IDMA Featured Article
On Past Lives Therapy by Silvana de Almeida Ferreira
Who am I?
I always have the illusion that I am what I have
This has driven me,
Till I realized that I was lost
Nothing belongs to me …
Not even the reality that I’m attached to
Who am I? I wonder again,
I am nothing more than the absence of everything,
The emptiness and the creation awareness at every second
And its loss at every second…
When we talk about past lives therapy, most of the times we have to face religious dogmas that come from our patients. However, as it is so well described in the 4th chapter of the book “Healing your Past lives: The Many Lives of the Soul," by Roger Woolger Ph.D -- ISBN 1-59179-183-9 Sounds True. Inc. 2004 – in our approach we shouldn’t try to convince the patient of the reality of past lives; otherwise we could get far away from the main target of our therapy, which really is to get him to a profound healing.
Actually, when we are faced with a report of a patient’s past life, our main objective is to take the patient through the story and the character in question and deeply look to the emotions that overflow from this role play, which were stored in the unconscious.
While telling us the story, the patient will be felling it physically and emotionally and will be unblocking emotions frozen for a long time and, thereby, producing a profound catharsis that is a new path to his healing.
Therefore, we see that this therapeutic approach holds its attention on healing rather than doing the metallization of the patient, or the exploitation of historical facts reported by the patient, as a parapsychology scholar would do.
So that healing begins to happen, it is necessary, at first place, that the therapist knows how to "listen", "view" and even "feel" the memory of the character that is behind the patient's complaint. As the practice in this therapeutic approach progresses, you can detect that there is a "story behind the story", brought by the patient to the consulting room.
Behind the fears, concerns or compulsive behaviors brought to the consultation, you can see that there are older stories, with events and facts much more powerful and devastating than those that the patient reports from his daily life.
I have also noticed that it happens as if the symptoms brought by the patient were out of context in time and space. This fact brings great suffering to the patient, because he doesn’t understand the reason for o much pain and, many times, this makes him close himself within his great pain.
Within the therapeutic area of security, the real cause of suffering may emerge and be released, and so the patient may disconnect his pain from the facts of his daily life. As soon as he has got a background to his pain anxiety into a new and different perspective, the patient will be free to live his own life.
Through this technique, it has been noted that there are several "triggers" in the everyday life of the patient that make this memory awakening. This memory can be seen in behaviors that manifest themselves through repeated phrases/sentences, symptoms of diseases, body postures, and even decision making. There, in anamnesis, we listen carefully to the history of physical diseases as well as the body language. It must be taken into account the chronic symptoms that resist to the medical treatment. If we look very carefully to all of them we can verify the existence of a more ancient history.
Whenever I heard talking about "past lives regression” I used to imagine a great "heavy gate at the end of a road" and once I got through it I could only get back, if someone rescued me from there, even in dander of not returning again. Indeed, the concept of time and memory of time has changed for me with this work of regression.
This way I began to be aware that "the time was in me and not me in time" when speaking of memories. In other words, I began to understand that I had to go to nowhere, that the memories were in me, and although the physical body was there to occupy a space in the present, here and now, parts of my soul or my conscience manifested themselves, as though they were living in other times, living other realities.
Many patients report one or other event from of his childhood, or something that happened long time ago, and they comment "this should not bother me, it must have happened so many years ago…" "After all, I’ve already overcome it so many years ago…." Our etymological conception of time comes from a linear one. The future in front of us, the past behind, as we conceive time in terms of space. Time is a unit that contains the number of times that Earth rotates around the sun.
At present, the focus is in the “here and now”, “what you feel?”. The truth is that, when you talk about events as if they were real, they cause feelings that are quite similar to experiences of real physical time. Then we notice that what keeps us away from the events, are the structures of time, built by our own language and false view point of the linear access to the memories that accompanies them. According to the homonymic principle, when something is covered by the same law, everything in our psyche reflects all other things. It is not relevant whether the therapist begins with childhood, with the body, with the situation of the current reality of or with the trauma of birth or even past lives. Any of these things can lead us to the feeling that is the core reason of this compound.
This therapeutic process does ask us to be vigilant, without prejudice, to hear the symbolic echoes of patient’s body and his verbal language. What we can understand as symbolic resonances are parts of our body or our psyche that carry a memory, as if something was still going on at that right time. Very often the patient can show us a physical or emotional symptom "as if it were…." For example, "I feel a pain in the chest….” (And the therapist asks -) as if it were what?. A pain as a bullet drilling the chest… “Or, I feel an immense sadness”, and the therapist wonders as if it were what? – “As if I were not going to see my family evermore”. All these echoes, if we are well aware, can alert us as "doors of entrance" to the various worlds of the patient. The ways we can start with are very varied. They may be a thought, a fragmented memory, a dream image, a common pain, a way of breathing, any form that can lead us to various levels of reality. In a single session of two hours, we can take the patient to a recent incident that is difficult to recall, to a birth memory or even to some kind of transpersonal or archetypal consciousness.
With this method I began to understand the concept so well described by Rogers as complex. I created for me a kind of visual metaphor of what a complex can be and how it crosses the existence of Being.
The complex, in my view point, serves as a lens of a kaleidoscope targeted at a particular point of the existence of Being. It is as if it could be focused as a "magnifying glass" over the several layers of the complex, or pattern of behavior. The degree of focus corresponds to the level that the individual allows it to be and that is comfortable for him to “look” and feel safe. There is no time or space in this kaleidoscope, there is only a focus that the patient wants or thinks is better for the moment.
During the therapeutic process it is the patient’s subconscious mind that leads him where the experience vibrates with greater intensity. Therapist and patient are together on this journey, as pilot and co-pilot on a spaceship through the fields of time and space.
These images, seen through the lens of the kaleidoscope, cause the "symbolic resonance" I mentioned above, term used by Rogers that clearly defines the vibrational connection of these images.
Rogers talks about several plans or aspects where the complex manifests itself: They can be Existential, Somatic, Biographical, Perinatal, Past Lives and Appearance Archetype.
Oh Being…… Oh son
Now you see that your light was on the bottom of the darkness
Your Heaven, was in hell
Your love on hatred
Your day in the Dark Night
You’ve been running so much,
You're so tired
Looking for yourself in despair
In blindness
And only when tears came up
And leaked the balm of healing
Then Love could pour freely.
Then you can rest…
Very often the patients complain that the emotion they feel, (pain, fear, anxiety, anger…) does not fit in the history of their present life. When making an assessment of their existence there are not sufficient reasons for so much suffering, neither in quality nor in intensity.
It is said now, more than ever, that the majority of psychological diseases are inherited in the psychic field. Rogers considers that there is the possibility of a trauma to occur for the first time in this life, but that this increasingly explains a small portion of psychological disturbances.
Indeed, what we see through this work is that the traumas of childhood are reprises of episodes of other lives. As noted above, regardless of the angle where we begin looking at the complex, or the angle of its current existence, or of a past life, we will always find a correlation. Rarely will it be an isolated event.
What really happens then…
What it has been happening is that there are facts in our life today, which trigger memories of past lives. This has much greater emphasis on early childhood, because of the young child's emotional structure. The triggered memory starts to be stimulated by subsequent events, which often would have no traumatic effect if there were not that background.
On the contrary, the Gestalt therapy states that the individual will not have a full and complete apprehension of his current reality, if there is a background that is not integrated, that means … the figure to be integrated will have to be complete.
Jung says that a complex appears "where we experience a defeat in life", as it is pointed out by Rogers further down: “What life?” Any life… I have observed that in any line of therapeutic work that is engaged to trauma, he refers to it as an "emotional freezing of that moment" as if it were a defense mechanism that allows the individual to continue ALIVE. (Well, here we must expand our concept of what will be kept alive.)
When there is an imminent danger, when I can not flee or fight, I get into a freezing state. If, for any reason, there is a fact that makes frozen memories vibrate, the framework of frozen emotions appears in the body, although the individual does not recognize anything in his life, or in his nowadays moment that makes him feel like that.
Exp. (fictitious name)
Maria Joao was a young woman of about 28 years old, who came to have therapy with me. Although professionally independent, she was still living with her parents. She wanted to talk with me, because he felt very anxious when he had to get out of her daily routine, mainly out of the house where she lived. This was getting even worse, as Maria Joao, had decided to take a course outside the country. Previously she had already given up from training abroad, for the same reason. Each time she thought of travelling, her anxiety and her fear increased. I proposed her to start then with a session of regression, to which she readily agreed.
With the patient, I started by looking for a phrase that was strong enough and the phrase that emerged was: "I do not want to be here." This phrase brought Maria Joao to the time of her birth, which had been traumatic for the child, because the mother had suffered an anaphylactic shock, due to anesthesia to give birth without pain. Then the patient revived the whole story and came into contact with the force of his birth and found that the mother had always been there for her, and that she was safe. However, the memory that had impressed her was of abandonment and existential fear. Each time she got out of her house, out of the security of her environment, the memory was stimulated, and the patient expressed the anxiety of that baby. After this session, Maria Joao finally managed to finish her course outside the home and outside her country.
If you look at life as a continuum, we can see that the mechanism we use to escape from the shock is always the same - freezing and consequently loss of consciousness.
One way or the other this mechanism will make us repeat the experience similar to that caused in the freezing, as an attempt of trying to find a part of us that got lost. As if a part of our soul were still suffering. When we become aware of this fact and we integrate it, this way we integrate a part of us that was lost.
This need to find a part of us, that is lost, leads us to types of behavior, or to changes in our way of life, caused by memories of unfinished issues from previous lives. As we have been able to verify throughout our history, this "blind" demand, this compelling need of redemption of a part of us, has promoted the whole dynamic of the evolution of humanity.
"The man in search of himself has written his entire history"
The Eastern religions such as Buddhism as well as the teachings of the psychophysics discipline of Yoga, have been recognizing, for a long time, the importance of what is called karmic memories.
Everything that happens to us and that we experience creates impressions in the mental substance (citta) of the individual that he experiences or does. As if it were a brand name or an emboss, there is always a trend or a willingness to repeat the action. Regardless of the quality of action (good or bad), we are creating what the yogis call karmic waste (karmaskaya). These karmic wastes have a key role in the compulsions, as described above, as they are reflected in our life as trends or availabilities (sanskaras). The sanskara is always accompanied by two types of traces; one (vasana), when activated, produces a reminder of the action that it created, and the other trace (klesa) that produces some distress or discomfort. The klesas are responsible for the prison in which the person is, as if he were sentenced to jail. In terms of soul traces, the vasanas can be considered as a perfume left in clothes that evokes an image, wheras the klesas are like wounds that evoke distress and get from one life to another in the form of compulsive thinking, with a heavy emotional burden. ("I Never come in time", "I am not capable", "No one can save me"…) The klesas are encouraged by the symbolic resonances mentioned above.
Love in the core
The compassion for the loneliness and emptiness
Makes the pain always in me,
That the fears surround me,
That the anger dwells in my chest
That the blame drags me.
When I meet myself and I do not feel alone,
Then I am able to be here
I thank all the pain, all the memories
And then I let them go,
And I get still
Here and Now
The blind repetition of the pattern in many lives deepens the groove of the image printed on the soul and that is called samskara, with its klesas and its vasanas. As time passes by and prejudices are put apart, Psychology may launch a deeper look at all the material inherited when we are born. Through the materialistic look of Western world, we have been accepting the genetic heritage in the physical world. We also accept the legacy of personality. But now, with the new approaches, we begin to accept the systemic family and cultural patterns. We start to understand that there is an order that does not only obey to the pattern of genetic inheritance, nor the pattern of personal memory, but to a pattern of emotional behavioral and mental repetition, which was not covered by any scientific approach, a pattern that was repeated but escaped from the conventional explanations. Jung has even come to address these aspects referring them as the archetypes that polluted the collective unconscious.
With the emergence of the new Western approaches that look at “the past lives", we can find what Rogers cites as the "missing link between the eastern and western psychology." Rogers refers to samskara as the karmic complex or the complex of past life.
The strength of the soul, seeking a part of itself that is lost and suffering, is expressed in the completion of an unfinished impulse. This demand makes the human being to live his life in search of himself, until the full integration of all the fragments of his soul scattered around the universe of Time and Space.
The complete awareness and the contextualization of emotions makes the whole suffering stop, whereas being far away from them creates the pattern repetition and life is conducted by samskara.
Death…
What will be the death, but a second frozen?
An emotion not recognized,
A lost consciousness,
A soul in distress?
Life…
What will be the life, but the conscience of one second?
Light indeed hidden,
A soul that is free
From the eternal captivity?
Our occidental philosophy has been dealing with the theme of death in a fearly and alienated way. It happens this way, because the Western world has seen life only as a material subject and, if there is any spirituality, it is kept for after death and is never experienced in life. The orientation of life objectives has only been linked to survival, comfort and the purely material values. This has created a wide distance from death due to the fact that it takes and steals all these plans. And this way it becomes the real enemy.
The work of past lives has contributed largely to a new approach on the subject of death within the therapeutic environment where it is seen as mainly a process of evolution. Working with past lives, as Roger has conceived it, death has a very important role. When we work a past life, there is always an important milestone to be looked upon, that is the most traumatic situation of that existence. Usually, traumatic situations are related to the violent deaths or situations of abandonment and rejection. When we are leading the patient in this journey, one of the ways to keep him away from the confusion that the trauma has left is to make him go through the exact moment of his death. With this the patient can gain awareness through a certain distance. Clarity begins to appear when the character of the patient feels and brings back the awareness that he is no longer in that existence. "Be aware that you are no longer in that body, look at your body as it was… be aware that the suffering has ended…just now nobody is torturing you anymore…. These ideas and feelings make the patient aware that the suffering is over and now it is safe to feel secure… to see……to discover, etc…….
When there is a trauma, as it has been said before, there is an emotional freezing and the memory keeps on repeating the suffering as a scratched record and the body is not aware of the passage, nor the end of the agony. This trauma may also occur in a particular time of the life of the patient’s character and, at that very moment, he gets “frozen” and he goes on living a completely dissociated life. That is what we call emotional death. In these cases, the physical death very often occurs in a calm way, although the traumatic situation has already occurred before. Then, the character gets aware of the moment of his death and may then look at the traumatic situation. "Now that everything is over you can just look…" "Now you are in the spiritual world where everything is possible… go and see what happened when you were only a boy of eight years…"
After the awareness of death, this work is carried out in the Bardo, (term used by Roger, which comes from the Buddhist philosophy). In the Bardo, which is the spiritual world, we work the unfinished aspects that belong to this existence of past life. We work the physical aspects that have become apparent "see what links you to that body… What is it like? It’s as if… It's like a rope. Try to get free of that rope around your neck… Now you can… We also work the emotional aspects "See that emotions still get you in this existence… what I would like to have said and did not… have done and did not…… Now you can tell your son how you fought to protect him… Now tell your patients how you feel when you use them as guinea pigs…
The expanded consciousness, at the exact time of death, creates an exaggerated impression on the soul, concerning recent thoughts and feelings. Very often this memory is reactivated immediately at birth. Even though it has not been awakened at the very moment of birth, this state of expanded consciousness prints the sanskara in the psyche that it transmutes. This spiritual work, done in the Bardo, is highly liberating and healing and helps greatly the patient to broaden the spectrum of awareness of reality that he lives today in his current life.
To complete this work I wish to stress how healing it has been in my own life. I could broaden the perspective of my reality. When coming into contact with various dramas of the characters’ past lives, it developed in me a sense of compassion for humanity, because I could feel it for myself. This is highly liberating and healing. Life no longer presents itself to me as a stepmother punishing and ruthless but as a wise master. All aspects that are present in my everyday life are true experiences. I have been experiencing my divine being inside my human condition.
The Look
I am in a room
I see the perspective I have of the room
I do not like it
I get aware that I can move myself
I change the place
I can then see another perspective
I like it, I know that there is the old one
But now I have another
The perspective is my reality
The room… the truth
Silvana de Almeida Ferreira
Peniche Julho de 2008