It's great to imagine that you may have been a royal or great warrior in a past life. The reality is most of us were just ordinary people.
Past lives are not just the territory of Hollywood scripts or late-night ghost stories.
Healer and esoteric therapist Anne-Marie Viviers of Heavenly Healing in Benoni said that we have all lived past lives.
And even though most of us were never royalty in previous incarnations, we were still people with lived experiences.
Viviers helps people access their previous selves via hypnosis.
“Past life regression is a state of hypnosis,” she said. “You take clients literally to a previous life.”
The purpose is not curiosity for curiosity’s sake, though.
More often, clients come with questions or problems they cannot solve in their current life, and regression is the key they hope will unlock them, she said.
Watch: The truth about past life regression
“Most people are just normal people, the way you and I are normal people,” she said.
Farmers, labourers, mothers and fathers. Lives cut short, loves lost, livestock stolen.
“It’s those emotions that people relive. Not the niceties, but the aspects that touch the soul.”
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The experience itself is not one-size-fits-all. Some people, when going under, see it like a film with themselves as the main character, others view it in third person, and still others feel it more than they see it.
Whatever the form, Viviers maintains, it is experienced in a very personal way. And sometimes, it is overwhelming.
“Before I regress anyone, we establish their safe space,” she said. This becomes the emotional safety net if fear or trauma rushes in during the session.
“If something traumatic happens, I remove them to their safe space. They’re still in hypnosis but no longer inside the trauma.”
Viviers said that nothing is imaginary.
“Regression is real. It’s been scientifically proven,” she said, noting decades of work by regression masters who, according to her, have helped people resolve anxiety, trauma and phobias rooted in experiences not of this lifetime, but another.
“You bring the energy from a previous life with you into your current life,” she added, “and if you can go back, relive the trauma and heal it, the energy becomes null and void.”
