Like a Psychedelic Experience, Without the Substances
Written by Donna Wilding, Life & Business Coach
Donna Wilding is a former corporate advertising executive turned life and business coach who helps female entrepreneurs build strategic, soul-led businesses. She works with the innate intelligence of their ideas, alongside her signature past life regression experience and heart-forward coaching techniques.
What if you could experience someone else's life for two hours, and return with a whole new understanding of what's possible for yours? “It was like a psychedelic experience, without the substances.” That's how a client recently described her past life regression session with me.
Imagine closing your eyes and finding yourself in another life. Rather than observing it as you would a movie, you're experiencing it from within.
Who are you? You're a wildly confident, sexually liberated, unapologetically wealthy woman who takes up space like she owns the place.
Meanwhile, in this life, you've spent three days agonizing over whether your Instagram caption sounds too self-promotional. I'd have questions, too.
Because for a little while, you've experienced moving through the world with a confidence you've never known, making choices that would seem entirely foreign to your present-day personality, and barely giving a second thought to things you've spent decades worrying about.
Then you open your eyes and return to the life you know. Same name. Same body. Same collection of unread emails.
Except now, you have an experience of being someone you never knew you could be. That makes the world you return to rather different.
The limits of what we can imagine
We arrive on this planet with an imagination capable of conjuring entire worlds. We've imagined flying machines, entire fictional universes, and ways of communicating across oceans that would have looked like sorcery to our ancestors.
And yet, when it comes to imagining our own lives, we can be surprisingly conservative.
Perhaps because we spend the first few decades being told to get our heads out of the clouds, make sensible decisions, and for heaven's sake, get a real job.
Then, around 40 years in, we pay someone to help us remember how to dream again. (We're interesting creatures, aren't we?)
Our families introduce us to their understanding of how life works. Our cultures supply the rules. Our experiences provide the evidence. We inherit a whole collection of ideas about money, love, success, safety, belonging, and how much happiness one human being is reasonably allowed to have before someone raises an eyebrow.
We get rather good at mistaking what we know as familiar for what is inevitable.
The sneaky thing about these inherited beliefs is that they don't announce themselves as limitations. They masquerade as reality. So when we’re dreaming of what might be possible for our lives, we’re still unknowingly working within the same old boundaries. Consider how difficult it can be to imagine a feeling you've never experienced.
You can read 47 books about confidence, wallpaper your bathroom with affirmations, and tell yourself you're a powerful, magnetic woman until the cows come home. But if your entire body is still convinced that being seen is a spectacularly bad idea, your affirmations are going to have a hell of a time convincing it otherwise.
You can spend years trying to be ok with taking up space, while having very little idea what moving through the world without that question would actually feel like.
But during a past life regression, people can encounter different experiences of what it’s like to be human.
They might experience a life of great wealth and discover that money occupies very little of their attention. Or find themselves in a life with almost nothing materially, yet feel a richness of connection they've never known. There are endless possibilities to imagine.
For a little while, the familiar rules of their present-day existence aren't running the show. When they return, they might start questioning why those rules applied to them in the first place.
When the imagination acquires new evidence and experience
All the thinking, wishing, and visualizing in the world can't quite give us what a felt experience can.
Consider the difference between reading about the ocean and standing in it for the first time.
You could study its currents, learn the composition of salt water, and watch a thousand videos of waves breaking against the shore. You could become remarkably knowledgeable about the ocean without ever getting your feet wet.
But none of it would tell you precisely what it feels like when a wave lifts your body off the sand. Suddenly, the ocean is no longer an idea. You know something about it with your whole body. I believe our inner worlds have oceans like this, too.
Vast territories of feeling, perception, and possibility that we may never have visited, even while carrying the capacity to experience them.
Perhaps one of the more peculiar things about being human is how readily we dismiss the imagination, considering how much of our lives it helps create.
Every invention began somewhere in the imagination. Every business, every work of art, every movement that challenged the prevailing order first required someone to entertain a reality that didn't yet exist.
Yet, when someone emerges from a vivid inner experience, we can be quick to ask, “But was it real?”
It's a reasonable question, particularly with past life regression. A vivid hypnotic experience doesn't establish that the events depicted actually happened. Some people understand their regressions as literal past lives, while others experience them as symbolic narratives or expressions of the imagination.
I'm comfortable allowing that mystery to remain open. I'm more curious about what happens afterward. What did the experience make available to you?
A feeling you've never felt? A perspective you've never considered? A relationship with yourself that you didn't know was possible?
The images may arise within consciousness, but the meaning someone makes of them can become part of how they approach their waking life.
We're so accustomed to personal growth being a long, noble slog up the mountain with years of unpacking our childhoods, examining our beliefs, and journaling about our journaling (I love a good journaling sesh).
But I also love the possibility that consciousness might have a few trapdoors. That you could tumble through one, spend an afternoon experiencing a life you couldn't possibly have dreamed up, and come back wondering who the hell wrote the rulebook you've been living by.
Perhaps that's what my client was getting at when she compared her regression to a psychedelic experience. For a couple of hours, the ordinary boundaries of who she understood herself to be had loosened. She got to see what else might be possible.
It’s so delicious to think that the future you haven't yet imagined might be waiting just beyond the edges of the self you've grown accustomed to being.
The life you'd envisioned for yourself may have been ambitious, beautiful, and expansive by every measure you knew.
Until you encountered something you hadn't even known was possible. Suddenly, there's more sky.
Read more from Donna Wilding
Donna Wilding, Life & Business Coach
Donna Wilding is a life and business coach and former corporate advertising executive who walked away from conventional success to build a more honest way of working and living. She supports women in creating businesses that are both profitable and deeply aligned, combining strategic clarity with past life regression and energetic work. At the core of her approach is the belief that every idea has its own guiding intelligence, and that business becomes easier when you learn to work with it. With over a decade of experience in transformational practices, Donna’s work bridges the worlds of strategy and soul.
