Written by: Jamie Carroll, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
In a book called Past Lives, Present Loves, regression therapist Jeanne Avery describes a fascinating past life regression session she does with an American lady called Connie.
When Avery regresses Connie back to a past life, Connie unexpectedly realises she is seeing a coronation – her coronation ‒ as a Queen of England. From Connie’s description of the clothing she and the other guests are wearing in that life, it is clear the coronation took place in a completely different century. In that life, Connie recalled that her younger brother had died early. Her father, also dead, had been more concerned about himself than his subjects.
Connie also remembered feeling a constant emotional battle between love and duty. She had fallen in love with a man who came from a disreputable family and who wasn’t royalty. Her chief advisors (who knew of the affair) were against the Queen marrying her lover, because they believed such a marriage wouldn’t have been good for the kingdom. And so the Queen reluctantly acquiesced to the wishes of her inner council, and gave up her plan to marry him. She was pained to see her lover go on and marry another woman. She was later grief-stricken when he died – and was unable to publicly mourn him.
Connie in the present-day knew nothing about English history or about the life of the person she believed herself to have been. But Avery quickly realised that Connie was describing life as one of the most important rulers in England’s history: Queen Elizabeth I. It seemed impossible – and yet Connie was providing details she wouldn’t have known about and psychological insights that fitted the historical accounts of Elizabeth perfectly.
The story gets more fascinating. In this life, Connie was in love with a younger man, a forbidden love called Tim, whom she couldn’t be with because she was married. During their affair, Connie was intensely jealous and possessive towards Tim and she didn’t understand why. In fact, she’d decided to get therapy with Jeanne Avery to overcome these feelings of intense jealousy. During the regression, Connie discovered that Tim had also been known to her during her life as Elizabeth. In fact, he had been her great love who she had been unable to marry.
The day after the regression, Avery and Connie met to do some further research on the Tudor era, and they discovered that Elizabeth’s lover was called Robert Dudley. At this point, Connie looked with amazement at Avery and said: “Don’t you know Tim’s surname? It’s Dudley.”
A pretty mind-blowing story!
Past Life Regression
Past Life Regression ‒ or PLR for short ‒ is exactly what it says. It is a regression under hypnosis to experience lives that we have had before this life.
PLRs started to become “a thing” back in the 1960s and 1970s as free-thinking and pioneering psychologists and psychiatrists, working separately, started to take the emerging PLR phenomena seriously. Many of the earliest therapists in this field, like Michael Newton and Brien Weiss, were simply looking to treat their patients’ symptoms with clinical hypnosis. They didn’t believe in, or have any personal view on, reincarnation and past lives. But they were forced to confront the phenomenon as their clients under hypnosis started reporting vivid experiences from other lives.
Was I famous?
Avery’s story with Connie was special and uncommon in the realm of past life regression. The chances of you being a famous personality in a past life, like Connie was, are fairly slim. Statistically, it stands to reason most of us were never Cleopatra or Alexander the Great.
In most of my own Past Lives I seem to have lived anonymously as a monk, a scholar, or a peasant. Occasionally as minor nobility. The closest I seem to have come to fame was a life as a speculator during the California gold rush! For most of my clients, their past lives have similarly been as ordinary people.
But an “ordinary” past life doesn’t mean an ordinary experience. It doesn’t mean there aren’t powerful lessons to be learned from these prior lives. Many of my clients have found themselves recalling being involved in extraordinary circumstances like wars, scandals, long journeys or extreme situations.
I should also say that occasionally I have conducted some very curious PLRs which defy explanation. For example, one of my clients remembered living on a world with three moons. Another remembered living in the wild as an undiscovered species of animal.
Whatever the life circumstances a client finds themselves exploring in a past life, the experience always feels meaningful to them.
Why Do a Past Life Regression?
Health curiosity is a good reason! All of us have a vested interest in the big question of what happens after we pass. Do we go on? Do we return? So many people who do a PLR are looking to discover, by going inside their minds, more about themselves and the deep mysteries of the universe.
But Past Life Regression also brings healing and the potential for transformation. In our unconscious we carry not just memories from our biographical past, but also the many fears and traumas from other lives. Thus behaviours from prior lives are often at the root of our problems today: “unexplainable” phobias, relationship issues, depression, and low self-esteem.
Past lives can reveal powerful reasons why we feel attraction or repulsion toward a friend, co-worker, or our boss. They may also give us insights into prior experiences with loved ones who have passed on in our current life.
When we bring PLR memories to our conscious attention this is usually pivotal in helping to solve whatever psychological problem we are going through. In the case of Connie, one of the powerful changes she reported six months after her Queen Elizabeth regression was that she no longer felt the need to live a life according to what someone else expected of her. In my own case, a PLR that took me back to life in medieval Italy made me realise that I was repeating the same mistakes with the same partner in two different lives. It was a very sobering insight! But the PLR really made me consider who I was and whether that relationship was right for me.
Isn’t it all fantasy?
To quote from a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Personally, I believe Shakespeare is right: there is far more going on in this multi-dimensional world than our five senses would have us believe. Past lives are just one more mystery which, one day, as a species we will come to accept.
But as I always say to clients, what really counts is not my belief system but the practical results. You may wish to believe that PLRs are just metaphors or allegories created by your subconscious mind. Well, if you want to believe that, that’s perfect. The important thing is do those metaphors help you to understand yourself and change? If they do, then it’s a job done!
And I have found that regardless of whether you believe in past lives or not, a PLR is a life-changing experience, creating a change that is for the better.
Jamie Carroll, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Jamie Carroll is a Hypnotherapist and Astrologer. His goal is to deal with the Soul Wound which we all have within us and to activate transformation. Using hypnosis, past life regression and talk therapy, he helps clients move past their blocks – be they depression, anxiety, or a phobia and start to find their authentic selves. He uses Astrology as an adjunct to the therapy, and as a tool in its own right, to explore the hidden forces that drive the client’s personality and unlock their potential. He operates in the UK and internationally (over Zoom).
