention on non-aligned aspects of our psyches so that we are eventually forced to create a homeostatic balance.
All contributors agree that on a spiritual level the journey through our various lifetimes is a movement toward karmic homeostasis.
We repeat patterns and work through them until we’ve achieved wholeness.
Life we live today gives us opportunity to rectify past mistakes and complete unfinished business (i.e., learn lessons we didn’t learn, perfect ourselves). The soul needs a spectrum of experiences to become complete.
–integration of opposites (facing the shadow and integrating rather than overcoming it.)
Holography – soul patterns repeat themselves on many levels. Shift in one can cause shift in others.
In altered state we have access to the source that is all-knowing and possesses deep wisdom. Basic self that knows the answers.
Physics postulates that energy fields, which include behavior patterns, cannot simply case to be: they can only be transmuted.
Physical traumas from past lives can become embedded at an organic (etheric) level and affect the physical body in current life (etheric=pattern for physical body)
Healing must take place in the etheric body. This is why various energy healings only sometimes work. –need to access the ‘quantum substrate.’ —– etheric, emotional, mental. Work diligently and lovingly with the etheric body.
Goal = Make the unconscious conscious=restore choice. Augments self-acceptance through an expansion of awareness. Physical body impacts etheric body and vice versa.
Past life memories – contacted in alpha state. Beta state is used for processing material.
Regression therapy- loosens rigidity of the intellect and opens door to new experience of reality
Not as important that we alleviate symptoms as to understand what it is we need to know to bring us to that place of peace and harmony
Altered state work connects patient and therapist.
One definition of an altered state is focused attention.
Lorrie Kazan (www.lorriekazan.com)
Copyright © Lorrie Kazan 2002-2005
